Acts 2:17 "'In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. When I was somewhere between the ages of 9-12 I had a vision in my dads bird aviary. What I envisioned was the bread of life. God was making this bread of life and it was developed in turns or stages on a conveyor. The bread of life consisted of pure all the best things like the highest quality of living. If you ate this bread it was joy and happiness unlimited with absolutely no negativity. It was like pure life. To make this bread of life God had to have total clarity. It was a very difficult process and took all Gods effort. What I saw was God making the bread and then him being attacked from below by the devil and this made one loaf of the bread fall to below. The thing is the devil had attacked because he thought he could interupt God in the process of creating the bread and then no one would get any bread at all because the devil thought the bread was still being baked. The devil thought he had timed his attack before the bread had become immortal or complete on turn or step 3 or near there. What I saw was the bread putting on armor. It had armor that was permanently bonded to it that gave it immortality but it was the most basic level, you could never take this armor off it's apart of you and permanent. Like this armor would take anything you could throw at it but it wasn't the full armor so you would still feel pain and suffering. By having the bare minimum of armor on if you were attacked in it you would be hurt but because your immortal eventually you recover and you become glorified because the armor adapts and glorfies at damage. It was like raising the level of the basic armor through it being attacked. With this armor you are immortal but still feel the blows. It's like the undergarments or something. This was all premeditated by god. He raced the devil and the devil took the bait. The devil had thought that if he attacked God declaring war that he could destroy the process of the Bread of Life so no one could have it and because of the clarity required the devil also thought by attacking he could prevent god from ever again making more bread. The thing is God knew. He fully made the bread in like enough time for it to be immortal. God kinda set the devil up by getting the devil believing the bread wasn't immortal or complete yet by disguising it in clouds and thereby baiting the devil. The devil thought that the bread was still at least 2-3 steps away. But yep it was finished. In the steps or turns it took the devil to make his attack god created the bread of life finished and ready and prepared. God planned for this exact level of armor and for the bread to fall to below just by the devil attacking it. It was a display of power on God's part against the powers of the devil as it compared them both equally in a race. God timed the bread and the devils attack perfectly. God knew exactly when the devil would attack and was ready it was all premeditated. He had paced the devil and new his moves before he made them. The attack of the devil knocked or launched the bread in it's current not full armor state to earth but this was to build up the level of the basic immortal armor into greater glory. The bread fell from heaven to give life to below also. Once the basic armor is built up then then when you put on the full armor that is also magnified and the full armor then can reach a higher overall level. I've forgotten some of the details maybe and haven't explained it fully but this is basic enough. This was my vision that I had. Jesus is the bread of life. Hope you enjoy. Leeda
Hello, Leeda and welcome. Be sure to check the site rules against preaching. It's hard to enjoy the idea that a young indoctrinated mind was led to make all kinds of false conclusions about the world around her. What you are describing sounds like a mild hallucination which sounds worse. The "Bread of Life" is a mythological symbol which seems to have been incorporated into Christianity through its fusion with the proto-Mithraic cults of the region. The setting for the Last supper was that the Romans were on the verge of crushing the Jewish insurrection. There had been a lengthy siege in which Josephus reports death by starvation on a massive scale. It stands to reason that the legends about how anyone might survive the siege could enshrine the idea of a Holy Bread and/or to supplement the other allegories that come together in the legend of Jesus. Not only is the lengthy Roman atrocity in Judaea practically wiped clean in the Gospels, but the surreal and magical atmosphere surrounding the crucifixion does include one core fact upon which all of Christian history turns: the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem. The legend preserves for us that it was caused by a metaphysical earthquake. As we know, it was destroyed by the Roman Army. The legend of Jesus dining with his 12 followers prior to his crucifixion resembles a legend in the cult of Mithras. The communion tables in the catacombs of Rome preserve evidence of this. It also seems likely that the significance of 12 followers was that the earlier Persian tradition, that the Sun god was being followed by 12 constellations of the zodiac, injected itself into the legend of Jesus, probably upon conflation with the 12 tribes of Israel. Clearly 12 tribes of Israel did not follow Christ. It looks like the churches probably originated in Egypt, possibly as far as Ethiopia, and from Syria into modern day Turkey and from there westward to Rome. The other element of the Last Supper is the cup, which is probably taken from the cup of martyrdom Plato describes in the trial of Socrates. That leaves it for the reader to speculate that this part of the legend may be conflating the starvation of the cities with the martyrdom of Socrates. There would be a lot of high symbolism in such an interpretation, but since so much symbolism is needed to apply it to the religious interpretation anyway, the question of relative plausibility isn't even an issue.
