Stuff to watch for in the future.

...different calendars.... grey hairs.....additional rings in cut-down trees..birthdays...... new Roman numerals at the end of film credits....zzzzzzzzz.......zzzzzzzzz.......zzzzz......Oh Gawd

stewards i do not want for us to argue you are a good person.


no the bible does not say you have to of had three miracles to become a saint, but the catholic church does not canonize any\
mere humans who do not bare this type of holiness.

holiness has different degrees.

Like some in the church had stigmatas, others suffered the passion, others healed, ect.

the became perfect while on earth and became saints on earth.

Once we repent that does not mean we cannot fall back into sin. We can repent and still lose our salvation. this is in the bible
where passages say stuff like work out your salvation with feaar and trembling.

St paul says, I fear that i may fall after learning the truth.

jesus say, not all that say lord lord shall enter the kingdom.

don't let the once saved always saved fool you.

also satan "cannot" perform miracles. he can perform wonders but he is limited. he can only do whats in the realm
of nature. he cannot, heal, cure, nor creat miracles that the saints have.

he can only do wonders.

if what you said is true then would not jesus of been satan in descise??

He is limited stewaard and cannot perform miracles.

also steward i swear on my life that god created a church.

please read this.

1Timothy 3:14

the mystery of our religion.

"" But if i terry along, that thou mayest know how
thou oughtest to behave thyself in the (house) of God, which is
the (church) of the living God, the (pillar) and foundation of (truth) ""

focus on the qoutes.

I am telling you he created an actual place of worship.

peace.

It doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that Christmas is on December 25th, that America exists, or that Peter would be considered the first Pope!
So?!?!
Heavens knows why we bother to grace this and similar cyber-drivel with reason; but get real on sainthood -no criteria for the first millennium though martyrdom helped a lot. Criteria changed since several times.
"beatification" and "veneration" need also to be studied. Past saints have been "un-sainted" ( the present Pope was very vigorous in this).
What are "stigmatas"?? "Stigmata" is already plural (of stigma) - and this from a self-appointed judge of Biblical translations ..zzzzzzzz........zzzzz.........zzzzzzzzzzz.
Oh Gawd

Estragon, good job at pointing out how churches teach self-contradiction...Which is why I avoid religion in favor of faith.

Well, still like what Chris Rock said in Dogma.

"Ideas are what one should have. You can change ideas. Beliefs, people die for them, people kill for them."

Also

"The one thing that pisses god off the most is all the wars carried out in his name"

Besides the Him part, I agree with it. Why do you need to go to war for a god? Shouldn't that god, if real, want people to worship it and think that they know? But instead it sends millions to their death, sometimes losing, sometimes winning.

Truth said...

Lets say that i was the leader of a nation.

that nation would be in complete peace with me caring for every single
human as if they were my family members.

(every) last one of them.

does our government or most leaders have this kind of compassion???

No they do not.

why??

They do not live by true christian teachings.

No it is because they are not Freemasons, every decent politician we have had were Freemasons, after all this nation was founded on Masonic teachings, not Christian teachings...you want Christian politics go to Europe, and we all know of the wars they've fought.

Particularly the 30 years war...trying to expunge Protestantism from the world, but luckly England held out (again because of Freemasonry) and Europe did not sink into total dictatorship by the Pope.

This reference is a book by credible authors and the particular pages I give reference talks of the importance of Freemasonry in keeping a "unified" britton. Oh and the Authors are both Brittish, so it's not American biased either. :p
Reference: The Temple and the Lodge by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (c. 1989 page:149-161)

Sincerely,
no signature

My friend Truth

I was not wishing to argue with you. But our doctrines will be different if you are a catholic and I a penticostal.
We must remember that Jesus did not teach a religion. The word religion comes from the latin word religrey, which means binding or to be bound. It is Satan who binds people, so for christians we are not to follow a religion which is full of traditions and rituals. These serve no edifying purpose. But we should be free from being bound to worship christ.
My aim is to seek out the teachings that christ gave to his apostles and also what they taught. This is the only true doctrine.
Canonizing is not something that christ or the apostles taught. I do not see it written in the bible, so I'm afraid that I cannot follow it. If it were in the bible then I would gladly accept. My fear is this, that on judgement day it will be worse for a christian who said he believed in God, yet taught a wrong doctrine than an ordinary sinner who is an athiest. That is why I strive to Live and tell the true doctrine. I have only been a christian for a few short years, so I find it hard to believe who is really telling me the true doctrine of christ. But I believe in my heart that if you truly seek for God you Will surly find him.
I am not fooled by this once saved always saved nonsense either, I am totally against it.

