Who Wrote The Bible?

[wvwvw]

Bible Fallibility
By Kevin Williams

Many Bible literalists reject the near-death experience because it does not agree with their literal interpretation of the Bible. Having been a Bible literalist for many years, I feel I am qualified to describe the very serious problems with having a Bible literalist mindset.

During Rev. Howard Storm's Near Death Experience, he was able to ask Jesus and his guides questions about the Bible. Here the excerpt:

When the review was finished they asked: "Do you want to ask any questions?" and I had a million questions. I asked, for example, "What about the Bible?"

They responded: "What about it?"

I asked if it was true, and they said it was. Asking them why it was that when I tried to read it, all I saw were contradictions, they took me back to my life's review again something that I had overlooked.

They showed me, for the few times I had opened the Bible, that I had read it with the idea of finding contradictions and problems. I was trying to prove to myself that it wasn't worth reading.

I observed to them that the Bible wasn't clear to me. It didn't make sense. They told me that it contained spiritual truth, and that I had to read it spiritually in order to understand it. It should be read prayerfully. My friends informed me that it was not like other books. They also told me, and I later found out this was true, that when you read it prayerfully, it talks to you. It reveals itself to you. And you don't have to work at it anymore.

Rev. Howard Storm's revelation about the Bible is certainly amazing. It reveals several things:

1. The Bible is a book that is true and worthy of belief. This is not to say that a literal interpretation makes it infallible.

2. The apparent contradictions found in the Bible arise from not interpreting the Bible in a spiritual manner. This implies that a literal interpretation can lead to problems

3. By reading the Bible spiritually and prayerfully, the Holy Spirit can guide the reader into spiritual truth.

From these facts, another conclusion may be drawn. While there exists severe problems with a literal interpretation, this does not mean the Bible is not worth studying. We mustn't throw out the "baby" with the "bath water." These problems of giving the Bible a literal interpretation only show that it is the men who wrote the Bible who are fallible, not the Spirit of God. It can then be assumed that having these severe problems of literal interpretation were meant to exist in the Bible - perhaps because there exists a spiritual and/or symbolic meaning behind the literal problems.

For example, the Book of Revelation has severe and catastrophic errors when interpreting it literally. However, when interpreted spiritually, this account may be spiritually true and not literally true. In fact, the same symbols in Revelation can be found in the dream symbolism of the Book of Daniel. This suggests the Book of Revelation is actually a dream or series of dreams which must be interpreted symbolically. Edgar Cayce unlocked the symbolic and spiritual meaning of the Book of Revelation.

Jesus rebuked the religious leaders of his day for taking a strictly literal, conservative view of the Hebrew Bible. They created an entire system of man-made rules and regulations around their literal interpretation of scriptures. Because they rejected Jesus' interpretation of scripture, their theology was in question, so they had Jesus killed. Today, there are a large number of religious leaders and followers who are making the same mistake. For the last two thousand years of church history, literalism help fan the flames of Inquisitions, crusades, and all kinds of disputes over man-made dogma, such as: works versus faith, trinity versus oneness, eternal security versus no security, baptism versus tongues, and predestination versus free will, just to name a few.

My purpose in pointing out the serious flaws of Bible literalism is to show that the gospel of Christ is much simpler than many Christians believe. The simple message of Jesus doesn't involve any interpretation nor all the rules and traditions that go along with it. The message of Jesus is love - unconditional love (Luke 10:25-28). The teachings of Jesus is not about religious dogma. A close examination of the Sermon on the Mount shows that the centerpiece of Jesus' teachings was love for your neighbor and your enemy. His gospel message is as simple and as profound as love. Love is also the message of the vast majority of near-death experience accounts.

[altin]

An evolved society, a society that creates a civilization, is not afraid to involve in battles. It can devise better plans, better military strategies, better guns, by definition. It can reliably win battles with minor losses, which give members of that society the confidence to involve in those battles.

A primitive society can’t avoid losses. You may have a lot of people at your disposition, but each of them has only one life and is reluctant to involve in confrontations where the chances to lose it are high.
So what do you do?
You can’t avoid their death, but you need to involve them in suicidal missions anyway.
The answer: you turn the end of life, the thing that your troops loose, from a discouraging thing into a desirable one. You engage in battle not despite the high chances to lose your life, but because of that.

The whole point of Christianity is that “death is not the end of the existence, but the beginning” and that “not only there’s no reason to be feared of death, but it might be desirable to anticipate it”.

Christianity was born among slaves, to turn them into kamikazes.

[Smith]

I did.

[Kalimtari]

[wvwvw]

An evolved society, a society that creates a civilization, is not afraid to involve in battles. It can devise better plans, better military strategies, better guns, by definition. It can reliably win battles with minor losses, which give members of that society the confidence to involve in those battles.

A primitive society can’t avoid losses. You may have a lot of people at your disposition, but each of them has only one life and is reluctant to involve in confrontations where the chances to lose it are high.
So what do you do?
You can’t avoid their death, but you need to involve them in suicidal missions anyway.
The answer: you turn the end of life, the thing that your troops loose, from a discouraging thing into a desirable one. You engage in battle not despite the high chances to lose your life, but because of that.

