Nobody's perfect. Except one.
Well, Yaakov, if personality is the lesser state then you should abandon your personal account and stop pestering us with illogic.
I just rattled off a few Scriptures about God's plan for the nations (before and after Jews existed) and Jesus's work for them, there are many more. If the god of Israel wants to dominate the nations, what if he is the universal god and thus the best god of all the nations? Because if you think the real god or monad is the impersonal and nobody should have a personal god but should worship the impersonal as greater, then you're against Jesus as if he said something wrong. But people never can get around to hanging Jesus on his own words.
The real God is the one that is revealed in creation and that lets each person find out truth by a unique traversal of the one path of truth (and, when one comes across special revelation, testing that revelation by the nature of truth revealed in creation). If people don't accept the reality of what (or who) the real God is, people face natural consequences, because rejecting reality leads to negatives. Now, people might argue that, oh, that's an evil god using tactics against me, but if it's the true God then all their special pleading is for naught and all the negatives are what they deserve for their prior rejection of reality. So you wouldn't be able to tell apart the true God from a false god by saying the true God doesn't participate in allowing evils to happen to you; any devil can put bad things in your life and promise to relieve them when you worship him. So that's not how people discern that the Biblical God is the true God. Instead, they decide that based on (1) seeing the true God in creation or (2) seeing the true God defeating any other proposed god in a fair test. If the first doesn't work, you get the second, even if the other proposed god is yourself.
Test comment. You should be able to see this logged out.
Preston, you're on the Conspiracies forum and you're citing PBS and Nova as if they're "contrary to the establishment's narrative". That's self-unaware. You're also upholding Islam, which makes all your contributions suspect due to taqiyya. But I find that taqiyya is sufficiently countered by extra transparency because people learn that they can be free to share the truth without feeling pressured by policy to uphold a single narrative.
"Muslim" now applies to a man of peace but was not used as a personal title that far back. You don't get to say Abraham and Jews and Christians are Muslims unless you use all the titles the same way. "Jew" means man of praise, "Christian" means man of anointing, and Abraham was all of those metaphorically and none of those titularly. If you don't see the word "Abraham", you sure don't see the word "Muslim".
Plus, it's illogical to appeal to Muhammad, who believed in Abraham, and then to argue that Abraham was a mere hypothetical. Yes, we accept that monotheist nomads don't leave memorials. The evidence for Abraham is (1) the chain of tradition by which the Bible came to us, (2) the fact that the Bible is reliable on every point on which it is testable, (3) the fact that the Bible's testimony is consistent with the early period and not with a later. Now, despite the validity of the first two evidences, some people quibble on the third, ignoring the Bible's chronology (Abraham 2044-1869) and pushing him later than the Sesostris period in which rich Semites from Canaan regularly got rewards and negotiations from the Egyptian pharaoh. Do you believe in the existence of Abisha the Hyksos? He visited a pharaoh of this period, 20th century, 12th dynasty, in exactly the same way Abraham did. It's possible he was Abraham in a later visit than those recorded in Scripture; his name is cognate. Egyptologists grant the provisional existence of people on much less evidence than that, but certain people raise a red flag anytime it means admitting that the Bible is a good historical record, because they think it'll mean they have to come to grips with the Bible's moral demands. If you actually uphold Islam you shouldn't use secularism to rail against Judaism and Christianity when the same is opposed to Islam the same way.
I told you Manetho mentions the name Moses. I told you that his name is the same as the root of Kamose and Ahmose, with whom he was contemporary (also another Ahmose, the mathematician), and with Ramose, the name of the city he lived in. I linked you all kinds of contemporary evidence that came up in a search of just one or two days. And you come back with establishment denunciation as if there's no robust Biblical archaeology community debunking all of it.
If you're a Muslim, there's nothing to argue about the existence of Abraham and Moses; in that case you're either betraying Islam by questioning them as if the questioning tears down your opponents, or you're practicing taqiyya and hoping your duplicity isn't caught, which would also betray Islam. If you're not a Muslim, you are running so many contrary stories at once that your position doesn't have any logical weight. (Sources for no Abraham, sources for a robust Abraham but in Arabia only; citing the Bible when convenient and rejecting it when convenient; citing the Bible for the character of Abraham but rejecting its dating of Abraham; etc.) So I'm not sure what benefit there is in continuing. The point of my quoting your book source is to have a large number of salient quotes for analysis, because it's quite an intriguing etymological study; but, without my stating a conclusion on the evidence, it still belies you because it totally argues for the existence of Abraham and Moses in every detail except traditional geography.
So, here's my one conclusion. It appears you are not someone interested in pursuing the truth at all costs, but only in popularizing narratives that advance a reactionary agenda (denigration of Christianity, also Judaism) whether or not they are the truth. Only one reality happened, and we have sufficient evidence to know the broad strokes of that reality, such as that Jesus rose from the dead and had a message and gift for us. Do you want to know the truth at cost of everything else, or do you think there is something more valuable than truth (in which case that something may be untrue and be deceiving you all along)?
