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Goodbye Jesus

Satan's One Aim Is To Stop You Trusting God...


DavidL

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"But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ."  - The Apostle Paul  

(2 Corinthians 11:3) 

 

Looking back to Genesis 3 it's very interesting to see how the devil worked his deception on Eve...

exactly how he still works today...!!

 

1. "Did God really say.."  - First he questions what God had said, causing Eve to doubt God's Word.. 

So today the Scriptures are challenged, and we are made to doubt their authenticity and reliability..

 

2.  "You surely will not die!"  - The blatant Lie that actually, on the face of it, seemed believable...

Again we find today that the truth of Scripture is out-rightly contradicted, in intellectual and philosophical terms that almost seem believable..

 

3. "For God knows..."  - The suggestion is made that God's motives are not pure..

Today also God is slandered and His motives made to look corrupt...

 

4. "...the tree was desirable to make one wise."  - In buying Satan's lie, the impression given was that this was a wise choice..

And so the same temptation is made to those who follow Jesus, to come out from the state of simple child-like dependence and trust in God (subjection to authority), and become your own god...(do what you want - think for yourself)..

 

 

Newsflash.

 

Satan is fictional.

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I remember a discussion I had with a jehovah witness a few weeks back, she was trying so hard to convince me that her brand of truth was the right one, after 30 minutes of bible bashing I calmly said, why should I worship a god who orders the killing of children, to which her only response was, NO! God does not kill children. Oh yes he does I said and much much worse.

 

Christians are always betrayed by the truth that they think they know.

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Jewish perspective on Satan and evil.

This is an excellent article by rabbi Tovia Singer, the bane of evangelicals.

 

Who is Satan?

http://www.outreachjudaism.org/articles/who-is-satan.html

 

This Jewish rabbi just answered more of my questions than any of my Christian leaders ever did. Interesting. Thanks for posting this!

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Jewish perspective on Satan and evil.

This is an excellent article by rabbi Tovia Singer, the bane of evangelicals.

 

Who is Satan?

http://www.outreachjudaism.org/articles/who-is-satan.html

 

This Jewish rabbi just answered more of my questions than any of my Christian leaders ever did. Interesting. Thanks for posting this!

 

I'm astounded at what OutreachJudaism says in this link.  I note that, as Centauri and others besides myself have insisted, the author says that Jewish tradition also agrees that God creates evil, including moral evil and not merely calamity.  On the other hand, the author insists on "free will," which we've been arguing is not a doctrine taught in scripture.  Like OrdinaryClay, the author merely quotes verses where a choice is discussed and then makes the unsupported assumption that the individual's choice is not determined by God earlier in the chain of causes.

 

Second, the rationale given for God's creation of evil, though, sounds very much like Fascism in the idea that virtue is only won through the crucible of struggle and conflict:  e.g. this excerpt from the link

 

These edifying verses underscore the fundamental biblical teaching of the Almighty’s divine sovereign plan, which provides that every searching soul must confront evil, as well as good, in order to remain vigilant in one’s personal search for perfect spiritual balance. The Almighty’s gift of freewill to humanity is what separates us from His other creations. For those committed to attaining a higher spiritual existence, the struggle toward a life of virtue is only possible with the existence of evil, which serves as a spiritual counterweight. In other words, righteousness cannot exist unless man is free to choose or reject evil.

 

This explanation for human suffering and struggle creates other problems, as theological explanations tend to do:

would Adam and Eve have attained a higher spiritual existence w/o disobeying God?  

do the resurrected souls in heaven continue to struggle against evil?  Can they fall?  if not, are they spiritually balanced, and if so, how?  If their virtue is confirmed, free will seems no longer operative... why not just create a set of heavenly beings in the first place and skip all the shit on earth?  etc etc

if God creates evil, what does it mean to say that God is all good?  Theologians classically explained descriptions of God as not univocal (univocal = a term means just the same thing when applied to God as when applied to creatures) and not equivocal (equivocal = a term DOESN'T have the same meaning when applied to God as it does when applied to creatures) but analogical.  I deem "analogical" an empty category in this context and think rather that we can have no sense of what "good" means when that word describes the God of the Bible. (years ago my Calvinist pastor quoted a medieval Jewish theologian, whose name I forget, as arguing that as God creates matter but is not material, so He creates evil but is not evil.  I don't think this works but can't go into it here.)

