Very Disturbing Christian Website

[geetrue]

Originally Posted by Foxtrot

didn't read this whole thread but try "Jesus Camp", "Worship Bush" and Westboro sites

I don't understand one thing one thing about majority of Christians. They believe that god is jesus but also that jesus is the son of god. Pretty stupid if you ask me.

Jesus lives in your heart if you invite him in that is.

If the ice cream man came ding, ding, ding down the street and stopped at your house and wanted to give you something really good.

How would he get in?

You would have to go over to the door and unlock it and let him in to serve you.

Same with Jesus ... if you don't open up your heart to him. He will continue on down he street till he finds someone that does want the gift of eternal life.

God the Father is the father of Jesus and the father of us all.

Jesus is His son and was His son in heaven before he was a baby in the manager.

After Jesus paid for all of mankinds sins on the cross, He was raised to everlasting life and the gift of the Holy Spirit was released unto the church with the promise that Jesus would come back again someday to take his believers to be with him forever in heaven.

There is power in his love, power you have not felt yet, forgiveness of your sins by blood Jesus shed on the cross is the power you need to feel.

Revival has broken out in Lakeland, Flordia ... Todd Bentley from Canada is having a healing revival live on God TV every night on channel 365 Direct TV.

Turn him on and tune him in ... He has paid for all of your sins.

http://us.god.tv/Publisher/Article.aspx?id=1000030502

www.freshfire.ca

Live online till May 4th and perhaps for much longer

[August]

Originally Posted by geetrue

Turn him on and tune him in ... He has paid for all of your sins.

I don't think these people really want to be preached to Geetrue...

[kurtz]

Originally Posted by geetrue

... Todd Bentley from Canada is having a healing revival live on God TV every night on channel 365 Direct TV.

Turn him on and tune him in ... He has paid for all of your sins.

Live online till May 4th and perhaps for much longer

Todd Bentley has paid for my sins? That's awfuly sweet of him.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by geetrue

[Todd Bentley from Canada is having a healing revival live on God TV every night on channel 365 Direct TV.

Typical they only heal lame or sick people, never give back a leg or a lost arm.

[kurtz]

Originally Posted by Fish

Typical they only heal lame or sick people, never give back a leg or a lost arm.

Now I think on this, won't god be angry if he's afflicted people with sickness if Todd goes round curing them?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by geetrue

Jesus lives in your heart if you invite him in that is.

If the ice cream man came ding, ding, ding down the street and stopped at your house and wanted to give you something really good.

How would he get in?

You would have to go over to the door and unlock it and let him in to serve you.

Same with Jesus ... if you don't open up your heart to him. He will continue on down he street till he finds someone that does want the gift of eternal life.

God the Father is the father of Jesus and the father of us all.

Jesus is His son and was His son in heaven before he was a baby in the manager.

After Jesus paid for all of mankinds sins on the cross, He was raised to everlasting life and the gift of the Holy Spirit was released unto the church with the promise that Jesus would come back again someday to take his believers to be with him forever in heaven.

There is power in his love, power you have not felt yet, forgiveness of your sins by blood Jesus shed on the cross is the power you need to feel.

Revival has broken out in Lakeland, Flordia ... Todd Bentley from Canada is having a healing revival live on God TV every night on channel 365 Direct TV.

Turn him on and tune him in ... He has paid for all of your sins.

http://us.god.tv/Publisher/Article.aspx?id=1000030502

www.freshfire.ca

Live online till May 4th and perhaps for much longer

Next time somebody wants to pay for my sins - he better asks me first what I think of it. Else he may find himself eating his divine ice cream himself. I hate ice cream - especially when you slip on it, fall down and brake your yawbone so that you cannot close your mouth again.

