I find Bible to the only True book there is

I don't believe in hell, devils, demons, and other scary stuff. I don't mind if you do. Jesus described a God of Love and I will go with that. The hell most speak of is the fiction book by Dante. Jesus did speak of the refuse pit and wasting your life instead of giving your life meaning.

 

I think of hell as a bad attitude, a resolute determination to blame God instead of ourselves for our failings. As I said, the God presented in the Old Testament started out as the tribal war god of the Israelites, the Badass Dude in the Sky (or was that really just the image His followers projected on Him to give Him the image of someone you didn't want to mess with?). He had many of the qualities of an oriental despot, which seems to have been the model they used. This was the norm for gods of the day--Baal, Chemosh, Dagon, etc.--figures worshiped for their power. When the prophets came along in the Axial Age and brought a new emphasis on moral qualities , Yahweh began to mellow and became a champion of justice. Then, at the time of Israel's greatest crisis, the Babylonian exile , when the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jewish elite were deported to Babylon, God became a universal figure--who had no territorial home base and was the creator of the all people. But your impression of Him was shared by some of the early Christians, the Marcionites and the Gnostics,who taught that there were at least two different gods--the wrathful god of Israel and.the superior god who sent Jesus to save us from the mess created by that other deity. As for the atonement model of Jesus' sacrifice, that was a notion introduced by Paul that caught on and became incorporated into traditional Christian thinking by various church councils. But it isn't necessary for a Christian to believe it. Luke seems to present an alternative model. "For Luke, Jesus’ death carries no saving power on its own. It provides no atonement for sins, whatever we may mean by atonement. Instead, Jesus dies as a consequence of his commitment to bless all people, especially the poor and sinners. He continues these activities even on the cross." Luke's Interpretation of Jesus' Death | HuffPost Christians don't drink blood or eat flesh. Those, of course, are symbolic acts done to commemorate our memory of Jesus' willing sacrifice on behalf of those values that we hold central.

 

Walmart, for sure...





I think that there's a lot to be said for establishment in human spirit, right? Isn't that what we have? People don't realize what this is... Our system of belief is extremely powerful!

And like anything, it's fragile at the same time. You can also spout disbelief - a sort of dispelling of our collective imaginations. Well shit... God is real. You can't have it.

 

gods are fine, while also owing nothing to what we tell each other, even in books.

books can be useful, or entertaining, or on rare occasions both.
after many years of thorough study,
i have found you bible to be miserably disappointing in its service to either function.

 

The "Sacrifice"

 

If that works for you, that's fine. I'm always puzzled by people who have these weird strategies for reading the collection of books known as the Bible. They always caution against doing what you would do for any other book, which is starting at the beginning and reading until the end (unless you are a Scientologist; that's not allowed in Scientology). It makes no sense to me.

I have read it from start to finish and I think this is the best way to go. Some people hit a wall with Leviticus and others with Psalms, it all depends on what you like. Just keep pushing forward like any other book.

Obviously, if you are just trying to figure out something specific, like having a basic understanding of the events of the life of Christ and the early Christians, well, that's different. For that you could just read Luke and then its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles. That's a pretty good read and you get the earliest written detailed account of a shipwreck and how they tried to prevent it, which is exciting stuff.
Job is a great story but the one Old Testament book that really illuminates the life of Christ is Isaiah and, of course, Psalm 22. If you get a version with the books of Maccabees, you'll gain a lot of insight into what was happening right before the birth of Christ.

The trippy thing about the Bible is when you take this jumbled collection of writings, all in various genres, written by very different people in different times and place, with different perspectives and concerns, and you start seeing the interconnectedness of the whole thing, like when you are staring at an autostereogram and out of that strange chaos an image flashes right before your eyes. It's like a mental or spiritual version of that. For me, it definitely beats anything I learned from Kabbalah, as weird as that journey can be (it kind of deconstructs Hebrew words and turns them into a mind-melting Sudoku; pretty freaky for 12th century Spain).

For free material on the Bible, I recommend watching Atheist videos "debunking" the Bible. They are great for spotting inconsistencies, which you can then look into further to gain some amazing insights. Also talk to any religious ex-con: those guys have really pored through the material without any reference point and they fixate onto some curious things. You can learn a lot of strange things from those guys. The Bible's a trip.

 

The presentation characterizes the sacrifice-atonement model as "the principle on which the entire religion hinges." Not my religion. I, like many Christians, prefer Luke's interpretation of Jesus' crucifixion, which does not depend on the sacrifice-atonement model. "For Luke, Jesus’ death carries no saving power on its own. It provides no atonement for sins, whatever we may mean by atonement. Instead, Jesus dies as a consequence of his commitment to bless all people, especially the poor and sinners. He continues these activities even on the cross." Luke's Interpretation of Jesus' Death | HuffPost

Paul's sacrificial metaphor, however, captured the imaginations of audiences at the time, when animal sacrifice was still the prevailing mode of worship of the gods, even of Yahweh in the Temple in Jerusalem. Most people were still in the transactional mode of relating to deities: quid pro quo, give something to get something; reciprocity. In trying to figure out how to relate to gods, they made the assumption that gods were like humans. They wanted to be flattered and given gifts. Many even had the idea that the gods depended on those gifts . In Mesopotamian flood stories, for example, when Enlil wipes out most of the human race for being too noisy, the other gods become upset because there are no humans around to feed them with sacrifices. In the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, when Utnapishtim's ark finally reaches its resting place after the flood, he makes sacrifice to the gods who flock around like flies attracted to the meat. Even Yahweh was attracted to the aroma of burning flesh offered by Noah after the flood. (Genesis 8:21). Yahweh preferred the animal sacrifice of Abel to the crop offerings of farmer Cain. (O the farmer and the shepherd should be friends!) On sixteen different occasions in Leviticus, God's fondness for the aroma of sacrifice is mentioned, although He doesn't depend on the offerings for his sustenance. The Aztecs, who carried human sacrifice to an extreme, believed that the tonali (life force) in the blood of a beating human heart was necessary to sustain the gods, and that it was the least we could do to show our gratitude for all they have given us.

