yayyyyyy God

[SaggyBalls]

that's why he

wrote.it.down.

[Esau.]

Apparently, there is a new "sorta" god in town.

[SaggyBalls]

more retarded than bruno's balls in eminem's face.

[Kanada Kev]

Lego Jesus lives in Sweden:

Edited June 12, 2009 by Guest

[Kanada Kev]

TV preacher proves that only the Christian god is real

This TV preacher uses irrefutable logic to prove that only the Christian's god is real.

"Have you ever seen somebody working on a fence and takes a hammer and hit their thumb and go "Awww... Buddha!" You ever see them do that? How many hit a gold ball like I hit a golf ball and they go "Ohhh... Mohammed!" Why do they call that name? You know what they do? They go "Jesus Christ!" "Jesus Christ!" Why do they call that name? Because I believe when a person gets hurt or they get angry, they wanna blame who? They want to blame God.

I guess that settles it!

Gareth Branwyn (who sent me the link to this video) told me this preacher's line of reasoning reminds him of his grandfather's argument against hippies. Gareth's grandpappy used to say, "If God had wanted men to have long hair, he would have given it to them."

The preacher also shares many other equally profound insights with his rapt audience: Satan uses LPs to control people, and burn victims are lucky because they've gotten a taste of hell.

[Kanada Kev]

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

"Have you ever seen somebody working on a fence and takes a hammer and hit their thumb and go "Awww... Buddha!" You ever see them do that? How many hit a gold ball like I hit a golf ball and they go "Ohhh... Mohammed!" Why do they call that name? You know what they do? They go "Jesus Christ!" "Jesus Christ!" Why do they call that name? Because I believe when a person gets hurt or they get angry, they wanna blame who? They want to blame God.

Ouch - reminds me of the BS I used to hear so much during my tender formative years (especially being sucked into the charismatic movement in the Anglican CC ) .

Steven Pinker's got a great chapter in his last book, The Stuff of Thought, on the syntax, semantics, and neurochemistry of swearing. One of his more persuasive points, imo, is that we're hard-wired to swear in the same kind of way as a cat is to wail if you step on its tail, but with a language circuit that the signal passes through - in other words, it's got this coded, communicative side to it as well, geared to specific communities of speakers. They're words, in other words, that tweak the attention of an audience to pay (unwilling) attention to them.

I don't suppose this guy's that interested in anything but himself, though, and whoever he can intimidate and keep on the hook.

[Kanada Kev]

Edited July 8, 2009 by Guest

[Thorgnor]

Truer words, eh?

[SaggyBalls]

How did he PROVE that God is real??

I missed that. enlighten us. We'll probably start tithing cause you'd be the first one to bring that kind of knowledge to anyone. You bring that to us and not only does he get new shoes, but you do for being the prophet's prophet.

big wide-eyed pyramid schemes.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I dunno, those are some pretty slick shoes.

Anyway, it doesn't matter.

[Kanada Kev]

New shoes? How 'bout new mansions?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2009-07-02-cerullo-money_N.htm

Religious broadcaster builds $4M home despite layoffs at his ministry

[Thorgnor]

He's just demonstrating that God is still happy with him and has shown it through all that cash.

[SaggyBalls]

Well...it depends on from where this guy draws his paycheque, and from which revenues these other employees are paid.

Ad revenue?

broadcast royalties?

marketing?

merchandaise?

If 80% of every dollar goes to 'spreading the gospel' then how is that gospel spread?

Without these details, it's just another cheap stab at a televangelist. Why not stab at him for watering down the real message of Christ and not just profiting from it?

[Kanada Kev]

Seriously, w t f ?

Drunken Evangelists Spread the Word

Edited July 12, 2009 by Guest

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Holy crap, what must the green room have been like.

I'd like to imagine that the party at Cana would have still been a lot more enjoyable, and much less weird and embarrassing.

[Biggest Fan]

How about some real God talk for a change (sort of anyways). I was listening to 'Pagan Christianity' which talks about the pagan roots of many of the ideas which we value as Christian (pretty interesting). One of the biggest is adoption of the 'mass' in a church. Done by Romans modeled after their pagan worship. If you think about it before the Romans where did Christian services take place... in peoples home. Secondly think of the format of these meetings... group meetings by nature.

I can only speak for myself but how much of our problem with religion comes as a result of the form it comes in. I would much prefer sitting around having theological arguements with my peers v. sitting around listening to someone elses thoughts on the subject.

[SaggyBalls]

I always thought that Jesus preached to abolish the concept of churches.

One could worship alone and find the 'glory of God' where dogma and ritual would otherwise come into play.

I think that arguing about God in an effort to worship woud be really counterproductive.

