A conundrum for Christians.

Post Reply New Topic

*laughs* I know the single most important rule of hell: It sucks. Doesn't matter how long a soul is there, it sucks for them. Other than that, I'm not sure. Honestly, it doesn't matter to me. Probably sounds bizarre, but I feel that if I was only serving God to avoid Hell, it would be facetious, and I'm pretty sure He isn't a big fan of BS servitude. *This Christian occasionally uses foul language.*

I'm actually not sure what version the free Bibles at my church are. I do know it isn't the NKJV or the old KJV. Why people think that a version personally approved by a king is superior to one translated by teams of people with Ph.D.s in old languages is beyond me. I've never heard a whisper about our church preferring one version over another.

KJV is hard for me to read, and I think The Message Bible sounds lame, and not at all like a 2,000 year old book should sound, so I'm not a fan. Other than that, doesn't much matter. I have verses memorized in several different translations, made Bible quizzing a pain in high school.

*grins* You'll laugh at this, the gun store I purchased most of my firearms at gives Bibles out for free as well. Not free-with-purchase, just plain free. Gotta love Idaho. I do know the gun store version isn't the NRA-V, in which Jesus and Moses used AK-47s to free the enslaved tribes of Israel from the Romans. *Family Guy reference, I'm pretty sure I mixed it up a little.*

I own several Bibles, one is the little kids version, one is the teenager version, and I currently use a New Revised Standard Version one I bought for Bib-Lit class the first time I tried college. All three say the same thing, but the first has pictures, the second has teenager-focused sidebars, and the third is loaded with a staggering amount of footnotes and context clarifications. Really helps me understand the New Testament, especially concerning Paul's letters to various churches.

Eh, they do it because they don't seem to understand how the Bible and translation works. They think that other translations are degraded, because translators corrected their favorite erroneous translations.

That is quite weird, the best I've seen for hand-outs are Gideons International NKJV bibles but they only include the NT, Psalms, and Proverbs and are pocket-size.

Hmm... yeah, if you want to make your life easier, get e-sword. http://www.e-sword.net/downloads.html It's a program that allows you to have a reference Bible on your computer. It is pretty handy if you want to search for a particular verse or type of verse but don't remember exactly where it is. It also has versions that come with the Apocrypha if you ever wanted to read that, or in Greek or Hebrew with the words translated so that way you can compare the English to a Greek or Hebrew phrasing, you can see where a misinterpretation may be occurring.

*blinks* Wow, dude, didn't see that coming. I'm looking that website up right now. *tips his hat.*

The only verse I hate being mistranslated is the "Thou Shalt Not Kill/Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder" one. If it's "Kill", then it was ignored about two hours after being written down. All murder is killing, but not all killing is murder. Other than that, I don't much care.

Our church doesn't shirk from the Old Testament, in fact we use the Cave of Adullam (sp?) that David took a ragged band of followers to as our motto. Refuge, Transformation, Partnership.

If you've got cargo pants, our give-away Bible is totally pocket size! hehe, it's pretty small, but it's all the books.

Why should I ask forgiveness for the flaw of imperfection by omnipotent design?

I've always wondered...

If you get Deja vu it's because I've cut this out of another thread I posted it in...

...has anyone read the recently discovered lost gospels? It's clear why they were left out when the Catholics first canonized the Bible. They are much more in line with Gnosticism (the more educated will know they were persecuted and killed by the early Catholic Churches leaders). Also they strongly support the fact that the early Christians largely believed in reincarnation and sin/karma based rebirth till a soul was ready for Salvation. From what I've read I don't think everybody was meant to understand many of the teachings of Jesus and I don't think it is meant to be spread like random carpet bombing. Much I think is too profound to be told to just anybody which is why parables were used. Buddism and other Eastern religions and philosophys use similar layered teachings to cater to an individuals ability to comprehend and not get 'freaked out' or confused. (The book of Revelations very nearly didn't make it).The Gnostics were big on inner knowlege, meditation and knowing thy self, this brought them in conflict with the universalists (catholic tranlated means universal) who were under the thumb of the Romans who wanted to water down Christianity in order to control the masses. So we have the Roman Catholic Church a weak parody of the real thing, sad. By the time of Luther and the reformation too much damage was done to its reputation with other world religions, not least of all the Pagans and Muslims.

Satan sends people to hell. If we accept Jesus as our lord and savior, we can go into heaven. Jesus died for our sins, so we won't go to hell.

A punishment is only meaningful if it teaches you something. If you put your finger in a fire the pain teaches you not to do that again. If God punishes you by sending you to Hell for eternal punishment it will teach you nothing since you have no future and the only thing you will have learned is that God is a sadist. It's like the hydrogen bomb which is only useful as a threat but if it is used it will be so destructive as to destroy any reason for its use. It's a kind of dynamic oxymoron.

I have to remind myself that God did not create man as I sometimes see mankind in the six o'clock news. I believe that originally when God created man, God created him perfect, with the ability to make choices. Mankind was free to do whatever he wished to do in every aspect of his life. Mankind was also given the choice to follow God's way or to rebel. And perfect man made a choice to rebel and that's the person we see on the six o'clock news.

I believe that if God had made us without the ability to make choices, we would be like machines and not human at all. I know that I've made some disastrous choices in my life, and I'm still making them, but I personally wouldn't exchange from being a person who sometimes makes an imperfect choice to being a perfect robot who gets it right every.

And I think that we now are given a choice between heaven and hell, which was a dwelling originally designed for the devil and the fallen angels. I think hell is also a condition of the heart, mind, and soul, an expressed desire to go out and do one's "own thing." C.S. Lewis said that heaven is the place of those that say to God, "Thy will be done"; and hell is the place of those to whom God will eventually turn and say, "THY will be done."