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Someone today mentioned something rather interesting to me and I have to expand upon her idea. She mentioned that folks that have never heard the word of God are set to enter heaven or at least purgatory. So while the heathens continue to live in their traditional ways and are none the wiser the Devil gets no new souls.

BUT! When the Christians come along preaching the word of God it opens up the barrel of new souls for the Devil. Because no matter how hard the Christians try, some folks just don’t want to give up hundreds, if not thousands of years of tradition to follow a dude who was nailed to a tree. And those folks bolster the Devil, their souls going to Hell since they heard the word and turned away.

So the Christians are shooting themselves in the foot. According to their own documents those that know about God and turn away are sent to Hell. Those that do not yet know won’t be going to Hell. They may not get into Heaven but at least they won’t join the armies of Hell to fight against Jesus.

From the Original Soap Box: 

Scripture does not tell Christians to convert the heathen—it commands us to preach the Gospel of Christ, because “It is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Rom 1:16). God converts them by the power of His Word; we simply bring the message.

If this is the way it is meant to be why is it that so many people seem to feel the need to preach it loudly at me and when I turn away from them they seem mightily offended that I didn’t listen to them, entranced by their magical fairy tale? Why must they follow me, accoust me on the streets and even come to my door? Where is the opt-out so I don’t get preached at all the time? And why do they get so upset when I try to talk to them about my own beliefs?

That is the part that really gets me. They come up to me to teach me about their religion, why can’t they be tolerant enough to understand that I am happy to listen to them if they are happy to listen to me? So I am going to Hell for rejecting their teachings but it is possible that they could go to the Basement for not listening to me. That is the reward for those that ignore the teachings of Lanky.

If we take the Bible literally, word for word, here is who we can kill without fear of retribution from God.

• Homosexuals (Lev 20:13 and Romans 1:26-32)
• Adulterers (Lev 20:10 and Deut 22:22)
• Disobedient children (Deut 21:20-21, Lev 20:9 and Exod 21:15)
• Women who are not virgins on their wedding night (Deut 22:13-21)
• All non-Christians (parable told by Christ – Luke 19:27)
• Those accused of wickedness by at least two people (Deut 17:2-7)
• Anyone who works n the Sabbath (Exod 35:2-3 and Num 15:32-36)

Women cop it fairly bad in the Bible

• Lot saves the messengers from the men of Sodom by offering up his virgin daughters to “do to them as you please” (Gen 19:8)
• “Kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save yourself for every girl who has never slept with a man” (Moses – Num 31:17-18)

Slavery gets a mention too

• God supports it (Lev 25:44-46, Exod 21:2-8, Eph 6:5 and Col 3:22)
• Instructions on how to sell your daughter as a slave (Exod 21:7-8)
• When to give your slaves “severe” or “light” beatings (Luke 12:42-48)
• It is Ok to beat your slaves only if they don’t die within two days (Exod 21:20-21)
• How to mark your slave: drive an awl through its ear (Deut 15:17)

And for anyone that says, “The Old Testament is brutual but the New Testament over rules it, this is not quite correct. Christ even says so, Matt 5:17-19

I found this passage on WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com

Dear God, almighty, all-powerful, all-loving creator of the universe, we pray to you to cure every case of cancer on this planet tonight. We pray in faith, knowing you will bless us as you describe in Matthew 7:7, Matthew 17:20, Matthew 21:21, Mark 11:24, John 14:12-14, Matthew 18:19 and James 5:15-16. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen

It has really gotten me thinking, why do people ask the big fella in the sky for so much? And would people even bother praying if the afore mentioned Bible passages didn’t offer the promise that God will deliver everything you ask for?

The Dictionary definition of Prayer: a devout petition to God or an object of worship.

But what is prayer? Is prayer a way of communicating to God or is it man’s “holy” outlet for greed? Or could it be the easiest way to get more followers. “Pray to our God and you will get whatever you want if you believe enough”. Sounds like a damn good pick up line to me. I’d believe in a box of cereal if it said “Believe in me, pray to me nightly and I will grant you your every desire”.

Unfortunately prayer rarely ends up with tangible evidence of completion. You can spend weeks praying for a cure to a loved one’s cancer. Sometimes they get better. It could be through the power of prayer, it could also be through the power of science. You can pray for rain in a drought stricken town. Chances are that one day it will rain but is that because your prayed for it or because weather patterns do vary and it can go for months without rain in certain parts of the world?

I prayed once. I had injured myself as a child and was quite a long way from home. I had fallen off my bike in the bush. I prayed for someone to come and help. In the end I had to drag myself out of the bush and get myself patched up. Is this definitive proof that prayer is a waste of time? Certainly not, scientific process dictates that I should repeat this process multiple times to confirm this finding but it did lead me to the belief that the only thing that gets you what you want is your own hard work.

