Name:Red •
Title: Human sacrifice? •
Date posted: 03/06/07 1:20
Q: To you guys that worship human sacrifice. Get with the program please. There are people saying sins can only be 'forgiven' by the sacrificing of human blood. (jesus). have you ever stopped to think how "pagan' you guys really are??
The modern pagans your faith demonizes all the time have quit putting stock in human sacrifice YEARS AGO.
Name:Red •
Date: 03/06/07 1:27
A: BTW, an end all to sacrifice with a sacrifice is absurd.
That's equal to ending all war with a war, or ending oil changes with an oil change............
Name:Mark-Tao •
Date: 03/08/07 19:03
A: If you say that Jesus is the only Son of God, then you have to answer the question, why would God allow his only son to be tortured and killed?
OH, so that God could satisfy his need for ritual sacrifice,
that makes sense.
But the idea that Jesus would have left his physical body here on earth is beyond our ability ot imagine.........
Now that's some creative thinking.
Name:Yaqov •
Date: 03/08/07 19:36
A: IMO, Micah 6:6-8 settles the need for human sacrifice debate. I love these verses. The answer to each line is obviously "No" and I'll bet many Christians would have a hard time reading these out loud.
"With what shall I come to the LORD and bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves?
Does the LORD take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Name:mark •
Date: 03/08/07 22:24
A: Hello
I'm a believer that Jesus died and was resurrected to abolish the sins of the world. I do not consider myself a "christian" and waste no time correcting those who refer to me as one. I consider myself a follower of "The Way" (Jesus is The Way) which is what christianity was known as before the word christian was coined and applied to them. Christianity has become so perverted and bastardized through 2000 yrs. of having it's doctrine decided by men as to be in my opinion unrecognizeable from what it started out being. Kinda like the U.S. Government since 1776.
I personally prefer the company of pagans to christians. I find them to be far more sane and just plain real.
sincerely
mark
Name:lightwoman •
Date: 03/09/07 0:11
A: Sacrifice is what the Jewish people - MEN - were crying for, just as they were crying for a Messiah for hundreds of years. Just as people still do today, the Jews of Jesus' time were tooking for someone outside of themselves - a scapegoat! - to save them, not just from their perceived "sins" but also from persecution by occupying Roman forces. The world they knew was swept up in a contagious mass consciousness expecting a messiah/savior.
And although Jesus' teachings were aligned with Christ (the Christ entity/Spirit or consciousness which dwelled within him), I feel the man Jesus (yes, he had a human ego/lower self to deal with, just like we all do) at times was also swept up in this mass consciousness of a messiah/savior, and, perhaps he - the human part of him subject to error- felt it was his mission to fulfill this role that mass consciousness was crying out for and which prophets had foretold. Jesus posed the question to others, who are they saying I am? Of course the human part of him had doubts and likely struggled with these questions. Jesus went to Jerusalem, knowing he would die there, where prophets of old had also met their deaths.
Arguments that Jesus fulfilled all the prophecies are ridiculous because Jesus himself knew the scriptures backwards and forwards, and knew exactly what needed to be fulfilled - call it a marketing tactic, in today's language - that's what the people wanted if it would get his message and teachings across with impact.
Did Jesus have to die? Yes, to get across the core of his message - that our true nature is Spirit, and there is no real death, only physical death - Spirit cannot die. Jesus just didn't necessarily have to die on a crucifix as a sacrifice, but that was the mass consciousness of the time.
Jesus also knew he had to die or depart in the physical sense. He knew that mankind tended to look outside oneself for guidance, validation and unconditional Love (which he ultimately was - unconditional LOVE). So he went to his death as a means to force his followers, once he was gone, to search within themselves for "the Comforter" that would come. So that each person learned to find spiritual guidance, validation and the ultimate Source of unconditional Love within his or her own heart.
