Do they understand?

There is one kind of Christianity that never spoken about. This is the one where Christians see that the heart of God is broken because his children “Adam and Eve” chose the fruit of “the tree of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” rather than to live within his will and grow into his children. Mature children that would pass on through the generations his will and his Kingdom in their hearts. These children would not of needed a messiah because they would not of fallen.

It could be that this broken hearted God has worked tirelessly through the generations to establish the condition where a symbolic foundation could be made to start the restoration of mankind and at various levels through Noah, Abraham, Issac, Jacob eventually to Moses and through the history of the Jewish people up to the life of Jesus.

Jesus represents symbolically a rebirth of the ideal that Adam was meant to fulfil. Jesus would of established The Kingdom of God On Earth if the Jewish people had embraced him but instead for the sake of fear and a few other excuses. As a consequence of this betrayal by the Jewish people of God’s anointed one the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth could not be established, but there was enough of a foundation for God’s Kingdom to be established spiritually and for God to continue working with mankind but instead of through the Jewish people he elected to work through those that accepted and relied on Jesus as the foundation of their lives.

Parallels have been drawn between events in Jewish and Christian histories and significant events.

I don’t have time to check the reliability of the owners of the site but I have come across these ideas before http://www.puritans.net/news/parallelhistories022403.htm among other places I saw the essentials of Jewish / Christian parallel histories on a wall chart/poster in the office of a Catholic Priest.

What comes out to me from the Bible account of the Jewish people and early Christian history is how hard and how desperately God worked for man’s salvation and how that was don done primarily through the lives of significant people in a specific genealogy first of physically through the Jewish people and then spiritually through the Christians. This work has been tireless on the part of God but patchy on the part of those few significant men, men that everybody else needed to catch the coat-tails of.

The Jews still look for their Messiah, the Christians seek the return of theirs and Islam (which could be perceived as a successful attempt to bring the idol worshipping Bedouin into the monotheistic fold) are expecting a figure to come at some unspecified time in the future to wrap up history to some kind of conclusion [not dissimilar to Revelations and Jewish End time prophesies].

That was a very brief synopsis of monotheism but the striking thing is the effort of God and a tiny number of others. What gratitude does God get for this? From many people a false sense of gratitude and a shopping list, if I was God I might feel tempted to tell these where to go so it’s just as well I'm not God.

Where is the understanding of this parents broken heart, his patience, who can even imagine God crying each time one of us hurts him by, who can imagine wiping the tears of God and promising with every fibre in his existence that he will not hurt him again, who tries to undo all the harm they've done. I have seen this but not in a religious context. I have seen it when a repentant son asks his father for forgiveness, and seen the promise of good behaviour kept. Where it is not seen is in church, it is not seen in the prayers of Christians or in their hearts enacted (in their lives in other words).

[I will post this on two sites so if you happen to post on both then please forgive me but I have been thinking of this for a while].

Heretic

God only has himself to blame if he's broken hearted. He created free-willed beings and then expected them to give up that free will to follow every one of his rather barbaric Hebrew laws. But I subscribe to a commpletely different theory on all of this.

The entire story of Adam and Eve is an attempt to explain several things from the pain of child birth to farming to why snakes slither. But what most people completely miss is the inevitability of Eve's disobedience. Because her disobedience and the subsequent "Fall" is a metaphor for Humanity's transition from being blissfully ignorant to becoming educated and knowledgeable. It is true what they say about ignorance being bliss, and that bliss is symbolized by the paradise of Eden. If Adam and Eve had chosen to stay ignorant and child-like, humanity could have stayed in Eden. But Eve chose to eat from the Tree and that single bite was the action that explains why humanity is not an "innocent" species, why we always seek knowledge, why we are curious, why we explore, and why we always push for something better - and the subsequent consequences that arise from doing so.

God wanted to keep humanity ignorant, a race of child-like beings that spent eternity just flitting about a garden having sex and naming animals I guess. Most of all, a child-like race is malleable and easy to control, something I'm quite certain God relished. Satan, or the snake, wanted humanity to grow, mature, and to face the world with eyes wide open.

