The Bible Is Very Edited

Red Sky at Morning

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False.

Sorry - I have kids of school age ;-)

Being honest with you, I suppose if I were a Qur'an believing Muslim and I read that Christians believed in three gods, it would be an article of faith to uphold this perspective.

I'm sure all of us Christians would be pleased if it would be accepted by others that we genuinely are not polytheists. I tried to explain this to @grateful servant a while back when she told me that 1+1+1 does not equal 1, to which I had countered that 1x1x1 did, but she was having none of it.

Not understanding or agreeing with what we try to explain about the Trinity is foundational to Islam, and as such is likely to make hitting a head on a wall seem rewarding by comparison!
 
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What is the "state of grace of the patriarchs?"
the patriarchs ie Abraham, Isaac, Ismael, Jacob, Joseph etc..they did not follow commandments/laws from God. They believed in God and lived a righteous life because God's Grace was on them.
They 'fulfilled' the requirements of the law without the law. The law was introduced through the Torah. The question is, was it meant to elevate the Israelites?
the argument made in the NT is that instead God revealed His law in order to make the israelites aware of the depths of sin and know their weakness.
For example in islam, alcohol is haram. It didn't used to be haram before Prophet Mohammad SAW so for example if Solomon or David AS drank alcohol no one cried about it.
Prophet Mohammad SAW never drank a drop of alcohol. When he was offered wine or milk he chose milk. This was a demostration of him being under the Grace of God ie he fulfilled the requirement of the law before it even existed.
So now, in a good muslim family if a son drinks alcohol, it is not a small thing but a big deal
ie the 'depths of darkness' being revealed.
then over time people break the law of God until in the end it's barely even a thing and people realise that our ability to live according to the law in the first place never depended on reason but on His power.
it's a lot deeper than this explanation since there have been books and books written on the topic.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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P.s. For those who want to continue with the view that the "Bible is very edited", carry on...

If you suspect that this is just a slur intended to undermine your faith, I really recommend a good academic author I encountered some time ago. His subject has really become the dating and authenticity of biblical texts. His work on the Codex Sinaiaticus, and the Book of Daniel were excellent. You might call him a "lower critic", and his references are very extensive.

https://www.billcooper.org.uk/books/
 
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the trinity even as it is, is not so much about accepting 3 seperate 'gods' but about believing that the father, son and holy spirit are all the same God via 3 different beings ie one God in 3 forms.
As i quoted before from St Augustine, it is also a sufi belief

'God is love, the lover and the beloved'
there are variants of this though.

BUT the reason I challenge the trinity is because THIS specific viewpoint held by someone like St Augustine, was always supposed to be a mystical understanding of God ie seeing His Immanence everywhere and in everything.
This was never ever meant to be foolishly written down as a core creed/theology because then it gets taken literally and becomes literal.
When you take it literally then that becomes a problem and it evidently contradicts the Gospels.
'No one knows except the Father, not even the Son'

For I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself

every single time a christian tries to explain the trinity, they are trying to logically explain God's Immanence.

I am a basic guy and I can do better than that.



look at it this way
Can you see God in the physical sky?

a logical person=no...God is neither in time or place, nothing in creation can contain Him, he is not in the sky'
a mystical person=yes, I can perceive of God's presence everywhere, even in the sky.


FACT
Jesus specifically made it his business to highlight the spiritual/mystical mindset when he said 'let your eye be single'
he did not mean this literally did he? he meant..to see Oneness in all things.
He said this to such a level where
'you cannot serve 2 masters at the same time' meaning to truely know God you have to reject all else.
did he mean this literally or did he mean in the mystical sense?

When Paul said 'to the pure all things are pure' what did he mean?
is this literal or mystical?
evidently, urine is not pure..and if you get it on your clothes your clothes become impure.
But from the mystical pov, if someone urinated on you, maybe in that moment the 'purity' of the experience is in the feeling of being humilated and you see this as a test or a punishment from God? a 'God conscious' person would see God's will in all situations good or bad and so with their mind on God, all things become pure to them.
 
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What you should also consider is, even if you're lucky enough to have a good interpretation of the trinity
over 1500 years at the very least, the majority of christians have not been lucky enough and for the most part....believed literally that Jesus the man is God, fully God, literally etc.
the fact is the majority of you truely believe this no matter how it is worded.
i say that God is in Jesus from the mystical pov but you say Jesus is God literally.
major difference.