Anyhow, looked at in historical perspective, a few groups as early as Jesus' time began to break away from the sacrificial concept. The Essenes, a sect of Judaism, taught that the version of the Torah commanding animal sacrifice was wrong, and that the Lord was really a vegetarian. Some of these ended up in the faction of early Christians called Ebionites, whose vegetarian version of Matthew had John the Baptist subsisting on a diet of honey and pancakes, much preferable to my way of thinking than the honey and locusts mentioned in the regular version. They also believed that Jesus was just a man, never a supernatural being. They apparently fled Jerusalem in 70 A.D., when the Romans sacked the place--or was it 69 A.D., when their leader James the brother of Jesus and head of the Jerusalem Church, was assassinated. They persisted until the fourth century as vehement critics of Paul and his version of Christianity, but eventually died out in the face of the overwhelmingly more popular teachings of Paul.

Say what you want about sacrifice, but Paul's metaphor that Jesus was the Paschal lamb had a grip on the minds of many folks back then and today, and his notion that people could be justified just by having faith in the sacrifice regardless of any works made it especially attractive to Gentiles who were put off by all the Jewis mitzvahs. Your You tube guy can drone on and on about how the sacrifice idea makes sense only if God is at fault, but this isn't Logic 101 we're talking about. To me, the whole idea that an omnipotent omnisicient deity would demand the sacrifice of His innocent beloved Son to atone for sins committed by defectivebeings created by said God Himself seems incomprehensible, but it's unlikely most believers are going to be so analytical. And what's with all the sketch artist stuff that I find kind of distracting from the presentation. Oh, I get it. He's trying to sell his "artwork" for $1.00 on ebay.

 

I might mention, animal sacrifice can be viewed as a step forward over the child sacrifice practiced by the Phoenicians and Canaanites. Moloch (aka,Baal Melqart) demanded that children be burned alive as offerings. “For the children of Judah have done evil in my sight, saith the Lord: they have set their abominations in the house which is called by My name, to pollute it. And they have built the high places of Tophet, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into My heart.” Jermiah 7:30-31. The practice was also said to be followed by the Carthaginians, Rome's enemy, who began as a Phoenician colony. Manasseh, one of Judah's bad kings, is said to have sacrificed his children in the fire to Moloch. (2 Kings 21:6) Would God then engage in a practice which He found abominable?

 

well if there was an all-encompassing all-powerful God then wouldn't He also be capable of preserving the Word that was written in the bible? or rather, it would seem that many people here would assert that the God of all creation is not capable of preserving His own Word here on earth?

and as far as the story of the flood goes, there are also stories of a flood in hindu AND chinese culture so clearly there was a global flood somewhere in the ancient past. thats 3 accounts from 3 different cultures that there was a great flood.

 

if...If there were, then of course (S)he could.. But is there...??? If there were and all-powerful God, (S)he could have written it all down on our hearts and minds and saved the stone and parchment. But instead, (S)he wrote it down in a book, in Hebrew no less, and communicated it to a bunch of miscellaneous Jews in a backwater corner of the Middle East, to be spread over subsequent centuries. Truly, God moves in mysterious ways.

There are more than that:some 270 of them.. Thisoesn't necessarily mean there was a global flood that covered the earth. At the end of the Ice Age 12,000 to 18,000 years ago, there were cataclysmic floods in all parts of the world as a result of the melting. The Black Sea deluge. positing a catastrophic inflow of Mediterranean seawater into the Black sea. is the subject of a hypothesis by Pitman, Demitrov, et. al in 5600 B.C. And most of the world's great civilizations developed around rivers, so folks would certainly have been familiar with floods. People would remember those things in tales told 'round the campfire, and would attribute them to the gods. But so far, geologists haven't been able to confirm a flood that covered the entire earth.

 

Second sentence, second paragraph supra should read "This doesn't necessarily mean ... "(Ten minute rule for editing strikes again)

 

i find every book to be truly a book. even those like religious books that try to tell people what to pretend while claiming to be the will of gods.
all are the will of gods in the sense that no god chose to prevent their having been written, which still says nothing as to the accuracy of their contents.

personally i prefer those that make less grandiose claims, or have content that is actually useful.

 

funny that you should say that. because this is what the bible says God said in the old testament when referring to the the new testament "The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant... I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people." Jeremiah 31: 31-33

 

Isn't the New Testament a book?

 

The new testament is a book but it is also the story of the new covenant. The old covenant is the covenant God made with the jews back in the days of abraham, and the new covenant began with Jesus. So I was using the terms new testament/ new covenant interchangeably.

So then in this passage the prophet Jeremiah(a jew from the time of old covenant) was prephesying about Jesus and the new covenant.