The Neverending Thread (was SATAN DECEIVES YOU)

[jason]

excuse me while I interject on page 5[]

first off, based on allanons origional post,you don't just 'let go of your mind'.you grasp it, and it's GOD-GIVEN potential.

the ones who are 'just letting go' of their minds are people who just blindy stumble through life w/no sense of who they really are,who 'let go' via smoking/alcohol/drugs,or just an aimless life.

remember that we were born into a state of grace.we were/are not/never were, separated from divinity.it hides within us, waiting for us to search for it.

modern christianity hides behind a book whose meaning has been so distorted by those seeking POWER OVER OTHERS,that they automatically activate the inner judge,who,of course,finds everyone guilty except 'them'.

[jason]

whoops! page 6 now!

wow!

[Allanon]

The Bible is the Word of God and all we have to go by.

[Man Of Jade]

One last question... Were exactly in the bible does it say that Astral Projection is evil if supposedly God created that in the first place, since he apparently created everything?

[no_leaf_clover]

quote:If I am so totally wrong on the nature of Christ than why have there been over 60 replies in one day?

Unfortunately, negative things usually draw people more quickly than positive things do. Not many people here enjoy Bible-thumping preaching, ESPECIALLY when the person preaching has no idea what they're talking about except the bs the church has been saying. "Jesus is Messiah.. He died for you.. Don't question God.. Don't even think.. Thinking = bad."

Now if you had come in hear with real evidence that a God exists, or that the pre-Christian Bible was wrong and the Messiah didn't have to any of the things it listed, there wouldn't be many replies, because there wouldn't be much room to argue. But it would be nearly impossible to prove there is a God, so statements are manufactured to keep common sense and reason at bay. The church WANTS your blind faith, because many of the things they have said over the centuries have by now been scientifically proven wrong (ie: Earth is the center of the universe), and they've grown to dislike the thinking man.

What you're saying about AP doesn't make sense to me.. If you accept Christ, then AP'ing is the work of God, but otherwise Satan gets credit. These are the kinds of things that annoy me. These are statements that don't need proof because of the way they were manufactured (blind faith), and because they're hardly an explanation for anything (more like a threat or something to scare you into Christianity), you're ideally not supposed to think too deeply on them.

[travelinbob]

quote:Posted - 23 August 2003 : 20:41:19
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Bible is the Word of God and all we have to go by.

Prove it. You just have your faith. And faith is no proof at all. Just because its written it does not mean its true. Ask anyone working in The New York Times.

"The bible is the word of God, because it says so in the bible."

Is that your argument?

Or is it because of its self-fulfilling prophecies? War in the Middle East anyone?

[Allanon]

quote:"The bible is the word of God, because it says so in the bible."

Is that your argument?

Or is it because of its self-fulfilling prophecies? War in the Middle East anyone?

The Bible is verifyable for those of no faith by its Prophecies and Eye Witness testimonies as well as Historical Evidence.

AP experience is not evil par se. It is the fruit of the AP that counts. If from your AP experiences you beleive that you do not NEED the blood of Christ for eternal life than those experiences are coming from false spirits.

If you AP and realize the Truth that is in Christ than I see no problem there. Test the spirits if they are of God as Paul tells us to do.

[MJ-12]

There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet.

[Allanon]

quote:we were born into a state of grace

Actually we were born into a fallen nature. We must accept grace first.

[Allanon]

Praise to God for a Living Hope

3Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade--kept in heaven for you, 5who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith--of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire--may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

[beavis]

Allanon "The Bible is the Word of God and all we have to go by."

You have a book. I have experience. My knowledge is direct therefore higher quality.

[MJ-12]

I hope Allanon remembers the good things of Christianity after he deconverts.

[shadowatcher]

I think someone needs to hit Allanon...very very hard.

[no_leaf_clover]

I think we should all stop posting here and just ignore whatever preaching he does in the future. This could go on forever. He just doesn't get that we don't want to be preached to.

PS.. To the message below this one, in order to prevent myself from posting on this topic again.. (Is this the first time anyone has replied to a post from above the post being replied to? o.O):

LMAO!