What is, in your opinion the difference between a miracle and a wonder? or how would you define both?.

Is it true that in the Roman catholic bible, they have what is the Canon and also they include the Apocrypha? In the church that I attend, we only have the canon according to the KJV. We are not taught out of the Apocrypha. So how would you describe what the Apocrypha is?

So come on Truth I'm not argueing with you, just chill out.

stewards

Reference Material---Textus Receptus...and the differences that are in the translations...which was used to create the KJV of the Bible.
More stuff to ponder......................

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Additions or Deletions?
The Last 12 Verses of Mark
by Chuck Missler

------------------------------------------------------

There has been much controversy over the final 12 verses of the Gospel of Mark. Behind this dispute lies some astonishing discoveries of profound significance.

The oldest existing manuscripts of the Greek New Testament text are three that had their origins in Alexandria in the 4th and 5th centuries.1 Since they are the oldest (in our present possession), many regard them as having an eclipsing authority. There are a number of passages that do not appear in these Alexandrian manuscripts, and therein lies an intense ecclesiastical debate.

Textus Receptus

At the end of the 3rd century, Lucian of Antioch compiled a Greek text that achieved considerable popularity and became the dominant text throughout Christendom. It was produced prior to the Diocletain persecution (~303), during which many copies of the New Testament were confiscated and destroyed.

After Constantine came to power, the Lucian text was propagated by bishops going out from the Antiochan school throughout the eastern world, and it soon became the standard text of the Eastern church, forming the basis of the Byzantine text.

From the 6th to the 14th century, the great majority of New Testament manuscripts were produced in Byzantium, in Greek. It was in 1525 that Erasmus, using five or six Byzantine manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 13th centuries, compiled the first Greek text to be produced on a printing press, subsequently known as Textus Receptus ("Received Text").

The translators of the King James Version had over 5,000 manuscripts available to them, but they leaned most heavily on the major Byzantine manuscripts, particularly Textus Receptus.

Textus Receptus Dethroned

Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort were Anglican churchmen who had contempt for the Textus Receptus and began a work in 1853 that resulted, after 28 years, in a Greek New Testament based on the earlier Alexandrian manuscripts.

Both men were strongly influenced by Origen and others who denied the deity of Jesus Christ and embraced the prevalent Gnostic heresies of the period. There are over 3,000 contradictions in the four gospels alone between these manuscripts. They deviated from the traditional Greek text in 8,413 places.

They conspired to influence the committee that produced The New Testament in the Original Greek (1881 revision), and, thus, their work has been a major influence in most modern translations, dethroning the Textus Receptus.

Detractors of the traditional King James Version regard the Westcott and Hort as a more academically acceptable literary source for guidance than the venerated Textus Receptus. They argue that the disputed passages were added later as scribal errors or amendments.

Defenders of the Textus Receptus attack Westcott and Hort (and the Alexandrian manuscripts) as having expurgated these many passages, noting that these disputed passages underscore the deity of Christ, His atonement, His resurrection, and other key doctrines. They note that Alexandria was a major headquarters for the Gnostics, heretical sects that had begun to emerge even while John was still alive.2

(It is also evident that Westcott and Hort were not believers and opposed taking the Bible literally concerning the Atonement, Salvation, etc. If you read their personal writings you wouldn't dream of letting them lead your Sunday School class!)3

The Last 12 Verses of Mark

Among the disputed passages are the final verses of the Gospel of Mark (16:9-20). (Look in your own Bible: you are likely to find an annotation that these were "added later.")