[Skybird]

Just in, and fitting into the meaning and theme of this thread:

(...) Faith is a very dangerous word, it includes two completely separate entities, which have got nothing at all to do with each other, the one is good, and one is evil. One is called "spirituality", and the other is called "religion". One is a private experience, the other is a public nuisance. One leads to self-knowledge, the other leads to self-indulgence at everyone else's expense. In one there is no compulsion, where as the other depends on compulsion for it's survival. On is grounded in innocence, the other in guilt. One embraces life, the other worships death. It's hard to imagine how these two things could be any more different, yet for some reason they are always sold to us together, in a single package under the banner of "faith". If you take one, you've got to take the other, a bit like a pet-shop giving away a free rattlesnake with every bunny-rabbit. I'm not saying that there is not more to this life than what meets the eye, because there obviously is... (...) It's clear that we are part of a reality that we do not fully understand. And if there is a "life-force" in this universe - and let's face it: there must be, otherwise there wouldn't be any life - it's natural that we would want to make some connection with it, because everybody wants to feel more alive. But there is no evidence that it requires "worshipping", or any form of subservient behavior, or that we are in any way central to it's agenda, or that we are even relevant to it any more than any other organism on this planet or in the universe - this universe or any other universe. So in that sense, i think we really need to get over ourselves big time. Also we need to stop pretending that all the man-made trappings of faith, the ornamental accessories if you like, are really anything more than just that; I'm talking about scripture, dogma, ritual, prophecy, religious law, all these things that have been put there to give religion some kind of structure, and to be fair: that's why they are there, isn't it. It's a bit like dressing the invisible man: once he's got some clothes on - you can see him! But of course you don't see him - you see the clothes. And that is the problem: everyone has become so obsessed with the god-damn clothes we've fogotten if there ever was anyone there in the first place. If you are a spiritual person, you don't need religion - and you know it. and you are certainly not interested in forcing your beliefs onto anybody else. If you are not a spiritual person, then what the bloody hell are you doing on your knees praying like an idiot, like a dog that had been taught how to do something without understanding why. Get up and stop making a fool of yourself! Because your faith is not a virtue - it's a vice. It's a slave to dogma, to scriptual certainties which nevertheless are open to self-interested interpretation by man. I'm sure you can see the obvious flaw in that little arrangement. Also, faith in it's Alice-in-Wonderland-way defines and measures itself according to lack of evidence - the less evidence there is, the more faith is required, and the more worthy it is of respect and [not understood] for some reason, not to mention large ammounts of public money, generous tax brakes, and the freedom to fill the minds of innocent young children with violent superstitions, and baseless fears - and this to me really is the curse of faith, and it is something that really ashames us from generation to generation. (...)

Damn, I cannot count how often I have preached exactly this to my meditation students in past years before. And what Pat says is so very much the same what Nietzsche brought up into arms as well, as he puts it so biting and determined in "The Anti-Christ", chapters 42 and 43:

Hard upon the heels of the "glad tidings" came the worst imaginable: those of Paul. In Paul is incarnated the very opposite of the "bearer of glad tidings"; he represents the genius for hatred, the vision of hatred, the relentless logic of hatred. What, indeed, has not this dysangelist sacrificed to hatred! Above all, the Saviour: he nailed him to his own cross. The life, the example, the teach-ing, the death of Christ, the meaning and the law of the whole gospels - nothing was left of all this after that counterfeiter in hatred had reduced it to his uses. Surely not real-ity; surely not historical truth! … Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated the same old master crime against history - he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and in-vented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now ap-peared, had referred to his "Saviour."… Later on the church even falsified the his-tory of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity... The figure of the Saviour, his teaching, his way of life, his death, the meaning of his death, even the conse-quences of his death - nothing remained untouched, nothing remained in even re-mote contact with reality. Paul simply shifted the centre of gravity of that whole life to a place behind this existence - in the lie of the "risen" Jesus. At bottom, he had no use for the life of the Saviour - what he needed was the death on the cross, and something more. To see anything honest in such a man as Paul, whose home was at the centre of the Stoical enlightenment, when he converts an hallucination into a proof of the resurrection of the Saviour, or even to be-lieve his tale that he suffered from this hallucination himself - this would be a genu-ine niaiserie in a psychologist. Paul willed the end; therefore he also willed the means. - What he himself didn't believe was swal-lowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching. - What he wanted was power; in Paul the priest once more reached out for power - he had use only for such concepts, teachings and sym-bols as served the purpose of tyrannizing over the masses and organizing mobs. What was the only part of Christianity that Mo-hammed borrowed later on? Paul's invention, his device for establishing priestly tyranny and organizing the mob: the belief in the immortality of the soul - that is to say, the doctrine of "judgment ... When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the beyond" - in nothingness - then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct - henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the "meaning" of life… Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labour together, trust one another, or con-cern one's self about the common welfare, and try to serve it? Merely so many "tempta-tions," so many strayings from the "straight path." – “One thing only is necessary"… That every man, because he has an "immor-tal soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant big-ots and the three-fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are con-stantly suspended in their behalf - it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. […] The "salvation of the soul" - in plain English: "the world revolves around me." … […] To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated.