Where did personality come from, from nothing or from the Higher Power? If it came from nothing, wouldn't that make us superior to the Higher Power because we have something that it doesn't have?
Why did Jesus say that he gives his life for the world, that God so loves the world that he gave, etc.? Why did Jesus say he had other sheep to bring into one fold? Why did he say God was building a house of prayer for all nations? Why did Simeon repeat the prophecy that Jesus would be a light to the Gentiles?
Thank you for at least getting Rev. 2:9, 3:9 relatively correct.
Thank you for being so forthright! Wouldn't you think the highest intelligence would use very punctuated demonstrations of his power and would be able to appear in any form anytime he wished, once people recognize that the form is not the whole being?
Did you want to look at specific Scriptures Jesus upheld to see if they actually say all the nations that don't serve Israel would be utterly wasted? Seems like the literalist Christians are just fine with them, as if they might not say what you think. I mean, your idea that he called Gentiles dogs and swine as if racial seems just as invalid as others' idea that he called Jews vipers and foxes as if racial. So you may need to work with the text a bit to see if we read texts the same way.
God defines Reality perfectly, we model Reality imperfectly.
Discovering Reality as "made-up" by God is no change because nobody else can "make up" a better one.
Discovering intermediaries making up proposed Reality models is indeed a very helpful, positive change.
In this Reality, one known physicospiritual form is sentient (Homo sapiens); other proposals exist.
God said he made the first from dust (golem) and the second from the first (GMO); the rest by natural diploid birth.
So there are right ways to think about creation of golems and GMOs, but most all proposals are dead wrong.
Nowadays, "mud" golems are called "metal" robots but work the same; no souls.
Ensouled and/or enspirited humans always have the power to escape the golem's "life" despite robotic behavior.
So true NPCs and clones are potentially wild, not guaranteed to follow orders of their "fathers"; as it should be.
NPCs and clones exist, and many act like them; either they can be human, or they can be proven robots (Turing).
So treat everyone as human who looks human until they prove otherwise, and you will not be deceived or disadvantaged.
what the point is in living if we as a community consciously deny Christ’s teachings
There are others who don't.
Are you committed to Christ's teachings as he reveals them to his bride en masse rather than as any individual interprets them? He's the one teaching, not us.
Cosmocentricity! Good one, I'll have my alt work on it.
I was wondering when conspiracists would get around to the Fugger Family who made a famous loan to Archbishop Albrecht! I won't be taking the 4 hours to review the video but at least tying them in helps the connections.
Yes. Actress Linda Blair was permanently affected psychologically, to say the least. However, the originally demonized boy whom the film was based on had a relatively normal life afterward and rarely admitted being the inspiration. The priests also lived to tell. So it was actually a triumph for Christianity but has been taken as scaring people with some alleged "power" from our enemy. Instead we should take it as proof we always march forward.
I don’t think you get to invoke BBT inflation
You may be right because the Bible invokes a big difference between light and stars. In the plasma universe origin hypothesis, the light begins everywhere at once and coalesces into plasma strands that eventually accrete into stars; even if there were not lightspeed decay, it seems this would account for the microwave background. But then by the same token, ultraviolet radiation would have redshifted into visible light as well. When you're getting to the range of 10 billion lightyears, you've had a chain of several assumptions to come to that conclusion and I'm not an expert on the whole series; but I do know that the experts are arguing about them, and no single news article is interested in giving the whole chain of inferences but only in quoting the scientists who assume them. For the flat-earthers, there is no evidence of 10 billion lightyears, and this opinion can be joined on many other assumptions too, as is demonstrated in the range of opinions in the "consensus" literature.
account for tens of thousands of professionals and experts who operate in these domains every day who would say your views are next to unfounded
a little more respect
Oh, I respect it enough to read it open-mindedly, but not enough to agree that it has right of appeal to authority. I'm pretty big on there being a conspiracy to cover up stochastic electrodynamics, so I hope that level of respect is understandable. But I am free to speak boldly due to the knowledge that truth will never deceive me and I have nothing to fear from myriads of contrary "experts": either my claims get backed up by the evidence, or I learn something new and admit it. So sometimes I am "very bold".
Why would God make it look like stars are clearly many millions of light years away? Why would God make it look like c was invariant? And make the CMB look like it’s 13.4 billion light years away? Why would God make the rock layers look like they got deposited slowly over millions of years of slow geologic processes, infrequently punctuated by catastrophic (and relatively rapid) layering events?
It's not that it has deceptive appearance, it's that age narratives are templated onto the data. Peter specifically answers that people deceive themselves by assuming uniformitarianism, that everything continues in the same way it has since creation, willfully forgetting (as you know) evidence of cataclysm that belies uniformitarian math.