The insistence that Mark's Gospel ends at 16:8 leaves the women afraid and fails to record the resurrection, Christ's final instructions, and the Ascension. It is understandable why these verses are an embarrassment to the Gnostics, and why Westcott and Hort would advocate their exclusion, and insist that they were "added later."

However, it seems that Irenaeus in 150 A.D., and also Hypolytus in the 2nd century, each quote from these disputed verses, so the documentary evidence is that they were deleted later in the Alexandrian texts, not added subsequently.)

But there is even more astonishing evidence for their original inclusion that is also profoundly instructive for broader reasons.

The Fingerprints of the Author

Let's examine these verses and explore their underlying design. Just as we encounter fingerprint or retinal scanners to verify an identity in today's technological environment, it seems that there is an astonishingly equivalent "fingerprint" hidden beneath the Biblical text that is still visible despite the veil of the centuries.

(Fasten your seat belts!)

The Heptadic Structure of Scripture

Everyone who explores their Bible quickly discovers the pervasiveness of Seven: there are over 600 explicit occurrences of "sevens" throughout both the Old and New Testaments. As many of our readers are aware, there are also prevalent evidences of design hidden behind the text.4 The "Heptadic" (sevenfold) structure of Biblical text is one of the remarkable characteristics of its authenticity. What about these disputed 12 verses?

There are 175 (7 x 25) words in the Greek text of Mark 16:9-20. Curious. These words use a total vocabulary of 98 different words (7 x 14), also an exact multiple of seven. That's also rather striking.

Try constructing a passage in which both the number of words and the number of letters are precisely divisible by seven (with no remainder)! The random chance of a number being precisely divisible by 7 is one chance in seven. In seven tries, there will be an average of six failures.

The chance of two numbers both being divisible by 7 exactly is one in 72, or one in 49. (This is a convenient simplification; some mathematical statisticians would argue the chance is one in 91.5 ) This still might be viewed as an accidental occurrence, or the casual contrivance of a clever scribe. But let's look further. The number of letters in this passage is 553, also a precise multiple of seven (7 x 79). This is getting a bit more tricky. The chance of three numbers accidentally being precisely divisible by seven is one in 73, or one in 343. This increasingly appears to be suspiciously deliberate.

In fact, the number of vowels is 294 (7 x 42); and the number of consonants is 259 (7 x 37). Do you sense that someone has gone through a lot of trouble to hide a design or signature behind this text?

As we examine the vocabulary of those 98 (7 x 14) words: 84 (7 x 12) are found before in Mark; 14 (7 x 2) are found only here. 42 (7 x 6) are found in the Lord's address (vv.15-18); 56 (7 x 8) are not part of His vocabulary here.

This is, conspicuously, not random chance at work, but highly skillful design. But just how skillful?

With 10 such heptadic features, it would take 710, or 282,475,249 attempts for these to occur by chance alone. How long would it take the composer to redraft an alternative attempt to obtain the result he was looking for? If he could accomplish an attempt in only 10 minutes, working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, these would take him over 23,540 years!

But there's more. The total word forms in the passage are 133 (7 x 19). 112 of them (7 x 16) occur only once, leaving 21 (7 x 3) of them occurring more than once; in fact, these occur 63 (7 x 9) times.

If we examine more closely the 175 words (7x 25), we discover that 56 (7 x 8) words appear in the address of the Lord and 119 (7 x 17) appear in the rest of the passage.

The natural divisions of the passage would be the appearance to Mary, verses 9-11; His subsequent appearances, verses 12-14; Christ's discourse, verses 15-18; and the conclusion in verses 19-20. We discover that verses 9-11 involve 35 words (7 x 5). Verses 12-18, 105 (7 x 15) words; verse 12, 14 (7 x 2) words; verses 13-15, 35 (7 x 5) words; verses 16-18, 56 (7 x 8) words. The conclusion, verses 19-20, contains 35 (7 x 5) words.

It gets worse. Greek, like Hebrew, has assigned numerical values to each letter of its alphabet. Thus, each word also has a numerical ("gematrical") value.