[caspofungin]

ok, playing devil's advocate...

without a belief in the immortal soul and eventual judgement, what's to stop an individual from living his life just to improve his own lot, regardless of the consequences to others? doesn't the fear of one day being called to account temper the actions of men?

[Skybird]

Never understood what drives people to make that link of religion causing ethics. And it seems to me that the attitude developing from that constant and horrific fear of hellfire has turned out the worst in man and made him commit many acts of the utmost brutality and mercilessness, as if wantint to prove that if hell cannot be found after death, man can create it himself while still living, and that way fulfilling his own selfmade prophecy. Or aide workers in the third world: are they all only going there in obedience to their faith, not because of the people? Well, i know that better for sure.

Why does anybody assume where there is no relgion, there is no ethical behavior? One thing I know for sure: my parents deeply love me - for the sake of myself, not to be obedient to any religious demands. And where I loved others, and deeply loved a girl once, far beyond just superficial desire, I never had any religious motivation on my mind with that. But those who had - all to often preach in favour of war, aggression, hate, intolerance, torture - always with the best intentions on mind.

Without religious dogma - we would have a far better, ethically more intact world, I think, which lacks this unholy separation between sacred and profane.. And where greed and envy and selfishness rule in business and politics in the past and present - religion it seems does not prevent that to be, and never has prevented it, but often enflamed and assisted it.

To "prove" how evil and bad atheism is, it often is pointed to communism, or Nazism. But that is nonsens. Materialistic ideologies like these (or capitalism!) are maybe atheist in that they are excessively materialistic, but not every face of atheism is limited to these - like every shepard dog is a dog, but not every dog is a shepard dog. Pat and Nietzsche both say what I say, too: for true sprituality, you need to leave religion behind. Atheism can also be the understanding that rejecting the concepts and dogmas of the religions and their self-constructed deities is a necessary precondition to spirituality, and sprituality never is a public affair, or a group event - it is most private, intimate thing and beyond words and thus: not to be delivered by teachings and dogmas anyway. you can't point at it with your finger and say here it is, and there you see it. You can only describe it by telling what it is NOT. the more people tell you about what God is and how much he loves you and what you need to do to be happy in his shining light - the less they know. "He who talks, does not know. He who knows, talks not." that's why I only talk in negations about "it" - when I talk about "it" at all. For the most, all these discussion, from my point of view, are about the more or less obvious social, cultural and political consequences of religions and how they behave inside a society or culture. Here is where I am concerned, and engage. Where people don't bother the world with their beliefs, I do not care, and do not start anything.

The name of God cannot be pronounced, the Jews use to say. People should understand that metaphor more precisely, and less literally - because there is much truth in it. Or as I translated my own german interpretation of the TaoTeKing, (1) :

The One Essence that could be known,

Is not the essence of the Unknowable.

The idea that could be imagined,

Is not the image of the Eternal.

Nameless is the all-One, is inner Essence.

Known by names is the all-Many, is outer form.

Resting without desires, means to reach the invisible inside.

Acting with desires, means to stay by the limited outside.

The all-One and the all-Many are of the same origin,

Different only in appearance and in name.

What they have in common is the wonder of being.

The secret of this wonder

Is the gate to true understanding.

[caspofungin]

Never understood what drives people to make that link of religion causing ethics.

easy tiger, i personally believe that if someone wants to screw someone else over, they'll do so regardless of their religion or lack of it -- "religion it seems does not prevent that to be, and never has prevented it, but often enflamed and assisted it." -- i'm with you there

like i said, just being the devil's advocate.

