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HopperUK posted:I would have thought the purpose of a holy document is to tell the truth about God in the best way possible. I mean, in that it makes sense to talk about documents having a purpose at all, in this simplistic way. The Bible was less about God directly and more about the Hebrews' experience of God, and their attempts to make sense of it. God himself remains an enigma.
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Nov 30, 2016 00:22
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Josef bugman posted:Then why does this poo poo keep happening? If God is the universe and he cannot alter Himself, then what on earth good is He? If you're unwilling to concede that God is God and humans are not, there's not much to talk about here. You keep insisting that God should be constrained to humans' sense of justice, and the whole point of Job is that he isn't. Humans are incapable of understanding God's perspective.
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Nov 30, 2016 01:38
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Josef bugman posted:This is a thing I just don't get, this is a being of infinite ability and infinite power. Why on earth wouldn't he be just from our perspective? If He is not expected to hold to laws that He sets for humanity then he is, at best, a hypocrite. At worst He is malevolent. To say simply "Have Faith that He is just" does not work when He allows injustice. And my point is, that is what Job is all about. You may not like it, but that's the book of Job's perspective. The solution to The Problem of Evil is that there is no solution. It's not something we are capable of understanding, so deal with it. Our only option is to trust God that it will all work out in the end.
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Nov 30, 2016 15:37
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Valiantman posted:I like a lot (a lot!) how one preacher I heard as a teenager first framed the problem of evil and then, paraphrasing, told the listeners that it's fine and good to be interested in theory and dogma but the real question you should be asking is "what am I going to do about it?". That's the best solution I've heard. Go on and do something about that evil that obviously is a huge problem! Don't stay in the sidelines, be a part of the solution! Yeah, that's a lot of my resolution of the issue. We would not know what Good was if we didn't know there was an alternative, and we must deliberately choose it. It's significant that the tree in the Garden of Eden was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. An important part of what makes us human is the ability to distinguish between them. So regardless of whether evil has to exist or not, the fact that it does gives us all the opportunity to exercise free will in choosing good.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:42
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Arsenic Lupin posted:I'd like to sidetrack here to say that degenerative and fatal diseases were around a long, long time before modern manufacturing and science. Kids were dying of leukemia in Christ's time, and he didn't heal all of them. This is, in my opinion, one of the great American (don't know if you're American, but it's a particular weakness of ours) fallacies. We assume that all misfortune is traceable: you got sick *because* you didn't eat right, or toxins, or vaccination. I wish we were more amenable to "poo poo happens, I'm sorry for your bad luck", rather than "your wellbeing is controllable, because otherwise I'd have to admit that bad things could happen to me." The attitude of people earning or deserving the bad things that happen to them was addressed by Jesus as well: John 9:1-5 posted:As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” His response doesn't address the general existence of evil, just this particular man's problems. The important thing that jumped out at me from it was Jesus' emphasis that nobody did anything to "cause" the man to be blind.
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Nov 30, 2016 19:12
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Yeah, the structure of Job simply seems to be a rhetorical gimmick to make it clear to everyone that nothing that happened to Job was his fault in any way. It does make God seem like a kind of arbitrary dick, but when it was written that may have been a common way of understanding the behavior of God (or gods) generally. I think it is a mistake to read too much into it. Job reminds me a lot of Plato's Republic in its style and form - illuminating philosophical issues in the form of a conversation among friends. While it's probably based on much older stories, it was written between the 4th and 7th centuries BC, right about the time time period as Plato - so it may be reflecting more of a trendy literary style in its depiction of God than anything else.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:52
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thechosenone posted:Wait what? poo poo that's pretty cool. I's it alright if I ask stupid questions like what saint or apostle would be most likely to be able to go super Saiyan? I just like connecting things to other things, I'm the kind of person who would love to hear metaphors extended well beyond their welcome. You've come to the right place, son. Did you know that salvation is like an RPG?
