Favourite Bible Quotes

PDN

Schuhart wrote:

I’m just popping in to labour the point already made by Scofflaw and Wicknight. I don’t see why God wouldn’t make his message as clear and unmistakeable as the Topsy and Tim books. This is one slope he needs to slide down.

Unfortunately we have to deal with the real world. That means that an omniscient God will do things in the way that seems best to Him, He is not bound to do it in the way that seems best to Scofflaw, Wicknight and Schuhart.

However, your responses do reveal one thing, that it is pointless for Christians to answer any requests from you to explain the meaning of any Bible verse. You have already decided in advance that any such explanation is necessarily false because the Bible does not come in a multilingual format complete with pictures and diagrams. Thank you for coming clean and admitting that your presuppositions render any debate with you concerning the Bible meaningless.

Cardinal

PDN wrote:

However, your responses do reveal one thing, that it is pointless for Christians to answer any requests from you to explain the meaning of any Bible verse. You have already decided in advance that any such explanation is necessarily false because the Bible does not come in a multilingual format complete with pictures and diagrams. Thank you for coming clean and admitting that your presuppositions render any debate with you concerning the Bible meaningless.

Their responses reveal no such thing. There's no need to be condescending because you've failed to convince another party of your beliefs. The reason it may seem to you that they have predecided not to believe in your explainations of bible verse is that ye're arguing over the wrong thing. One party beliefs the bible to be the word of god, the other that it was written by men.

Ye can argue the meaning of verses till the cows come home, but ye're never going to agree on the context of those verses so ye're never going to agree on their meaning. My theory is that there is no point in those who believe in God arguing with those who do not, about anything other than the existance of God as ALL their arguments are based on this issue.

Tim Robbins

PDN wrote:

I like the way you ignored two words, "rigidly" and "formal", so as to completely alter the sense of my point. Was that accidental or deliberate?

I don't think it alters the sense of your point. Logic is logic.
I consider the words superfluous and don't see the sense of having to consistently say "formal" logic and not just logic, in the context of a detailed discussion about logic validity it should be deductively obvious we are referring to formal logic.
Unusual how you "like it", cue sarcasim detector. Let's just focus on debating and leave the personal jibes out of it as requested by the mod.

BrianCalgary

Wicknight wrote:

Clearly not, considering the amount of religious violence in the last 2000 years between different Christian groups. It would appear they are as clear as mud.


So do you think that most people in Europe in the last 2000 years who lived i times of religious war and oppression were true Christians?
:

Wicknight I wish you'd study your history a bit better.

Every war ever fought has always been and will always be about power and control.

Leaders of the struggles have used religion and nationalism to defend their motives, but they have always been about gaining power and control over another people group or geographical region.

An altogether anti-Christian reason.

Dades

PDN wrote:

Thank you for coming clean and admitting that your presuppositions render any debate with you concerning the Bible meaningless.

PDN you must have been aware that the posters here don't agree with you on the Big Issue. Surely this should not be such a revelation?

Everyone can still discuss the bible though, like they can any book.

Zombrex

BrianCalgary wrote:

Wicknight I wish you'd study your history a bit better.

Every war ever fought has always been and will always be about power and control.

That is rather irrelevant.

If the Bible makes it clear that these wars should not have happened, and these people believed in the Bible and God (particularly his punishment for sin) then these wars should not have happened.

Since they did happen what is missing?

These people clearly did believe in God, and in God's punishment, so it wasn't that.

So the only other conclusion is that the Bible is not clear. The Bible will appear to support what people want it to support (as I've said a few times in Christianity forum)

This goes against Fanny's argument that the Bible is clear and is in fact the most clear way for God to get his message across

History is against you

Schuhart

Wicknight wrote:

2 - The message wasn't clear at all and these people believed that the Bible to support their actions.

The second seems a lot more likely, judging by how even today religious devotion can drive people horrible crimes. Any suicide bomber will tell you that.

Spot on, and I’m sure we can all think of examples. I remember a programme a few years ago about one of those Michigan Militia type organisations. They were having a Bible session. One read out some quote about ruling the world with a rod of iron, held up his gun and said ‘this is the closest thing we have to the foretold rod’.

I’m not suggesting the Christians posting here agree with that interpretation, just to point out that the Bible is so unclear that it can and does support a wide variety of interpretations by people who all claim to be Christian. So if God wanted to send a clear message to people who choose to believe in him, it looks like he failed dismally because some of them must be wrong but they all seem to be convinced they have the correct reading of the text.

PDN wrote:

Unfortunately we have to deal with the real world. That means that an omniscient God will do things in the way that seems best to Him, He is not bound to do it in the way that seems best to Scofflaw, Wicknight and Schuhart.

Seems to me that either God isn’t omniscient enough* to be able to work out how to communicate to his creations or, like you say, he doesn’t have the power to be able to overcome the constraints of working in the real world.

*can a God be 'slightly omniscient'?

Zombrex

PDN wrote:

Unfortunately we have to deal with the real world. That means that an omniscient God will do things in the way that seems best to Him, He is not bound to do it in the way that seems best to Scofflaw, Wicknight and Schuhart.

But Scofflaw, Schuhart and myself shouldn't be able to come up with better ways for this to happen, since we are not gods (well I'm not at least).

God's way should be clearly better than all our ideas.

The fact that it wasn't speaks volumes.

Its almost as if poorly educated humans wrote this thing .... :eek:

Vorak

finlma wrote:

I see the Christians have a favourite Bible quotations so thought we should have one of our own.

Mine has to be Genesis 19:4-8

Either you, or this website are misquoting the bible..

