Profits, religion and politics

Quote from vladiator:
Listen, moron ........Idiot.
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Quote from inandlong :
Unfortunately you clearly misunderstood my point. And you hacked off an important part of my post. I heard the Word, knew (a priori) it was true, end of story for me. That is the end of the story...for me. I didn't question it for its validity. My heart knew it was true for me.
One of many things I do not understand though, is the harshness with which non-believers go about making their point.
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Where was I or Mattjclark being harsh.?
I notice a very great deal of harshness and hostility emanating from Vladidator,who apparently rushes toward your "truth" to embrace it without the scientific or detailed explanation or inspection one would expect an academic to make beforehand. It's unusual for me to see such impatience from a supposedly highly educated being, by however means they may have been provoked.

You have your "truth" I have mine. I feel every bit as strongly (in my opinion stronger) that I hold the very best "truth" . I respect you should be able to hold and express your faith as I should my beliefs and understandings. I think you misunderstand things and that you have wrongly , in my view , reached a conclusion which contradicts itself. However I don't slam your position just because it is that way.

It is simply put that I don't believe or agree with your kind of "truth" for these reasons.
Being able to examine and question everything I can without having a preconceived answer before I start and coming to a definite heart felt belief or faith that I may have about something without precepts is exhilarating and also gives me a heart felt understanding it is how things should really be.

Finding a "truth" like yours that can't be questioned for validity , is against all that is natural to me. One day inandlong, you may well find that a heart felt knowledge collapses and if you are honest and brave enough and can face up to the fact .....what you knew to be absolutely true was no longer , could have a dramatic effect. It did for me

Should that happen to my "truth", then I partly expect it. My point is you are not be able to.
I feel stronger and happier knowing I can look objectively without having a preformed answer, yet still poke around at my certainty. I think you are poorer in "spirit" for not being able to do that. Please be clear, I am not making hostile criticism, just putting a point of view. I think a closed mind or concept like yours is too debilitating in the big picture.
 
inandlong:I heard the Word, knew (a priori) it was true, end of story for me. That is the end of the story...for me. I didn't question it for its validity. My heart knew it was true for me.


Vlad: Couldn't have said it better. Inandlong, you have just made a friend.
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ohmigosh..

you guys surprise me. one a med grad, the other a finance phd, yet both seemingly unaware of the requirements of 'knowledge'.

i have no idea what in the world you're talking about by knowing "in my heart" that it was true. we don't "know" with our hearts, we "know" with our brains.

if you are presented with an assertion, you surely don't "just know" it is true do you? that's not how we generally go about "knowing" things. don't we compare them to our currently accepted body of knowledge to check for consistency?

for me, 'the Word', as a whole, cannot possibly be true, because it contains numerous self-contradictions - the best evidence for falsity you can ask for. (those aren't the only reasons i reject it, however) "daniel_m is a married bachelor" doesn't get a second thought because it's self-contradictory. so when i come upon self-contradictions in the bible, like Genesis 32:30 and John 1:18 ("I have seen God face to face" and "no man hath seen God at any time") i write the bible off as untrue.

you didn't question it for it's validity inandlong? maybe you should have. perhaps, then, you might understand why, after 24 years of servitude to it, i was forced to right it off as the Immaculate Deception.
 
Apparently people have to "do their time" in the prison of religious faith before they are able to be free.

I was Interested to learn it took around 1600 years for the Bible to be written. After Christ,there were just 100 years taken to finish it. 35 to 40 different men wrote it. Parts were later found to have been forged by the Church :) Great basis to form a "truth" upon :)
 
Therein lies the entire crux of the matter daniel. You don't know with your heart. You are not alone though. I know others who, like you, know with their minds but not with there hearts.

God, the Love of God, Obedience to God, Faith in God... all are not found in the mind. They are found in the heart. God searches your heart... not your mind. Jesus didn't place His faith in men because He knew the hearts of men - paraphrased. In fact, a simple run through a concordance will elucidate the importance of the heart in knowing God.

Vladiator's response demonstrates, as you pointed out, another who knows with his heart the Truth, and the Love, and the Peace of God. And again as you pointed out, we are educated men, trained in critical thinking. I was a believer long before medical school though. And it is a knowing heart that helps me be a genuinely compassionate physician rather than the automatons too many of my colleagues are.

I am sure there are many many verses that seem to contradict each other. You point out two that surely seem to. But in the context that they were written, they are not contradictory. To pull out verses from their context and say, "look here, these two surely show the Bible is nothing but a contradiction" is weak evidence compared to the awesome happenings that you could use as evidence of the whole fantasy.

By this I mean it would appear if the contradiction of these verses is your basis for rejection, then you are saying the parting of the Red Sea, turning the Nile into blood, manna from heaven, water from a rock, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, healing lepers, and on and on are not the basis of your rejection. It seems to me that these things would be far more suspect than honing on the meaning of two verses written hundreds of years apart. I can hear and even sympathize with someone who might red of these events and say "yeah right" because theyare truly awesome. Bypassing all of that to point to two verses and say "Ahaaaa, see... see...here is the reason I fell as I do" just seems a bit contradictory itself.

Okay daniel, let's get ready for trading huh? It's 9:05 here, and the pre-market ES has been all over the place since London opened.
 
Quote from stu:

Apparently people have to "do their time" in the prison of religious faith before they are able to be free.

I was Interested to learn it took around 1600 years for the Bible to be written. After Christ,there were just 100 years taken to finish it. 35 to 40 different men wrote it. Parts were later found to have been forged by the Church :) Great basis to form a "truth" upon :)
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Some interesting Bible facts:

I have a friend that's a "Good Christian Boy" who always tells me that the Bible is the most accurate and complete piece of history known to man, likewise, this is one of his rationalizations for his deep belief and commitment to the Bible. This has always puzzled me because for the most part I can't disagree with that. It really is one of the most historically correct manuscripts of the time. How could this be? Well, apparently around 250 A.D. there was a ruler of Egypt who was a Christian and he had a mandate to burn all manuscripts that were not Christian. In effect the Christian Bible is the best depiction of history because the Christians erased any other record of history that would compete against it.

The Bible, as we know it, is really just a collection of many stories that developed over time (somewhat like the story the Beowulf manuscript 1000 years later). Eventually these stories were written down in Hebrew on animal skins on to what you and I would call scrolls (I don't believe any of these scroll exist today). FYI: animal skin is not a great material to write on. It quickly decays and makes it quite difficult to read after just 30 or 40 years. Anyway, after a long period of time the ruler of Greece (believed to be Ptolemy) ordered that these scrolls all be pooled together and translated into Greek and it is from that we have the first good record of the Bible that is the basis for the 3000 plus versions of the Bible which exist today (with obvious inclusion or exclusion of certain books). So if we are to believe the divine nature of the Bible, we are to believe that first it was accurately passed down from person to person as a story. From that point the story had to be divinely transcribed onto animal skins, and from those decayed (hard to read) animal skins, the bible was simultaneously read, and translated to the Greek record we have today. That is a lot of divine intervention if I do say so myself.
 
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so when i come upon self-contradictions in the bible, like Genesis 32:30 and John 1:18 ("I have seen God face to face" and "no man hath seen God at any time") i write the bible off as untrue.
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The Bible is remarkably consistent about something: all visions and supernatural experiences involving God show His hidden in one or another. Furthermore, the Old Testament is very clear that one cannot look upon God and behold His true glory.

The Bible is similarly consistent in that all physical manifestations of God (theophanies in the Old Testament a la Gen 32:30 and Jesus Christ in the New) allow face to face contact.

This consistency is actually a credit to the Bible not the other way around.
 
 
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