No-one can save anyone else, you can only save your own soul through the process of Self-realization. The crucifixion - altho it was a real event - is also highly symbolic of the process of the birthing of the Christ within each person - to take up one's cross and deny self (crucify the ego/lower self) so that one can be resurrected in Spirit, or higher Christ-consciousness. One must make the entire circular journey - like the Prodigal son - and ends right back at the beginning, coming to love and accept oneself as perfect and whole and Loved in the eyes of the Father/God/Source, and has always been one with and never separated from Source, and then one has truly been born again, as Spirit, part of All That Is. That is how one saves oneself - by following Jesus' example - this is how he is The Way. These to me, thru my own experience of rebirth in Christ-consciousness, and my personal relationship with Jesus - are the much deeper, esoteric meanings of Jesus' teachings that are not easy to uncover when reading scriptures literally. His message truly was to believe in what he taught and demonstrated to us, and by knowing we are eternal Spirit, that is how we defeat the illusion of physical death.
Jesus was teaching us a new way to perceive ourselves (we are just too darn hard/down on ourselves, really!), that we are Spirit, not separate from God/Source, not unworthy of God's Love. We've never been apart from God's Love, which is always there inside of us. The Kingdom of God is within you. Seek and ye shall find; knock and the door shall be opened for you. Jesus was an amazing teacher - a human being who succeeded in uniting his higher Christ-Self with his human lower self, while he walked the earth in a human body. And he taught us we ALL can achieve what he did, and more. We are his sisters and brothers, his peers. He taught us from Psalms, "I said ye are gods, sons and daughters of the most High." I don't believe it was ever Jesus' intent to be worshipped as a deity; he considered himself our teacher, but also our brother, a peer, an equal. Slowly but surely, after he was gone, we (speaking generally) forgot the equality he taught, and once again, we felt unworthy in the eyes of God, separated from God, and so we made Jesus a deity (until the council of Nicea, Jesus' deity was hotly debated; even Jesus' own brother James, who led the Ebionites, did not believe Jesus was a deity!). So men put Jesus back up on a pedestal with God that we poor, lowly sinners cannot reach. How soon we forget! And how sad.
It's not about the sacrifice - that was man's invention from feelings of being unworthy and separate from All That Is (an illusion in reality). Jesus was about awakening to the Truth that we are Spirit, and we are One with All That Is. There is no death - death is the ultimate illusion.
Blessings, Love and Light to each of you on your respective journeys toward ever higher consciousness and soul growth! Now, that's true evolution - of the soul!
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/09/07 1:52
A: Red, sins cannot be forgiven in the sense of pardoned without someone paying the penalty for sins. God does not pardon sins at a word because that would be unjust. To accept Christian teachings means one must first accept that man is evil. Not errant, not a little weak at times, not misguided, not harmed by his social upbringing. Man is wicked, evil, selfish, and every other synonym to describe someone that is completely and utterly unworthy of life. That is a difficult pill to swallow - it is difficult for man to face how bad he really is; I understand that and find myself raising excuses for my own heart as much as anyone else.
Christ sacrifice is due to the nature of God's justice -- In reality, we all deserve what we get, but Christ was willing to accept the penalty for our sins. God is just, and if God is just he cannot wink at sin, His justice is as absolute as is every element of the divine nature.
Nor can one say that ending a sacrifice with a sacrifice as absurd. Christ is the only true sacrifice for sin because He is the only one who was both able to pay for sin (being God) and He was the only one who had the right to redeem (being man). Previous sacrifices in the Old Testament were pictures of what coming Christ could do.
By the way, I think this does constitute Christian bashing. If I was to start dealing with the absurd elements of the philosophy you espouse, you would immediately call me close minded - ever consider the fact that your doing precisely what you commonly seem to accuse Christians of doing? Or is hypocrisy something that only applies to theists and Christians, and not to those who accept your religion? So what has naturalism given us besides the rise of racism in the nineteenth century (on the basis of social Darwinism) as well as the rise of the Nazi party? Huxley and Nietsche did a great job in telling us that the ideas of the strong supporting the weak was something that needed to be eliminated from humanity so that it could further evolve. Why is it that the regimes that have the biggest body count in the century, the USSR, Red China, and Nazi Germany were all centered in a naturalistic worldview that was openly antagonistic to Christianity?