Be sure to check the site rules against preaching. Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye.
Well done! Folk like him forget that his worldview is also a religion, and should be treated as such. jan.
Jesus is immortal as am I. Even though I die I live through resurrection. I believe I am immortal and this is how I confer immortality on Jesus and figure Jesus is immortal. I am so sure I am immortal. I'll be back. It could be I might not die before reaching fullness but should I die I will certainly be resurrected. I am eternal. Leeda
Bread is symbolic of human civilization. Bread does not grow on trees, but requires many stages of processing. It first requires farming and the harvesting of the grain, which is pivotal to civilization. Then one needs to mill the grain into flour, which is also advanced behavior. Then you need to combine the flour with other specific ingredients in the correct proportions (food chemistry). Then we bake this in the fire for so much time. Once we have bread, we have a source of food that is uniquely human yet made of natural things. The bread of life would reflect civilization, but in a way that is natural from the floor to the ceiling. The tree of life has twelve types of fruit and its leaves are for the healing of the nations. It reflects the various natural skills of civilization, from which the bread of life can be made; natural humans. Natural humans are like an instrument of the earth taking the natural creation to the next level of natural. These ideas are connected to religion because the ancients saw the need of God's help to achieve this ideal. The twelve fruits on the tree of life, are analogous to the one type of fruit or apple in the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The apple symbolizes laws which define good and evil. Being natural will not happen with laws of good and evil, since nature is neutral not polarized like law. The result is that processing bread, via law, will not allow the bread of life. The twelve types of fruit, on the tree of life, reflect twelve neutral skills that make the bread of life possible. Science may be one of these fruits, since science is neutral and based on what the data says. It not what we wish it to say, based on knowledge of good and evil like politics. From this platform of objectivity, we can define what is natural so when we process the bread of life, it reflects the needs of life and the extension of nature. There are eleven other fruits (skills) that also help the cause.
When I post in the tenor of my post above, I am applying science to explain religion. I may not always be correct, esp since we have to work with sketchy information, but at least I'm making an effort to assemble the evidence the best I can and to work through the analysis. To the extent that there may be evidence or logic to contradict me, I invite discussion from anyone. Preaching is telling the audience how to live. I haven't done that. I've placed facts in evidence and analyzed them for explanatory content in search of the origin of the rite of the Eucharist. Neither of you have contradicted the facts or logic I used, so they still stand as the only plausible explanation, until controverted by better evidence. Having said that, I understand that your interpretation of the Bible is colored by your belief that it's historical narrative. But that's an error which confronts you with the evidence of history. As I mentioned, we already know that the Temple was razed by the Romans, during the crushing defeat of the Jewish rebellion which broke out around the year 66. The scene in the Gospels where the altar breaks in half during an earthquake is obviously not historical narrative. At best it could be called symbolism, but it's not purely that either. The story tellers are lamenting the fall of Judea, and for some reason they transferred all of that angst into the figure of a crucified martyr (a punishment reserved for rebels). It's obvious that there would be a presence of magic in the lore since this symbolized God's abandonment of the Covenant. And it's also logical that they would transfer their ideology and rites away from the classical Judaism, now that God had abandoned them. Christ even echoes this: "Oh Father why have you abandoned me?" It's just laden with angst. Gone is the promise that by devoting themselves to all the rites and rituals, God would deliver them to the Kingdom of God. Gone is their center for organizing as a movement, the