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Dec 1, 2016 03:22
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Smoking Crow posted:Angels are lower on the totem pole than humans what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. Psalm 8:4-5 (emphasis added)
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Dec 1, 2016 04:16
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Pellisworth posted:note that Satan as fallen angel Lucifer is not in the Bible at all, actually All that stuff is in the book of Hezekiah. I read it myself.  Yes, I know there is no book of Hezekiah. That's the joke.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:28
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thechosenone posted:poo poo really? Where the heck did they get that part from then? a supplementary text? Frickin dlc makin me pay Most Christian mythology originated with the Divine Comedy or Paradise Lost.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:30
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to fight bonus bosses.
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thechosenone posted:That's like a corruption of like three biblical names right? No, he was a king of Judah mentioned in 2Kings. He reigned about 700 BC. His most famous claim was cutting an aqueduct under Jerusalem which still exists.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:34
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thechosenone posted:Cool. The "satan" mentioned in Job is more of an office than a specific being. The Satan was sort of the prosecutor in the heavenly court who brought charges against the dead, who then had to defend themselves. The snake in the Garden of Eden was most likely just supposed to be a snake. In the folk tales of the area, snakes were the tricksters who often convinced people to do dumb things - sort of like the monkey in Indian and Chinese folk tales or coyote in Native American ones. The beast in Revelation was symbolic of earthly powers, not supernatural ones. People have tried to weave disparate characters from 1,000 years apart into a single figure that doesn't actually fit any of them.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:43
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thechosenone posted:So what kind of earthly powers, and would its dbz metaphor be bio-Broly? "Earthly powers" as in the Roman Empire and its emperors - wielders of power. Not like laser beam eyes and stuff.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:47
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thechosenone posted:yeah I know, though how does that factor in now that Christians are more mainstream exactly? Or is it that revelations happened already, and it was when the roman empire fell, and what happens now is anyone's guess? I mean that sounds like something one could argue is that case, is that we live in a post-apocalyptic world. Well okay that is probably actually true just by the post Rome thing at least for Europe, but you know what I mean. Apocalyptic literature used its own code that is mostly lost to us today, so we're left guessing as to just what it meant. It probably describes events that happened during the reign of Domitian c. 95 AD. It seems prophetic because that's the way apocalypticism was written. It was deliberately crazy sounding so that authorities would dismiss it as the rantings of a madman and no on would get in trouble for it. Domitian was a zealot for traditional Roman religion and seems to have persecuted Christians rather severely. The message of Revelation seems to be telling people to hang on and remain true to the faith however bad things seemed at that moment, as Christ would win in the end and they would be rewarded for their faithfulness. Revelation so wild and hard to understand has made it ripe fodder for all sorts of speculation and fanciful mythology through the centuries. It's possible the mainstream understanding of the book is wrong and some of these others are more accurate, but it seems unlikely.
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Dec 1, 2016 05:11
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thechosenone posted:what does this thread think about my mayor making the town splash park closed on sundays? I figure it doesn't make sense, as a day of rest wouldn't having some fun at the splash park make sense? Not that it is a replacement for the pool they filled in... Your mayor is an idiot and blue laws should be unconstitutional. My holy day is not necessarily your holy day and I have no business forcing you to observe mine. As for your other, I find it unanswerable because my opinion of someone's Christian bona fides is irrelevant. I've never really thought about historical figures in those terms. Most people who've been widely hated were so for legitimate reasons.
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Dec 1, 2016 06:40
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thechosenone posted:So, like, what do you think god's day should be used for? Like, for Christians, and for non-Christians who are affected by it? "The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath." - some Jewish dude Everyone should have a day of rest and reflection, not dedicated to making money. It is for our own good that we should not work seven days a week. Religious people should put aside a part of their rest day for worship and fellowship, nonreligious would do well to spend it with friends and family. It does not matter what day of the week it is, or even if it's consistently one particular day. Sabbath is more of a mental health issue than a religious one. I guess I'd be OK with a law that says all workers must have one day off per week, but not one that specifies what that day must be.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:56
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CountFosco posted:Explain where I can find toll-houses in those works. Toll houses spring from the same cosmology that Dante drew on. My own bias is showing a bit, I guess, as I was implicitly intending Western mythology more. Eastern mythology is a whole 'nother ball of wax with which I'm only passingly familiar.
