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I will look up that passage however let's face it was more than good intentions. Paganism was practically wiped out and Christianity spread from dispersed communities to literally every corner of the globe. And look I've been a critic of Constantine but if we're talking 'God's unfolding Plan' this has to be taken into account.
Acts 15:21 is a strange verse. It seems to not really make sense in the context and I imagine it's one of those cases where it made better sense in Greek.
I suppose my words weren't perfect.
Hope you're lead in the direction God intends GB. I get really nervous when I find myself in a place where everyone is in agreement. I found that I was looking for a group that agreed with me because of what you said before (more comfortable being in a crowd than on my own). Just be careful that your desire to be in the crowd shouldn't sway the path God has set for youNo disagreement. I'm in fellowship with numerous like-minded brothers and sisters. Long distance fellowship, but fellowship nonetheless. There is a growing group of folks who are reaching the same conclusions and finding little/no receptivity to the ideas within the church. So many are leaving the institutional church and starting home fellowships.My
Take this from a guy who has had pretty much the same epiphany as you have....there's a fine line here. Sometimes the crowd is right and we are wrong. Sometimes we are right and the crowd is wrong. I learned that if I come to my conclusions and interpretations without going through all three phases of prayer, reading scripture and fellowship with others, I'm doing it wrong. Of course, that doesn't mean that I have to follow the crowd, but if I exclude fellow believers in my journey, I'm not doing it the way God designed and I'm probably not going to get it right ever. There's a fine line between being loyal to the word and putting one's self above everyone else.
I agree with you. The chapter is about circumcision and James easing that burden from gentile believers. He says in his letter to them "you will do well to avoid these things" (v29).shader said:
Constantine (again while I agree he completely altered the course of doctrine forever...) also gave the world the symbol of "the Cross" as a symbol. There were a wide variety of symbols for Christianity before then - the fish, the morning star - but it was Constantine who spread the cross as a symbol throughout the west, and the west then took it across the globe.CrossEyed2 said:
Straw man.proninja said:
But paganism wasn't wiped out...not even close. It merely had it's practices co-opted into "Christianity".SaintsInDome2006 said:
Oh ok, we don't see many shrines to Oden or Quetzquatl around, but ok.
No, that's not what I'm saying. Actual paganism is just more covert. Satanic ritual abuse is widely prevalent worldwide.
Just the names I tend to use. I think names are important and, in the Bible, they represent something about the person being named. I feel like the English/Latin translations tend to take away some of that meaning, so I use Yahweh and Yahshua. Just a personal preference.
We are in a lot of agreement on this point.
Who wrote the New Testament that you are so sure nobody knows much about?
Just as, if not more, likely it was based in one of the criminals being a product of the Penitentes. I worked adolescent psych in NM for several yrs and that work showed me that there are as many flagellant Catholics in rural NM as there are junkies (and rural Rio Arriba County has had the highest % of smackheads in the US for 40 yrs). The kids cut, burnt, ruined in the name of angry 'gods' broke my heart, nearly my spirit and certainly my taste for the work. Fanaticism is fanaticism, sure as rape is rape and murder is murder. Name don't matter.
I know people in law enforcement. It is downplayed. Very seldom are cases publicly disclosed. I'm surprised the one in NM made it to the news.
The arrogance in this paragraph leads me to believe you aren't humbly engaging with this issue.
Almost everything I believed was true was blown up over the past couple of years, and I've had to allow God to put my understanding back together brick by brick.
Because you think you have the correct interpretation and others don't. That they don't follow scripture and you do. That you don't engage in eisgesis but others do.
Lots of people. James, Paul, John, Luke, probably some source material of unknown origin...
You will be doing the same thing all over again in a few years the way you are going right now.
I had an interview that was going to be published as part of the foreword for the Dead Sea Scrolls. But it was later rejected due to family issues. You know the dead sea? My father killed it.
Just curious, how many times have you made major shifts in your theological framework?
