This is what I think........

I believe there is no Hell, Devil, or Judgement waiting on anyone.

Point 1.) If God is all knowing as in knows everything before it ever happened then why give free will and then punish you for something that he already knew was going to happen? Totally contradictory.

Point 2.) God frequently is referred to as "angry, vengeful, judgmental, etc....If God really is a perfect being then he would not be subject to petty human emotions such as these. An omnipotent deity would be composed of the one and only perfect emotion which is love.

Point 3.) The Bible was composed by the Catholic Church at the Council of Nicea and over 100 books that were religious texts of the day that did not fit in with the Bishops beliefs were thrown out and burned. I.E. The Bible was put together by fallible men who could only see as far as their own faith allowed them to. Therefore they edited and omitted the books they did include and this is obvious because the masses at the time were illiterate and needed to be controlled, and the Bible was actually illegal to be owned or possessed by anyone but the Catholic church for 100-200 years.

I will continue to add to and be engaged in this thread as it progresses including more detail as I go.

Sadly as good as your points are there is one thing indoctrination does, which is not to question the belief implanted in them. By the way if we can nit pick at the whole bible for what gives the answer that we want, both sides win and interpretation should be out of the way since it's the word of god.

star nice o.p. clearly worded,expressingan opinion asan opinion
simple,and logical a real treat lately.

reply to post by DragonSpirit2


I couldn't put it any better, i kind of like the idea that all of us are god, experimenting with different situations.
When we die, we return to the lobby where all lifeforms are waiting living or dead, as heaven wouldn't be subject to the silly idea of time.
Then once in the "lobby" we find our next assignment.
I wanna be a fly in the next one as i intend on flying into someones open mouth.
With that in mind, don't anger me!!!

reply to post by Arsenis

interpretation should be out of the way since it's the word of god.

Is it really the word of God??
Or is it the word of men??

Even if it had not been rewritten numerous times throughout the years, and if all we had to go on was the original text, then wouldn't we still just be taking man's word for it? Man is who says it is the word of a god.

But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.

quote from- Marilyn Manson

Originally posted by DragonSpirit2
I believe there is no Hell, Devil, or Judgement waiting on anyone.

Fine. You can do that.

Point 1.) If God is all knowing as in knows everything before it ever happened then why give free will and then punish you for something that he already knew was going to happen? Totally contradictory.

God draws every man, it's you who reject Him, not vice versa. He created you with free will, and went to extraordinary lengths to redeem fallen man to Himself. If you don't want anything to do with that, it's not because God hasn't tried to forgive you and love you.

Point 2.) God frequently is referred to as "angry, vengeful, judgmental, etc...

Cherry picking. God is also Holy, righteous, love, He delights in His mercy, and has offered to forget every sin done at the simple request and leap of faith. The Bible is a record of His judgments, but it's also a record of His patience with rebellious man. Picking 3-4 attributes out of dozens for you view isn't basing a decision on ALL God's revealed qualities.

If God really is a perfect being then he would not be subject to petty human emotions such as these.

It's your conjecture that God does.

An omnipotent deity would be composed of the one and only perfect emotion which is love.

And "love" without justice, honesty, respect, patience, forgiveness, blessing, is lust. God is perfect, in all His ways. In order to have a "perfect" version of Love, then it would have to rest upon the integrity of the one Father. God loves us all, it's us who are too proud and reject God.

Point 3.) The Bible was composed by the Catholic Church at the Council of Nicea and over 100 books that were religious texts of the day that did not fit in with the Bishops beliefs were thrown out and burned.

COMMON internet myth. The Nicean council didn't discuss the cannon of scripture. First century church fathers quote from the books of the bible. The Council discussed a church stance on the deity of Jesus Christ, and the bishops appointment in the Alexandrian church. You can read the Nicean Creed with a simple check of Google. Dan Brown's book are found in the fiction section.

Nicea Myths: Common Fables About The Council of Nicea and Constantine

I.E. The Bible was put together by fallible men who could only see as far as their own faith allowed them to.