[Tab]

He posted a GI Joe link. You sure this isn't someone's idea of a bad joke -_-

If so, it was hook line and sinker.

[Allanon]

" 'Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
be ever seeing, but never perceiving.'
10 Make the heart of this people calloused;
make their ears dull
and close their eyes. [1]
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed."

[Allanon]

19 When men tell you to consult mediums and spiritists, who whisper and mutter, should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? 20 To the law and to the testimony! If they do not speak according to this word, they have no light of dawn. 21 Distressed and hungry, they will roam through the land; when they are famished, they will become enraged and, looking upward, will curse their king and their God. 22 Then they will look toward the earth and see only distress and darkness and fearful gloom, and they will be thrust into utter darkness.

[Robert Bruce]

G'day Folks!

The only thing that supports the bible is the bible. I say again:  there is no historical evidence to support the new testament.


RB.

[James S]

Faith in something unseen is one thing. Faithfully following something blindly without ever testing it objectively is completely another, and will lead to error.

Faith in the bible with out questioning is blind faith. Following the bible because someone told you to is also blind faith. This is true for any religious text.

The texts of the new testement cannot be proven, in any truely clear objective way. There are no external references that can corroborate anything written in the new testement at all. That is the fact, that is the truth.

If someone wishes to heed the words of the bible, then it is for them to decide for themselves if the words of the bible are of value to them spiritually, or for their general way of life.

I'm not going to tell you "don't read the bible its all a pack of lies". Its your choice. You're entitled to believe what you will. Just as it is the choice of other people to choose not to read the bible if .

Seek wisdom from the Lord Allanon. Forcefull preaching as you are doing, with no evident thought or respect for those you are preaching to will only produce a negative effect. Surely you must be seeing this by now.

This site is made up of thinking people....not sheep. The members here will not blindly follow someone just because they have stated "this is the truth."

James.

[PeacefulWarrior]

Robert, I see you what you are saying and you are right, but why are you saying this?  If you have seen what I have written in response to Allanon, you will see that i disagree with a lot of what he is saying and especially how he is saying it, but I too believe in Christ and I don't really care about "historical evidence."  If I loooked to historical evidence to support all of the things I believe in, including the OBE phenomena then I wouldn't believe in anything.  

I have read most everything you have written and have corresponded with you privately and have never seen any hint of anti-Christian sentiment, but it seems like you are trying to shut down belief in the New Testament, which for me is a valid document.

Could you clarify please?

Best,
Dan

Here is a little something I picked up on the net, nothing extraordinary:
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Is There Historical Evidence for the New Testament?

The following is a brief excerpt from a larger book.
For a fuller treatment of this subject as well as a better context, see:
I'd Like To Believe In Jesus, But...
(The harder, less frequently discussed questions)
By Bob Siegel
Published by Campus Ambassador Press
A ministry of Mission To the Americas
Wheaton, Illinois
Copyright ‹1999 by Bob Siegel
This article is not be be reporduced without written permission from the author.
All Rights Reserved

In my dialogues with university students, objections to the Bible are very common and very similar: "We can't use the Bible to defend the resurrection," they tell me. "That's too internal. You are using one book to verify itself. Besides, the disciples of Jesus were extremely biased. They loved Him. They believed in Him. We can't trust them to give an objective report."

Part of our problem with the Bible in discussions like these is the pre-conceived image people have of the Bible. Frankly, Christians contribute much to this image. When people look at this special book, leather bound, with gold plated pages and a personal name engraved on the cover, it seems like something so mystical, so spiritual and so subjective, that it cannot possibly have anything to do with history or any other objective discipline for that matter. Our claim that it is the Word of God doesn't help much either. It may be a true claim, but the phrase "Word of God" evokes different meanings in different minds. Some take the description to mean that God practically dropped it out of Heaven, wrapped in a white box with a blue ribbon. This, of course, is not what the New Testament writers claimed. Instead, they claimed to have written it themselves while inspired by God's Spirit (John 14:25-26, 2 Tim 3:16). Whether or not one chooses to believe that the history surrounding Jesus was given with inspiration, the fact remains that it is history and must be studied as history.