If evil is a precondition for righteousness, as the author claims, why is it so great to have righteousness (so understood) in the universe?  Will there then be no righteousness in heaven? Maybe there's a way of spinning things to say that perfect love is beyond righteousness, but you'd have to do a word study to prove that the resurrected are not "righteous," and certainly you'd come across claims in the NT that they are.   

?

I really don't like the excuse that evil exists so that we can prove our mettle by opposing it.  

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Still waiting on DavidL's response to posts # 11 and 41.

 

 

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^^^You may not get one, BAA.  So far, Brother Dave seems to have only responded to those posts wherein he could defend his position with an experiential argument, while ever-so-subtly blowing off our own experiences with the insinuation that we didn't have complete trust in god.  His seems to be a faith built completely on emotion/experience (the lord saved him from a life of drugs and debauchery etc.) and it would be unlikely that he could counter a logical and objective interpretation of the scriptures, such as rendered quite adroitly in the aforementioned posts, as well as several others in this thread.  While I am quite pleased that his life was spared the trauma of drug addiction, I fear he has merely replaced drugs with jesus for the high his psychology requires.  I would be surprised if he offered us anything new or original; to wit, a thoughtful, lucid rebuttal of the points addressed.

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^^^You may not get one, BAA.  So far, Brother Dave seems to have only responded to those posts wherein he could defend his position with an experiential argument, while ever-so-subtly blowing off our own experiences with the insinuation that we didn't have complete trust in god.  His seems to be a faith built completely on emotion/experience (the lord saved him from a life of drugs and debauchery etc.) and it would be unlikely that he could counter a logical and objective interpretation of the scriptures, such as rendered quite adroitly in the aforementioned posts, as well as several others in this thread.  While I am quite pleased that his life was spared the trauma of drug addiction, I fear he has merely replaced drugs with jesus for the high his psychology requires.  I would be surprised if he offered us anything new or original; to wit, a thoughtful, lucid rebuttal of the points addressed.

BAA and Prof, you'll notice that instead, DavidL has started a new thread based on two Bible verses and his ruminations on them.

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^^^You may not get one, BAA.  So far, Brother Dave seems to have only responded to those posts wherein he could defend his position with an experiential argument, while ever-so-subtly blowing off our own experiences with the insinuation that we didn't have complete trust in god.  His seems to be a faith built completely on emotion/experience (the lord saved him from a life of drugs and debauchery etc.) and it would be unlikely that he could counter a logical and objective interpretation of the scriptures, such as rendered quite adroitly in the aforementioned posts, as well as several others in this thread.  While I am quite pleased that his life was spared the trauma of drug addiction, I fear he has merely replaced drugs with jesus for the high his psychology requires.  I would be surprised if he offered us anything new or original; to wit, a thoughtful, lucid rebuttal of the points addressed.

BAA and Prof, you'll notice that instead, DavidL has started a new thread based on two Bible verses and his ruminations on them.

 

 

He must have studied under the great master, that 7-eleven clerk from San Diego.

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I wonder if he was even a Kiwi?

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Jewish perspective on Satan and evil.

This is an excellent article by rabbi Tovia Singer, the bane of evangelicals.

 

Who is Satan?

http://www.outreachjudaism.org/articles/who-is-satan.html

 

This Jewish rabbi just answered more of my questions than any of my Christian leaders ever did. Interesting. Thanks for posting this!

 

You're welcome.

It goes to show that the standard Christian claims about Satan and evil are by no means accepted by Jews, whose scriptures the Christians claim to understand better than anyone else.

The Christians attempt to make absolute claims about something they can't validate, but worse still they drum their nonsense into the heads of children and adults alike.

