No need for a 'saviour'

i think jesus loved goats . he wouldn't like any goat to be sacrificed . he was jesus , savior of the goats . jesus loves life . do you ?

 

Unlikely to the point of impossible, yeah. Pretty much.

Umm... okay. I would argue that logicalness and rationality is an intrinsinct part of God's nature and character, but still, if Christ is God, then He isn't "just" a man.

I don't know about where He shat, but I am certain that He did. And urinate, too. And get sick. And breath. And do everything that humans do. He was human, after all. He also claimed to be God.

Don't know about a trinitarian conspiracy, but the Jews had already singled out God's Wisdom as having independent thought, action, and personhood from God the Father, though still being God. Read Philo (a contemporary of Jesus) for more info on Jewish philosophy. Hypostatis didn't come out of nowhere, it was grounded in the Old Testament.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Further, I would argue that people today are not taught to reason, either. Look at the number of Relativists out there. Relativism as a philosophy is *completely disregarded* by the philosophical community, yet there it is, being encouraged in our schools and homes and through our conversations and our entertainment. No, I would say that *other* dogmas are forced on the innocent before they can reason, instead.

 

when a christian doesn't believe in a personal afterlife ... that person probably don't care if you do or donut . it would be irrelevant to why christians get along and love one another .

you want to insist i'm going to meet you in the sky ?
well , i love you too .

you want to give a bag of food to this old hobo and say jesus love me ?
same thing .

maybe it's only a question of style ,
of how kindness gets ritualized .

is ritual kindness really all that great ? not so free ?

 

ALSHARAD

Jesus was 'pretty much' absolutely not just a man.

How do you know this.?
Absolutes require absolute evidence. that means evidence like gravity that you can show all .
What REAL WORLD evidence can you produce to show jesus was more than just a man?

None?

What a suprise. If you want to play in the arena of thinking beings.
Like most on this forum. then you have to start thinking instead of just parroting the rubbish the church tells you to say.

Occam

 

Jesus is the only person I know who only preached for 36 months, and now has over 2 billion converts. And that is an absolute fact. Just as real a gravity.

 

Campbell...there are an estimated two billion persons worldwide who belong to a large number of religious sects generally categorized together under the name Christianity. A minority are converts, most were born into it.

 

Does that lessen the fact that Jesus made a tremendous impact on the world even in the short time He preached?

"Although heaven and earth will pass away... my words will never pass away" And they still havent... that Jewish carpenter was right!

 

Meh. The real world actually requires much less in many circumstances. *You* want absolute evidence, but really, I bet you live your life with a lot less evidence for a lot more things. "Absolute" evidence is a nice theoretical concept, but most people don't really live their lives by it.

Well, I like what Mr. Holmes/Mr. Spock said:
"If you eliminate the impossible, then, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

I don't need to show "absolute evidence" that He was more than a man, I just need to show that He couldn't have been anything else. Again, I don't need to "prove" that He was God, just that Him being "just a good man" is impossible.

What evidence is there? Well... He said He was God. And not in some esoteric, impressionistic, "we are all a part of God" type of teaching. He made it very clear that He was God and no-one else was/is. This is His most prominent claim and it is spread throughout His teachings. If we know *anything* about His teachings or the man Himself, then we know that He claimed to be God.

So, we have a simple logical deduction. His claim: "I am God." can only be true or false. So let's look at our options.

If it is true, then He is God.
If it is false, then:
a. He claimed it believing the claim to be false (He lied).
or
b. He claimed it believing it to be true (He was insane).

The only impossible position is that He was simply a good man. A morally good man doesn't lie and an insane person isn't really intellectually "good" in then sense that we mean. And being simply mistaken is right out. I can be mistaken about a lot of things, but you don't *accidentally* or mistakenly claim the completely wrong identity.

Again, in our list of possible scenarios, "Christ was just a good man" is an impossibility because the claims of Christ are contradictory to what a "good man" would claim. The statement is self-contradictory and cannot, therefore, be true.

So, if we can show that it is impossible that He was a liar and that He was insane, then we have eliminated the other possibilities and the only other option is that Christ was telling the truth (regardless of that option being improbable).