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis%2019:4-8&version=9;

Zombrex

Schuhart wrote:

So if God wanted to send a clear message to people who choose to believe in him, it looks like he failed dismally because some of them must be wrong but they all seem to be convinced they have the correct reading of the text.

Nail on the head

PDN

Wicknight wrote:

But Scofflaw, Schuhart and myself shouldn't be able to come up with better ways for this to happen, since we are not gods (well I'm not at least).

God's way should be clearly better than all our ideas.

The fact that it wasn't speaks volumes.

Its almost as if poorly educated humans wrote this thing .... :eek:

No, the fact that you think your ideas are better than God's speaks volumes.

Son Goku

A side question, is God bound by logic?
If he isn't then couldn't he make us all automatically happy and good and still have free will. Obviously the above makes no logical sense, which is the reason for the question.

PDN

Son Goku wrote:

A side question, is God bound by logic?
If he isn't then couldn't he make us all automatically happy and good and still have free will. Obviously the above makes no logical sense, which is the reason for the question.

Can an omnipotent God create a square circle?

Zombrex

PDN wrote:

No, the fact that you think your ideas are better than God's speaks volumes.

But they are better ideas. Look at something like the UN Declaration of Independence. Or the Constitution. There are not 300 different interpretations of that are there?

Clearly legal language works much better than vague stories and parables. Otherwise all legal documents would be written in parables and vague stories about figs

You are simply falling back on the theists default position that God must be right, even if it looks like he is wrong.

Zombrex

Son Goku wrote:

A side question, is God bound by logic?
If he isn't then couldn't he make us all automatically happy and good and still have free will. Obviously the above makes no logical sense, which is the reason for the question.

But the range of emotions we have are decide by God. This doesn't effect our free will

For example I cannot feel sadder than God has decided that it is possible for a human to feel sad. I cannot feel happier than God has decided that it is possible for a human to feel happy.

These ranges don't effect our free will. No one would argue that I don't have free will because I cannot feel sadder than God the range of emotions that God has set up for us.

So God could easily move these ranges so that we only feel happy without effecting are free will at all.

coffee_cake

PDN wrote:

Can an omnipotent God create a square circle?

I think that was the point of the question

(speaking of which: http://www.philosophersnet.com/games/god.htm )

Son Goku

PDN wrote:

Can an omnipotent God create a square circle?

Yeah, can he? That's my question. Although be careful, as a circle is a construction within a logic.

Wicknight wrote:

So God could easily move these ranges so that we only feel happy without effecting are free will at all.

Yeah, true. I suspected there would be something wrong with my example, I should simply say, can he break logic?

Scofflaw

BrianCalgary wrote:

Wicknight I wish you'd study your history a bit better.

Every war ever fought has always been and will always be about power and control.

Leaders of the struggles have used religion and nationalism to defend their motives, but they have always been about gaining power and control over another people group or geographical region.

An altogether anti-Christian reason.

In addition to Wicknight's remarks, consider this - it's not just a question of wars (although, seriously, do you contend that the Crusades were not religiously motivated?) - it's also a question of whether individuals thought they were doing the Christian thing by killing infidels. Are you claiming that this wasn't the case?

cordially,
Scofflaw

philologos

Isn't this thread going completely off topic. I thought it was for people to post their favourite Bible verses not to argue about History?

Dades

Jakkass wrote:

Isn't this thread going completely off topic. I thought it was for people to post their favourite Bible verses not to argue about History?

Ironically, if there were no Christian posters it would never have gone this way.

However better we get a bit of feisty discussion going IMO. It's a bit of a non-thread topic otherwise - atheists/agnostics favourite bible verses??

UU

Hehe! tHis thread is funny!!!!

What's next 'Favourite Qur'an verses'? I must say though I found the Bible to be much more interesting than the Qur'an. In fact, as a book I like the Bible - I find it very interesting and I rather like some of the stories and stuff. Some is really weird and freaky though which is usually edited from Children's Bibles. Could you imagine a Children's Bible with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah?

I tried reading the Qur'an once but I hated it. And I'm not being anti-Muslim or anything. I just didn't find the Qur'an to be a good read. It didn't have the interesting stories that the bible has. It is pages upon pages of warnings and commentary. I fell asleep in Surah 1!!!

Oh yeah, my favourite Bible verses are:

Matt 6.21 "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

Matt 6.19 "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal"

It's all about the treasure!!!

Schuhart

UU wrote:

I just didn't find the Qur'an to be a good read. It didn't have the interesting stories that the bible has. It is pages upon pages of warnings and commentary. I fell asleep in Surah 1!!!

I think the repetition is hard to take along with the sort of slimmed down versions of the Bible stories. That said, some say that Arabic speaking Christians regard the original text as good literature.

But to my mind a typical Quranic verse is something like: “You’d better believe me. I’m telling you, you’re fecked if you don’t. You’ll have devils poking you with red hot pokers, so you will. That’s what happens to people who don’t listen to prophets.

Like the people who didn’t listen to Noah. They were fecked. They all drowned but Noah didn’t because he listened to me.

Listen to me and you’ll be grand. Listen to me and you’ll be beating the women off you in paradise. You’ll be so sick of riding, because the pussy will be absolutely on tap.” Its so busy telling you to listen, it nearly forgets to tell you what you're supposed to be listening to.

Scofflaw

Quite like this one:

"Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession."

Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, "Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us."

He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel."

The woman came and knelt before him. "Lord, help me!" she said.

He replied, "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs."

"Yes, Lord," she said, "but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."

Then Jesus answered, "Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted." And her daughter was healed from that very hour."

Matthew 15:22-27

The implications of Jesus' statement are rather obvious, but I like the "It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs" bit. Shows you where you stand, you know, as a Gentile.

cordially,
Scofflaw