It's The Bible Quotes Thread!

Considering How The Bible Came Together - How Can Anyone Take it as The Word Of God.

 

More like iGod

 

No. How on earth did you get here from my post or are you just throwing stuff at the wall hoping some of it will stick? :noidea:

BTW: Please define "absolute morality" and give me an example?

 

Deuteronomy is the last speech Moses gave to the people before he died. It contains a recap of the journey out of Egypt and a very long recap of the Law as given in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.

The commandment to kill those of other religions is a direct commandment from God in Exodus.

In Exodus Chapter 20 it says:

22Then the LORD said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel……..

It goes on and on with various commandments until you get to Chapter 22 and:

18"You shall not allow a sorceress to live.

and then

20"He who sacrifices to any god, other than to the LORD alone, shall be utterly destroyed.

That seems very plain to me. If someone worships another god, you kill them. Straight from God.

Who released man from the requirement to keep the law as written in the Old Testament? Jesus didn’t. Jesus and his disciples followed the law and kept the feasts. Jesus specifically said he didn’t come to change the law:

Mathew Chapter 5:

“17 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets ; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18 "For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 "Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven ; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.â€

Again, it seems very plain to me. The last I checked heaven and earth are still here so the law is still in effect.

I can buy the argument that some of the bad stuff done by the Israelites was the work of imperfect men. Moses, the judges, and the kings were not perfect. However, there are plenty of absolutely horrible things attributed to God specifically. An example:

Exodus Chapter 7:

7 1Then the LORD said to Moses, "See, I make you [as] God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. 2"You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall speak to Pharaoh that he let the sons of Israel go out of his land. 3"But I will harden Pharaoh's heart that I may multiply My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt. 4"When Pharaoh does not listen to you, then I will lay My hand on Egypt and bring out My hosts, My people the sons of Israel, from the land of Egypt by great judgments. 5"The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out My hand on Egypt and bring out the sons of Israel from their midst."

This is the beginning of the plagues on Egypt. God specifically says that he won’t allow Pharaoh to let the people go so that he can do increasingly horrible things and prove his power to the Israelites and Egyptians. Of course this ends with God killing every first born child in Egypt.

This is horrendous is two ways. First, God is not happy with inflicting just one plague and then allowing Pharaoh to let the people go. He wants to do greater and more horrible plagues. Second, he kills thousands of infants to prove a point. There is no way that this can be blamed on man. The bible specifically states that God, through an angel, kills every first born in Egypt. Not just Egyptians by the way but also the first born of the slaves that were forced to work in Egypt at the time.

How is God killing infants to prove his power moral?

 

You are partially correct but need to go further. This is a pretty well laid out study on the "new covenant", better than I can explain for sure. As you can see the new supersedes the old but the commandments were not the old covenant but part of it.

You might have mention this before but do you consider yourself an atheist?

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

 

1) The Bible is the 'Word of God' i.e. not the work of man.
2) The Bible is the source of 'Absolute Morality'.
3) The rules of morality in the Bible have changed.

This is the contradiction I am having trouble with. I have seen all three espoused by some proponents of the Bible. It was not my contention that you do, but if you don't believe all of them, which are the exceptions?

Yes, this is usually my question as well.

 

I'll try an arrange my points in the same order as your's to avoid confusion or misinterpretation of our respective arguments.

As Biblical scholar's have pointed out for thousands of years there are two laws, God's Law, the Ten Commandments written on the stone tablets and Mosaic law, which God allowed man to institute. Why? Because God made man with Free Will and that's how men want things to operate. If God imposed His will on everything man did then pretty soon man would just ignore God and He might just as well hang it up and go on vacation. Which might explain why no one has seen Him in over 2,000 years.

God's Law mentions no punishments for violation, only a promise. Man's law does, because men feel that some form of punishment must be instituted to dissuade those from committing acts that violate their societal norms. If God instituted a punishment for each and every act that violated His Law then what would be the point of free will?

If you had read the New Testament you quoted above, you would have known that some of Jesus's first acts violated the very law's (Mosaic) that you insist He kept! Destroying the law of man as to a person's fitness to live and society and attain the Kingdom of Heaven was practically the entire reason He came back! NO ONE enters the kingdom of heaven by obeying the Law, can't be done. Only by and through the power of God and His Holy Spirit or through belief in God and acceptance of the Sacrifice of His Son on the cross for your sins, a FREE gift can that be done.

How would you have handled freeing an entire slave race of people from a tyrant King? One warning after another was given to him and no amount of persuasion would convince him to free the people of God. If God were the hateful murdering tyrant atheist make Him out to be why would He even bother to ask? He could just kill all the Egyptians and let the Jew's take over an established nation, communities, agriculture, infrastructure and all as well as saving them 40 years in the desert.
But the King of Egypt didn't listen because a free labor source of slaves was to much power and to rich a gift to give up. So God, through Moses, He does like to work through us ya know, started at the bottom of the plague scale and worked up. Even the last and ultimate one didn't convince the King of Egypt that God was serious about "Let My People Go!" because after letting them go he still gathered his entire army after the Jews left and tried to slay them. God ended up having to slay almost the entire male population of Egypt that was fit to serve.
Untidy things happened to nations that couldn't defend themselves in those days. I wonder how the elderly, women and children of Egypt fared after their means of defense from other nations was taken from them? Find a history book of those days and discover it for yourself. It's a fascinating read and may shed some light as to why things were done the way they were done in those days.

