| Feb 2 @ 11:51 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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iam01
Posts: 6,283
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We have seen too many Christians far too long display so much stupidity, ignorance, mealy mouthed platitudes, empty meaningless dogma, superstition, hypocrisy, narrow mindedness, delusion, hallucination, mental illness, indoctrination, pompous arrogance, useless prayers, lack of logic, lack of education, lack of reasoning, lack of rationality, etc, etc, etc..... Have I left anything out? Was it brainwashing, speaking in gibberish, exorcism, divisiveness and rolling in the isles? How could I forget?
I would like to see a demonstration of original thinking, intelligence, knowledge, learning and yes, wisdom. This is your chance to show your real stuff. This is your chance to let the world know your brain has another purpose other than scrambling or frying. Show us your epistemology. Support your beliefs using reality. Show us some examples, supporting evidence and well thought out research. Show us what you believe is not supported by blind faith but is real and verifiable. Show us you are familiar with history, mythology, science, philosophy and psychology. I would be very happy if a bright intelligent Christian comes forward.
In a sense, any Christian who could come forward would be a savior of sorts given the track record of Christians for the last 2000 years. I mean, look at history. Forced indoctrinations, missionaries, religious wars, Deicide against Jews, Inquisitions, Crusades, Witch burnings, Antisemitism, Holocaust, and so on. The list goes on.
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| Feb 3 @ 12:03 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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Jankia
Posts: 11,908
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I would like to see a demonstration of original thinking, intelligence, knowledge, learning and yes, wisdom.
Heres a little demonstration of someone who for far too long has displayed so much stupidity, ignorance, mealy mouthed platitudes, empty meaningless dogma, superstition, hypocrisy, narrow mindedness, delusion, hallucination, mental illness, indoctrination, pompous arrogance, lack of logic, lack of education, lack of reasoning, lack of rationality and about as redundant as one could ever be in a public forum.
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| Feb 3 @ 7:44 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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yashaenka
Posts: 8,267
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As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade. 
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| Feb 3 @ 8:36 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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yashaenka
Posts: 8,267
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To know something means to have a true concept of it. A concept is true if it expresses the essence of the object of which it is a concept. The concept is the mental abstract of a physical or experiential object. To have a concept of something is tantamount to having knowledge of it. This is how conceptual thinking understands knowledge. Knowledge means in this context always the possession of a concept by internally appropriating the given sensual representation of an object. The concept is equivalent to the essence of the object. The essence is discovered by the intrinsic mental faculty of comparison and analysis (Plato's diairesis). The concept is the generalization of a particular object. Concepts are always universal, never particular.
The world of our thinking is therefore different from the world of particular objects which are only given in perceptions and sensations as representations. We experience particular objects but we think universal objects. Concepts of our thinking are these universal objects. To have the concepts is equivalent to having the objects. The rational is the real, and the real is the rational (Hegel's dictum). A deeper scrutiny of this notion, however, discloses its deficiency. The knowledge we have of objects is only conceptual knowledge and not essential, objective knowledge. He is spouting Concepts but alas nothing original, he is short on thought and knowledge and long on hyperbola. 
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| Feb 3 @ 8:51 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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eyesofastranger
Posts: 930
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infidel
As infidels we can be killed without question. This will guarantee a place in heaven for the murderer. Makes sense? Sorry not a christian belief.
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| Feb 3 @ 8:59 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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yashaenka
Posts: 8,267
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"If the truth is that ugly -- which it is -- then we do have to be careful about the way that we tell the truth. But to somehow say that telling the truth should be avoided because people may respond badly to the truth seems bizarre to me." --Chuck Skoro, Deacon, St. Paul's Catholic Church
The Bible is a lot of things to a lot of people, but to Christians, especially, it is a source of inspiration and a guide to daily living.
To others, the Bible is a historical document and a source of controversy.
To others still, the Bible is a self-contradictory mish-mash of arcane rules and proscriptions, mostly relevant to long-dead cultures in far away places.
What is the truth in all of this?
The reality is that it is all true to an extent, and equally nonsensical at the same time. The Bible has meaning to all its readers, but it is important to consider that the meaning it has is informed by the prejudices the reader brings to it.
To really understand the Bible and what it intends to say to present generations, it is necessary to understand who wrote it and why, and the cultural context in which it was written. The story is an interesting one, in no small part because the story is so much messier than most of its advocates would have you to believe. And its very messiness is why it is a story rarely told in any completeness to Christian audiences.