(1) On standard math, the stars appear millions of lightyears away because they are, and because (as he said) the heavens were stretched out suddenly, millions of times faster than lightspeed, as BBT agrees. (2) Right now c invariance is by definition but it did not appear invariant before this definition; if it wobbles a little we wouldn't know it because we'd assume our dynamic seconds are a little off from the radioactive second. (3) Same as 1. (4) When polystrate trees appear in multiple layers across "millions of years" of invented geologic time, that's evidence of big catastrophe, not occasional punctuation. The rocks don't look like they were deposited over millions of years, and there is no geologic column anywhere on earth that contains all the eras; they are just mishmashed together into one narrative and given subepochs, rather like your many geologic catastrophes, without any real evidence that one theory is better than another.
Satan did bury stupid arguments in atheist brains to test our faith, yes, but dinosaurs are no threat to the young earth, only lying stories about them are. But lying stories about reptilians go back to the Garden of Eden, don't they?
Look, Graph, if a plant shoots up 3 feet from a seed in a couple days, and later you observe it growing only 1 inch a week, are you going to say the plant is 30-40 weeks old by uniformitarian assumption, or are you going to investigate whether plants have differences in growth spurts? It's the same for every single assumption of old earth. I've debunked the worst the establishment can offer, I offer myself to take on all comers, I'm not surprised by their feints anymore. I'm not trying to "prove" young earth as a whole because I find it better to deal with the specific argument that comes up any given day. The evidence is enough for me on the grand claim, and I'm happy to go into specifics with a willing audience, but I don't want to fall into a time-eating trap, so I seek to stick to a response that is not much more than the time the interlocutor put into it.
Hey Graph, I've explained all of those here except the date of asteroids, which hasn't come up but is a straightforward application of the others. Plus I could pull out my references for literally a hundred other young-earth dating mechanisms. So it's not that simple. Until the late 19th century, all scientific consensus used a cosmic age under a million years, even though the Hindus were conducting initial market tests with random large numbers.
Important to note, alongside the Jews there were the Sumerians who are Israelites and have stayed in the Levant.
(I'm going to take it you mean Samaritans, in which case you can skip the next paragraph written on the assumption you meant what you said.)
According to history, the Sumerians were on their way out by 1800 (priestly language only) to 1700 (population decreased due to saline lands), but history knows no Jews for many centuries afterward; the Bible has Judah born in 1797 and not a tribe (as opposed to a family) until the Exodus of 1539. So you seem to be imagining that Sumerians survived somewhere and were imaginatively recast as Judahites, ignoring the fact that the Judahites have perfectly good songs dating back to the 15th century indicating their presence in Canaan and not Sumer. But Sumerians were overpowered by Akkadians and the last "Sealand" dynasty that purported to continue Sumerian tradition was conquered by Babylon before 1500. There are no records about Sumer continuing, but there are plenty of records from Nebuchadnezzar about conquering Jerusalem and migrating Jews, who were the same people Cyrus populated Jerusalem with again. The nation of Israel from Jeroboam on (as attested by Shishak) was Sumerian, but there's no evidence of Sumer for over 500 years and there is continuity of Jeroboam from evidence of a meticulous judgeship period with the contemporary songs, covenant forms, pottery, graves, etc.
Oh, wait, maybe you mean Samaritans. They are often not regarded as Israelites, but let's take their own testimony in combination with that of Nebuchadnezzar and presume that they were first an offshoot group of Josephites in Samaria and then that they were largely intermarried with Iraqis imported by Assyria to repopulate the land. This gives them the right to keep being called "Israelites" but their disagreements with the Israelites associated with Judah ("Jews") are well-known. Funny thing though, the Persians got no civil war because Jews worked slowly and there was no open belligerence at all, until Hyrcanus in 110. There's evidence there were more Samaritans than Jews for a couple centuries, but there were probably more Iraqis among the Samaritans than natives; and the tension between them and Jews was equal on both sides, it was not a matter of Jews against everyone as you suggest.
So with a few tweaks your narrative works almost passably, because Persia did have imperial interest in subsidizing the Jews, but that doesn't tie to a narrative of illegitimacy for the Jews or Persian invention. An invention would not have the accuracy of depiction of the former periods that the traditional texts have as validated by archaeology.
I'm a straight-stick Christian, sold-out to Jesus, but around here I sometimes speak cagily for people who are listening. Meece meant that what Jesus did (as God) was so alien that it tops anything that can come from outer space. This builds on passages like Is. 28:21, about God's "alien task" NIV or "strange act" KJV. He said that to get people's attention, and so did Meece!
