Mark 3:28-30

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Hi all. Yeah, this is another thread about religion. I was raised by an uber-religious father with narcissistic personality disorder. This has had a big effect on me.

Anyways, I want to talk about a very creepy Bible verse.

"Most certainly I tell you, all sins of the descendants of man will be forgiven, including their blasphemies with which they may blaspheme; but whoever may blaspheme against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin" —because they said, "He has an unclean spirit."
- Mark 3:28-30

A lot of people have told me. "God can forgive almost anything, including murder. A murderer who repents before he dies can go to heaven. The only person that God can never forgive is an unbeliever."

Am I the only person who finds this mentality to be incredibly unjust? Why do so many people think that free speech is Biblical in origin? It obviously isn't.

If God can never forgive an unbeliever, there's one thing God can't do, so He's not almighty.

man judges man, not god.

^ Exactly !

I wouldn’t take the verse to heart.

Man does, indeed, judge Man—not God.

Mark wrote this, it seems, under the influence of some holy rapture or something.

To answer your last question, most people and religions pick and choose the things in the Bible they want to follow. It sucks when your religion is fundamental and chooses to follow as much of the Bible as possible.

Ethically, I think it’s hard to pick and choose what you want to follow. If one believes in the Bible, maybe he or she would think that it would be defying God on some level to do this. I don’t know. I found a lot of the Bible goes against my own sense of morality and justice.

I say: “Throw your Bible away and find your own meaning and morality.” I’m not directing this entirely at you OP. I’m sort of thinking out loud.

The Catholics have a more elaborate afterlife than do the other Christian sects.

The rest (Protestants, and the Eastern Orthodox)just have Heaven and Hell.

But the Catholics have Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo. Limbo is for just what Mark was talking about. For "virtuous Pagans" ( and also for unbaptized babies).

Actually I am not absolutely sure how Limbo works, but it could be a good way around the problem. If you were a non believer but were virtuous then, like you and me, the early Catholic theologians thought it was unfair for you to go to Hell. But like Mark the early Vatican didn't think that you belonged in Heaven with those who are both virtuous, and believers either. So they just stuck you in the limbo of Limbo. Niether punished, nor rewarded.

What I am not sure about is this: does it make a difference in Catholicism which kind of nonbeliever you are?

If you live in the jungles of New Guinea today, and never heard of Christ, or if you are one of the millions who lived in the Stone Age, or Bronze Age, for the thousands of years, before Christ came along, it wouldn't be your fault that you don't believe in Christ. So those kinda of nonbelievers would not get punished (but also not get rewarded). I am pretty sure I got that right.

But if you are a scoffing, Christopher Hitchens reading, disbeliever who lives in a Christian country but who chooses to not believe..then that might be considered different. You might get sent to the punishment place. And not to the neutral place to hang out with the ignorant of Christ adults and the unbaptized babies. Even if you were virtuous...if you actually chose to not believe then I think that you're supposed to get the pitchfork treatment with all of the other kinda sinners even in Catholicism. But I could be wrong.

Meh, It's Just a Line of Poetry/Parable out of a Dusty Book; 'you' are the one who chooses to believe whatever you want of it, or you may be spoon fed whatever someone else says it means. Poetry/Parables is/are Beautiful like this but also extremely Dangerous when folks use it in their Organized Deceit of Harming others, up to Murdering so-called Disbelievers.

To me at, least, the Holy Spirit is just the Fire of Original Creativity that some folks come to Possess and use to Create whatever Art they do Create to Raise the Positive Energy of others; or do the opposite which can and will be done with Darker Creative Arts to Bring Folks down.

That usually is associated with whether folks see Life as a Loving Experience now that can and will be trusted or the other side of the Coin that can and will come to Be Misery Loves Company.

I Live in a World of Joy Loves Company; and I just visit Dark to remind me of some of the places I've lived in Before; those are the darker parts of life that also do continue to inspire a much Greater Positive Holy and Creative Spirit Full of Meaning and Purpose as yes the Darkness will be Transmuted this way In Greater Lights of Human Emotional and Sensory way too that is A Realest Part of Life there is at Core of Being Human.

It's all worth noting to me at least too that the Experience of Holy and Sacred is actually an Emotional/Sensory Feeling of Life that's sort of like a Celine Dion Song if you can and will actually Relate to what's she's actually feeling and sensing when she too lifts folks up, in Song. No Religion is Required Just a Loving Free Spirit that and who actually Creates some kind of Positive Art to give and share with others.