Temple, the place so many brave people died defending from desecration. And on top of that they suffered heinous executions by crucifixion for simply trying to do what God told them to do. It's really sad. If anything like this happened today, the world would rally to the defense of the victims. Once they've reached that last stage of grief, acceptance, they're left with no logical recourse but to find a new path to God. They wipe the slate clean and start with a new set of rituals. And of course the central ritual was the mass, the Feast of the Eucharist, although it takes some effort to try to figure out how many years passed from the destruction of the Temple to the widespread belief that they should bless and eat Holy Bread and Wine which had become the body and blood of Jesus through this strange kind of magic they called Transubstantiation. Lost in your error--the one that treats legend as historical narrative--is this back story. Jesus symbolizes the crushing defeat of Judaism as a promised world power. The Jews were fully expecting a Kingdom on Earth, not in heaven. God broke the deal. But God can't be wrong, so they must have misunderstood the deal. What other Kingdom did he mean to give them if not the one centered at Jerusalem. Aha. A kingdom in heaven. The reason why it's significant that this reasoning took root outside of Judaea is because that's where all the refugees of war had fled. They were displaced and traumatized. They had no temple, no rabbis, nothing to fill all of the holes in their lives. Among the places they fled were the two main corriders the Greeks had used in their world conquests -- Alexandria, Egypt, to the south, and Syria/Anatolia to the north. That northern route is where the Persians had attacked Greece long before, and the Greeks had come back that way later to defeat them. It was a crossroads, a place where cultures mingled, where soldiers took local women for their wives and raised kids who became steeped in hybrid traditions. The man who calls himself Paul is born there in exactly those circumstances. He is the product of a Jewish refugee taken for the wife of a Roman soldier. A lot of Christian ideology is created around Paul, which is why this fact is so crucial. It was on that crossroads, where Persian, Greek and Roman cultures collided, that those hybridized offspring devised a new version of the Persian religion centered around Mithra, who now became Mithras. Mithras is now known to his followers as a demigod who has a last supper with his 12 followers on the eve of his crucifixion. The 12 followers of the seminal Persian version (Mithra) were the 12 constellations of the zodiac. We can also speculate that this is why Judaism had 12 tribes. But there at the crossroads the magic number "12" became conflated. The Persian Mithra was the Sun, who was followed by the 12 constellations. Now Mithras had 12 human followers. Since the Greek word "disciple" means "follower (of a teaching)" you can see how easy it would be for the hybrids to conflate this. By the time this hybrid religion worked its way to Rome, and in parallel with the then-evolving Christian legend, we know they were having a Eucharistic Feast of their own, because the Mithraic cult built their holy dining tables into alcoves down in the catacombs under Rome. In fact when these were discovered long after being forgotten, the discoverers believed they had found the first tables at which Christians had been consecrating the Eucharist. It's these facts I'm interested in exposing, nothing more. You won't hear me telling you how to live your lives. I'll tell you're seriously mistaken in treating legend as historical narrative, but I won't even be basing that on belief. Just evidence.
The belief in immortality is rooted in the biological defense mechanism. All vertebrates have a brain, which provides a natural set of defenses to protect organisms from predation. Humans acquired this from our apelike ancestors. When combined with the human faculty of reason, and coupled with our creative faculty, when we contemplate our mortality (such as when witnessing the death of a loved one) our defense mechanism instinctively triggers. It engages the creative faculty to devise a protection from this "predator". There is no "fight or flight" alternative to death by natural causes. New pathways are needed. And those pathways are the ones that build the response "I will live forever through Jesus" or "I will live forever through Allah" etc.