Yeah, like thats really an improvement.
Name:Red •
Date: 03/09/07 3:15
A: Wrong. Your own scripture qoutes Jesus as saying ' If you forgive a man his tresspasses, than he is truely forgiven' Why would he say that. Simple. If a man robs me, It is I that has the power to forgive him or press charges. An act of forgivness is as powerful and real as an act of Jailing him.
But NO..... The church has made jesus a SIN REDEMPTION SACRIFICE. And a sacrifice to end all sacrifice. The problem is, IT NEVER ENDS. Jesus is sacrificed daily, over and over, and never let down off that cross. A perpetual sacrifice that has corrupted much like the establishment that killed him. This is whty the church's main visual aid is jesus dead on a cross, while ignoring his last words " It IS FINISHED"
Read Mein Kampf and find out one of the reasons hitler despised the jews. It has something to do with uh... Jesus. Btw, the catholic church signed on to nazi germany too....
Here again, I understand your need to wrap me up in some sort of religion. I suspect this is the only way you can debate. The diffrence between you and I is, I dont filter everything in this world through a religion. I dont test everything that happens with the Bible. Why? because that book can only test diffrences in other Religions. Hence the need for you to label everyone with one.
Your Idea of mankind in general is sick. Not being perfect does not make man UTTERLY UNWORTHY OF LIFE. That is a lie intended to get people to join a cult. Telling that to a child is mental abuse in my book.
It is a medical fact that people who are severley depressed have those thoughts. But someone in the past put them to good use by defending them......
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/09/07 4:27
A: Again, everyone is religious - by definition, religion is anyone's answers to certain questions - there are ultimately two types of religion in the west, theological religions and philosophical religions, yours is the latter
Actually, Hitler's beliefs were based in a combination of German occultic groups as well as through the naturalist philosophy of Nietsche - who hated Christians. He did use Christian language and other elements for propoganda purposes, but Darwin was the ultimate source of his religion. His goal was the Ubermenschen - the difference between him and Nietsche was only that Nietsche identified the supermen by class, and Hitler by race.
As for Mental illness - thats precisely why the biggest butcher in world history, Joseph Stalin, tortured and murdered millions of Christians - the claim was that those who accepted religion in a secularlist state must be mentally ill.
The difference between him and you is that he realized the logical implication of his beliefs. So did those in this country who began the Eugenics movement and sterilized several thousand young people. It wasn't a Christian, it was the naturalist Herbert Spencer who taught that class distinctions were the natural result of evolutionary processes, and helping the poor would only prevent man's development by continuing to foster those who were ultimately unfit. Darwin's theory was the impetus that brought Ernst Haeckel to write about how blacks were incapable of any higher level mental development, and so it was the result of Darwinism that the Encyclopedia Britannica for some time ran articles indicating that blacks were less intelligent than whites. It was Thomas Huxley, one of the first men to popularize the theory, who wrote "the practice of that which is ethically best -- what we call goodness or virtue -- involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence."
All from the heart of men who believe such as you, the difference is that they saw the logical conclusions of what you believe - but at least you have not dimmed the one witness God has given you of the way the world ought to be - the gift of a conscious, one of his witnesses to himself. They, burning in the fuel of naturalism, realized that according to naturalism, man wasn't special, so human life wasn't sacred, so it was best to thin the herd of those thought to be unfit. They thus burned away their conscious, as every atheistic society is doomed to do, for it is only the conscious that prevents man from descending into the evil found in his own heart.
Name:Red •
Date: 03/09/07 14:31
A: Then it's a damn good thing we live in th U.S.A . A constitution that forbids Me and the way I believe from whacking christains, and to keep you and the way you believe from whacking non-christains isnt it??That;s why we can be diffrent.