I live in a Locality that has the most Fundamentalist Christian Churches of any Locality as recorded in Record Books of the past. I quit Drinking the Fundamentalist Hell Fire Kool-Aid, since i was about three, before I could Speak at 4 (in other words I never truly drank it). Truly an 'Autistic Advantage' that was; not getting trapped in other folks lies of words, in organized deceit to me at least even more.

Have A Nice Day; It's what I do and for now it works without fail.

Meanwhile, Other Folks Literally Create Hell for themselves; and even Create it in the Future as if wasn't
bad enough that so many Folks already Live there now.

Truly it's not hard for me to tell, at least, the Difference.

Been there done it in real time now, too; that other place too.
Real Heaven here on Earth within is Truly Beyond Infinitely better
as the Real Force that will Never Fully Be Measured by Any Scientific Method; Namely, Love.

Hi, DarthMetaKnight.

I'm sorry you are struggling with this passage-- even though I'm a follower of Christ, I've had many times when I struggled with something Jesus said that was troubling or scary. I'd like to share some of what I've learned about this passage, if that's all right.

Mark 3 talks about how Jesus was going around healing people from sickness and casting out demons, and great crowds were gathering around him. But the Pharisees, the religious leaders of the time, didn't like that, because they were in the habit of inventing huge lists of rules that only they could keep, so that they could see themselves as better than the common people around them.

But Jesus wasn't following the rules. He healed a man from his illness on the Sabbath day (Saturday), and it was against the rules to do any work on the Sabbath. Healing people was sort of Jesus' "job," so technically he was "working" by doing it, wasn't he? Jesus asked them,

"Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?”

But they said nothing, and instead reached out to another powerful group, the Herodians-- people who they didn't get along with ordinarily-- and began trying to figure out how the could kill Jesus.

Jesus was making a couple points by healing the man on the Sabbath. One was that God cares more about loving others (healing the man's sickness) than he cares about keeping the letter of the law (which was just a means for the Pharisees to feel more righteous than others). The other was that Jesus did not consider himself to be bound by their rules. And that message came through loud and clear, and it made the Pharisees furious. Seeing more and more people come to Jesus every day made them afraid.

The passage you quoted happens with that as the background. Now so many people are coming to see Jesus that the house he's staying in is packed, and there isn't even any room for his disciples to sit down and eat. Jesus' own family confronts him (his mother Mary, and his younger brothers)-- they don't understand why he is doing any of this, and the only conclusion they can come to is that he is insane.

I want to point that out, because Jesus' brothers included James and Jude, who both eventually became Christians and even wrote books of the Bible. So clearly they were not beyond salvation, even though they called Jesus insane! So whatever blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is, it cannot merely be doubt or insulting Jesus or saying something wrong.

Then, what is it? Well, some religious leaders came up from Jerusalem (where they had been plotting together about how to kill him), and they came out with a new accusation: Jesus was only casting out demons because he was in league with Satan himself.

What was so serious about this attack that Jesus would warn about an unforgivable sin? I believe it's because of what the religious leaders knew. These were men who studied the Scriptures carefully; they knew all the passages that talked about God sending a Messiah to save Israel, and they recognized the signs of that Messiah-- he would heal the blind, deaf, and sick, cast out demons, raise the dead. He would teach with authority that comes straight from God rather than relying on manmade rules. They recognized who he was.

And they hated him. They didn't care. He messed up their neat and ordered world in which they were the most righteous, the most respected. He exposed their rule-keeping as just a way to make themselves look and feel better. He offered forgiveness to even the most "disgusting" sinners if they just came to him.

Do you see? They weren't in a state of doubt about who he was-- they didn't come to Jesus saying "I'm not sure who you are"; they recognized that he had to have come from God. But they hated him so much that they preferred to say he was from Satan. Because not only did they want him gone, they didn't want anyone else to listen to him either. He was too dangerous.

So I want to assure you, no matter what you believe about Jesus, no matter how many doubts you may have, even if you think he sounds like a lunatic, *you have not committed the unforgivable sin* Jesus talked about in this passage.

If everything Jesus said was true, then he was God's gift to the world, providing the only way that sinners could be saved-- whether their sin was one that people like the Pharisees looked down on, or if it was like the Pharisees' own sin of self-righteous pride. He will never turn away anyone who comes to him. (And a few Pharisees did end up laying aside their pride and coming to him, like in John 3.) He was talking about a specific sort of hardheartedness that says "I don't care if you are the only way; I don't want you." A final slamming of the door, so to speak.



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Sorry for my long post, and it is fine if you don't agree with everything I said. (I'm sure I didn't explain everything the best way possible). But I hope and pray that it will be helpful to someone.