It's an inerrant collection of 66 books by 40 authors who didn't know each other mostly and it's demonstratively an integrated message system that had to have it's origins from outside the space time dimension. It pinpoints future evens with perfect accuracy that it could have only been from extraterrestrial origin. the OT is the story of nation that will bring the Messiah, and the NT is the story of one man, the Son of God. You can find a type, shadow, or indirect reference to Christ and Him being God on every page of the OT. Written by 44 different men over 1,000s of years.

Therefore they edited and omitted the books they did include and this is obvious because the masses at the time were illiterate and needed to be controlled, and the Bible was actually illegal to be owned or possessed by anyone but the Catholic church for 100-200 years.

Actually the Catholic Church has MORE books of the Bible than the protestant church. They include the Apocrypha.

I will continue to add to and be engaged in this thread as it progresses including more detail as I go.

Please do. It's been fun so far, don't you agree?

Originally posted by DragonSpirit2
I believe there is no Hell, Devil, or Judgement waiting on anyone.

Point 1.) If God is all knowing as in knows everything before it ever happened then why give free will and then punish you for something that he already knew was going to happen? Totally contradictory.

Hey, he's God. He can do what he wants, and if you're not happy with it, you're welcome to take up your case with him when the time comes.

Whether God knew ahead of time or not has no bearing on what your decision is. Be thankful that you're around to be able to make the decision -- I've seen some people try and argue the point that if God knew they were going to reject him, he shouldn't have let them even come into existence.

But I see that you're an advocate of free will. Go talk to a Reformed theologian about the Calvinist doctrine of Double Predestination. If you accept that, and lots and lots of people do, then there's no contradiction, because God predestined some for salvation, and some for damnation, and there's nothing you or anyone else can do to change it, because if you weren't predestined -- before you were born, before the beginning of time -- to be one of God's elect, he's not going to give you what you need to be saved, period.

If you don't like that idea, stick with the Catholics, Lutherans and other Protestants who follow Arminianism, the belief that God does grant the grace of faith to everyone, but most people reject it.

By the way some of you seem to be implying something about my belief structure. I however have no religion I have a belief system I have constructed for myself based on research and books from other religions as well as the Bible and some other books. I believe in God, I believe the Bible and other major religious texts were meant to be a loose guide not meant to be taken word for word as some obviously do. Therefore even if your model is correct all the "Bible" says I must believe is in God and his "word" but I do believe just from a different perspective it's all up for interpretation it always has been some people just don't see it that way.

In the beginning...........(theory)

We were all sparked off of "God" at the same time. All souls were created in the same moment (Big bang theory???)
perhaps the creation of the universe occurred at the same moment? Btw if all you can do is quote the Bible without using just one reference to historical evidence other than that particular book then don't say anything because the Bible in and of itself is not proof it's too debated over whether it is historically accurate or not. Just because you have faith that it is accurate does not mean that others do which is why this debate has been kept alive. There are infinite ideas that our finite brains simply cannot wrap around.

This is why most fundamental religions fail miserably to explain God, Love I will say again is the only perfect emotion, and yes a sense of some other emotions is key however Love is the root of all of those to begin with so just to stick with the basics God IS LOVE, and if he is love and only love then he would not judge it makes no sense, ALL PATHS LEAD TO THE SAME PLACE, "everyone is here for a reason" "everything happens for a reason." I totally believe those last two statements to be true. If everyone is here for a reason and everything happens for a reason, every situation is here to teach the next person something, every person in your life is there so you can learn something and vice versa, if this is the case then there can be no sin because that would imply that everything is random and just based on random moment to moment decision making on the part of human beings. Yet we see that regardless of our decisions rarely do things go our way. Simply there is more to the grand scheme than meets the eye.

All of this is pre-planned "up there" and of course there are "free radicals" i.e. dark entities which we do not fully understand however there are no demons and devils there to change your mind or control you. If you believe in devils and demons, and they have actually effected you in some way you should probably see pharmacological help. Belief is the key, the human spirit and mind combined are so powerful most people don't understand that your mere belief in something can sometimes be enough to actually manifest and change reality.

