[quote]rainjack wrote:
CD - you are not going to shake my faith because you call my God an idiot.
[/quote]
I didn’t. I said that Jesus said crazy and ridiculous things to his accusers, which is true. I think he did it on purpose.
I can also point to a lot of instances where Jesus was wrong, but that doesn’t make him an idiot.
What ought to shake your faith is that nobody in charge at your place of worship knows what he said was crazy.
[quote]CDarklock wrote:
This is really the crux of my dissent with christianity. I can believe that some random philosopher might have some good ideas without knowing much about Jewish law, but I have a really hard time believing the son of God Himself wouldn’t know it backwards and forwards – so when Jesus argues with Jewish scholars from a position of almost shocking ignorance, I don’t think they run away from the truth so much as they back away from the lunatic.
[/quote]
As I understand it, nowhere is it said that Jesus discussed with the Pharasies out of a position of ignorance. In fact (okay, probably not the right word to use here, really, it’s just my understanding of the gospels), though there is a HUGE gap from 12 to 33 years of age, it is said that at 12, he was shockingly UNDERSTANDING of the law.
This is a very interesting thread.
Particularly the Judaism/ is Jesus son of God portion.
I am a Christian with a handful of Orthodox Jewish friends. I know what they believe and why. They make good logical sense.And some of their beliefs about Satan make better sense than the Xian POV.
I would like to add to this discussion, but I have to leave.
CDarklock,
What is your Jewish background? If you don’t mind. If so, that is okay. Reform, Conservative, Orthodox (or as they like to say, practicing)
Thanks
[quote]btm62 wrote:
Stop talking as if you know anything and that your words are fact.[/quote]
Son, I know things you can hardly conceive; you are so far out of your league, you should be frightened.
Basic rule of thumb? Don’t argue scripture with Jews. We have this weird habit of reading it.
Let’s do a little project. This is one of the easier ones.
First, read Mark 2:23-28, noticing that the disciples do indeed pick corn and that the Pharisees observe only that this is not lawful on the sabbath. Hardly “off kilter”.
Then read Samuel 21:2-6 for the actions of David, to which Jesus refers in the previous passage.
Then see Leviticus 24:5-9 to read the laws about shewbread.
Then consider the facts: once new shewbread is laid out, the old shewbread belongs to the priests. It was common for this shewbread to be given to the poor and needy, although they had to eat it in the temple. (There is much discussion of why this is in the Talmud, but you probably don’t care.) David came to the temple, and being needy asked for bread. The priest gave them the shewbread, provided they had not been raping women (though the priest is a little more delicate in asking this question), entirely under the law.
So when Jesus calls this unlawful, Jesus clearly does not understand the actions of David and the laws related to shewbread. Unless, of course, he was lying. So which would you prefer: “Jesus was not an expert in Jewish scripture”, or “Jesus was a liar”?
I for one will be charitable and propose that Jesus was simply not an expert in Jewish scripture. That would make him unlikely to be the son of God, but someone you might be able to believe once in a while.
However, since you need Jesus to be God and God to be omniscient, you’ll probably have a problem with that interpretation. Most christians would rather have a Jesus who lies than a Jesus who doesn’t know everything.
Are you listening to yourself?
[quote]CDarklock wrote:
Let’s do a little project. This is one of the easier ones.
First, read Mark 2:23-28, noticing that the disciples do indeed pick corn and that the Pharisees observe only that this is not lawful on the sabbath. Hardly “off kilter”.
Then read Samuel 21:2-6 for the actions of David, to which Jesus refers in the previous passage.
Then see Leviticus 24:5-9 to read the laws about shewbread.
Then consider the facts: once new shewbread is laid out, the old shewbread belongs to the priests. It was common for this shewbread to be given to the poor and needy, although they had to eat it in the temple. (There is much discussion of why this is in the Talmud, but you probably don’t care.) David came to the temple, and being needy asked for bread. The priest gave them the shewbread, provided they had not been raping women (though the priest is a little more delicate in asking this question), entirely under the law.
So when Jesus calls this unlawful, Jesus clearly does not understand the actions of David and the laws related to shewbread. Unless, of course, he was lying. So which would you prefer: “Jesus was not an expert in Jewish scripture”, or “Jesus was a liar”?
[quote]CDarklock wrote:
OH JESUS WAS AN EXPERT IN JEWISH SCRIPTURE.
When David took the consecrated bread the priest went against the law as it was only to be eaten by priests, however the priest put david and his men’s lives above this religious law, as this upheld the higher law of love. As was the same with many poor people too.
Jesus and his disciples picking corn on the sabbath was purely a demonstration to the pharisees that the sabbath laws had become more important than the sabbath rest.
David and Jesus understood that the intent of god’s law is to promote love for god and others.
When they applied the law to Jesus they misunderstood his intent.
PEACE TO ALL
[quote]CDarklock wrote:
What ought to shake your faith is that nobody in charge at your place of worship knows what he said was crazy.[/quote]
You’re going to have to do better than making blamket statements like that.