 

So you contend that when God says to Moses:[FONT=&quot]"Now these are the ordinances which you are to set before them".......... followed by a long list of rules, that those are rules that were created by men, not God?[/FONT]

How did people get to heaven before Jesus came to earth?

I suggest you reread the text. The text doesn't say that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. The bible clearly states that the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart. When God makes you do something you do not have free will.

Plague after plague it is the same:
Chapter 9 Verse 12: [FONT=&quot]And the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he did not listen to them, just as the LORD had spoken to Moses. [/FONT]

Chapter 10 Verse 20: [FONT=&quot]But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he did not let the sons of Israel go.

Chapter 10 Verse 27: [/FONT][FONT=&quot]But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he was not willing to let them go.

[/FONT]Why does God do this? Why doesn't he just let Pharaoh let the people go? God says why very clearly:

Exodus Chapter 10:
[FONT=&quot] 1Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may perform these signs of Mine among them, 2and that you may tell in the hearing of your son, and of your grandson, how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I performed My signs among them, that you may know that I am the LORD."


You didn't answer my question. How is it moral for God to kill infants? Babies can't make their own decisions. Egyptian babies were not defying God, so why kill the babies?


[/FONT]

 

I think you mean covenant.

 

It's funny to see people who I think are Christians, arguing old testament dogma. The only reasons that the old testament was kept by the new Christians were: to lend credence to their new belief by showing it had a history (which was very important to people at the time), and to use those parts of the old testament that could be shown to presage the coming of Christ.

That is why Christians do not follow the 613 laws, or celebrate old testament holidays, or keep kosher for that matter. So why all these arguments about old testament stories (which according to modern rabbinic tradition, are allegorical, and not history or science lessons.) What a waste of energy, man.

:hippie:

To paraphrase Lewis Black, if you want to know about the old testament, ask a rabbi. They have no idea what you are talking about here.

 

Arguing/debating with them is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.

 

Yes, thank you. :embarassed:

 

'So mankind created gods in his image...male and female he created them'



Genesis 1:27 (New Atheist version)

 

OTOH, he didn't believe the bible was the divine word of God. His views, which varied over time often fit some version of agnosticism.

 

Just trolling.

1 Timothy 2:12

I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.


(Don't ever say this quote in Sweden)

 

We'll probably never know who the actual man, Charles Darwin was, it seems even he had a difficult time understanding himself. Something I think we all share.

 

I know who I am and understand myself. This "deeper meaning" all stems from religion.

What: Human
Purpose: to reproduce

Me before birth: was nothing
Me after death: will be nothing
Me during life: Irrelevant as long as primary biological objective is achieved

Nothing says you can't have fun or do things you like to do, or help others, or anything. But all of that is superfluous. If you enjoy church, then why not. I fully understand that religion is a social interaction. But doing it because you are trying to score brownie points with a deity is just ridiculous.

 

If your trying to make the supposition that God took an otherwise good man and somehow manipulated him into becoming a bad man it's easy to see it that way but it's not as nefarious as it seems.

It's difficult to take a single or small group of verses and formulate an accurate picture of what is going on. Go back and reread you'll see that Pharaoh first hardened his own heart, he was keeping an entire nation in slavery and treated them harshly not to mention the fact that Pharaoh put himself up as god.

Through Moses God made a reasonable request, "Send my people away that they may celebrate a festival to me in the wilderness." I think it was for three days. According to Cecil B. De Mille, Pharaoh had a pyramid to build so I'm guessing he couldn't spare his slave work force for that period of time and refused, saying who is this God I should recognize Him? God makes more reasonable requests, performs miracles, the two go back and forth, yada, yada, yada, it's all there in the Bible read it. Until finally Pharaoh's stubbornness is so great that force must be used. BTW, stubbornness is another definition for the Hebrew word used in the Bible for "Hard Heart" IIRC.

So God hardened Pharaoh's heart. But it wasn't by some mind manipulation, hypnosis or trick. It was simply done by making reasonable requests pointing out facts Pharaoh didn't agree with and performing miracles in front of a man so hard of heart and so stubbornly set in his world view that any evidence to the contrary or POV that disagreed with his own POV hardened his heart. His stubbornness finally resulted in the ruination of his kingdom.

I suspect I may have just hardened your heart on this issue as you probably don't agree with my POV? I hope not, God Bless. :amen:


p.s. How did people get to heaven before Jesus came to earth? Study the Bible it's all there. hint: except for a select few, people aren't in heaven yet it all happens at the end.