atrol:I think there is a lot of truth in this. From the times of earliest man, almost everyone in their life has to come to terms with the fact that friends or relatives have died. Seeing a person’s body sometime after they have died is not a pretty sight, and the complete termination of their association and friendship is often painful. So it is not particularly surprising that people would be receptive to claims that their departed friend and relatives are actually just in another, happier place, awaiting them.
Wow, do Christians come up with some wacky definitions. I have people close to me that I have great love for, but my feelings for them are hardly what I would think God to be. As to saying only love can create, well, come on now. Maybe the only person that should be allowed to apply for a new patent at the patent office is God? Superlatives get downright silly sometimes.
Hey Cadry!!!! CR is contesting your claim that there is no sex in heaven. CR asserts that we are physically built just like God, and that most assuredly includes the sex organs. (Unless those parts of our anatomy are, in heaven, vestigial? Heaven forbid, vestigial is a claim of evolutionists.)
that's cool. i did that too with preconditions and notions. like you i found what i thought were uncomfortable scriptures and other christians having wrong beliefs, doctrines, ideas of life and the world and just plain thinking untenable things. i became impartial and started studying scripture again by myself and i see the truth. i understand little comparatively, however, perhaps not.
i'm glad you didn't rip on the cave parallel, you got what i meant - thanks davisbj -
:deadhorse:
That is a pretty fair statement that shows how Christianity presents that ephemeral promise that death is not the end of one’s existence.
I do not dispute that worship has been a part of man’s history for a really long time. I thought I already agreed with that. I don’t know what you mean by “influenced upon him”.
Many Christians would agree with you. Others may choose to express what Christianity is to them in different terms. Years ago, I would have been comfortable saying the same as you did (but no more).
Again, words that I used to say as well. Until I forced myself to be brutally honest, and admit I had been using that lie as a placebo. I decided that between the pleasing pretense and a harsh truth, I would opt for the truth and admit God was just a product of man's imagination.
But I see no sign that you believe in the cessation of your conscious existence at your physical death. You have not weaned yourself of the placebo that mortality is but a temporary state on the way to an eternal conscious existence.
Your whimsical notions of a fabulous Godly realm and its wondrously, eternal, structured supernatural hierarchy Michael is a pure religiously inspired fantasy.
Face it Michael, no such thing is at all likely to be even close to the truth if only because it is merely that which other human beings have imagined down the ages and you have latched onto it, just as all those others do around the world with a quite different set of fantastic beliefs.
We stopped being children after puberty but yearning for a benevolent father figure who looks after us and tells us what to do is what some adults still want to cling to it seems.
I have no intention of ever being subservient to what are after all only other people's supernatural assertions, but I also object to the very idea that I have somehow been called into existence for the absolutely pointless purpose of eternal servitude to a supposed omnipotent entity, it's too ridiculous.
Also I dispute that we live under any godly "roof". As far as we can tell we are here purely by chance and should try to deal with this reality, bravely, as it actually is, not construct a perhaps more comforting fantasy opiate, let's try to grow up and take some responsibility here for our own lives!