The law is dead, because of Christ’s death and resurection - If you don’t grasp that concept - then Jesus would indeed sound crazy to you.
CDarklock,
You are definitely more read than I am…not that that is hard to do.
I agree with you, most religions are “follow these rules, here’s your reward.” This is were the Jews and much to your chagrine/disbelief Christians do have something that is different from the others. God actually says He wants to replace our hearts of stone with new ones and he wants to give us new spirits too. He wants to be our fruitfulness…not us be our fruitfulness. He (God) wants to be our righteousness.
The problem I have with polytheism is when you place some of the attributes described in this thread on the “gods”, their roles become redundant. Do you really need two, three, four … “gods” where all are, omniscient, omnipotent etc? By my reasoning, no. Sure it maybe flawed reasoning but I guess I will have to live with it.
So that gets rid of the polytheisitc religions.
I found Buddism to provide similar/same teachings as the Bible, but fell short at the, “to what end, for what purpose?”
As you put it, “for what reward?” Also no real definite concept of God. I find nature and the human body provides too much evidence to be random acts of coincidence, or some issuance of energy unguided by a higher being.
The Muslim religion, I really don’t know much about. But I do find it interesting that a religion teaching freedom for the slaves, had its prophet having slaves. I find it interesting (so I am told) that the leader of the Muslim religion put out a book stating that the US would not land on the moon, after they already had.
I have a friend that is Zoraostrian (sorry if spelled wrong) and I read what he had on that. They don’t believe in outside influences of evil (I do) plus they get into fire worshipping.
Taoism again gets into energy manipulation, but I have not read much if anything on it yet, I am sure my friend who sent me information on all the other things will eventually get to sending me stuff on this too.)
I hope you will provide my a little leaway as I ask some questions since I have not been to seminary, Bible college/school, or courses and was not brought up in the church.
How many laws were added (if any) or modified after Moses?
If the Law is all that was needed, which the priests had. Why were there prophets?
If the Law was all that was needed, wouldn’t the Shema(I only know because it is written in my bible) read, “Love the Lord your God with your actions”? Instead of, “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength?”
Where was the Ark of the Covenant found?
Peace,
T-Ren
Just to let all the people who think Jesus was not the Son of God but a really wise man
This is what he said in matthew 10:34
Do not suppose that i have come to bring peace on the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but division. For i have come to turn a man against his daughter, a daughter against her mother, a daughter in law against her mother in law, a mans enemies will be members of his own household.
As you can see even the son of god new we would be fighting over whether he is the truth or not.
[quote]Stevemax wrote:
OH JESUS WAS AN EXPERT IN JEWISH SCRIPTURE.[/quote]
Then why did he mislead the Pharisees as he did? Clearly, if Jesus was an expert, then he knew either that what he said was wrong or that the Pharisees would be unwilling to accept it.
Either way, this was a clear violation of Leviticus 14:19, “You shall not curse the deaf nor place a stumbling
block before the blind”, which prohibits doing wrong to another simply because they are unable to know you have done it. No matter how you slice it, Jesus did wrong to the Pharisees by “poisoning” their attitudes with contradictions of the existing Jewish interpretations.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
The law is dead, because of Christ’s death and resurection - If you don’t grasp that concept - then Jesus would indeed sound crazy to you.[/quote]
God said the law was eternal. Did God lie, or did Jesus?
That’s a pretty simple choice, if you ask me.
[quote]CDarklock wrote:
rainjack wrote:
The law is dead, because of Christ’s death and resurection - If you don’t grasp that concept - then Jesus would indeed sound crazy to you.
God said the law was eternal. Did God lie, or did Jesus?
That’s a pretty simple choice, if you ask me.
[/quote]
Where did God say this?
General Observation:
This thread started as a very specific discussion of the validity of Roman Catholic doctrine and has broken down into childish quarrelling about very simple, widely accepted religious beliefs spanning a few different religions. I guess I am wondering why anyone thinks his post will do anything. I don’t think a few lines of yellow text are going to change my core belief system or anyone else’s.
Let me paraphrase:
Person A: What do red apples taste like?
Person B: Sweet.
Person C: Don’t worry about that, yellow ones are better. I couldn’t possibly believe in red apples.
Person D: All the apples are fucked! I can’t stand them.
Person E: That’s why I eat oranges.
Person D: No, all fruit is invalid because it would not grow without sunlight.
Person F: Nothing would exist without sunlight!
Person G: Are you saying that you have experienced the absence of sunlight?
Person: F: No
Person G: Then you can’t say for certain that fruit would not exist without sunlight.
Person F: But you can’t say that it would!
Person H: Yellow apples are still better!
Am I oversimplifying, or does this seem really silly to anyone else?
[quote]T-Ren wrote:
I agree with you, most religions are “follow these rules, here’s your reward.”[/quote]
I would say anything which departs from that formula is not a religion, but a philosophy. Religion, IMO, is a specific variety of philosophy in which a value judgement is made as to the desirability of human behaviors, and these abstract behaviors are attached to concepts that illustrate the nature of that judgement.
