IF eternal life is "the best deal", then I suppose so. No negotiations are necessary, though. All one must do is follow God.
I'm not jewish, Christianity doesn't command killing of anyone, not destroying any artifacts. Praying not to be seen by others doesn't mean in a closet, just better to be in a closet than praying because you think it's popular. Of course you know all this. It's just much cooler to misrepresent with mockery than enter honest discussion. When will you anti christians I answered realize that A) Christians don't get their Jimmie rustled by this silliness and B) the only ones who think what you are doing is cool is those that only think that because they believe thinking like that is cool to do. You're on a bandwagon, one that is repetitive and shrill. One day that bandwagon will finally tip over and then religion will be cool again. Those same people who cheered you on will be on the other side of the fence, where the grass seemed greener. Society does this. Attacks a religion one day and embraces it the next. People can't think for themselves so they repeat the same platitudes and strawmen. It's always "homophobic" or "witch burner" or some such. This may come as a surprise to you but I find the cries of "heathen" and "damnation" just as irritating. I hope you all stay on your bandwagon. Keep posts like this going. When christianity is hard, unpopular, lonely, then I know my resolve, and the resolve of other believers is true. I don't get my kicks from insulting everyone who doesn't agree with the crowd. I never did. I didn't when I was a kid. When I was a kid, and it was popular to hate gay people, I didn't. I didn't call them names. So, the crowds called me a homo. Now today, I won't renounce my God, so I'm called "homophobic". How ironic. It didn't bother me when I was a child, it doesn't bother me now, and it won't in the future. I want you to know that I am your worst nightmare. I cannot be pressured or insulted into behaving in a way that reflects the popular mold. In fact, it only embolden me. You cannot manipulate me or intimidate me. I rest my life on the unfailing pillar of God, of whom I am not ashamed. Nothing on this Earth causes me fear, certainly not a rusty old Internet trope, much worn through much use, blind to its own hypocrisy. No. I believe in God, not you, nor anyone else.
If a person isn't Jewish why would he believe in the Jewish deity and in the Jewish ethnocentric religious fairy tales like Noah's flood?
You have over 12 and a half THOUSAND posts on this political forum, which I'm sure the Lions share are in the religious sub forum. Your very username mocks christianity. And yet, you don't have even a cursory understanding of the relationship between christianity and the old testament? No. I don't buy it. If you honestly don't know, go spend 15 minutes reading about it on wikipedia. If you do (more likely) then I'll not be trolled into answering questions both of us are already well versed in.
Even the Bible says that a person shouldn't believe in Jewish myths. It even calls them senseless. Titus 1:14 (CEV) = "Don’t pay any attention to any of those senseless Jewish stories and human commands. These are made up by people who won’t obey the truth."
Are you saying those authors had no free will and could not make mistakes or choose to write things differently?
They were inspired by the holy spirit, given power not only to speak, but to do so in different languages.
It doesn't say they should not pay attention to Jewish Scriptures, it says senseless Jewish myths and human commands. If you want to know why read about early church history.
But they still had free will, so the could have made mistakes or chosen to go against God's word, yes?
But we're talking about 2000 years ago when religion was part of life. Nations had gods, cities had gods and even families had gods. What we know, they didn't. Even up to probably 4 centuries ago religion was important in Europe. We know many of the problems in the early church from the writings of Paul and other Epistle writers, and from Early Church Fathers. OK. The Bible contains myths, but it also contained commands that saved lives. The health regulations, family relationships. It contains some history of the Jews AND the Middle East. Forget the religious aspect. The Bible helps us to understand the ancient Middle East. Ancient relics describe battles between the Jews and other empires. The Bible often confirms this. Ancient codes show us where much of 'Moses' commands come from. Acts tells us in religious terms of the death of Agrippa I. Josephus tells us of the death of Agrippa I. His explanation is purely medical - yet put the two together and they are very similar. The Bible is actually a mine of information and confirmation of facts.
