Saint, When you die your concsiousness ceases to function. You will not be wisked away to heaven, hell, or anyplace. Those are fantasies.
How predictable you threaten me with a plain of ficitious existence that does not exist.. your such a silly billy Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
What Age are we now? The Age of global warming! The age of extinction? The age of pollution? We have our problems. Don't sit there thinking you have all the solutions. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
All of which will overcome us if we cannot use our reason and intellect. Faith is the real problem because it values belief in the absence of evidence.
I'm not some damn savior, but I do argue in favor of reason and science. All the religionists offer is the false hope that God will come down and take care of everyone.
We have to ask ourselves, are we part of the problem or part of the solution? We just can't help being part of the problem but the over all balance, is your life contributing to the solution. If it is you qualify as a "saviour" as you say. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
No, I don't believe it's necessarily a matter of personal responsibility, it should properly be considered a political problem.
You mean like a democratic decision? Even they take their guidance from the population. Greens are taking over as the people realise the politicians are not taking enough of the tough decisions. You and I have to make the decision to enable the politician to make the decision too. They need backing, otherwise it would be dictatorial, like Cambodia years ago. If you are sitting waiting for the politicians to make the right decisions that is wrong. Look at the changes in the last 2 years. Have ideas get it out there in the social media, twitter etc and next thing you know you have a movement, but some have to be willing to die for the cause. Look at Syria. Wow can they turn that country around, and what will be the result. How will we stop Iran building a bomb, will China balance it's trade? There has to be a much more aggressive popular swell of opinion and say.
When I say it's a political problem, that doesn't mean that I don't participate in the political process, only that politics is the realm in which we should be addressing these things. I didn't invent our way of life, but I do have to live in it, which often means making choices that are not ideal.
You silly, I am not slave, I am free, with hope of eternal life. What do you have? Mortal and waiting to die?
And others use the OT to explain the N. Seems rather circular. Luckily Ecclessiastes is pretty straight forward, no need for interpretation.
And the cure for that is -- rich bible knowledge? Rich bible knowledge would incorporate the sum of human knowledge, which would overrule the literal interpretation of the bible, weed out the myth, legends, fables, superstition, and borrowed pantheistic elements; redact and correct the historical, geographical, biological, physical, astronomical/cosmological errors; tag all the unverified authorship and source material; properly group and estimate the timeline of authors and properly annotate the amalgamation of authorship and the arbitrary attribution of authorship in the early Christian era; trace the etymology and correct, redact or tag the linguistic anomalies; resequence the timeline errors and properly annotate the references to contemporaneous philosophies, religions and cultures, removing the ethnocentric bias and restoring ancient cultures their place in history; ...and so on. By the time you got finished you'd have some cheesy poetry and a few recitations from Hammurabi. But you'd sure know your bible verses inside out.
Was that your own thought Aqueous or did you borrow that list of things to do? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
My recommendation to the school boards of the US, a curriculum on bible study.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Faith and belief should not circumvent reason and intellect, Reason and intellect should not circumvent Faith and belief.. the two are not mutually exclusive.
We can't believe something that isn't supportable by the evidence. One thing, among many, that the authors of the bible fail in their teaching of, is that belief is involuntary. The mind forms our beliefs based on the evidence we are exposed to. If I were an ancient human not knowing of scientific discoveries, I might be wrongly inclined to think that the wind was a spirit as others back then did. I'm not saying that God doesn't exist or never existed, but that belief that the bible is correct is believing in something not real.