Not at all, I'm just trying to understand where GD has been on his theological journey.proninja said:CE1 wasn't usually this dismissive
Too many to count, and all of them I value as part of an amazing journey of God working in me to bring him closer to understanding Him and His Word.
You've never moved before? My father's career and my career have both required relocating many times. I think I've lived in more than 20 different houses and units in my lifetime. We often commuted large distances to stay with our churches after another move. I'd say 6 churches is a low number for the number of moves I've made. I have never left a church because it was a negative experience or because of a personal or theological difference. Of course those differences existed as they do when you have more than 1 person involved.
I was in this position as well for a year or two. It was after I left seminary, where I realized seminary exists to create parrots of the faith, and not a place to think critically and question. My wife and I started looking into Torah observation, celebrating God's holidays (Jewish) and stopped celebrating pagan holidays (Christmas and Easter). The more I went in this direction, the more I questioned Paul's books. The more I questioned Paul's books, the more I saw inconsistencies between him and Jesus. The more I saw inconsistencies, the more I questioned his apostleship. The more I questioned his apostleship, the more I questioned those who selected his books as scripture. The more I questioned those who selected his books as scripture, the more I found evidence that Paul didn't even write some of the books attributed to him. The more I found evidence that Paul didn't even write some of the books attributed to him, the more I found evidence that the books attributed to Peter are forgeries. This led to learning that the gospels were likely written by followers of Paul. Out of the entire new testament, the only books that weren't written by followers of Paul were James and Revelation. And revelation even makes a case that Paul and his cohorts were false apostles. After realizing all this, reading Galatians now has an entirely different context for me. The church always taught that Paul is talking about some other group of people teaching a different gospel. But Galatians makes far more sense when the context that Peter (Cephas), John and James are teaching a different gospel than Paul. It's quite clear that Paul got his gospel from visions of Jesus after Jesus died. He even insinuates that God didn't share this gospel with the 12 apostles while he ministered to them for 3 and a half years because they were too stupid to understand it. So God waited until Jesus died so Jesus could show up to Paul in visions so Paul could share it with the world. What Paul taught was never taught by the 12 apostles. The verse in 2 Peter that supposedly validates what Paul taught was again a forgery written by a follower of Paul. It's written by someone who lived and/or was educated in Alexandria. It's very unlikely to be written by someone who lived in Judea like Peter. This knowledge led me to understanding that Paul's "gospel" is actually just a lot of pagan beliefs that had been around for centuries that he attributed to Jesus. Heaven, hell, salvation, afterlife, savior, redeemer, forgiveness of sin.... blah, blah, blah.... all of this can be found in pagan religions prior to Jesus even being born. As well as the holidays and traditions Christians follow. It's all just a bunch of pagan beliefs and traditions with Jesus as the centerpoint. So what's the truth about Jesus. I believe he existed. I believe he had a lot of people who believed he was the messiah (the next anointed king of Israel). I don't believe he had 12 apostles (that's a pagan story), but he did have a large following that included Peter, John and James (his brother). These people believed Jesus would end the gentile occupation (Rome) of their promised land. They believed he would reunite the lost tribes. They believed he would make Israel into a country the rest of the world would admire. This was a political movement. None of them believed he was a savior, who would die for our sins, who would redeem us to everlasting life. They wanted him to be the next king of Israel. And that's why he was killed. This political movement was upsetting Rome and it was upsetting the Jewish establishment. They both wanted him dead, so they worked together to do it. James then became the leader as royalty is passed to family. The movement rallied around James until around 70 AD when Jerusalem fell. Between Jesus death and 70 AD, this Jerusalem "church" (which again was a political movement within Israel) accepted gentiles. These gentiles however, in order to believe Jesus was the next king of Israel, would of course have to become Jewish. If they weren't Jewish, why would they care who the next king is? Problem is, these gentiles who were joining this