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Dec 1, 2016 19:19
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SirPhoebos posted:So if Satan isn't as prominent in the Bible as most people think, then who was tempting Jesus in the desert? Was that just Him personifying the internal debate He was having at the time? Satan as a personification evil had a life outside of the Bible and was common in beliefs at the time. Jesus casts out demons and stuff too, so there's a whole taxonomy of underworld creatures that are implied or assumed to exist by the Biblical writers, without ever being addressed directly. So the Bible itself does not present a coherent picture of Satan, but he's still around at the margins. The concept of Satan thus goes way back, but the specifics of him are mostly of recent vintage.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:18
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The Phlegmatist posted:If by "recent vintage" you mean almost two millennia old, sure. This goes back to Dante and Milton being the source of most Western mythology about Satan. They, of course, drew on other sources which are now obscure. The Bible itself is not the source, which is often problematic with some Sola Scriptura Satan-obsessed Protestant denominations.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:29
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The Phlegmatist posted:You make it sound like Satan in the entirety of scripture refers exclusively to the pre-3rd century BC Jewish conception of Satan sitting on the heavenly court and functioning as an accuser. That's not true. The role of Satan evolved in Judaism, very likely due to Zoroastrian influence, during the 3nd century BC -- as historically attested to by the books of Daniel and Enoch. The New Testament was written in this climate and is fairly clear in its dualistic cosmology where God is good and Satan exists in full opposition to God and all things holy. Look at Paul in 2nd Corinthians referring to false teachers as being servants of Satan. That makes no sense if Satan only fulfills the role of an accuser. Sorry for the misunderstanding, then. I'm aware of all that and was speaking more of the common current ideas about Satan. Most of it is extra-Biblical and what many people will swear is in the Bible actually tends to come from Milton. Similarly, a lot of people (primarily Protestants) are obsessed with the Rapture, which is barely mentioned in the NT and yet an elaborate mythological structure has been built around it that people assume is all Biblically grounded.
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Dec 1, 2016 22:36
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Cythereal posted:Daniel is a fine book, the story of Daniel and the lion's den was one of my favorites as a kid. There's just... really weird parts of the book, too. Daniel is cool because we can pin down when it was written almost to the day. The "prophesies" about the King of the North and what he was going to do start diverging from what actually happened just about September, 164 BC.
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Dec 2, 2016 02:46
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Ooh! Say more! The character Daniel (or Dan'el) was a well-known from local Canaanite folk tales. He was in the mold of Odysseus, having lots of adventures fighting with gods and mythical beasts. So the book of Daniel was written in the style of those tales, veering into apocalypticism toward the end. It is thematically as well as stylistically related to Revelation, as they both are sending the message to its readers to hang on through the bad times, better times will come. It was actually written during the Maccabean revolt from 167-160 BC. It uses stories of Daniel set in the Babylonian Captivity to illustrate how keeping the faith in time of distress paid off. I would have to dig out lots of books and get caught up again on specifics, but basically chapter 11 of Daniel is all about the war between the king of the north (the Seleucid Antiochus IV Epiphanes) and the king of the south (the Maccabeans). It follows pretty accurately what records show happened through most of 164, but the writer states that the king of the north will hold Jerusalem for 70 years, while the Maccabees were able to get it back shortly after the battle of Beth Zur, in late September or October of that year. From that, it's been concluded that the book must have been written shortly before that battle. That December was when they had the famous rededication of the Temple, where they only had one day's worth of oil and yet the lamps burned for all seven, leading to the festival of Hanukkah.