Do you have free will to write the things that you think about or are you compelled by some inhuman force to write things that you don't want to write?
Goodness. It seems, IMO, that the "free will or certainty" that you claim to have has led you to a condition of uncertainty regarding whether or not you are "being controlled by an outside force."
I see no evidence that I am being controlled by an outside force, but that is not the same thing as being able to say for certain that I am now. However, given no evidence that I am, the logical response is to act as if I have free will. However, this distraction has nothing to do with the point of my original post. If the Bible writers had free will, then they had the power to make mistakes in their righting or to put untrue information in it regardless of what God wanted them to write.
That is exactly my point. Even though those writers were inspired to write, they wrote according to their own free will.... " [h=2]inspired[/h] adj1. aroused or guided by or as if aroused or guided by divine inspiration: an inspired performance; she was like one inspired. 2. extremely accurate or apt but based on intuition rather than knowledge or logical deduction: an inspired guess." Likewise, your uncertainty as to whether or not you are being forced by an outside force to write the things that you write and not precisely portraying the image in your mind of the things that you were thinking. Your intuition guides you to act as if you have free will.
So what? It is a public forum and I am free to comment on any thread that I desire to make a comment.
Sure you can, but not being the target audience or even disagreeing with what I said, what exactly was the point?
If you can't figure out what I stated, then your intelligence is not as great as you would desire others to believe it to be.
God chose them. Certainly God would have chosen those who would desire to do His will, whom He could bestow knowledge to, the knowledge they want transmitted. That's a far cry from saying God possessed people and forced them like robots to print his words, but you know that. Speaking to you atheists on this forum is quickly making me cynical and distrustful of atheists. Why do you distort what is said and constantly ask questions you know the answers to? Why ask things that only portray absurdity and ridicule? Is it so much of a stretch to conclude that the purpose is to portray absurdity and to ridicule and not to glean answers? You all wonder why Christians constantly call foul and claim victimization. Do you remember how Christians, the majority of them, would ask obviously silly questions, which in hindsight look foolish? The questions that were only meant to set a trap? Questions like "Don't you care you are letting your kids go to Hell?" and such. Now all of us Christians look back at them and groan. We know it makes us look bad to have them in our history. They are our burden. We must answer for their hateful and confrontational behavior, and are called to task for their actions, and our numbers dwindled, all because a group of our people in the past were hateful when they thought they were being clever. The atheists here, now, are a good representative of the group of atheists that will be future atheists burden. You guys think you are being clever, but you accomplish nothing except to alienate people who might otherwise have agreed with you. People will wonder why you guys attacked from ignorance, and what you have to fear from Christianity, exactly as Christians used to do to those who became atheists. This is why I always encourage you atheists to keep it up. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. My enemy is atheism, it's worst enemy is atheists like you. Erego, your actions are be efficient to my cause. There is nothing I can say about atheism to make it look bad. I cannot use case studies, because they are not representative. I cannot use statistics because correlation is not causation. I cannot use ideology because atheism alone isn't enough to find fault in. I cannot use the Bible/Christianity, because it isn't popular. Thankfully, I need do nothing to portray atheism as a negative, hateful, vicious attack dog. Atheists do that for me. Why would I tell you all this? Because I know it won't change you. You all have been at it for thousands and thousands of pages, hundreds of threads, millions of words. You'll be back at it after this very post, I'd bet money on it because it wouldn't be a gamble. So I won't even ask you to keep it up. I already know you can't help yourselves.
And yet also within these sediment layers are trace fossils like footprints and burrows, as well as the fossilized charcoal I mentioned before. A little hard to explain these when everything is under two miles of water. http://paleo.cc/ce/tracefos.htm Most flood geologists accept that mainstream stratigraphic principles are valid and the sequence of time periods in the geologic column, but still try to fit the flood in somewhere. Unfortunately, taken together they have proven that at no time was the entire Earth underwater. http://reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/article/view/44/36 Flood geologists like Dr. Morris have done a lot of work trying to pin down when Noah's Flood