political movement were upsetting other Jews in the political movement by not following Jewish law. James, finally decided following every Jewish law from the very first day of their conversion is a ridiculous expectation, given there are over 600 laws and they don't know them yet. So he said they can start by honoring a few easy ones, and they will learn to honor the rest by hearing the scriptures read in the synagogue over time. But rest assured, these gentile converts became Jewish, as this was a political movement about the new king of Israel.... which of course began to die off when Jerusalem fell. When Judea was lost a few decades later the movement of James, Peter, John, et al.... completely died off. After all, why have a political movement about a new king of a country that doesn't exist anymore. Which left followers of Paul to own the history of what happened. The truth is James, Peter, John at all, didn't know Paul was teaching a pagan version of Jesus to gentiles. They thought he was out recruiting gentiles to their political movement. When they heard about churches in Asia doing pagan things, they went there to correct it and return them to the Jewish Torah. THEY were the ones Paul was #####ing about in Galatians. They taught them a different gospel than Paul taught them, because Paul taught them the pagan religion that he fooled everyone into believing was given to him by Jesus and visions, and was kept from James, Peter and John, who actually knew Jesus while he was alive, because they were too stupid to understand the gospel. It was the churches in Asia that rejected Paul which Paul even admits (2 Timothy 1:15), the churches in Asia that Revelation was written too, and the church of Ephesus (in Asia) that is commended in Revelation 2:2 for testing and finding those claiming to be apostles false (Paul called many of his cohorts apostles too). Ephesus gave Paul a ton of crap during his missions (likely imprisoning him for quite a while as well). On Paul's last trip to Jerusalem, he couldn't even dock in Ephesus. He had to dock to the south, so that those in Ephesus who still followed him could safely meet with him. And to top it off, when Paul is in Jerusalem trying to convince James that the rumors about him teaching followers to not be Jewish are false, it was Asians that wouldn't let him get away with fooling James. At that point, Paul and the Jerusalem church parted ways. But again, because the Jerusalem church (a political movement) died off due to Jerusalem falling and Judea being lost, followers of Paul have taught Paul's pagan version of what happened unopposed. They wrote the gospels, which is just a ton of pagan beliefs tied to Jesus. They wrote forgeries such as both books of Peter. They even forged some books in Paul's name. Why they included James and Revelation in their chosen books of scripture is a mystery, but both are known to be the last chosen for acceptance and had the most opposition out of all the books that made it. So in the end, does this mean I believe the truth is we should all be Jewish? Not in the least. I believe there was a movement to make Jesus the next king of Israel, but that country died off. It's been gone for almost 2000 years. The new version of it is a joke. It was created by Zionists who are trying to make prophecy come true. Part of me wants to be bitter that I was raised on this bunk, because to be honest letting go of it literally had me going through the five stages of grief. And given my life, my family, my friends, et al, was a world established in, on and around Christianity, it's safe to say my world is much different now. So it would be easy to be bitter, but honestly it's quite fascinating knowing that billions of people throughout history have lived entire lives based on the teachings of Paul, who was clearly a male chauvinist bigot who condoned slavery. I'll give him a pass given those were cultural norms at the time. But humankind has had a serious delay in development due to so many people believing his writings to be the word of god.
It's unlikely that Matthew was written by someone named Matthew. It's unlikely that Mark was written by someone named Mark. Same with Luke and John. The books make no claim at all who authored them. The names of the books come from tradition. People just made assumptions as to who wrote them, thus eventually the books were given those names.
I just braindumped. Took me about 5 minutes to write that. 6 minutes max. If I invested time paragraphing it, 100 times as many thoughts would have entered my head that I would have had to write about too. I spent years on this journey and could talk about what I learned for days.proninja said:
They were magic grits.proninja said:That was 1467 words, which makes you officially the fastest typist in the world at 244 words per minute, assuming a 6 minute post time
(and I'm just teasing, I don't care that you underestimated your total time invested in writing that)