Several of us here have discovered Michael Heiser's research on the Near East interpretation of the divine council (some of which led to the Nephilim, cf. Jesus's teaching on Ps. 82). It explains most of the Scriptures where God deigns to sit at the head of a council of gods (angels), speaking at their level as the Angel of Yahweh. That is exactly how Jesus came to speak at our level, without losing anything of the classic creeds or the common confession of the church.
So when someone wants an alien to save us from ourselves, he can find no better than Jesus! Thank you for your understanding.
Demons, of course.
Angels are frequently associated with stars, as in when the stars sang together at creation (Job 38:7), which was 2 days before Adam (Gen. 1).
Aliens COULD BE older than Adam and Eve. So no mention of aliens in Genesis. Giants/nephelim are a thing completely set apart from ET but related to a kind of breeding in the Bible (fallen angels and women).
Fallen angels are aliens. In the young-earth theory they are 2 days older than man. No need for Genesis 1-11 to use the modern term "alien" when there are plenty of alien things there already.
I truly wish aliens are an ancient beyond ancient race that saves us from ourselves. I can dream.
One of them is, Jesus Christ. David Meece song He Was the Alien: "He was the alien, living on Earth, he's the alien. Some were scared, afraid to speak, the man had powers they had never seen."
We'll have some fun with that sometime. No need today.
hes only got 2000 years out of 300,000
Why do you believe the highpriests who are proclaiming 300,000? What if it's actually 6,018 and God has them all? I have the receipts.
the bible that was just stolen stories
Every time I've tested this claim the Bible has been proven original. Even when it admits summarizing other known records.
I wish I could just believe in the sky daddy like that
Your wish is granted, you can.
And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant (Gen. 9:25-27).
For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief: even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all (Rom. 11:29-32).
God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us (Acts 17:24-27).
Sounds like there's potential for shifting of status and potential for retention of gifts both.
Board readers should be aware that El Al has reportedly the best security in the world because they routinely reserve the right to take you aside and ask a few probing questions. They don't need any TSA or crazy search procedures because they have people experienced at spotting security risks interviewing potential risks all day every day. The fact that he didn't expect this and calls it a "detainer" shows that he's making much book out of what is ordinary for Israel.
That person made a decent connection of all the issues but didn't specify much about causality. By definition that map was enough for one human to consider at one time. It's much deeper than that. However, future explorations of the subject would rely on spadework such as that.
Not too far for this board, keep going. Who is the final boss?
The creator of a world has to decide whether it will include freewill or not. If not, it's not much of a creation, more of just an automation. If freewill is included, that will mean some creatures will do evil, but (as your question presupposes) it is better for creatures to have freewill (a good gift) than not.
It's not relevant to compare this universe with other hypothetical ones though because this is the one we live in. If other universes had been created, by the definition of universe they would be separate from this one and so we wouldn't know about them except by imagining them. So, yes, freewill creatures who have willingly given themselves are a better aspect of this universe than the creatures who have no freewill and just obey the laws of nature regardless (whether those are robots or rocks).
Then the creator has the decision of how to structure the world so that freewill creatures will choose good and so that evil will be limited. There too one can't fault the creator for deciding on a certain amount of evildoers if there is evidence that the domain of the welldoers is infinite and that of the evildoers is finite (it burns out). If the first evildoer is a spirit creature, and this tempts many other spirits and ensnares all humans who will be born of Y-chromosomal Adam, that's not a risk but an accepted part of the freewill narrative that is outweighed by the benefits coming at any time.
So we don't "have to" be perfect, but while we are not it grates against life and calls us to higher life, which is a good thing in a freewill universe.
It wasn't that knowledge was wrong, it's that knowledge of evil by definition means accepting the corruption and nihilism that the concept of evil would mean. Jesus willingly accepted that corruption upon himself by becoming intimate (knowledgeable) as to evil without committing evil. The purpose of the tree was to show that there would be a human who could absorb death without committing evil like our parents did. And that's what Gen. 3:15 says. They didn't have intimacy with evil before because they hadn't committed it, even though they could have reasoned about it for some time before making the fateful decision (see Perelandra by Lewis for a narrative of what could have happened).
There was no risk because the trajectory of those hundred billion plus would be calculable. The issue is the amount of loss compared to the amount of gain in the long run. We have faith that it's worth it, and he have faith that it's correctly stated that all those hundred billion had opportunity to recognize the creator in his creation in some way and were able to choose sufficiently for their lifespan, or not. But when we start saying we know better both how many people are unsaved in this universe and how many people should have been unsaved in a more perfect universe, we're playing God when we are just incomplete creatures. There are many more reasons than we can process for why things happen, and I've found that whenever I seek a specific reason or answer it's always available sufficiently for what I ask. The handwaving escapism of rejecting all moral responsibility because a couple of theodicy questions remain a bit murky is always mystifying to me. If you know so much about right and wrong, propose a moral law yourself and go about doing right and getting right done, instead of criticizing those of us who are doing it.