Now, I'm not a Satanist or anything - since I don't believe either beings are real. They are just personifications of various human attributes, most obviously good and evil. But they also personify other attributes, as well: Ignorance vs. Knowledge, Child vs. Adult, Obedience vs. Independence, Static vs. Changing,

I'm sure if I looked around long enough, I would find a story very much like Adam and Eve (the Bible stole and borrowed from everywhere) but without the references to "good" and "evil." The Bible advocates that God's way is best and that we should have picked ignorance, child-like, obedient, and static instead of the other possibility - but that wouldn't have been possible. The story is, after all, a metaphor to explain what IS ... and there never really was a choice to begin with. But Judaism and its follow-up religions push for people to be ignorant and such. Of course, that's the easiest road to follow, and the road to ignorance and blind obedience is well-travelled.

But assuming there even is a God, is that really how he wanted us to be? All we have to go on is what the Bible says, and why should we trust an old book? Why do we have this great mind and insatiable curiosity coupled with a vast universe to explore and unravel? And why is it that the more we know and the more mysteries we solve, the less we need God? Perhaps that was the plan all along.

What I am trying to explore is why theists anthropomorphise but only so far. They frequently refer to god as a Father but rarely relate this to their own experience or the experience of others of parenthood. In this light it is possible to see the bible as one of the greatest book on the 'love of a parent for their children'. But it might be seen as a book where God frequently throws away the present (and everyone in it) for the sake of the future.

This link between parent and child is the bible's greatest strength and it's weakness because the idea of a human parent discarding children at the rate which god appears to of done would be seen as the most despicable of crimes. Hitler and Stalin probably only though of maybe 20 to 30,000,000 people as disposable yet God appears to of discarded billions throughout history and continues to do so. Remember Christians states very clearly that those not 'adopted by god' (a sort of second class parenthood) will be thrown into hell by their father-figure.

To me parenthood is about the successes and failures of my own parents and the same about my relationship with my children. Even of the worst of us are model parents compared to God as taught by Christianity, perhaps they need to re-read and re-interpret it before someone reports God to Social-Services for child-neglect.

Heretic

The Garden of Eden story is just some sort of attempt to explain class society: we must have done something really dreadful to have to live like this - or there must be an insane God who is out to get us for something someone else did once. Let's grovel like mad, and we may be let off whatever is getting up His eternal Nose. It is sick old stuff!

I have tried to explain the position of God previously.

You can have a perfect product and be told exactly how to maintain it so that it will go on for ever, if you deviate you are told the consequences.

Heretic, all organised Religions are a variation upon the same Control Game:  Jam tomorrow.

Wrong, Cristianity promises a good life for all today were they all to adhere to God's wishes.

polyglide wrote:Wrong, Cristianity promises a good life for all today were they all to adhere to God's wishes.

Christianity rather than Cristianity.

It would help everybody if you gave same indication as to who you are responding to as you would help everyone understand what (by accessing the context to which you are referring.) including possibly other Christians. Having said that if you do not care whether you are understood then carry on as you are doing.

Hitler promised a Reich to last a thousand years, a promise is only worth the capacity it has for being fulfilled.

Heretic

A promise depends entirely on who is making it, to compare Hitler with God just shows how out of touch with reality you are.

Hitler's existence can be proven for a start.

So can God's if you look in the right palces.

So you've said before. Without backing it up.

polyglide wrote:A promise depends entirely on who is making it, to compare Hitler with God just shows how out of touch with reality you are.

Hitler chose to elect a people of many millions to be saved whereas as God saved only eight when he committed his genocide (sorry if the word offends you.)

Genocide as defined by Wiki. Genocide is the systematic killing of all or part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group.

I have hunted for a word to describe the killing of nearly an entire species but failed to find one but if such a word could be found then God would be guilty of it.

Heretic

For some people, Monotheism seems to mean "What I believe is the only thing it's possible to believe."

oftenwrong wrote:For some people, Monotheism seems to mean "What I believe is the only thing it's possible to believe."

Most of think that the way we view the world is the only way it can be except that most of us acknowledge that we may learn something in the next ten minutes that will turn our whole world upside down and that when the dust has settled that we will have a whole new way of looking at the world and that this new view is the only view possible or the only way it makes sense. This new view is of course subject to the reappearance of the ten minute rule that may turn everything on it's head again.

Others of course has the smug certainty that some stone edge Bedouins wrote a book over two thousand years ago that is superior in some way to the work of many many brilliant men of science over the last hundreds of years. These others may tell us that the universe is six thousand years old or that evolution never happened, they do this without ever producing any convincing evidence.

Heretic

The main point in this matter is, choice.

I have given the appropriate example of how a thing can be made perfect and therefore cannot be improved upon, the only way it can go is down.

God made man perfect, man has through ignorance and all the other man made imperfections brought about all the ills etc; which you refer to, you cannot blame God.

