I'm on my way.
Posted on 09/25/2012 6:42:30 AM PDT by marshmallow
Man, that’s funny. Would you hit it?
Hop on your motorcycle. Go as fast as you can! You’re still getting old. Drive real fast past the graveyard.
“Though his continuation of the custom, rather than his flouting of it, would have been more in accord with what eventually became effective hygenic practice.”
You can’t be serious. Maybe I’m reading your post wrong. Jesus did not ‘flout’ hand washing for it’s sanitary purposes - He ‘flouted’ it because the pharisees misled themselves and others into believing that man-made traditions -such as the public washing of the hands - would bring salvation to the performer of said tradition. He was, in essence, flouting ‘religion’.
But surely you know this and I’m misinterpreting your post and wasting my valuable time typing this.
Kettle bell from Hell?
exactly, that is his triumph. i recall hearing that in a sermon delivered when i was in elementary school, right around when the movie the Exorcist came out.
Despair is the word that comes to mind for me. I can’t imagine living that way.
What makes you think I was trying to be funny?
I’m sorry, even though I don’t know you, I don’t believe that you have the ability to discern evil from mental illness merely by looking into one’s eyes. Either now or even especially when you were a high school student.
I just buried my mother a few months back, who suffered from bipolar disorder for pretty much the last 20 years of her life. In and out of psychiatric facilities when she would go off of her meds. I have experience in mental illness where I wish I had none. And the notion that a high schooler is somehow able to diagnose/discern these disorders and determine mental illness from evil with little but a religious upbringing is a tad on the offensive side.
So you got sarcasmed.
I appreciate your perspective. It’s well reasoned in terms of exegesis.
In terms of science - which I believe goes hand in hand with the Old Testament, if not the New as well - the simplest explanation is usually the most satisfying if it unifies to existing theory. This is my sense of theology as well.
I believe good and evil are real. But I have trouble taking on “faith” those things for which I see no evidence of before Man is capable of abstracting them through his mind. Whereas contrarily, I see lots of evidence for the workings of God in the same reality.
Though I do acknowledge and respect the sophistication of your reasoning and am content to have it so.
God’s bounty on You and Yours, always...
Indeed. And may God’s eternal peace be upon you and your family as well.
My biases come from my early Catholicism, which I still have so much healthy respect for having spent a fair amount of time bouncing around the Protestant leagues.
No religion is perfect, but I frankly crave the evidence that Satan is real as much as you do, and the Catholics have done an amazing job of attempting to compile it.
For me, this brings some sense to the notion of having to be on earth in the first place, inside the presence of the Advocate, but outside of God’s direct glory.
If I can ask your perspective, how do you look at the book of Job? For me, it is a difficult book all around.
At the risk of further wasting your valuable time, I’d just point out that Jesus too was a Pharisee having been ordained a rabbi through semikhah which rite was practiced only by the Pharisees at the time, and by which they later developed into the various aspects of modern Judaism, particulay Orthodoxy.
Shalom.
I was raised as Lutheran but spent a lot of early life taking Catholic instruction with my Mom who had to take it as she wanted to sing in that church’s choir. I still have my copy of “Father Smith Instructs Jackson” and still re-browse it even today.
I later sang in the Episcopal Church, and so had cut my teeth fairly well on Christian doctrine.
I was always uncomfortable with it though, and gradually drifted into a small synagogue where I spent a full Torah cycle and then some, and have been fairly happy in various shuls ever since, though I haven’t converted.
I guess my take on Job comes from various Talmudic souces who claim it is primarily a fictional account drawn for the purpose of illustration. It does seem sort of odd as compared with Torah where Hell is not really mentioned, and Gehenna takes on a more metaphorical meaning in later books.
I hate to seem short, but I’ve got some stuff I’ve got to take of, even as interesting as this sort of stuff really is for me.
Hopefully later....
You haven't had the experience. Most people haven't. When it happens, it is so unmistakable you know in your bones, or soul, or gut, or someplace deeper you aren't even aware of. It is always a shock. You aren't anticipating seeing it. You aren't planning to see it; it's never been in your mind before, to look into someone's eyes and think, "This is evil." But when you are held in the grip of that stare and you see that dead, black, hate-driven fury, you just go cold with terror and shock. You just know. Instantly. You don't WANT to know this. You just want out of there. It is repulsive and horrifying and terrifying at a gut-punch level you instantly realize you aren't equipped to deal with.
You should thank God you've never seen it.
You should thank God you’ve never seen it.
<><><><
What you have described I have seen. In the face of my ‘in the grips of psychosis’ mother. Several times. I’ve seen exactly what you describe. It was mental illness.
No less scary, no less horrifying than your description of evil, and certainly not anything I was prepared to cope with. But I did. Because I had to. Dad was already gone.
I know (as know for a fact) that I am expressing an opinion. Plain and simple. Do you have that same realization, or are you suggesting that what you know is fact?
“I believe good and evil are real. But I have trouble taking on “faith” those things for which I see no evidence of before Man is capable of abstracting them through his mind.”
So I guess I did understand your post. You seem very knowledgeable about religions. Have you ever prayed for actual revelation?
Thank you. I enjoy the study.
I thank God, and hope that I’m discerning Him properly, but not for revelation. I honestly try to pray more for others than for myself.
May God Bless You and Yours....
The eyes are indeed the window to the soul...
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