Unless one is aware of the flaws in Christian doctrine, they aren't very likely to question it.

And the propaganda beat goes on, passed from generation to generation.

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Jewish perspective on Satan and evil.

This is an excellent article by rabbi Tovia Singer, the bane of evangelicals.

 

Who is Satan?

http://www.outreachjudaism.org/articles/who-is-satan.html

 

This Jewish rabbi just answered more of my questions than any of my Christian leaders ever did. Interesting. Thanks for posting this!

 

I'm astounded at what OutreachJudaism says in this link.  I note that, as Centauri and others besides myself have insisted, the author says that Jewish tradition also agrees that God creates evil, including moral evil and not merely calamity.  On the other hand, the author insists on "free will," which we've been arguing is not a doctrine taught in scripture.  Like OrdinaryClay, the author merely quotes verses where a choice is discussed and then makes the unsupported assumption that the individual's choice is not determined by God earlier in the chain of causes.

 

Yes, I noticed the "free will" claim when the rabbi ignores the hardening of hearts done by God.

Free will takes an even bigger pounding in the New Testament, where blatant predestination is taught.

I also noticed he said that angels do not have free will, including Satan.

 

"Throughout the Bible, an angel is a messenger of God who carries out the divine will of the Almighty. There is not one example in the Jewish Scriptures where any angel, Satan included, ever opposes God’s will.

 

In essence, Satan is an agent of God, and has no free will or independent existence."

 

Second, the rationale given for God's creation of evil, though, sounds very much like Fascism in the idea that virtue is only won through the crucible of struggle and conflict:  e.g. this excerpt from the link

 

These edifying verses underscore the fundamental biblical teaching of the Almighty’s divine sovereign plan, which provides that every searching soul must confront evil, as well as good, in order to remain vigilant in one’s personal search for perfect spiritual balance. The Almighty’s gift of freewill to humanity is what separates us from His other creations. For those committed to attaining a higher spiritual existence, the struggle toward a life of virtue is only possible with the existence of evil, which serves as a spiritual counterweight. In other words, righteousness cannot exist unless man is free to choose or reject evil.[/size]

 

This explanation for human suffering and struggle creates other problems, as theological explanations tend to do:

would Adam and Eve have attained a higher spiritual existence w/o disobeying God?  

do the resurrected souls in heaven continue to struggle against evil?  Can they fall?  if not, are they spiritually balanced, and if so, how?  If their virtue is confirmed, free will seems no longer operative... why not just create a set of heavenly beings in the first place and skip all the shit on earth?  etc etc

if God creates evil, what does it mean to say that God is all good?

Indeed, this deity creates a world filled with malfunctions and then subjects it to "evil", in an effort to offer an avenue of spiritual growth.

Seems like a treadmill of suffering to me.

 

Theologians classically explained descriptions of God as not univocal (univocal = a term means just the same thing when applied to God as when applied to creatures) and not equivocal (equivocal = a term DOESN'T have the same meaning when applied to God as it does when applied to creatures) but analogical.  I deem "analogical" an empty category in this context and think rather that we can have no sense of what "good" means when that word describes the God of the Bible. (years ago my Calvinist pastor quoted a medieval Jewish theologian, whose name I forget, as arguing that as God creates matter but is not material, so He creates evil but is not evil.  I don't think this works but can't go into it here.)

If evil is a precondition for righteousness, as the author claims, why is it so great to have righteousness (so understood) in the universe?  Will there then be no righteousness in heaven? Maybe there's a way of spinning things to say that perfect love is beyond righteousness, but you'd have to do a word study to prove that the resurrected are not "righteous," and certainly you'd come across claims in the NT that they are.   

?

I really don't like the excuse that evil exists so that we can prove our mettle by opposing it.

I think the teaching of duality comes into play here, with the aim being to define one's being based on comparisons gleaned from actual experience.

In other words, one cannot know hot if cold didn't exist.

"God" then places this duality before humans and lets them experience it.