The whole point of Christianity is that “death is not the end of the existence, but the beginning” and that “not only there’s no reason to be feared of death, but it might be desirable to anticipate it”.

Christianity was born among slaves, to turn them into kamikazes.

As you usual, you continue to impress with your ignorance.

Christianity does not turn people into Kamikazes but into humanists. Early Christians were pacifists and they even refused to serve in the Roman army. It is also good not to confuse Christianity with Christendom. Christendom is what Christianity became after it mixed with the highly militaristic and authoritarian culture of Romans. The early Christians were persecuted. Those who committed crimes in the name of Christendom violated the teachings of Jesus and Christianity, while Muslims who commit crimes and attrocities do so in the name of their God. Christianity in fact teaches separation of Church and State.

Christianity (not Christendom) had a positive influence on the world.
According to Christian theology, Jesus Christ embodies the union of the perfect and holy God with human nature, a belief expressed as the Incarnation. From very early on in Church history, Christ’s Incarnation was understood as the ‘recapitulation’ of the imago Dei—its fullest and clearest revelation

Graeco-Roman culture had emphasised the importance of the virtues, but Christianity reworked the order and primacy of these virtues. Because Christ was agape Love incarnate, and because he had given his life for all humanity, sacrificial love (charity) became the primary Christian virtue.

This charity was extended especially to those who had been ostracised and overlooked by pre-Christian culture. Pagan culture allowed the exposure of disabled and unwanted.

Christianity dramatically eased the plight of the socially disadvantaged: widows were placed in the centre of the church’s concern and women abandoned by their husbands were entitled to compensation for the first time. One of the starkest examples of Christian charity was the persistence of Christians in caring for the sick and dying victims of the great plague of AD 251–266, long after the pagans had left the North African cities of Alexandria and Carthage.

Historian David Bentley Hart argues, ‘This immense dignity—this infinite capacity—inheres in every person, no matter what circumstances might for now seem to limit him or her to one destiny or another. No previous Western vision of the human being remotely resembles this one.’ It was this deep respect for human beings—and the charity that flowed from it—that helped spread Christianity and replace the pagan view of the human person with the imago Dei. As the pagan emperor Julian wrote, ‘It is [the Christians’] philanthropy towards strangers, the care they take of the graves of the dead, and the affected sanctity with which they conduct their lives that have done most to spread their atheism.’

The early church’s conception of the human person not only affirmed individuals’ moral worth, it also infused their lives with a deep sense of meaning. If God has indeed taken human form in the person of Christ, the question of whether human life is meaningful ceases to be a meaningful question—it is so clearly true. Because Christ had put on human nature and transformed it, human beings were able to participate in the character of God through Christ. Fifth-century theologian Cyril of Alexandria expresses this reality as the ‘participation’ of humanity in the divine nature. Christianity held that every human being could become one with Jesus Christ. The slave or the soldier, the child or the statesman, could all become ‘partakers of the divine nature’.They could grow in their resemblance to Jesus Christ and thus come nearer the ultimate purpose of their lives. Every single human action then had significance in the eyes of God, for every action and experience had the potential to serve this end.

[altin]

As you usual, you continue to impress with your ignorance...

It's not about knowledge or ignorance, because much about the beginnings or Christianity is in dark. It's about reasoning. The function of brains, (or processors installed in many devices) is at the very minimum to preserve the physical integrity of the system they're mounted on.

The whole point of Christianity and Islam is that loosing your body is not a big deal, because your soul can and will live without it for eternity. For as long as you respect God's will, you're fine. Upsetting God is the only thing you should worry about. Dying for God and earning a place in paradise is much better than refusing God's will to save your body.
There is no way that the most evolved brain in nature, Human brains, invent a mental framework that does exactly the opposite of what brains are supposed to do, which is again the physical preservation of the body they're part of.

That's why no one discovers God by himself. It comes to us through other people's confessions.

The reason why Christianity and Islam have been used to enroll people in wars, is because they were designed specifically for that.

The societies that crated Christianity and Islam were failed societies, that's why they placed the rewards after death, because they couldn't reward themselves in this life. They weren't the kind of societies that use minds to improve their lives.

[Linebacker]

From what I know the Jews wrote it.

I can be wrong of course because I am clueless about religion.

[Kalimtari]

From what I know the Jews wrote it.

I can be wrong of course because I am clueless about religion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Evangelists we're talking about Gospel "authorship" here ofc

[Linebacker]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Evangelists we're talking about Gospel "authorship" here ofc

I don't even know what those are,and by the first looks of it,I don't even need to.

Religion is a big pile of donkey shit.

[Kalimtari]

I don't even know what those are,and by the first looks of it,I don't even need to.

Religion is a big pile of donkey shit.

to be fair, religious Dogmatism is exactly what you wrote. On the other hand, intimate, moderate, non-intrusive/non-dogmatic beliefs I find totally acceptable, and in some cases even respectable (selfless charity being one of them).