Discussion and argument are not synonymous.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I always thought that Jesus preached to abolish the concept of churches.

That would be an enormously difficult thing to argue, given what he was said to have said (setting Peter up at the head of the church, e.g.).

One could worship alone and find the 'glory of God' where dogma and ritual would otherwise come into play.

Fair enough - while there's a recognition of congregational worship, there's also the admonition there to do serious prayer alone and behind closed doors (or wherever).

I think that arguing about God in an effort to worship woud be really counterproductive.

Though I'd think it important to argue about the nature of God in order to get it right (and if you look at the example of the Gnostics, some arguments end up shut down in short order for the sake of preserving [unhealthy] orthodoxy).

Discussion and argument are not synonymous.

Yes and no - elaborate?

[SaggyBalls]

Argue the nature of God in order to 'get it right' is exactly the problem with this concept.

'God' is already perfect. Any divergence ad the whole point is missed - I don't quite understand how this could really be 'argued' but I'm presuming that it's up for discussion somewhere.

Are you referring tho Gnosticism being shut down by the Romans or are you referring to some sort of self-dissolution?

I suppose my 'abolition of churches' was a bit mispaced. A church as the supreme power in a following? That seems entirely un-christian to me.

I feel that 'arguments' are more quarres/disputes than 'discussions' ad although few people ever entirely agree and the dictionary definition of a set of statements that logically follow toward a conclusion, it is quite easy to make the poit for a synonym.

One word is far less than a group of statements.

love,

.r.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Argue the nature of God in order to 'get it right' is exactly the problem with this concept.

'God' is already perfect. Any divergence ad the whole point is missed - I don't quite understand how this could really be 'argued' but I'm presuming that it's up for discussion somewhere.

Maybe because people's idea of "perfect" can be hopelessly and wildly divergent. Absolute? Transcendent? "Just like us, but better"?

There has never - I'd wager - been a satisfying definition of what "God" is, ever. I used to like Anselm's ontological argument for the longest time - "that than which nothing greater can be thought" -but even that has its limitations. So for some people, it's the big bearded guy on the cloud, for others, its the godhead, the point of creation, for others, it's totally indefinable, and can even be given a name. Some people will take it all very dogmatically, others more ironically. It's messy. So people are bound to argue. There's not much that makes for easy discussion in this, imo, across the board.

Are you referring tho Gnosticism being shut down by the Romans or are you referring to some sort of self-dissolution?

If by Romans you mean the Christianised Romans (Theodosius etc.), then, yeah - those characters who found Gnosticism politically threatening, in the fourth and fifth century, or with the Albigensians in the 13th c., or all the way through the Reformation, and into modernity with the ways Christian conservatives rail against anything that smells like unorthodoxy (in terms of their particular theologies).

Sorry - I risk getting carried away and should stop with that .

Edited July 14, 2009 by Guest

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Karen Armstrong always puts it well: Should We Believe in Belief?

The extraordinary and eccentric emphasis on "belief" in Christianity today is an accident of history that has distorted our understanding of religious truth. We call religious people "believers", as though acceptance of a set of doctrines was their principal activity, and before undertaking the religious life many feel obliged to satisfy themselves about the metaphysical claims of the church, which cannot be proven rationally since they lie beyond the reach of empirical sense data.

Most other traditions prize practice above creedal orthodoxy: Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do, and that you cannot understand the truths of faith unless you are committed to a transformative way of life that takes you beyond the prism of selfishness. All good religious teaching – including such Christian doctrines as the Trinity or the Incarnation – is basically a summons to action. Yet instead of being taught to act creatively upon them, many modern Christians feel it is more important to "believe" them. Why?

In most pre-modern cultures, there were two recognised ways of attaining truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were crucial and each had its particular sphere of competence. Logos ("reason; science") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to control our environment and function in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external realities. But logos could not assuage human grief or give people intimations that their lives had meaning. For that they turned to mythos, an early form of psychology, which dealt with the more elusive aspects of human experience.

Stories of heroes descending to the underworld were not regarded as primarily factual but taught people how to negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche. In the same way, the purpose of a creation myth was therapeutic; before the modern period no sensible person ever thought it gave an accurate account of the origins of life. A cosmology was recited at times of crisis or sickness, when people needed a symbolic influx of the creative energy that had brought something out of nothing. Thus the Genesis myth, a gentle polemic against Babylonian religion, was balm to the bruised spirits of the Israelites who had been defeated and deported by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar during the sixth century BCE. Nobody was required to "believe" it; like most peoples, the Israelites had a number of other mutually-exclusive creation stories and as late as the 16th century, Jews thought nothing of making up a new creation myth that bore no relation to Genesis but spoke more directly to their tragic circumstances at that time.