New age teachings also use this analogy, where "God" is more of a chemist that mixes elements together and watches what happens.

One way of experiencing "reality" is just as valid as another, making "God" immune from being defined as good or evil.

I find most religious and metaphysical teachings to be quite inept because in the end, they are left with a creator that resembles a child playing with an ant farm.

 

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I wonder if he was even a Kiwi?

Nah, he never was a "true" Kiwi ... us "True" Kiwis eat, drink, and are merry! GONZ9729CustomImage1687979.gif 

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I wonder if he was even a Kiwi?

Nah, he never was a "true" Kiwi ... us "True" Kiwis eat, drink, and are merry! GONZ9729CustomImage1687979.gif 

 

 

Granted I have more experience with Aussies than will Kiwis, but I had my suspicions, too.

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I'm still waiting for evidence that OC and David are actual Christians. How do I know they have genuinely accepted Christ as their savior? How do I know they are proselytizing the true Christian religion and true interpretations of Jesus Christ and God? How do we know these guys aren't a bunch of charlatans running around, claiming they believe in God? Shit, one of them is USING Jesus to stay off of drugs? Sounds shady to me.

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  • 3 weeks later...

 

I wonder if he was even a Kiwi?

Nah, he never was a "true" Kiwi ... us "True" Kiwis eat, drink, and are merry! GONZ9729CustomImage1687979.gif 

 

 

A true Kiwi male eats, roots, shoots and leaves.

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  • 2 weeks later...

According to this line of thinking, Satan is way more successful than god in my life. As god had my faith for years, and yet Satan was easily able to steal me away.... So it would appear that God is a loser.*

 

*Or the much more likely scenario is that god nor satan ever existed, and my rational mind was able to deduce this fact after many years of education and study of the facts, despite the brainwashing of indoctrination I was deluded by for years.

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It's always interesting how Christians grant themselves absolute freedom to (mis)interpret the Hebrew Bible any way they see fit, but when Muslims do the same thing it is total heresy and blasphemy. 

 

The Satan was an angel of God. He was not the enemy of God. Christians introduced that "innovative" (mis)interpretation. 

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It's always interesting how Christians grant themselves absolute freedom to (mis)interpret the Hebrew Bible any way they see fit, but when Muslims do the same thing it is total heresy and blasphemy. 

 

The Satan was an angel of God. He was not the enemy of God. Christians introduced that "innovative" (mis)interpretation. 

Actually, there is good reason to think the movements in Judaism that produced the book of Enoch and related literature had beliefs closer to the current Christian idea than to the stances that we can find in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, it wasn't the Christians who introduced it, it's an idea that did appear in movements of 2nd temple judaism.

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It's always interesting how Christians grant themselves absolute freedom to (mis)interpret the Hebrew Bible any way they see fit, but when Muslims do the same thing it is total heresy and blasphemy. 

 

The Satan was an angel of God. He was not the enemy of God. Christians introduced that "innovative" (mis)interpretation. 

Actually, there is good reason to think the movements in Judaism that produced the book of Enoch and related literature had beliefs closer to the current Christian idea than to the stances that we can find in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, it wasn't the Christians who introduced it, it's an idea that did appear in movements of 2nd temple judaism.

 

 

The Book of Enoch talks about Sathani-el (the enemy of El). This is different than Satan (the accuser). But a group outside of rabbinical tradition like the Christians would have easily conflated the two. 

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So if Satans one aim.....then it worked one most of us here! God. What a Wuss!

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It's always interesting how Christians grant themselves absolute freedom to (mis)interpret the Hebrew Bible any way they see fit, but when Muslims do the same thing it is total heresy and blasphemy. 

 

The Satan was an angel of God. He was not the enemy of God. Christians introduced that "innovative" (mis)interpretation. 

Actually, there is good reason to think the movements in Judaism that produced the book of Enoch and related literature had beliefs closer to the current Christian idea than to the stances that we can find in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, it wasn't the Christians who introduced it, it's an idea that did appear in movements of 2nd temple judaism.