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Dec 2, 2016 04:18
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Jaramin posted:The 70 years thing is from chapter 9 and directly references the prophecy of Jeremiah that the Israelites would serve the Babylonians for 70 years before rebuilding. It's not a reference to the Seleucids, though chapters 8 and 11 talk about them, and specifically Antiochus IV Epiphanes a lot. You're right. Looking at things more closely and not relying on my memory, it's about verse 40 in chapter 11 that it goes off the rails. That's where it predicts the king of the north will have a huge victory all the way to Egypt. That's what was snuffed out at the battle of Beth Zur and thus never came to pass.
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Dec 2, 2016 06:14
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Mr Enderby posted:This is fascinating. Does the composition point to a single point of composition (barring the apocryphal sections) , or does the veering into apocalyptic visions represent a change of authorship? Daniel appears to have been written as a series of vignettes, roughly corresponding with the chapter divisions. Compilers were a bit haphazard in pulling them together, though, as they get out of chronological sequence. The apocalyptic visions generally parallel the events of the Maccabean revolution, but jump around a bit. Combined with the crazy imagery, it's tough to keep straight just what's going on. That's probably why there's additional Daniel stuff in the Apocrypha - other stories in the same vein that didn't get into the initial compilation, but remained popular.
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Dec 2, 2016 15:41
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zonohedron posted:These are the visions where Christ supposedly told the disciples how to make chrism during the dinner conversation, right? Or am I remembering a different bizarre visionary? I'm having trouble connecting how an "electromagnetic disturbance" that made instruments malfunction at the Edicule has anything to do with the Shroud of Turin. "There's something odd here" doesn't mean there were 3.4 terawatts of UV light emitted from it.
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Dec 2, 2016 19:35
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Lutha Mahtin posted:the forums or my image host or something is being stupid, so please just click this link:  
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Dec 4, 2016 02:39
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Bel_Canto posted:What I mean is that our concert happens on Holy Saturday/Easter Vigil, which is in fact the holiest night of the year. Turns out it was the university itself that forced us to do it; they booted us out of what would be our normal slot so they could have a major hoopla in the central auditorium/concert space on campus. Ughhhh this is so infuriating. Is a religious holiday conflict not a valid excuse for missing a performance? They're forcing you to put one over the other, and they're going to lose.
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Dec 6, 2016 04:40
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HEY GAL posted:oh, no doubt, but you could extend The Phlegmatist's question to all punishments administered by someone who isn't you. Is it OK to demand [x] even if you've forgiven the person who wronged you? I don't think demanding a particular sentence is compatible with forgiveness. Accepting that there are civil penalties for actions and being content with whatever those are is different. If I have forgiven someone for their crime against me, my part in it is done. If the civil authorities drop the charges and set him free, or it they lock him up for life is not my direct concern at that point. Actions have consequences beyond my control. I'm responsible for what I can control.
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Dec 7, 2016 19:40
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That's rather similar to the Methodist concept of prevenient grace - that God is at work in our hearts to prepare us for receiving him before we even know he exists. Ultimately, though, faith is not compelled. It must be chosen by the individual, although freely available to all. We must exercise our free will in a positive decision.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:04
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CountFosco posted:No, actually it is evil, hth. There's lots of names for shades of gray, but none of them are white. They're all less than white and it's just a matter of exactly how not-white it is.
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Dec 13, 2016 05:55
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Josef bugman posted:So every time you post on here it's an act of evil. I joke, but it's serious, would you say that posting on SA is a morally good act? If it isn't then it's evil. The act of posting in and of itself is nothing. It is the intent behind the act that makes it sinful or not. Discussing theology with you is good. Giving advice and encouragement to others is good. Having honest and frank discussions on other subjects is good. Trolling is sinful. Name-calling is sinful. Being dishonest is sinful. A pastor of mine once defined sin as "anything that damages relationships - to yourself, to others, or to God." Sin is inherently destructive and divisive, which is what makes it evil.