I can't myself say if Jesus has already been resurrected. But in terms of how do I know I will be resurrected? Well you look at how fast society is moving technology wise and simply look into the future by extrapolating a little. Also the very drive of humans. Work for bread that endures to eternal life.
Aqueous - I have hypothesized as much in the past (re #2), especially the correlation between the metaphorical (in the case of Gethsemene) or actual/symbolic Grail and the cup of Socrates, considering that there appears to be a degree of Platonism in early Christianity, anyway. However, I should like to read what has been found on this and the other issues you cite, on either side (Theology is fascinating, isn't it?). For my edification, would you indulge me enough that I might ask for sources?
I think you need to familiarise yourself with the difference between the sciences and the humanities. We cannot apply science to "explain" religion (by which I presume you mean, "explain away the religion of others"). It doesn't deal with that subject! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Ahem... your religious belief that the bible is not a historical narrative is your own business; but such claims need to be made with something better than a claim of "obviously"! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The bible is not, obviously, a history of Judaea of the kind that might have been written by a dull American don in 1955. It is an ancient text, and nobody in antiquity, to my knowledge, treats it as other than a recounting of events. Surely you would need to produce some ancient texts that indicate that this is how the text was written to be understood? Otherwise this is merely making up a fairy-story. Evidence is preferable to imaginary stories. <snip more speculation> I'm afraid you have fallen for a crank story here, most of it by a certain Acharya S. Modern Mithraic studies does not endorse any of this. Have a look at Manfred Clauss, "The Roman cult of Mithras", which is the standard university textbook. A few comments: The Roman cult of Mithras does not originate in the near east, nor does it originate in Persia, nor is Mithras the same as Mithra, nor even derived from him (as far as any man now living knows). The archaeology is clear: Mithras arose in Rome. The earliest archaeology fans out from there, in the late 1st or early 2nd century AD, and the first literary mention, ca. 80 AD, is Statius. Mithras was not a demigod, but a deity: he did not have a "last supper", he had no "12 followers"; Persian Mitra or Mithra did not either. The depiction of Mithras (if it is him) surrounded by the zodiac does not mean that he had 12 followers, any more than the presence of stars on his cloak means that he was a member of Kiss, or his association with the sun and moon means that he was an astronaut. The remainder of the comments about "12" are, unusually, even dafter than the rest of it. Out of curiosity: where did these come from? I don't wish to be too harsh, but it's obvious that you didn't check any of this. So you didn't know if any of it was actually true, hmm? That's not really acceptable, you know. It seems that you're just saying whatever you find convenient. And that is not very rational, and it will get you clobbered. I'm afraid that no such "Mithraic dining tables" are recorded in the standard compendium of Mithraic monuments, Vermaseren's "Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae". Check it and see. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! This is a little disingenuous. When we attack the religion of others, we are indeed telling them how to live their lives: the silent inference is that our opinions are better than theirs, and so they had better live as we do: that is, by convenience. You're a little prone to flatter yourself, you know, for qualities that you don't actually possess. You praise yourself for not lecturing people; but you ARE lecturing people. You praise yourself for "facts"; but you're not actually interested in facts. You talk about "science"; but you don't know what it is. This won't do, you know? I'm not accusing you of dishonesty: rather, I'm saying you've been duped. You're repeating stuff you've read and found convenient, written by people who (to be honest) were liars. You've got to be way more careful, and a great deal less self-flattering. When people flatter, you can be pretty certain that you intend to screw you in some way or other. Normally people don't flatter, unless they want something. Be sceptical of everything you wish to believe. Think for yourself. Never say something unless you have checked whether it is true, and doubly checked anything that is controversial on politics or religion. And be aware that wishing Christianity isn't true does not equip you with any learning, intelligence or other attribute for which you have foolishly praised yourself. It's just a wish. The truth has to be found by people who can think. Those who just adopt the values of our masters and rulers are merely cattle. All the best, Roger Pearse