We should also keep in mind that the Bible is not one book but actually a collection of 66 different manuscripts, penned by 40 different authors over a period of some 2,000 years. Although several of the books were written in a poetical style, many of the books claim to be actual history and can be corroborated by other ancient documents and archaeology.

The New Testament itself (our primary focus if we are discussing the resurrection), is a collection of 27 different documents. Two of the four Gospels were penned by actual disciples of Jesus, Matthew and John, and both of these men claimed to be eyewitnesses for the resurrection.

Notice John's words from a letter that he wrote subsequently to his Gospel:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched--this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared, we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us ( I John 1:1-3).

Nothing in this wording even remotely suggests that John is inviting his readers to take a blind leap of faith. Instead, he talks as though the facts are out there for anyone who wants them verified. And he himself follows Jesus because of what he has personally witnessed, not because he was taught to follow Jesus in Sunday School.

Another Gospel writer, Mark, was a companion of Peter who penned Peter's version of Christ's ministry supplying us with a third eyewitness source. This was a common practice in those days: A man, not very literate, would employ the help of an assistant commonly called amanuensis. Nevertheless, when we read Mark, we are really reading the testimony of Peter.1

Were the disciple's of Jesus biased? Of course they were. But are we to assume from this that their record is unreliable simply because they liked and believed the man they were writing about? I find such logic very questionable: "Show me an eyewitness or a historian who accepts the life and resurrection of Jesus as actual fact, but the men who knew Him, followed Him, lived with Him, listened to Him, studied with Him; none of them count." Really now. I doubt that such a standard would be placed upon any other figure of history.

The noted New Testament scholar F.F. Bruce, (Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis at the University of Manchester, England), once discussed an interesting analogy to this whole subject of bias:

Nor would any historian ignore Sir Winston Churchill's The Second World War or Mr. Harold Wilson's 'personal record' of The Labor Government, 1964-1970 on the ground that the author occupied the position of Prime Minister during the periods covered respectively by these works and would therefore present biased accounts ( F.F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament William B. Erdmans's Publishing Company, Grand Rapids Michigan, 1977, p.15).

Think about it. Who honestly believes that Winston Churchill held a view of World War Two free from personal bias? But the follow up question is just as important: Would any historian in his right mind be uninterested in a book about World War Two written by Winston Churchill?

Yes, the disciples were biased, but no more so than anyone else who writes history. In the case of Jesus, we also have records that demonstrate the biases of those who did not follow Him. This is an important point to note for now and return to later.

First, let us wind down our discussion of the New Testament attestation by taking a brief look at the author of the remaining Gospel, Luke. Although he was not an original disciple himself, he wrote as a historian and interviewed many eyewitnesses to the life of Christ. Observe his words:

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, oh most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught (Luke l:1-4).

Theophilus' identity is uncertain, but he seems to have been a Roman dignitary of some kind who sponsored an investigation into the matters at hand by a man reputed as being a factual historian. It is difficult for people to think of Luke as a historian but only because they are used to thinking of him as a part of the Bible, and the Bible (as mentioned above) is approached with the unfair image of being "just a religious document."

But Luke did write as an accurate historian. This has been verified by many scholars, including Sir William Ramsey, one of the most famous archaeologists who has ever lived. Educated in the German Tubingen School in the late 1900's, where the Bible was torn apart according to popular (and extremely subjective) theories, Ramsey originally took it for granted that the Gospel of Luke was untrustworthy. This all changed when his journeys to the Grecian-Roman world and subsequent archaeological digs began to verify fact after fact as reported in the third Gospel and Acts (also penned by Luke).

