I've heard that all before davious and I don't disagree with your views. My pastor, my bible study teacher and the person assigned to me when I first joined the church all told me about the gift of eternal life. Whether we choose to accept that gift or not is our choice and part of having free will. I understand that, but it wasn't my choice to eat of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, why do I and the people I love have to suffer for the mistake of one (supposedly) perfect woman thousands of years ago. That is what I don't think is fair.

A friend of mine in college said he wished God had allowed Adam and Eve to remain immortal so we, as their children, could let them know how angry we are with them.

Why are people following a 1000 year old book written by people that had NEVER met Jesus?

I'd really like to know....

I find it hilarious

Because people (Christian or otherwise) get caught up in literalism even when they don't realize that they're doing so.

Really, the purpose of the initial chapters of Genesis is to show the relationship of God and man in the sense of what it can be (full communion) and what it is (separation due to sin). IMO, there is no heritable "original sin." That's a church construct. IMO, the overall point, really, is this: God created our immortal souls and gave us free will. What we choose to do with that free will ultimately manifests as our individual relationship with God. Some make a free will decision to reject God entirely, and the result is that they will forever be separated from Him (which is the definition of hell; it's not a place of eternal torture, for that is another church scare-tactic construct), just as we are separated from Him now. So, in a sense Earthly life = hell. Some make a free will choice to accept Him and will therefore, eventually, know Him, having more and more communion with Him until, eventually, they have full communion, which is what heaven is. (Heaven as paradisical place where you get everything you ever wanted is yet another church construct, only in this case it's advertising. )

So, it isn't that people need Jesus because Adam and Eve sinned. Adam and Eve are symbols; we've inherited nothing from them because they never literally existed. Rather, people need Jesus because of their own daily choices to sin. That is to say, if a person wants communion with God, then they need Jesus to receive God's grace and forgiveness, which in turn allows one to enter into His presence, eventually. Even Scripture says that this is not the path that most will choose. Most will choose to reject God. God, of course, knows this. The church, in turn, made the choice to reject God seem like one that will result in eternal torment...but honestly, I do not believe that to be the case. But that's an entirely different debate.

Also, your time scale is a bit off: Genesis as a written story is at least 3,000 years old and probably has a longer oral history than that.

Eve wasn't perfect, and Eve was not Adam's first wife.

Adam's first wife was Lilith.

Lilith is a Biblical name, as it appears within the Bible, however her status as Adam's first wife is not Biblical, but rather apocryphal. She is referenced in a few Dead Sea Scrolls as well as the Alphabet of Ben Sira, but there are no references to Adam having any wife other than Eve anywhere within the Bible itself. Neither source is considered canonical at all. ie, non-Biblical myth.

Your account of God may be a little milder than davious's God but again mostly man and not much of God. I wish I could do this Thread justice but it will take more than I am willing to give at the moment; but know this, It's an old lie like old money and hard to get rid of. God is a spirit and while human emotions are used as part of God's make up, it is so far from the Truth.

Would it be hard to understand a God that only see His creation through His own righteousness/perfection and the only sin he is against is when you choose to see yourself through your own eyes and not His?

Man is at war with himself and God don't have anything to do with it!

Because most of what we follow these days are ideas that have been evolved over thousands of years to make them better. Would you follow some guy who made up something in one day and trust that it works? Most people back then had ideas that were 'ahead of their time' like Copernicus and Galileo for example and their theory about the solar system. No one believe them for about a hundred years.

A thousand years is really not that long, it's just a time that humans created. Since we only live for approx. 80 years we think it's a long time but we've been living in a society that had been created and evolved over thousands of years and on an Earth that is almost 5 billion years old.

They weren't really writing about Jesus' personality, actually. It was more about writing about the events, it's like the news. People will talk about some guy that went to jail and just explain the events that happened but they don't even know who he is, same thing with gossip.

davious, I agree with you on the whole free will thing. My friend told me the same thing once but in person (stuff sounds so much better in person). It's pretty much... like... He made Adam then made Eve, gave them free will and told them not to do something. If we have free will, eating the fruit is inevitable. It doesn't matter if it was Eve who ate it or Adam, someone would've eaten it eventually.

Another one of my friends was reading some book, and he said something like, God made the world and answered all his questions except one: 'What would the world be like without God?', so he blew himself up (Big Bang), created our world and right now we are answering his question.