The total numerical value of the passage is 103,656 (7 x 14,808). The value of v.9 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); v.10 is 5,418 (7 x 774); v.11 is 11,795 (7 x 1,685); vv.12-20, 86,450 (7 x 12,350). In verse 10, the first word is 98 (7 x 14), the middle word is 4,529 (7 x 647), and the last word is 791 (7 x 113). The value of the total word forms is 89,663 (7 x 12,809). And so on.

Individual words also tell a tale. (click for Greek), deadly (v.18) is not found elsewhere in the New Testament. It has a numeric value of 581 (7 x 83), and is preceded in the vocabulary list by 42 (7 x 8) words, and in the passage itself by 126 (7 x 18) words.

This all is among the legendary results of the work by Dr. Ivan Panin. (See inset below). In fact, he identified 75 heptadic features of the last 12 verses of Mark.7 We have highlighted only 34 heptadic features. If a supercomputer could be programmed to attempt 400 million attempts/second, working day and night, it would take one million of them over four million years to identify a combination of 734 heptadic features by unaided chance alone.7

Authentication Codes

Just as we encounter coding devices in our high technology environments, here we have an automatic security system that monitors every letter of every word, that never rusts or wears out, and has remained in service for almost two thousand years! It is a signature that can't be erased and which counterfeiters can't simulate.

Why are we surprised? God has declared that He "has magnified His word even above His name!"8 We can, indeed, have confidence that, in fact, the Bible is God's Holy Word, despite the errors man has introduced and the abuse it has suffered throughout the centuries. It is our most precious possession-individually as well as collectively.

And it never ceases to unveil surprises to anyone that diligently inquires into it.

Originally posted by James the Lesser"The one thing that pisses god off the most is all the wars carried out in his name"

www.theonion.com...

That was pretty cool there Truth trying to smash me with what did you call it "pure ignorance"? You sure did, you smashed me with pure ignorance. I maybe new, but I am not new to the "Everybody is going to hell" idea. Wow, talk about a loving God, and merciful to boot! You show me a god, that loves to condemn people. I only try to show respect and kindness, because deep down inside that's what I like to do, because that is what I learned from experience, that doing good to others, and helping them along the way, actually makes me feel good. Something that Christ taught. So leave your condemnation aside, and get in touch with yourself before condemning me. I for one don't fear you or your comments at all. It reminds of a little child screaming for attention.

Everybody lets give Truth a big hug?

Let me get my Boa sarge and let him give truth a big hug. Maybe the lack of oxygen to his brain will make him snap out of the you going to hell phase. I'm sorry, from the you will face the wrath of my god phase.

With the subject, I see GWB not gonna make a second term. Then Al and Jesse will say something racist and other stuff, then the Minnesota Vikings will lose next game. But only after truth condems someone else to the wrath of god.

Also, pure ignorance? Nothing is pure, always a little something polluting it. Only reason I don't say you are a pure dolt. Or that Catholic Preists are pure child molestors, for some to old to get it up and can't buy viagra. And some just don't like "blessing" the alter boys.

Well, Truth...

Answer me this:

Why does your God do this to us?
Where did "sin" really come from?
Who are you really putting your faith in?
How would you know if your beliefs were wrong? Have you tested this?
Do you believe what you are saying, inside?

Answer me these questions, but DON'T THINK first... just answer with the first thing on the top of your head... I want to know your self-unsensored 'truth.'

Do what to us?
From where God said it did; come on!
In God, of course.
It bears out the testing, and yes, I'd know.
Absolutely.

Sorry, I'm not U-P but I had to take the quiz. Disregard it if you'd like, I don't mind. I'm just wandering around the board is all.

Quote: from James the Lesser.

Also pure ignorance, nothing is pure.

You obviously have no idea on God's plan for mankind. The sole purpose of jesus dying on the cross was so that mankind may become PERFECT in character.

You may say that making someone perfect is an impossible feat. But ask yourself this.

IS ANYTHING TOO HARD FOR THE LORD?.