One alleged Lucan error was his statement that Lystra and Derbe were in the region of Lycaonia and Iconium was not (Acts 14:1-21). This contradicts Roman writers like Cicero, who said that Iconium was in Lycaonia. But in 1919 Ramsey found a monument that proved Iconium was a Phrygian city, not a Lyconian city.2

A more serious controversy involves Luke's date of the Roman census. This census, conducted under the Syrian Governor, Quirinius, took place in 6 AD, according to the ancient historian Josephus (Antiquities 18, I. I.). But Luke associates the census with the time of Christ's birth (Luke 2:1) which, according to Matthew, took place during the reign of Herod the Great (Matt. 2). We know Herod was dead after 4 AD. We would seem then to have a fairly major contradiction. But in 1912 Ramsey discovered an inscription in Antioch stating that Quirinius had been governor twice. Although it is not mentioned where, this dual governorship could easily have been in Syria. Since we know he ruled as governor of Syria once, that is the likely location for his earlier term and the location Ramsey argued for.3

These are just two of the many ways Ramsey was continually impressed. He went on to write:

Luke is a historian of the first rank. Not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy, this author should be placed along with the greatest of historians (William, Ramsey, The Bearing of Recent Discoveries On The Trustworthiness of The New Testament p. 222).

Footnotes:

1) See the writings of the church Fathers Iranaeus (end of second century, Adversus Haereses III.I.i in Eusebius H.E. V. , and Papias (130), (Expositions of the Oracles of Our Lord, in Eusebius H.E.III. 39).

2) Joseph Free, Archaeology and Bible History, ( Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1992) p. 271.

3) William, Ramsey, The Bearing of Recent Discoveries On The Trustworthiness of The New Testament, pp. 275 ff.

[curiousgirl]

yes, you have a point, peaceful warrior.  there are plenty of people who believe in what the bible says, regardless of lack of historical proof (and even with proof that things could be wrong), but do not have such extreme, eerrr... ah, i can't think of a good word to describe it... psycho-fervor of hate-filled condemnation that this allanon person has.  you can believe in everything that the bible says, without believing that everyone is going to the pits of hell for not believing in it, too.  and you can believe in it without forcing it down everyone else's throat.  and you can believe in it and still respect other's beliefs, too (which i'm sure is what jesus wants us to do... respect and love each other despite differences).  perhaps allanon's case is one of extreme difference of interpretation of the bible, and perhaps some hardcore brainwashing to boot.  either that, or allanon's playing a prank on us all.

[curiousgirl]

oh, i'm not saying that everything in the bible has been proven wrong... i know that there have been some things found that seem to confirm events in the bible... but then at the same time, there are things that people find that go against it.  but either way, i was just trying to state that people have faith in the bible regardless of whether it is proven right or wrong, and i have no problem with that.  i'm saying it seems that someone's faith in the bible is not what is creating all this hubbub, because while peaceful warrior has faith in the bible regardless of lack of proof (and regardless of proof for or against it), he is not the same as allanon, who also has faith in the bible.  they both have faith in it, but their approaches to it and the people they come across are completely different.  peaceful warrior does not preach at us, tell us we are gonna burn in hell, and seems to accept all our various beliefs and stuff.  allanon, on the other hand is completely different, as you can see.  so i am saying that the problem here is not the faith in the bible.  but maybe it is how he is interpreting it.

[James S]

Dan,
That was an intelligent post and an interesting read.
(I always considered Luke's account to be the most objective)

I too remember from my days in church that the historical accuracy of the bible was frequently brought into question by the scientific / archeological / historical communities.

Indeed you're right, that the validity of the christian belief should not be hinged on the historical accuracy of the bible. It just seems unfortunate that there are many christians who view the bible as the one and only true source of accurate spiritual literature in existence. This and the fact that many varying interpretations of the bible have lead to many different doctrines and dogmas, with a number of conflicts having risen within the worldwide christian community as a result.

Isn't it interesting though that despite the many criticisms and cases against the bible, most people here are accepting of the great wisdom and wonderful insight given to the world by Jesus. His words still seem to ring true in people's minds and hearts despite the feelings towards the rest of the bible. Maybey if more christians were to focus and, dare I say it, *meditate* on His words ( meditating on the word of God is actually scriptural [])rather than bully people with rules and absolutes, we wouldn't see such conflicts as have arisen in this thread.

Kind regards,
James.

[cainam_nazier]

singing  "My god's better than your god. My god's better than yours....."


This is how wars start...

Everyone take a good look at what is going on here....please.  Then simply allow your intellect to take over and this can all go away.

[Allanon]

Satan has the power to deceive. Even with your so called "historical" evidence. The Bible is True and you can take it or leave it. But the fact remains that it is the ONLY God inspired book.