The overriding theme of the Bible storylines is the theme of cultural conquest. Conquest by the Hebrews over their enemy neighbors, culturally by the Jews over the Israelites (used here to mean members of the ten "lost" tribes), the Christians over the Jews, the Catholics over the Gnostics, Marcionites, and other pre-Catholic factions, and on and on. In some cases, the conquest is recorded as a historical, often military event. In others, it merely is recorded as a change in content and context, an alteration of the storyline and outlook and worldview.
And the story of the editing and translation of the final form of the Bible into what today is regarded as holy scripture is a story not just of cultural conquest, but of political intrigues, and not just between competing bishops, but with secular political authority itself. It is as if the U.S. congress or president were to decide what constituted Christian doctrine and scripture, and everyone went along - at the peril of their lives - until no one even questioned the accuracy of the official viewpoint.
The effect of its origins as selected parts of whole bodies of scripture, written by at least a hundred and fifty different people in dozens of different places at different times, many centuries apart, and for different reasons, colors what its authors wrote. Yet that simple fact is widely ignored, both by people who naively follow what they read in it as the inerrant word of God, and by more liberal scholastic theologians, who seek to understand its historical context as well as a body of doctrinal scripture, which they often blindly follow, even though they know full well its messy origins.  
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| Feb 3 @ 11:02 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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iam01
Posts: 6,283
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The reality is that it is all true to an extent, and equally nonsensical at the same time. The Bible has meaning to all its readers, but it is important to consider that the meaning it has is informed by the prejudices the reader brings to it.
And this is the curse of scripture. Its a chop suey of imagery, allegory and metaphor where any interpretation can be made and any horror can be justified depending upon how demented the reader is.
As it stands now not one intelligent Christian has some forward to show his or her knowledge and wisdom. Still waiting.tick tock tick tock........Oppps, I forgot about Jankia. Obviously this was the best they could come up with. 
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| Feb 3 @ 12:42 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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uncrazy
Posts: 2,382
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The overriding theme of the Bible storylines is the theme of cultural conquest.
This is well said and easily seen. The impending event in the grand scheme the Jewish God had for his elect people to become sole rulers of the world under a jewish temple and kingship was ever being predicted by their prophets and priests. Failure of the predicted event allowed declaring the prophet false, declaring th people sinful and in more need of some atoning behavior to become pleasing to God so he would help them.
This theme leaks into the NT revelations, as do so many other Jewish ideas and old temple structures can be seen in the christian church structures, forms and liturgies.. Apochraphal writings were not new to the christians, but the christians forgot that the thousand years in revelations relates to a 4900 year Jewish cycle that was bumping around 3900-3950 years at the time Jesus was on the scene. We have long past the 1000 years the christians still await in revelations(about 1040AD), but they await the impending doom because they have been assured their safe from it unlike all the heathen unsaved and unloved creatures of God who haven't followed the directions declared truth from God in their church. The time of revelations has long passed as history, but it has remained so useful to the church that has moved old jewish mysticism, fortune-telling, and prediction of a desired future forward another 2000 years.
The superstions of the tribal peoples who move Yahweh, an original volcano god of the mountain through a phase where he had a wife to his showing up a singular head God of the Jews are clearly presented in the story, but somehow cannot be seen by people who claim knowledge and wisdom gainable without education and study of the adjacent contemporary histories. And pushed they take refuge is reporting the uselessness of knowledge, that the simple-minded have some gift of discernment received from some great authority, then label their knowledge as pearls that pigs cannot comprehend.
This cultural conquest of others theme is seen in each of the three branches from Abraham. His story is one of cultural conquest in the Egyptian areas after loosing his right to kingship in babylon upon the lose of kingship by his father Terah. If we look back far enough we can see that the conflict between Cain and Abel was a cultural dispute over the comparative values of nomadic sheperds against sedentary farmers.
We have a metaphor for a BBQ in the Cain and Abel story, and it could have turned out so differently had Cain only had a good recipe for baked beans...someone labeled the story sacred and men are not allowed to look at it.
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| Feb 3 @ 6:35 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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iam01
Posts: 6,283
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The superstions of the tribal peoples who move Yahweh, an original volcano god of the mountain through a phase where he had a wife to his showing up a singular head God of the Jews are clearly presented in the story, but somehow cannot be seen by people who claim knowledge and wisdom gainable without education and study of the adjacent contemporary histories. And pushed they take refuge is reporting the uselessness of knowledge, that the simple-minded have some gift of discernment received from some great authority, then label their knowledge as pearls that pigs cannot comprehend.
Uncrazy,
Awesome writing as usual. I wonder if others were able to grasp even parts of what you wrote. They, the Christians, seem to have a great aversion towards critical thinking yet they believe they have some sort as wisdom despite not having the education. Can you imagine the fun a mental health professional would have with that?