The end result was that when you take a look at a Prayer about non-ambiguous requests, “Please lift this fallen tree off of my leg”, God never answers with the requested action. When this statement is proposed to religious believers the most common come back is, “God has a plan and is using the tree to teach you a lesson about being resourceful”.

I would like to see some verifiable proof to show that a Prayer is successful. And this can’t be an ambiguous prayer. You can’t pray for God to cure a cancer patient as there is no way to prove that God did it instead of science. Go forth folks, prove me wrong about prayer being a waste of time!

An interesting question that I came up with today. No doubt others have pondered the same thing and their answers would be cool to hear. And yes, this is very much like the “tree falling in the forest” question but with one subtle difference. We know trees exist. We know sound exists. But we don’t know that God exists.

It can be postulated that if one person believes in a spiritual entity then that entity must exist for at least one person, the belief making the entity exist even if there is no physical proof. Granted this statement can show that God exists. If at least one person believes.

But what if everyone stops believing in God. Does God continue to exist?

This question raises the interesting notion. Do we need God to exist or does God need us to exist? God does go out of His way to ensure that everyone believes in Him. 1 John 5:21 speaks of protecting children from false idols, Mark 13:22 mentions false prophets, there are many passages demanding that you believe in God and no other. Is this because God fears that you will love others more and that His existance could be in peril?

We can now ask ourselves, where did God come from? Looking back at Christianity and then comparing it to other “pagan” religions it quickly becomes evident that God and Christianity are a combination of older religions. Religion in its most basic form was started to explain the unknown. Religion popped up all over the world and most have similar stories of creation. Many Christian events are originally pagan events. Christmas being on the Winter Solstice is not random chance but a deliberate act.

From WikiPedia:

Dies Natalis Solis Invicti means “the birthday of the unconquered Sun.” The use of the title Sol Invictus allowed several solar deities to be worshipped collectively, including Elah-Gabal, a Syrian sun god; Sol, the god of Emperor Aurelian; and Mithras, a soldiers’ god of Persian origin.^[12] Emperor Elagabalus (218–222) introduced the festival, and it reached the height of its popularity under Aurelian, who promoted it as an empire-wide holiday.^[13] This day had held no significance in the Roman festive calendar until it was introduced in the third century.^[14]

The festival was placed on the date of the solstice because this was on this day that the Sun reversed its southward retreat and proved itself to be “unconquered.” Several early Christian writers connected the rebirth of the sun to the birth of Jesus.^[3] ”O, how wonderfully acted Providence that on that day on which that Sun was born…Christ should be born”, Cyprian wrote.^[3] John Chrysostom also commented on the connection: “They call it the ‘Birthday of the Unconquered’. Who indeed is so unconquered as Our Lord . . .?”[3]

It was a special day for a few religious groups so instead of demanding they change their ways the Christians usurped it and gained more believers. God slowly converted more.

It could be said that God and Christianity are an collective of religions that absorbed and assimilated others until there was only one God left. The Gods of old, do they exist now without any believers to follow them? And could it be possible that the Christians will stop believing and God will cease to exist? God only knows.

Some time ago on another forum there was a discussion about a website http://www.proofthatgodexists.org. Within that discussion many things were learned. Even better was that the webmaster visited the forum and actually entered the debate to uphold the values stated on the site.

At first it was pleasant, made a bit of sense and was fun. Then we descended into the blind circular argument that faith can bring out in some people.

We debated Absolute Morals and Absolute Truth. This is where it all went wrong. Canuckfish (the webmaster of http://www.proofthatgodexists.org) could not wrap his head around the possibility that Morals are based on Social Circumstance and therefore can change. At one point someone posed the point that rape could be considered good if everyone in the Social Structure felt that it was good. He ignored this by saying that the Morally Rape is Wrong. Morals of course that are based upon the Bible.

Wheel of Power

The Wheel of Power to the right is the best defense when you fall into this questioning circle with a Bible Basher. They go around and around and for some reason their simple minds can’t seem to grasp that a self-referencing text is not the best source to use in a debate.

The Bible is the Word of God because God said so in the Bible that He wrote.

How could that argument ever fail?

In a point of interest I wish I had of had this image a few years ago when the thread was going strong.

Feel free to read through that thread, let us know what you think. At one stage he was making sense, I could see it from his side and it could have worked if there was an alternative reference source as well as the Bible.

Had I of had the knowledge that I have now this debate would have gone a lot smoother. I actually enjoyed the debate and owe a lot of my current thinking patterns to the questions and answers posed in that thread. Without that debate I would not have realised just how blindly some people can follow a 2000 year old book.