Above all, myth was a programme of action. When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life and the way our humanity worked, even if its insights, like those of art, could not be proven rationally. If you did not act upon it, it would remain as incomprehensible and abstract – like the rules of a board game, which seem impossibly convoluted, dull and meaningless until you start to play.

Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.

But during the modern period, scientific logos became so successful that myth was discredited, the logos of scientific rationalism became the only valid path to truth, and Newton and Descartes claimed it was possible to prove God's existence, something earlier Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians had vigorously denied. Christians bought into the scientific theology, and some embarked on the doomed venture of turning their faith's mythos into logos.

It was during the late 17th century, as the western conception of truth became more notional, that the word "belief" changed its meaning. Previously, bileve meant "love, loyalty, commitment". It was related to the Latin libido and used in the King James Bible to translate the Greek pistis ("trust; faithfulness; involvement"). In demanding pistis, therefore, Jesus was asking for commitment not credulity: people must give everything to the poor, follow him to the end, and commit totally to the coming Kingdom.

By the late 17th century, however, philosophers and scientists had started to use "belief" to mean an intellectual assent to a somewhat dubious proposition. We often assume "modern" means "superior", and while this is true of science and technology, our religious thinking is often undeveloped. In the past, people understood it was unwise to confuse mythos with logos, but today we read the mythoi of scripture with an unparalleled literalism, and in "creation science" we have bad science and inept religion. The question is: how can we extricate ourselves from the religious cul-de-sac we entered about 300 years ago?

[SaggyBalls]

How can we extricate ourselves from that 300 year old bag of crap?

Stop trying to figure out God. It's not fair to ourselves to try to figure out something that we'll never comprehend (and even if the concept of an all powerful nothingness everywhere and every time simultaneously seems comprehensive enough for our human minds, the reality of it can only be truly recognized when we're busy doing other things) and could quite easily drive us crazy.

Would it not be much better to learn from the experiences and potential wisdom and to get ourselves to a point where we can tap into a sense of divinity that transcends intellect?

Our concept of perfection will never be perfect. We can't fathom true perfection because our test is entirely imperfect and fallible.

I say give high fives. Have potlucks. Drink water slowly. Find the God in that and we'll all probably be happier for it.

Of course, I'm not going to suggest that you NOT try to discuss anything as potentially enlightening as this subject, but to be fair to God (if one can even assert that God deserves to exist (to me the concept of God existing borders on blasphemy)) respect can much more easily be shared through worship than definition.

Detractors of the Unorthodox really did us some harm when they sent out bad mistrusting vibes all those years back, resonating and shaking in the Quaker that could have turned the world around.

Unfortunately, Richard Nixon turned out to be a truly evil (but charming and intelligent) man.

Does anyone know much about Quakers? Seems like they're everywhere and we don't quite see.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Where is our resident Quaker, anyway?

The only reason I wanted to get into that is because there's a not a little irony in the title and in much of the content of this thread, which comes out of abuses (as I think we'd see eye-to-eye on) of the word/concept "God". Of course, the people who use "God" as a weapon don't see that as abuse, but as something essential to their belief. Mysticism freaks some people out - they don't like the idea of having so little control (and it often enough seems that these are the same people who have a hard time dealing with poetry, metaphor, irony, etc.).

Now, how do you open up the concept of God with these folks? They've got their theology, which they're no more prepared to leave behind than they would be to jump out of the Ark when the water was highest. It's not just that it's 300 or more years old, and tired - it's extremely modern, very 2009, and like Armstrong's article says, it ruins both science and religion not to be threshing through these issues.

[SaggyBalls]

Resident Quaker! He's probably working hard.

What about anyone else? It's off to Wikipedia for me...

Mysticism freaks people out?

Mysticism is the Devil or of the devil to these people. It probably freaks them out less when they see it like that so 'the Devil' can freak them out instead...maybe you're right and they just pass the buck.

Perhaps If they were told that it were all a part of God or that God were a part of everything, then their impression of said mysticism would lead them to freak themselves out.

Why should we open up the concept of God with these folks? How does their belief really hold back true science and real religion/spirituality?

Is it fair to presume that These are not the people that are making an impact in these fields anyway?

I'd suggest to let them live as they're going to and ignore their pettiness and help ourselves to not jump into it as well.

We can't help everybody. They'll get their chance another time around.

Attitudes and openmindedness both shift as we go on. I wonder how it's going to be in 15 years from now.

Will our Political leaders have more of a sense of God/the divine in their lives and policies?

I sure hope so. I'm sick of this empty political landscape.