Re: Caveat
Submitted by hopesalive on May 24 2002 21:32:58
In reply to Caveat submitted by A.I. Watcher on May 24 2002 18:33:38
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I have been outside for a while. I wasn't intentionally dismissing you. I'm glad that you did your homework (or at least a teeny bit of it). I already apologized way back for saying it was intentional. I thought you noticed it, but you seem to read through my post in a very fast way and miss a lot. You are right in saying that some people do not like to talk about these passages. You should understand that most people who call themselves "christian" have not read much, if any, of the Bible. They just get what their preachers give them, which is generally the politically correct version of it. This is very disturbing to me. Centuries ago, the Catholic church became corrupt with power largely because common people did not know how to read. This allowed them to control the perception of the Bible. It seems that the same is happening today, but more because people just don't care what the Bible says. Church is more of a social gathering place than anything. I think any verse taken apart from the Bible and treated as a document in itself is dangerous, and in some sense out of context. The Bible is a big book. It is not meant to "prove" something, or try to justify or condemn. Rather, it is up front about its nature. It is to help us see who God is. He can be both extremely loving and forgiving and a destructor. This dual nature is something that is hard to understand, but in the New Testament there are passages that give us a lot of insight. "God is love." Not the romantic kind... the kind described in the Bible. Think of when you were little (this is if you had good parents). Your parents may have done something that just seemed mean or pure evil, but it was because they loved you and knew more about the world than you. Now, imagine that you had perfect parents who were the creators of the universe (hehe). They know all the rules of existence and love you more than you can comprehend. With this perfect knowledge, they could make life or death decisions. Everything they do is perfect, so you can have absolute blind faith in them. Or, you can trust your limited knowledge and see their actions, which you can't understand, as a mean way of getting back at you or just hatred. They give you this choice because they don't want a drone. They want a son who honestly loves them. |
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