Eating of the tree was preventable by simply not having the tree, but since the tree was there, it had to have been placed there with the knowledge that one if not both eve and adam would eat of it, which quite frankly defeats this idea of free will. We can't have free will if our creator(if we actually have one) already knows exactly what were going to do(predestiny).

It's difficult to answer you, urisStar, without knowing exactly how you see God. I would need to know what is this Truth of which you speak, for one thing. But I personally believe what the Bible says about God. In all honesty, I do not see the Bible as the literal "Word of God" or even that it was necessarily "inspired" in the way that Christians often use the word (as in, God essentially remotely-controlled the writers) so much as I see it as a collection of writings with obvious wisdom, written by people who knew God, who really knew Him. And by "knowing God," I don't mean knowing him face-to-face (although some, like Moses, did) so much as people who were truly open to Him, who walked closely with him, were guided by Him, and who truly wanted to know Him. If one wants to know God, then one will get to know Him, absolutely. And some people who get to know Him write down the things that they have learned. This, I have learned.

So, as I see it, the Bible was written by people, and yes, I am fully aware that it was the church who ultimately put it together in the anthology that we know today. But I also know that the Jewish people who were responsible for faithfully keeping and copying the books that eventually became the Old Testament were not the sort of people to make careless mistakes or, really, any mistakes at all; this is very well-documented. I also know that the books of the New Testament were...well, honestly not that old when the Bible was "put together." Subsequent translations are known by scholars (not necessarily scholars with any bias, as many are not practicingJudeo-Christian themselves) to be mostly accurate, and they are fully aware of the bits that aren't. And the church did not put the Bible together willy-nilly, either; there were distinct, rigorous criteria to which they adhered as to what went in as canon and what didn't make the cut. Agenda of some sort may have been involved, certainly, but I do not think that was the dominant concern.

And what the Bible says about God is pretty clear when read in context and, when it comes to the OT, a bit of knowledge about the Hebrews as a people. One must also bear in mind that God's relationship to man changed drastically with the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and so the way that He dealt with people during in Old Testament times was quite different than the way he deals with us now. Still the same God, though.

I agree, though, that man is at war with himself. That's kind of my point. Regardless of what we think about the concept of sin, we all have desires to do things that we know aren't "right," and we have to fight with ourselves to make the right choices. Sometimes, we don't succeed, and that's where grace comes in. In the end, it's all about choice, really. And no, God doesn't have anything to do with that because He does not (and obviously does not want to) control our choices. That's the whole point of free will.

Sure you can. In a different thread, I used a time-traveler as an example...the movie Back To The Future Part II is a perfect example, really. In it, An elderly Biff Tannen in the year 2015 takes a sports almanac, and uses the Delorean to travel back to 1955, so he can give that almanac to his much younger self. Now, the almanac contains the results of every sporting event until the year 2000...

What you are suggesting, is that with fore-knowledge, everything is completely without free will...IE, as soon as Biff gives himself the almanac, none of the sporting events contained within needed to be played anymore, because obviously, the outcomes are already known, so why bother? Furthermore, it implies that EVERYTHING you do is completely meaningless, as soon as anyone knows in advance what you are going to do. I simply cannot accept that premise. My argument would be that those games still have to be played, in order for those scores to appear in the almanac to begin with. thus, we had to choose to sin in order for God to know in advance that we would sin. Fore-knowledge is not the same as causation. Just because God knows what we will do, does not cause us to do them.

Take your position to its logical end...If there is a God, and God knows everything we will ever do, thus completely negating free will, then I can do whatever the hell I want, kill, rape, steal, lie, cheat, etc, and claim I bear no responsibility for those actions at all, afterall, I have no free will. If you were on a jury, you would be compelled to claim I am totally without fault, because I had no choice, there was absolutely nothing I could have possibly done differently, that my actions were locked in stone. If I had no choice whatsoever, I can't possibly be punished for it, right? Now tell me, do you believe that people who break the law should be punished? Or should they all be totally let off the hook, because they have no free will, because God knew they would do it?

Yes, since humanity only felt shame after the fall. Prior to the fall, humans would have felt 100% comfortable walking around totally nude. Shoot, there are nudist colonies and nudist beaches etc where people do that anyway. I have never felt nudity in and of itself was really all that big a deal, I favor loosening of censorship laws for TV in America (in that it is personal responsibility to limit the content in your house, not the Government's job), etc...but that is really a topic for a different thread.