Either that, or we don't know what He said at all, in which case, you can't say He was even a good man, because such knowledge would be impossible to prove.

Careful, Occam, I try very hard to avoid personal slants and attacks on this forum. There is no faster way to end meaningful dialogue than to start insulting the other party.

And in case you hadn't noticed, most of what I post on this forum *isn't* what most people in the church today would even understand, let alone telling me to say it. So please, stop with the assumptions that you know what I am going to say. You are only demeaning yourself.

 

However they got there still does not take away the fact that one man and 36 months of His preaching has had a major effect on this world, and this fact cannot be ignored.
Most Christians who are born into a religion will still have to go through some religious training, and those who do this, will have to decided if they will continue to remain Christian or leave.

 

Absolutely true.

True as well.

I replied to your post because of your sweeping generality...like my Christian friends who claim America is a "Christian Nation"...by constitutional law, it isn't, although the majority religion here is historically and currently Christianity.

 

Absolutely not.

A Sunday-school stereotype. No one knows what Jesus did between the age of twelve and his re-emergence into history at thirty.

Speaking of "words not passing away", the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-gita predates Jesus and the New Testament by centuries and is in worldwide print and circulation, with about as many translations and editions as the NT.

 

Speaking of Hinduism, that whole love thy neighbor and turn your other cheek stuff was around long before Jesus. Just because the Jews never thought of it before doesn't mean he dreamed it up. Take away that and you're left with some dude angry at the commercialization of his religion.

 

Predating has nothing to do with it. Just think back in the time when Jesus walked the earth. He was just an average man that eventually claimed a not so average idea and as a result He was killed. Now there have been many many men that have claimed to be God. These men have made many predictions, yet only one man's predictions has come true. Jesus is that man. And although Jesus was in this world, His accuracy was from out of this world.

 

Jesus did not tell the Jews to love they neighbor in order for them to get to heaven. He gave the Jews these examples to demonstrate to them that none of them will get to heaven by doing good works. The other religions teach we need to earned our salvation, Jesus tells us that no one can earn salvation. And there's the difference between other religions, and Chrisitanity.
You donot get to heaven by punching the good works clock, and after enought good works, you retire and go to heaven. Jesus tells us, your best works are but filthy rags before the throne of God.

So tell me, how do we get to heaven if not by works?

 

If you're not already in 'heaven', I'm sad for you. But if you want to dissociate from this universe entirely, me summarizing the Tibetan Book of the Dead is beyond the scope of this thread.

 

I'm sorry, but I work in a hospital, and I see the condition of so many sick and dieing patients daily. This is not heaven. And what I see of the conditions out in the world, I don't see heaven there either. Heaven is a real place, but this is not it. If you can ignore all the evil and suffering going on around you, then perhaps it is you, who have dissociated yourself from the reality of where we are.

 

If you believe in some pie-in-the-sky MATERIAL world devoid of pain, then you are the delusional one. Either you take part in life or you do not, but to complain about its nature is pitiful. There's nothing we'd like more than for you to reach nirvana, although you do not apparently possess the keys, so we don't have to listen to your bitching about how terrible it is to be alive.

 

Well the Bible talks about a place called heaven, and it also describes the time of the end of this world. And if those prophecies that speak of the end of time are are true and accurate. Why would you not believe that heaven is just as real. The Bible tells us just before Christ returns, the Jews would return to the land of Israel, and they would retake Jerusalem. The Bible tells us they will be surrounded by enemies, and the focus of world attention will be on the fate for Jerusalem. The Bible also tells us that Jerusalems East Gate will remained sealed until Christ returns and opens it Himself. The Bible tells us that all attempts to open the gate and break the prophecy will also fail. They have. Nothing delusional here, what I have just stated here is the truth. And Christians are on the cutting edge of this life, because we are often the first one's going out to help the down and outs.

 

Persecution of Galileo and countless other scientists; intolerance of different faiths; witch hunts; the inquisition & crusades. Thanks, you guys are such great humanitarians, and the only reason you ever help others is to spread your bible of jewish propaganda cause you think it will get you a ticket upstairs.

 

Please quote out of the Bible where it says good works will get a person into heaven.


There may be people that believe that... but that is not what the Bible states.