I have offered them the opportunity to express their knowledge and wisdom gained without education and study. Perhaps they would demonstrate the divine origin of their intellectual abilities. Such a gift can not be hidden for too long. Anyone so gifted would need to take great pains pretending to be ignorant so no one learns how wise they really are. That being so, my first paragraph is really what they want us to believe about them. They show themselves in that way to cloak their wisdom. They sure had me fooled. 
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| Feb 3 @ 6:42 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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onoudn
Posts: 6,354
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Define "Christian", and why only ask for comments from them ? It's kind of against the rules to have a thread disignated for responses from specific groups like that. But, it's ok cause I don't think that was really your intent, am I right ?
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| Feb 3 @ 6:46 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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onoudn
Posts: 6,354
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Nah, I checked. As long as it's not designated "exclusively" for responses from a specific group it's ok....never mind... 
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| Feb 3 @ 6:48 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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iam01
Posts: 6,283
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| Feb 3 @ 7:21 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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uab_5
Posts: 4,759
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Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
Response: I love you Iam01
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| Feb 3 @ 7:24 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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iam01
Posts: 6,283
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uab, no one was supposed to know. It was supposed to be our little secret. 
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| Feb 3 @ 7:29 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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uab_5
Posts: 4,759
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I had bet myself a cookie what your response was gonna be.
Now I don't get the cookie because I under estimated you, sorry.
Unconditional and unceasing love is the greatest wisdom that Christ taught.
If He can love and forgive the men who drove nails into His body and hung Him in the desert sun to slowly die, I can love total strangers who are bitter towards their persecutors.
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| Feb 3 @ 9:36 PM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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Angel178
Posts: 36,334
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| Feb 4 @ 5:10 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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Dukums
Posts: 1,686
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1 Corinthians 3:18 Stop fooling yourselves. If you think you are wise by this world's standards, you will have to become a fool so you can become wise by God's standards. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, "God catches those who think they are wise in their own cleverness." 20 And again, "The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are worthless."
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| Feb 4 @ 6:08 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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sail_dancer
Posts: 9,866
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Duke,
1 Corinthians 3:18 Stop fooling yourselves. If you think you are wise by this world's standards, you will have to become a fool so you can become wise by God's standards. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, "God catches those who think they are wise in their own cleverness." 20 And again, "The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are worthless." This is a powerful scripture containing an excellent message. The problem is that any group can adopt it to support their foolish dogma.
Why as a christian do you believe that this in scripture in any way excludes christians? Where does this scripture say "christian" standards?
Why couldn't this passage have been directed to organized religions of the time? Jesus spoke out against the religious practices often. If Paul was presenting Jesus' teachings, wouldn't this altered passage be one that Jesus taught? Stop fooling yourselves followers of religion. If you think you are wise by this world's standards, you will have to become a fool so you can become wise by God's standards. 19 For the wisdom of the religions of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, "God catches those who think they are wise in their own cleverness." 20 And again, "The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are worthless."
Why would christians feel that they are wise enought to KNOW god?
Are you saying it is impossible that christians can't be "wise in their own cleverness"?
It amazes me how a group of people can exhempt themselves from statements like this.
Peace
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| Feb 4 @ 6:32 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom.
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Dukums
Posts: 1,686
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Sail,
Do Christians believe they are wise enough? Not true ones. They know that they are not wise enough. They know that they know God based on grace and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.
and can they be wise in their own eyes? Absolutely!
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| Feb 4 @ 7:01 AM |
Invitation to Christians to post their knowledge and wisdom. |
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sail_dancer
Posts: 9,866
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Duke,
They know that they know God based on grace and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. And what supports this belief of yours? Are you saying that you know god enough that you are positive that He doesn't consider this belief to be "foolishness to Him"?
Seems that you base everything on a bible that is far from a clearly written set of instructions presenting god's will. Just the idea of christianity having over 3,000 denominations shows that the bible can be interpreted in many ways.
Why would the interpretation that you can know god through his grace and sacrifice of Jesus on the cross be any more true than having an ass and snake talk?
I am not attacking your beliefs. I am trying to understand why you believe as you do when there is nothing to verify those beliefs. Couldn't these beliefs be "foolishness to god" ?
I have certain beliefs but I will admit that I cannot prove them. They just feel right to me. Could my beliefs be "foolishness to god"? Sure they can!
I think anyone that truthfully believes that they know god and his will and insists that they are right are only fooling themselves and would look foolish to god.
Peace
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