I'm sure all of this will be put under a magnifying glass, scrutinized, analyzed, and then quoted with Bible quotes underneath it, not being condescending, I'm just saying I've been involved in these types of discussions before and the people who do nothing but quote the Bible in response to my theorizing and my analysis through my experiences get nowhere with me. Just saying I grew up Southern Baptist and I am far from that now, I did not reject God I just simply changed my point of view, my perspective.

Originally posted by DragonSpirit2
In the beginning...........(theory)

We were all sparked off of "God" at the same time. All souls were created in the same moment (Big bang theory???)
perhaps the creation of the universe occurred at the same moment?

In many ways, I don't really disagree with you, though I wonder, if all souls were created at the same time, what was I doing until 1962? Some (Mormons are the only ones I'm sure about, but I think that there are other Christian groups that see things the same way) believe that we were in heaven prior to this life, and chose to be incarnate in order to (fulfill something / be like Christ / grow as a being / fill in the blank) but I have a tough time wrapping my head around that.

It seems far fetched to say that I'd be a spirit, freed from the pain and stress of this world, and would want to go back to it. Maybe, but that would imply that being with God is less than perfect, and that being here (or becoming something by being here) would be better, and that just seems unlikely.

Bear in mind that an immortal soul is not eternal -- it was created, and so there's no reason that, for me, it couldn't have been created in 1962, as opposed to "sitting on the shelf" for 14 billion years.

I don't know. So much has been debunked and corrected to deal with changes in this one's and that one's point of view, with Jesus starting out as a Gnostic allegory rescuer of Sophia the Greek Wisdom deity, but then the Literalists killed off the Gnostics so Jesus got to be a real-life historical martyr-rescuer of regular folks, who was declared to have physically resurrected instead of being whatever the hell the Gnostics invented originally as the Hebrew version of the hero god-man, and then that meant that his mom Mary had to become real too, and that meant that his brother James had to also be real, but at some point Mary had to become an eternal virgin because (as usual with this whole thing) some men with power in the church had to "fix" the facts around her - this time because they couldn't handle the idea of her getting laid by Joseph - and that meant that Joseph had to be suddenly provided with a previous wife who actually bore James and whatever kids Joseph brought into his marriage with Mary, but then it started sounding stupid when people got wind that there wasn't any of that Brady Bunch stuff actually mentioned in the gospels, (thanks a lot Martin Luther... ) so James was transformed into a sort of brother (like a soul brother) to Jesus, and that started the whole thing back toward getting esoteric again, but then Americans got their rugged, independent little mitts on the whole thing and simply dismissed all the logic that may or may not have been shoehorned into any of it by that point in the process, and these pioneers declared the bible to be inerrant and one of them "love it or leave it" things that "y'all can just go straight ta hell if y'all don't likes it", and that sent Europe off the deep end and into atheism (to the tune of about 70% or so of educated people that live there) in direct rejection of how absolutely foolish the whole thing was getting. And that's where we are right now.

I'm not sure, but I think I might've covered most of it, and you just need to toss in millions of people killed, tortured, burned and sent to hell without dinner to flesh it all out.

With all that, why are you people arguing over any of this. Obviously reality doesn't have anything to do with any of this. They've been revising this thing for 1900 years, and without a hint of embarrassment during the whole process. Word of God. Sure, whatever.

Originally posted by adjensen

Originally posted by DragonSpirit2
In the beginning...........(theory)

We were all sparked off of "God" at the same time. All souls were created in the same moment (Big bang theory???)
perhaps the creation of the universe occurred at the same moment?

In many ways, I don't really disagree with you, though I wonder, if all souls were created at the same time, what was I doing until 1962? Some (Mormons are the only ones I'm sure about, but I think that there are other Christian groups that see things the same way) believe that we were in heaven prior to this life, and chose to be incarnate in order to (fulfill something / be like Christ / grow as a being / fill in the blank) but I have a tough time wrapping my head around that.