If god made man perfect then where did this ignorance come from?

Ignorance along with arrogance etc; originated and will continue because of man's failing to adhere to God's will.

Please get someone to explain..

polyglide wrote:Ignorance along with arrogance etc; originated and will continue because of man's failing to adhere to God's will.

Please get someone to explain..

So, prior to the fall of man, man knew everything?

No, man knew what was good and what was bad, he had the choice
and look where it has got him.

polyglide wrote:No, man knew what was good and what was bad, he had the choice
and look where it has got him.

So, given ignorance means a lack of knowledge, and you agree that man didn't know everything prior to his fall, then that means that when god created man, he was ignorant of some things. Therefore, ignorance was in god's creation from the off. By all means refute this logic, since its yours I'm applying here.

Your understanding of logic, I am afraid, is different to mine.

You buy a car, the manufacturer explains the manner in which it should be treated for it to perform in a proper manner, he/she also explains that to deviate from the manner explained would result in failure.

I know, I know, it is rocket science, however, get some child to explain.

polyglide wrote:Your understanding of logic, I am afraid, is different to mine.

You buy a car, the manufacturer explains the manner in which it should be treated for it to perform in a proper manner, he/she also explains that to deviate from the manner explained would result in failure.

I know, I know, it is rocket science, however, get some child to explain.

Your analogy would only work if, once the car manufacturer had given their explanation, I would then know everything / be ignorant of nothing.

Yuo would be aware of what to do and what not to do and the consequences involved.

polyglide wrote:Yuo would be aware of what to do and what not to do and the consequences involved.

That's irrelevant to the paradox of your claim about ignorance stemming from the fall of man though (given you concede some knowledge was lacking prior to his fall). Think about it. Or don't - it doesn't alter it either way.   

Ignorance can be used in different terms.

Not being aware of.

Behaving in an improper manner, etc;

Well, if you take it to mean 'behaving in an improper manner' then that would also apply to before the fall as man defied God's wishes before the fall of man, hence the fall of man happening. Wouldn't you agree?

The fall of man happened in the Old Testament and, therefore, should have no relevance to today's Christianity (according to polyglide's logic)

Very true Shirina the fall started in the garden of eden did it not by eating the forbidden fruit?

stuart torr wrote:Very true Shirina the fall started in the garden of eden did it not by eating the forbidden fruit?

Indeed it did ... but when you bring up all of the other insanities present in the Old Testament, polyglide will claim that only things that happened after Jesus really counts. Well ... except for the things in the Old Testament he wants to count.

It's just a rather sad state of affairs when anyone beleives that an etiology is historical fact - like an adult who still thinks thunder is caused by angels bowling in heaven.

Very sad it is Shirina,almost childlike is it not,and he says he will pray for each of us too,going to be a very long prayer.  

Shirina wrote:

It's just a rather sad state of affairs when anyone beleives that an etiology is historical fact - like an adult who still thinks thunder is caused by angels bowling in heaven.

Now that's just silly. Everyone is aware that thunder is the rumbling of the wheels of Thunor's chariot.

I thought it was god moving his furniture Norm when he was tidying up.

polyglide wrote:Wrong, Cristianity promises a good life for all today were they all to adhere to God's wishes.

If only Christians could agree on a definitive list of those 'wishes'. The problem is they all claim absolute infallibility for their version of god's wishes. Then there are all the other religions of course, and all the versions of all those other religions, the mind fairly boggles that this most important message ever could be lost in this melee of claims and counter claims, when they all claim a being with both limitless power and knowledge is the root cause.

polyglide wrote:Your understanding of logic, I am afraid, is different to mine.

You buy a car, the manufacturer explains the manner in which it should be treated for it to perform in a proper manner, he/she also explains that to deviate from the manner explained would result in failure.

I know, I know, it is rocket science, however, get some child to explain.

1. The car manufacturer isn't clearly identified, but many hundreds are all claiming they made it.
2. They all claim to be infallible.
3. They all make claims that are palpably erroneous
4. All the evidence suggest the car evolved without the magic these manufacturers all claim made it.

So in the end, as you suggest rather sarcastically, it's not really rocket science at all.

My guess would be that if God were at all concerned about the variety of theories put forward to explain Him, He would find consolation in the totally ephemeral nature of internet discussion boards.

As usual you do not appreciate the meaning of an example given.

It would not matter how many people manufactured the car nor who they were.

The fact remains as stated.

What actual fact is that PG in normal english not rhymes please.

probably right there oftenwrong