 

 

The Book of Enoch talks about Sathani-el (the enemy of El). This is different than Satan (the accuser). But a group outside of rabbinical tradition like the Christians would have easily conflated the two. 

 

Sathani-El and Satan's names basically come from the same root. However, the main difference here that unites Christians and Enochian Judaism in opposition to Rabbinic Judaism is the notion that God does have a supernatural enemy. Christians and Enochites share that assumption, Rabbinic Jews don't. The minor difference you pinpointed there doesn't really affect what I said.

 

The Biblical Hebrew word 'satan' can mean both accuser and enemy; We cannot just look at whether the name is Sathani-El or Satan, we have to look at what's actually said about them to know what significance they have in the relevant movements of judaism.

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It's always interesting how Christians grant themselves absolute freedom to (mis)interpret the Hebrew Bible any way they see fit, but when Muslims do the same thing it is total heresy and blasphemy. 

 

The Satan was an angel of God. He was not the enemy of God. Christians introduced that "innovative" (mis)interpretation. 

Actually, there is good reason to think the movements in Judaism that produced the book of Enoch and related literature had beliefs closer to the current Christian idea than to the stances that we can find in the Hebrew Bible. Thus, it wasn't the Christians who introduced it, it's an idea that did appear in movements of 2nd temple judaism.

 

 

The Book of Enoch talks about Sathani-el (the enemy of El). This is different than Satan (the accuser). But a group outside of rabbinical tradition like the Christians would have easily conflated the two. 

 

Sathani-El and Satan's names basically come from the same root. However, the main difference here that unites Christians and Enochian Judaism in opposition to Rabbinic Judaism is the notion that God does have a supernatural enemy. Christians and Enochites share that assumption, Rabbinic Jews don't. The minor difference you pinpointed there doesn't really affect what I said.

 

The Biblical Hebrew word 'satan' can mean both accuser and enemy; We cannot just look at whether the name is Sathani-El or Satan, we have to look at what's actually said about them to know what significance they have in the relevant movements of judaism.

 

Relavent quote from William Propp, biblical scholar

 

In most of the Hebrew Bible, God plays the role later Judaism reserves for Satan. Ha satan ‘the Adversary’ first appears in early postexilic writings as an officer in Yahweh’s angelic court entrusted with presenting human behavior in the worst light (Zech 3:1-2; Job 1-2). But when Judaism encountered Zoroastrianism, Persian dualism evidently attracted thinkers troubled by Yahweh’s role in creating evil and misfortune. Beginning in the Persian period, various spirits—Belial, Mastemah, Asmodai, Sammael, the Evil Impulse, Satan—assumed the task of seducing humanity toward evil and launching attacks against individuals. For example, although it is Yahweh who tempts David into sinfully ordering a census (2 Sam 24:1), a later retelling (1 Chr 21:1) makes the instigator Satan. Similarly, while it is Yahweh who attacks Moses in Ex 4:24, in Jubilees 40:2, the adversary is Mastemah. Even the command that Abraham sacrifice his son (Gen 22:2) is, according to Jubilees 17:15-16, Mastemah’s doing (Exodus 1-18, 354). http://contradictionsinthebible.com/yahweh-or-beelzebub/

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DavidL,

 

The Bible has no more credibility than the emails in the East Anglia scandal.  The council of Nicea was a group of men, not much different than today's academia and they were just as agenda driven as the politics of today.  Please show me some evidence to show otherwise. 

 

I doubt he'll be able to show you evidence of anything, since the ban hammer fell on him.

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DavidL,

 

The Bible has no more credibility than the emails in the East Anglia scandal.  The council of Nicea was a group of men, not much different than today's academia and they were just as agenda driven as the politics of today.  Please show me some evidence to show otherwise. 

 

I doubt he'll be able to show you evidence of anything, since the ban hammer fell on him.

 

 

 

Being banned wasn't the thing that stopped DavidL from providing evidence.  He was unable from the get go.

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