It seems far fetched to say that I'd be a spirit, freed from the pain and stress of this world, and would want to go back to it. Maybe, but that would imply that being with God is less than perfect, and that being here (or becoming something by being here) would be better, and that just seems unlikely.

Bear in mind that an immortal soul is not eternal -- it was created, and so there's no reason that, for me, it couldn't have been created in 1962, as opposed to "sitting on the shelf" for 14 billion years.

Well the finite mind commonly has difficulty with understanding why and when and how. It's easy to think though if heaven is perfect, and God is, and our goal is to become more like him then we have to come down here to do it, through experience is the only way, knowledge is not enough. So no you were not "sitting on a shelf" for 4 billion years you were incarnating on this planet and others throughout the universe to learn and grow. You choose to do this because in "heaven" or wherever you are free from petty feelings about inconvenience or thinking that life is too hard, you feel invincible and so you come down to perfect things that have plagued you in past lives like finances, relationships, employment, criminal tendencies, etc........everyone has flaws and everyone experiences them in a different way with different emotions.

Ok though seriously let me spell it out for everyone.

We were all created at once to "experience" for God. Because although God is all knowledge and therefore all knowing, an infinite being that has so to speak been up in the sky forever has never experienced anything for itself. So in short we were sparked off of the creator and by being sparks us and him are the same and he can experience things vicariously through us. We were given consciousness and free will.
Then we were given the ability to choose what we would be either white entities, gray entities, or dark entities as creatures of free will God would not stop us from choosing. Having consciousness and choice and the ability to come down and incarnate changed us souls though we became more human like, more able to be damaged, and technically further away from being "God-like." It has almost from the beginning been our goal to become more like "God" ourself, even in the Bible it encourages this behavior.
We then meet with a council and our guide or guides in order to choose and yes I said CHOOSE our life down to the last detail, who our parents and siblings will be, who our friends will be, who most of our enemies will be, YES YOU CHOSE THE PEOPLE WHO TEST YOU ON A DAILY BASIS. Your hair color, eye color, whether you will go bald or not, your weight and/or weight problems, how tall you are and will be, etc....
Everything and everyone in your life happens for a reason, which is to teach you something and bring you closer to perfection, the better you deal with a scenario without running from it the closer you are. Therefore no one person is evil if they have a purpose. It's all about perspective.

reply to post by DragonSpirit2


I totally agree. However, the Bible is a good place for great teachings and lessons to live your life by. Personally, I live some of the stuff in there but others have no relevance to the world today. Many Christians feel the need to defend the Bible but I feel the need to defend what its intent is. The true intent of the Bible was to convey the message of salvation which was later manipulated into a form of control.

Many people are fearful of hell and the devil which hinders their ability to perform things that give good lessons and life experiences. I have lived through the sins of life and I will continue to until I die because I am not perfect. If we were not meant to experience this life than God wouldn't have given it to us. What's the point of living life without experiencing everything in it? That is like opening a chocolate bar and smelling it rather than eating it because it is bad for you.

Ya I totally agree all religious texts should be taken with a grain of sand, and used loosely as a guide of ideals to try and live up to but not beat yourself up over, or scare yourself, your family, or your children over because it mentions an ancient boogey man and "bad place" where "bad" people go. What a bunch of superstitious hogwash. The devil and hell were created to control illiterate masses that were out of control and having a hard time converting to catholicism and then later protestant Christianity, it was a means to an end to get people to "behave" because they thought the devil would get them otherwise. Come on doesn't that sound like some childish mess that some wacked out parent would tell their kid to get them to go to sleep, like you'd better not get up again stay in bed like a good little boy/girl or the boogeyman is going to jump out of the closet and swallow you up and you'll never be heard from again? WTF how are people still falling for this baloney? Not trying to down anyone's religious beliefs and like I said I do believe in God, and heaven, and the existence of Jesus, however I have a different perspective on "sin" and "evil"