Keep trying James

Stewards

Once again, nothing is perfect. No person, no object, nothing is perfect. Close, but no cigar. Right tyler? Close might count in some things, but not here. Your "lord" didn't make nobody perfect. What has Jesus done that no magician/con artist hasn't done? Healing? Con artist, one into many, magician, and walking on water, again magician. Ok, he was 2000 years(maybe) ago, but still could have been a con or magician. Wouldn't be the first time. What you think cults are? Cons who sometimes use magic to get followers. Except back then the people were ready to believe anything.

If we were like them, this site wouldn't exist. The government says so, so it is. Why do we need to believe different. Like the bible says, we sheep, the government is the shepard.BAAAAAA!

But we don't. We go, wait, that doen't sound right. Or I don't like that, something is up. So, have blind faith and be sheep, or be an individual, form an opinion, and find the TRUTH!

So James, nothing is perfect? Not even God? But then how do you explain all we have! God created it, you may say different, but when you stand before my God, you will know what it means to be punished.

But how can you say such a thing? God made evrything here perfect. Arewe not humans, with souls, perfect? Maybe not a ape or other animal, for they have no souls, but I do, you do, can you say you are not perfect?

Through miracles, I have found the truth. I have had god speak to me, and I know now the truth. I hope people like you James will find it. I pray for you, and your soul. For you will need it when God comes and has the sins of the humans be paid for.

I have a theory that while the Universe is Perfect, and orderly, because it can not deviate from its fate....man on the other hand is Imperfect, and can pick and choose through his fates, almost as if he has total free will.

It is when you let go of your desires for free will, and let the peaceful waters of fate that intertwine through out this universe carry you down to that great sea of eternity, that life truly becomes a heaven, and perfection is attained in your mind, and your soul forever holds that experience, and you are reborn again to repeat the experience.

However, if you should so deviate from a chosen fate, or disrupt the fate of others, and end lives prematurely, or cause much suffering, then you have fallen to the dark side, evil and hate corrupts your soul and your waters become a torrent. Which ends in a great maelstrom and your pain is reabsorbed by the Great Conciousness, and you never live again, only existing as a memory of suffering and pain.

Ahh...logic dictates we live in an orderly world without suffering, there may be conflicts but suffering and conflict must not be confused, though sometimes their lines become blurred.

Not many enjoy life, they work too hard, and that is probably a great cause of our suffering these days. Hmm I've lost my train of thought

Ok then...for further answers to the riddles of the universe, just ring and I'll be there!

Sincerely,
no signature

Guys enough arguing. This is serious. we just had a massive earth quake
never seen before of this magnitude hit in alaska.

it reached all the way to New orleans and killed zero.


protector, let me just say this to you.

Why do you have so much doubt?

Why can you not believe me when i say i have witnessed dreams of wallking in blood
in a white haallway behind jesus?

I have seen miracles done in the name of jesus.

Other events i will not get into i have seen.

Do you understand this?

two, two, years from today i had an 8th grade education dropped out of school
in the 9th grade, did not know what a christian was, had no clue who jesus was.

In a matter of 1 and a half years i have been led to these teachings by awesome miracles that words on computer cant describe. Ive witnessed mind boggling dreams of
our lord jesus.

I "know" this is the call from god during these last days. i was baptised at one and have been called
back to the church through his will, not mine, i used to "hate", 'hate" aall religions, but
the way god has shown himself to me, i "know" he is the lord and where he sent me is true.

" i will not hand you a snake if you ask for a dove "

i want to give up every sin in the world for God. i cry all the time over you guys and other souls in the world and want you to come
home.

I cant force you to believe, but hopefully some on this site realize this "is' gods call for them.

peace.

Truth, I have had those same "miracles" only I percieve it as fate...and it has led me to a far different conclusion then you. If there is one almighty god that is the Christian god, why would courses of events in my life lead me away from christianity? Am I the anti-christ?

Sincerely,
no signature

Because you took the wrong road at the intersections in the courses of events.

But remember, when you come to a fork in the road, take it!

By the way, as long as your still sucking air on this side of the grave, it is never too late.

[Edited on 5-11-2002 by Thomas Crowne]