Without religious dogma - we would have a far better, ethically more intact world

maybe, but this is assuming that without religion, everyone will be automatically "ethically intact" -- i just wanted to know your thoughts on the idea that sometimes, religion can act as a moral "brake" and make someone act more ethically than they would have otherwise. or in other words, without religion, what's the drive that cause people to act "good?" does spirituality have to have some aspect of "good will be rewarded, evil will be punished" to make people respect each other?

sorry, i've not had any formal philosophical training, so my point may not be getting across as precisely as i would like...

[Skybird]

I think "intact" ethics not so much come from adding some considered positive quality to life, but from not adding a negative quality to life. ethics to me are not so much abiout something that is there, but about something bad that is missing, like I also often think of evil not being a quality that exists in itself, but as being the absence of goodness. I am a bit naturalistic in that, maybe. I follow the TaoTeKing's guidance in this, or maybe also what I imagine (not knowing for sure!) to be "American-Indian" in the widest sense and how I perceive it to be grounded in Earth and Nature itself. But with that reference maybe I am just romantically dreaming, I possibly have many chlichees on Indians on my mind. If Ishmael would have a laugh at me for this, I would not be angry and accept his correction. Interestingly I once found him mentioning Taoism to be part of his repertoire, too.

And just to be sure, regarding "easy Tiger", no, I took nothing queer that you said. You maybe misunderstood me when making your remark, or my wording was misleading.

[caspofungin]

[mrbeast]

Some good stuff there Skybird.

To return to your point that people often point to nazism and communism to show how 'bad atheism is though.

When people make this argument I think they miss quite a glaring point about communism (by communism I'm largely talking about Stalinism and Maoism) and nazism is that they had most of the trappings of religon.

They had dogmatic rhetoric (class war etc, the superiority of the aryan race). A figurehead who had a personality cult and was held in almost divine awe (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al). They had sacred texts (Mein Kampf, Das Kapital and other Marxist works, Mao's little red book). They promised their followers a paradise to strive for (Greater Germany and a world free of Jewery and Bolshievism, a workers or peasants paradise).

Above all they imbued their followers with a lack of moral uncertainty.

Another point to make about nazism is that it was not an entirely athiest ideology, every observant German soldier would have noted that his belt buckle carried the moto 'Gott mit uns'.

[August]

Originally Posted by mrbeast

Another point to make about nazism is that it was not an entirely athiest ideology, every observant German soldier would have noted that his belt buckle carried the moto 'Gott mit uns'.

Actually like many of the German uniforms attributes those belt buckle slogans predate the Nazis.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by mrbeast

Some good stuff there Skybird.

To return to your point that people often point to nazism and communism to show how 'bad atheism is though.

When people make this argument I think they miss quite a glaring point about communism (by communism I'm largely talking about Stalinism and Maoism) and nazism is that they had most of the trappings of religon.

They had dogmatic rhetoric (class war etc, the superiority of the aryan race). A figurehead who had a personality cult and was held in almost divine awe (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et al). They had sacred texts (Mein Kampf, Das Kapital and other Marxist works, Mao's little red book). They promised their followers a paradise to strive for (Greater Germany and a world free of Jewery and Bolshievism, a workers or peasants paradise).

Above all they imbued their followers with a lack of moral uncertainty.

Another point to make about nazism is that it was not an entirely athiest ideology, every observant German soldier would have noted that his belt buckle carried the moto 'Gott mit uns'.

Not too mention Hitler'S and other Nazi'S fascination for mysticism, Tibet and cultic rituals, and concerning that motto on german belt buckles, I am ot sure, but I seem to remember that this was no feature the Nazis invented, but was already part of the German uniforms in WW!. I do not know out of the blue wether or not Nazi speeches did not occassionally refer to something like "God with us", but I wouldn't be surprised if goebbels or hitler and others did not make use of the motivating effect when refering to God to point out one's own war is a just cause. If they really meant it and really believed in God and relgion - of course is a completely different issue.