You can use Hitler and the nazi philosophy any way you want to. I will admit the core was a complicated hodge podge of old Norse Pagan romanticism, with elements of Modern christianity. But Hitler made himself VERY clear in his book. You can write it off as "propaganda", but he acheived alot of his goals later when he came to power.
Mien Kampf...Chapter; ' Marxism as the destroyer of culture'
" Hence today, I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the almighty creator: By defending myself against the jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord".
p. 326 "Culturally he (jew) contaminates art,literature, the theater, makes a mockery of natural feeling, overthrows all concepts of beauty and sublimity of the noble and the good, and instead drags men down into the sphere of his own base nature. Religion is ridiculed, ethics and morality represented as outmoded, until the last props of a nation in it's struggle for existance in this world have fallen".
You can pick up any modern book by any militant christain , or tune in on your tube and hear that rhetoric loud and clear....... This is only one paragraph out of a whole chapter of this hauntingly familar tone .....
But wait, there's more......
His life (jew), is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature 2000 years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course the latter (jesus) made no secret of his attitude toward the jewish people, and when necessary he even took to the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity........ In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party christains debase themselves to begging for jewish votes at elections.
P.662 " The fight against Jewish world Bolshevization requires a clear attitude toward soviet russia. You can not drive out the Devil with Beelzebub."
" If social demacracy is opposed by a doctrine of greater truth, but equally brutality of methods, the latter will conquer."
"....... Which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr Karl Lueger and the Cristain Social Party..... Today, more than ever, I regard this man as the greatest German mayor of all times. How many of my basic principles were upset by this change in my attitude toward the Christain Social movement!"
I suggest you do some open minded reading outside the bible, and read the stuff for what it says, and not what you would like it to mean, to fit your religion.
I dont equate to stalin in the least. I said it was a MEDICAL FACT that people who are severely depressed have thoughts like those. ("utterly unworthy of life".) You assume that fact is some sort of conspiracy, No, it's a medical fact that depressd people can have those thoughts REGARDLESS of their religious beliefs. So dont make the medical state of depression something it's not, to further your religion.
Thanks for telling me what kind of religion I have. I know you have to do this because you have no other way of intereacting with this world. No other way to intrpit it. You feel that you have all authority to determine where eveyone stands so you can " discern' amongst them.
If Hitler said anything i can aggree with it is this p.455
Political partiesare inclined to comprimise; Philosophies never. Political parties even reckon with opponets; Philosophies proclaim infallibility".
Name:Red •
Date: 03/09/07 14:36
A: Excuse the spelling, i was in a hurry..
Name:slyfoxx •
Date: 03/09/07 16:13
A: Pagans don't sacrifice anything, human or otherwise
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/09/07 20:43
A: I've read mein kampf for a paper on the philosophy behind it in my undergrad, thank you very much. Again, he used Christian language - largely because he knew it would evoke imagery he could twist. It was clearly not a part of his core philosophy, however. And I don't interpret things simply on the basis of my religion, and I take pains to be objective. if that is what you think is going on here, it indicates that your own powers of observation are somewhat lacking.
As to medicine, don't take my words out of context, I am not arguing that people should be suicidal or depressed, nor on the basis of comparison to others (which is ultimately from where this type of depression stems). Remember as well that much of what is identified as mental illness is built on less than hard science. I'm arguing not from the view of man, but from the view of Scripture. I don't feel evil or unworthy of life, but the Scriptures indicate that in forensic terms.
What I meant by mental illness is that this is precisely the excuse used by the greatest mass-murderer in history; be careful with that word mentally ill.
I also know the difference between a technical definition of religion and the colloquial "those who serve some kind of deity" that we have today. The colloquial definition serves its purpose - but that purpose doesn't include debate of any kind. Religion is roughly an equivelent of "world view." The fact that you don't know this is only an indictment of the American educational system.