The Christian view of evil makes ABSOLUTELY no sense at all. LOL According to Christianity, God created everything. Since He is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, He knew how weak-willed the human race would be. None of this would have occured if God'd had never created it. He knew that Eve would eat from the tree and tempt Adam to also. That's like sitting a mega-sized jar full of candy in a child's room and then getting upset when they eat some of it. There's no way He could be upset with us if he 1) Knew what was going to happen since the beginning of time and 2) Had every opportunity to turn things around.

And how in the world did Satan even get to Eden if he was banished to Hell? Surely God would have seen him sneaking in the garden? How did Satan even get the amount of power he has? Is God not allowed to see what goes on in Hell? LOL Why would you even allow someone that tried to overthrow you to have as much power as you? Did God allow Satan the option of free will too? I'm just so hung up on the relationship between the two; why would God let a fallen angel wreck havoc and chaos onto His creations and world? That's like allowing your pedophiliac brother back into your home after getting out of jail for molesting your children.

davious, you said that humanity is sinful. Well, God created us with the full knowledge of our imperfections. He shouldn't be surprised, upset, and IN NO WAY punish us. Him planting a tree in the Garden of Eden with full knowledge of Eve's weak willpower should not explain or justify why newborns die or innoncent people are killed from disease.

You seem to assume that with an all-knowing creator we'd have a choice to do something that our creator hasn't already seen us do, we would only be doing as the creator had seen with no way of doing anything differently. A creator that knows everything that will happen in detail would mean that they(or something more powerful than them) would have to have programmed us to do exactly as they see, thus no free will. But perhaps this creator of ours isn't all-knowing or even all powerful, which would mean that they aren't perfect either and could never be perfect and ultimately not worthy of being worshipped.

Cyberian Trooper: Since I was a small child, I was told that I was a Christian, and that God existed, and I was young so I didn't question it. It was what my parents taught me, and I had no idea what other views were out there. Once I started maturing and seeing the other sides of things, I realized that I didn't fit in with other Christians, and I stopped telling people I was a Christian. And I just recently had a moment in school where my teacher said that religion was invented by early man as a way to explain what was going on, because they didn't know any better. They had no idea where the rain came from, they didn't know what the sun and the moon were. That's when it just clicked. I realized that all religion is made up, and when you've got something as complicated as a religion, things are bound to conflict and not make sense.
Oh, and I've always went to public school, so they aren't allowed to talk about religion of any kind, and were only allowed to talk about evolution as a possible explanation for how things came to be. But the students who believe in God got upset because they thought that people shouldn't have an alternative explantion, that everyone should just think God did it, and that's the end of it.
That pissed me off, in all honesty.

the day people figure out how to censor ones thoughts is the day i shove a gun in my mouth.
seriously.

but i have noticed things like that, myself. not a lot of religious people, that ive met*, are free thinkers. they just accept what theyre told without questioning, and that...that right there, that bothers me.
idk, maybe it some sort of natural instinct, but something tells me that the bird that does not question the nearby shadow is the one to be eaten by the predator that creates it. >_>;


*i cannot stress this enough: in no way shape or form am i denying the existence of people who go against it, but, i am referring to those i have encountered IRL. not on the internet, not on the radio--real life.
this note exists because i just know that if i dont explain/affirm it, someones going to jump in and go WELL NOT ALL PEOPLE ARE LIKE THAT... really? they arent? i never wouldve guessed--of COURSE not all people are like that! there are ALWAYS exceptions. *rolls eyes* anyway. carry on. im just a bit bitter from hearing that crap over and over.

I think the tree is just a symbol for knowledge. And I think free will is the will to learn... so it's pretty much saying... Eve 'eating the tree' gave her knowledge but it has nothing to do with the tree.

When God made all things, he pronounced them good. Everything God made was good. He decided to give Adam and Eve free will. Free will is good. But free will allows the possibility for evil to occur. If you don't understand this truth, then it's hard to understand much else about God.

Why would God give Adam and Eve free will, knowing that they'd screw up? Omniscience (knowing everything, including the future) is not the same as causation. God didn't make evil, nor did he make man do evil. All men chose to do evil. If ever you've met a person who is living forever, that person is perfect, because he doesn't deserve death. God allowed men free will, and thus allowed anything, good and evil.