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Dec 13, 2016 15:15
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WerrWaaa posted:I will be able to teach a few adult ed classes at my local Episcopal parish in the coming year. If you were given the choice to teach/learn something at church, what would it be? and how would you structure it? Most useful thing I've taught is ancient history of the Middle East. Agricultural revolution up to the fall of Rome and anything in between, as detailed as you want to get. It's kind of overwhelming, but there's a lot of stuff that happened over a very long span of time, and for most people it's all sort of a jumble. Anything more than about 200 years ago is just "the past" and all the events were virtually simultaneous, in that no one can keep the chronology straight. When I've taught it I've generally kept the focus on Israel and how the events in the civilizations around it shaped its own history. It helps things like "Uriah the Hittite" or the Decree of Cyrus make sense to people, and gives them some context for understanding the Bible and who wrote it. The downside is that some are absolutely turned off by it - they want to study anything but history. I don't really follow that attitude, given the Protestant emphasis on reading and understanding the Bible for yourself. "Popular" and "useful" curricula do not often overlap, unfortunately.
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Dec 15, 2016 00:46
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JcDent posted:
Needs a giant gorilla climbing up the side of it.
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Dec 25, 2016 15:20
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Josef bugman posted:To me the spoiler sounds like a literal Deus Ex Machina since when has that actually happened/ when is it ever a good story telling choice? Personally, no. There is God and the absence of God. There is no other. The Devil is a personification of our natural instincts for self-preservation. The "little voice" urging us to act self-centeredly at the expense of others is just our evolutionary heritage to act as animals. People can call that The Devil or demons tempting them to sin if they want to - the net result is the same. God has given me free will to act as I choose. I'm not bound by my animal ancestry. I do good by acting as God would have me - showing love for him and my neighbors, rather than putting myself first. I like this formulation as it ends up in the same place theologically, and is far simpler. Ockham's razor and all that. Others here vehemently disagree with me, though.
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Jan 11, 2017 15:21
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Tias posted:
That doesn't really change anything. I oversimplified for the sake of brevity, of course. Cooperation due to self-centered motivation is still self-centered. Acting in love means serving others without regard for what I get out of it.
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Jan 11, 2017 15:39
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Josef bugman posted:I never quite "got" the idea that you needed to abstain from sex for additional holiness. I mean if it floats your goat go ahead, but it does seem an odd idea. It's about denying your body in all ways. Fasting is the same way. You willfully ignore the demands of your body to force your thoughts heavenward.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:55
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Josef bugman posted:Doesn't it just actually cause hallucinations due to how hunger works after a certain amount of time? It's about discipline. Yes, the demands of the body need to met, but not whenever the body asks for it. Mastering your appetites, rather than being a slave to them, is the goal.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:04
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Josef bugman posted:As a person who frequents this thread can I just ask all of you guys to go and eat something. Like just go out and eat a pie, because if I start having to set up freaking meal plans and boxing up food packages to people I am going to be pissed. It's different for different people. Mastering my sense of hunger had a side benefit of being a great way to lose weight. I don't eat when I'm hungry, I eat when it's time to eat and then only as much as I choose to. Obviously, getting obsessed with it can lead to anorexia - but eating the proper amount of food, no more and no less, is the goal.
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Jan 16, 2017 21:16
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pidan posted:Don't worry I'm fine. Some very nice people picked me up and even rubbed my legs a bit until I was back to normal.I lost my winter hat though. I would agree with you. Gluttony is not just overeating, it's about obsession with food. In that sense food becomes a false idol, prized above relationships and everything else.
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Jan 16, 2017 21:31
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Josef bugman posted:Hunger isn't. From what I have read an overall reduction in calories whilst retaining similar sorts of food is usually required. I don't like it when people injure themselves, especially not when people are fainting. You completely missed the point of what I was saying. My body wants to eat more than it needs. If I eat whenever I'm hungry, I gain weight. Learning to ignore my cravings and eat properly is what matters. I am eating the appropriate amount of food. You seem to be going out your way deliberately to misunderstand this whole self-discipline thing.
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Jan 16, 2017 23:50
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