Name:KRS •
Date: 03/09/07 20:48
A: As to your ad hominum argumentation - which is pretty much the only thing you've offered on this and several other threads, arguing on the basis of some percieved understanding of the psychology of someone you have never met is the province of the unwise.
Your argument ultimately amounts to this, "Christians are stupid because they don't agree with my worldview." This is, at the least the height of Hubris. There is little more to say to someone who can't address a point, and only address the elements of an argument (Vis a Vis the logical consequence of your worldview) addressing only the one point where you think you have something of a case. These are not the actions of objectivity.
I dust me feet off.
Name:Red •
Date: 03/28/07 16:26
A: Of course I will argue my views and opinions. That's what debate is all about.
If you differ in opinion, Great. there is nothing I can do.
But If I differ with a Christain opinion, Christianity imposes a Punishment.
Two major diffrences between my 'world view' and yours.
You Quoted me as saying "Christains are stupid because they dont agree with my world view". I did not say that. If i leave that sentiment so be it..... What's worse? Bieng labeled 'stupid' for disagreement, Or getting thrown into eternal damnation for Disagreement? What's good for the Goose is good for the Gander.....
Name:betty47 •
Date: 03/29/07 4:52
A: I grew up as a Catholic, but I personally never got the Jesus died for your sins part. If all humans were created in God's image, then technically where are we sinning?: Yes. I know we're all not perfect, but I prefer to focus on doing good deeds and trying to be a better person.
Name:Panluna •
Date: 03/30/07 1:16
A: Jesus wasn't a sacrifice.The crime he committed had to with the incident at the market place when he vandalized the money changers and businesses that were open on the Sabbath.He was arrested.As was the custom of the day the romans gave the people a choice:to free Jesus a spiritual pacifist or free Barrabas a strong and aggresive leader.They chose and freed Barrabas who later incited and led a revolt against Rome.Jesus purpose was to make the people see the importance of keeping the Sabbath holy.I think the idea of human sacrifice may have come about latter on to justify His death when the news of the"MIRICLE" of the risen Christ spread.Saving the human race with Christ's blood might have to do with our being redeemed from Original Sin---when Eve defied God in Eden and she and Adam took a bite from the apple in the garden therefor(symbolically)they went from complete innoscence(sp?) to knowledgable.The forgiveness to humankind is that God in His rage cast out His greatest creation then found a way to forgive us of our natural intellectual curiosity.
This idea was added to Church doctrines much later,probably sometime during the reformation.it was introduced to justify the crucifiction and explain why Jesus couldn't save himself from execution even though he was viewed as God incarnate..By the way:Do apples grow in the Middle East.I would have thought figs would be more common.
Name:Panluna •
Date: 03/30/07 1:33
A: Of course nowadays how we treat each other and live ours lives is the most important factor.Doing good brings good Karma and nice results.
Name:Panluna •
Date: 03/31/07 14:24
A: To correct myself:Baptism by water(a practise started by John The Baptist?) washed away Original Sin.How Jesus' death on the cross can erase all the sins of the believers is a matter of faith and church doctrines.I would still view it as God's total forgiveness for transgressions commited during one's life time.Was baptism a rite practised before John the Baptist was mentioned in the Bible?
Name:CanuckChick •
Date: 03/31/07 15:43
A: Consider this:
When God created the universe, he set in motion immutable laws governing its continued existence.
One of these laws is: Sin = death
Man was not designed to govern himself, but was to look to God for guidance and leadership.
Because the first two humans decided to flaunt God's authority, and decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong, they "sinned".
God did not intend for man to live a few paltry years on the earth and then die. He was meant to live forever, under God's authority.
Out of love for mankind, soon after the first transgression, God promised a "seed" that would once again allow mankind to fulfill its original purpose. God does not ignore the laws of the universe that he himself has put in place.
This law required that a perfect human being prove that he could live on earth, amidst the temptations, trials and tribulations, and remain faithful to his creator, unto death. Enter Jesus.
He ransomed mankind from death by living a blameless life, and then dying on the torture stake, of his own free will.