God didn't have to redeem us. He could have just created us, we'd live, sin, and be separated from him forever. Someone asked me, "If God created you and then condemned you to hell, would you still praise him?" I really struggled with that, because until then I praised God mostly for his love, mercy, forgiveness, kindness, grace, etc. So I felt that if he didn't choose to save me, then he wouldn't be who he is. Above all else, it would be cruel to create something and then have it suffer for eternity. But God is not bound to save us. Just as he chose to give us free will, he chose to give us a way to be with him. God is good. And I would praise him because he is good and brings evil to ruin.

1) if we're supposed to be focused on " the inside " of people, what do clothes matter anyhow, present or otherwise?

2) because... a body is just a body? everyone has one; no surprises there. of course there would be people who " got their jollies " by viewing nudies, but you see, if we never had worn clothing until now--that wouldnt be such a big problem. it wouldnt be a sensitive subject. everyone would already be accustomed to nudity.

3) um...chilly? i wear clothes for warmth, not so that someone cant see my genitals. i almost always wear clothes, but its more out of comfort than fear of someone seeing me naked. *rolls her eyes* we all have the same parts, anyway, even people who mix and match 'em.

4) no more than the usual. and rapists will rape, REGARDLESS of clothing being present or not.... so thats rather invalid.
and i dont see why anyone would protect their children from pedophiles--child molesters is what id be worried about, and the two are not always conjoined. leave those poor pedos alone, they endure enough grief from society [ and quite possibly, heres a notion: THEMSELVES--we dont know that all pedophiles enjoy being pedophiles ] without being the source of some easily terrified persons animosity.

and on the topic of god and saving and praising--why does god NEED to be praised, anyway? if we're such lowly scraping maggots like the bible makes us out to be, why does he need our attention, let alone our constant acknowledgment that he is bigger and better? does god have that much of a superiority complex? wanting praise and worship seems more human than something expected of a being who possesses no body, no vices, and obviously, no need to really seek anyones approval.
oh, and on that--why does a being who has no body, themselves, care what happens to those who HAVE bodies? where does god get off making the rules for how people govern their bodies, when " he " himself--how an omnipresent being can even HAVE a gender, i will never know--has none? -_-
you dont see dead people coming back via spirit and stressing the sanctity of life. thats because there is none, and most probably because dead people dont give a flying fuck about what happens to the living.

Can you explain why it wouldn't be acceptable? Various societies do it and it doesn't seem to be a problem for them.

People in societies that do cover up have been conditioned to believe that people should cover up and that being naked is rude, but that's due to their conditioning rather than any truth about nakedness being bad.

Suggesting that people wouldn't be comfortable if we take off our clothes now isn't a measure of the wrongness of it, it's just a reflection of what we have been taught.

This reminds me of a line from the dialogue in "And when he falleth" by theatre of tragedy, I've posted the whole thing and bolded the bit I'm refering to.

Here is the full dialogue:
Man: That cross you wear around your neck;
is it only a decoration, or are you a
true Christian believer?


Woman: Yes, I believe - truly.

Man: Then I want you to remove it at once!
- and never to wear it within this castle
again! Do you know how a falcon is trained my
dear? Her eyes are sewn shut. Blinded temporarily
she suffers the whims of her God patiently, until
her will is submerged and she learns to serve -
as your God taught and blinded you with
crosses.

Woman: You had me take off my cross because it
offended....

Man: It offended no-one. No - it simply appears
to me to be discourteous to... to wear
the symbol of a deity long dead.
My ancestors tried to find it. And to open
the door that seperates us from our Creator.

Woman: But you need no doors to find God.
If you believe....

Man: Believe?! If you believe you are...gullible.
Can you look around this world and believe
in the goodness of a god who rules it?
Famine, Pestilence, War, Disease and Death!
They rule this world.

Woman: There is also love and life and hope.

Man: Very little hope I assure you. No. If a god
of love and life ever did exist...he is long
since dead. Someone...something rules in his
place.

1000 years??? What is that, the Young Earth theory of atheism?


I suppose I'm not qualified to have an opinion, but I always kind of thought that if you supported torturing prisoners, you were never a Christian to begin with. (However, polls show that people who call themselves Christian are more likely to support government torture than those who don't call themselves Christian. Go figure. It makes me wonder if there shouldn't be more to being a Christian than just reading aloud a line out of John.)