Theirs, too. That’s why the gods of polytheistic cultures were largely NOT omniscient and omnipotent. They had limitations very much like human beings, but on a larger scale. Mortals could occasionally sneak up on the gods and trick them.
The big-G God was a really radical concept in the biblical era, and most little-g gods were extremely different. There’s very little effort to paint a pretty face on the more vicious and destructive things God did in the early scriptures, because in comparison to the gods of the time, God was pretty cool; He simply killed people who broke the law, and was pretty unlikely to eat his favored priests alive or burn down his own temples with the worshipers inside. If you look at God’s contemporaneous deities, He was a really nice guy.
After Moses? None. After Sinai? About six hundred. The overall count most commonly accepted in the Jewish community is 613 mitzvos, or commandments.
Modifications are a tricky one; you have to ask whether a law is modified when our understanding of it changes. We could probably debate that one all day. And that doesn’t even begin to get into when something is a new law, a clarification of an existing one, or simply an example of how a law should be followed in practice.
The Jewish party line is that no laws have been modified, but the Shulchan Aruch does an awful lot of changing what things mean in practice. It is a matter of some debate whether we are homing in on the truth (as Orthodox and Conservative Jews tend to believe), or twisting the law to our own ends (as Reform and Reconstructionist Jews tend to believe).
The law is all the law that was needed. The prophets brought guidance without added law, applying the existing laws to the situation at hand.
A more simplified description might be that the law says what everyone everywhere ought to do all the time, while the prophets say what these people over here ought to do right now.
This is a very strange question, because the Shema is part of the law. In effect, you’re asking “if the law is all we need, why isn’t it different?”… and the answer to that ought to be pretty obvious, because the law you propose is NOT all we need.
So why do we need to be told “with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might”? Because people are lazy. If you tell them “follow the law”, they will do exactly that: follow the absolute letter of the law, with as little effort as possible. What we really need to do is not only follow the law, but understand the law, and recognise why the law is the law in the first place.
Found? It was lost in the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonian army. To my knowledge, it has never been found – and has therefore remained pretty exclusively the subject of Jewish conspiracy theories, lunatic ravings, and Steven Spielberg movies.
Of course, I’m probably just part of the dreaded international Jewish Zionist conspiracy. 
If you’re asking where it was kept, you’ve chosen the right time. The ark was kept in the inner sanctum of the temple, and access to it was permitted exactly one day a year on Yom Kippur… which is this comming Friday.
CDarklock, have you ever read “The Sign and the Seal” by Graham Hancock? I’m just curious what your thoughts on it are.
[quote]Animal Lifter wrote:
This thread started as a very specific discussion of the validity of Roman Catholic doctrine and has broken down into childish quarrelling[/quote]
I suppose that depends on how you read things. If you imagine whiny voices and stomping around, yes, it looks childish. Imagine a group of old guys in suits sitting around a table sipping brandy, however, and it starts to take on a whole different character. You can have very deep, personal, and even heated discussions without anyone being childish.
Why not?
When you come down to it, most of us formed our core beliefs based on a few lines of text. Many christians were converted with the famous “For God so loved the world” quotation from John 3:16, which isn’t much at all. Many Jews were brought up on Hillel’s “all else is commentary” quote, which is even less – and it’s not even scriptural. So why can’t a few lines of text have a profound effect on how you view your existing faith?
The real question, of course, is why our posts have to do anything in the first place. Isn’t it okay to discuss without converting one another, simply to gain a broader perspective on religious matters?
[quote]ToShinDo wrote:
CDarklock, have you ever read “The Sign and the Seal” by Graham Hancock?[/quote]
Nope. A lot of people are really bound up in where certain artifacts are or whether certain events really happened, and they don’t really do a very good job of digging… so I tend not to be very interested in books about that kind of thing.
I did look up an excerpt on the web, though, and found it to be pretty much like most other books of this variety. The Amazon reviews are pretty standard, too; a bunch of five-star reviews, and a bunch of one-star reviews. It’s all about how willing you are to believe the hype.
CDarklock: True enough. What I found interesting was his account of his interaction with the Ethiopian Jews, who seem to have a lot of rituals from very old Judaism. I’d never heard of them before reading that book. Most people either tend to love or hate Hancock anyway.
To-Shin Do
Hey Rainjack,
With all due respect, I believe it says that Jesus did not come to abolish the law but to fullfill it.
Peace,
T-Ren
There is a reason I am posting the following on a religion thread. Please ponder the depth of this statement and what it means for you.
You make your World.
Vegita ~ Prince of all Sayajins
[quote]ToShinDo wrote:
What I found interesting was his account of his interaction with the Ethiopian Jews[/quote]
Sephardim are very different from the Ashkenazi most people think of when you say “Jew”, but as you might expect, this is less than surprising to actual Jews.
I do kick myself for not being more interested in my Jewish heritage when I was in Kenya. It’s one thing to talk to an isolated Sephard, and another thing to experience an entire community of them.