John 14
Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” 9Jesus replied, “Philip, I have been with you all this time, and still you do not know Me? Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?…



christians: this confirms the trinity

next verse
10Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me? The words I say to you, I do not speak on My own. Instead, it is the Father dwelling in Me, carrying out His work

The Father being IN Jesus, is exactly how I think of God's Immanence in Jesus ie that God is in him..doesn't make him God.
Doesn't make Jesus co equal in Godhead but clearly someone who accepts God's Immanence in himself and is trying to teach people this mystical perspective ie that you can all become perceptive of God's Immanence.
 
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I'm sure all of us Christians would be pleased if it would be accepted by others that we genuinely are not polytheists. I tried to explain this to @grateful servant a while back when she told me that 1+1+1 does not equal 1, to which I had countered that 1x1x1 did, but she was having none of it.
You may genuinely believe that the trinitarian doctrine is not polytheistic but according to Islam it genuinely is. Yes genuinely, really and truly, it is polytheism.

I don't know what you mean that I was having none of the 1x1x1 example. the multiplication example doesn't fit at all because it just means 1 thing three times like, the father X the father X the father or...the son X the son X the son or...the holy ghost x the holy ghost x the holy ghost. It totally leave out the "three persons" you know - the father is not the son and the son is not the holy ghost and the holy ghost is not the father ...and the father is not the holy ghost and the holy ghost is not the son and the son is not the father ...

nice try though, not really.
 
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it's not about what it is in itself

it's about how it's used and understood through the eons of time.
there is a hikmah in Divine revelation that God alone fully knows.

if some bloke came a few hundred years later and wrote down something, even if you believe it is good, it has no business becoming the center of your religion because it wasn't coming from God's divine wisdom, if it was, it would be in the actual NT itself word for word, exactly like it is, with the explanations (ie the athanasian creed) with it
 

Violette

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Let me put this to rest and educate you on your own religion which you truly have no idea about because if you did you wouldn't be tossing these uneducated statements ever after I have just told you that the Kaaba and the black stone are only a focal point in the direction Muslims face when they pray to the MOST HIGH. It's only your subjective feelings and current anti-Islamic beliefs that lead you to believe that Muslims pray to the Kaaba/black stone instead of the reality, which every Muslim will tell you is that the Kaaba is only there to be the point in which people that believe in the Most High pray towards. It's as simple as that. You believing otherwise makes your ignorant of your own religion or you're flat out just trolling.

When Jacob got up early the next morning, he took the rock that he had used for a pillow and stood it up for a place of worship. Then he poured olive oil on the rock to dedicate it to God

- Genesis 28:18

Then Moses wrote down what the Lord had said. The next morning Moses got up early. He built an altar at the foot of the mountain and set up a large stone for each of the twelve tribes of Israel.

- Exodus 24:4

On the second day they marched around the city once and returned to the camp. They did this for six days.
On the seventh day, they got up at daybreak and marched around the city seven times in the same manner, except that on that day they circled the city seven times.

- Joshua 6:14-15

I will bow down toward your holy temple and will praise your name for your unfailing love and your faithfulness, for you have so exalted your solemn decree that it surpasses your fame.

- Psalm 138:2
God is omnipresent, there's literally no need to pray toward any precise direction. They circled the city of Jericho for a specific purpose, not an object associated with Saturn worship because of traditions. We don't serve the same God, so using examples from the Bible doesn't help your case. My subjective feelings didn't lead me to believe that Muslims literally pray to Kaaba. I saw with my own eyes that Muslims pray before and bow down to an object, that's an objective truth. You can keep trying to twist my words but you can't change reality. My original point stands, I'm glad there's no statues or busts of Jesus because people would definitely worship it.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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The problem in articulating the Trinity is rather like my issue when I do a painting. Transposing the view I see to paper and pigment on a flat surface is so much less than the reality of the view I see, but the only language I possess.

I trying to articulate the Trinity we are attempting to transpose something unique, unlike anything else and transcendent from our own experience into human imagery and examples. At best we can get a whisper of a likeness in the analogy, but it always falls short...
 

Red Sky at Morning

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You may genuinely believe that the trinitarian doctrine is not polytheistic but according to Islam it genuinely is. Yes genuinely, really and truly, it is polytheism.

I don't know what you mean that I was having none of the 1x1x1 example. the multiplication example doesn't fit at all because it just means 1 thing three times like, the father X the father X the father or...the son X the son X the son or...the holy ghost x the holy ghost x the holy ghost. It totally leave out the "three persons" you know - the father is not the son and the son is not the holy ghost and the holy ghost is not the father ...and the father is not the holy ghost and the holy ghost is not the son and the son is not the father ...

nice try though, not really.
I meant in three dimensions. The greatness of God not diminished by the immenance of Jesus or the dynamism of his Spirit. I know your vision of God differs from this btw ;-)

P.s. As a liar an a counterfeiter, it struck me that Satan also wishes to mimic God, Cube worship with him as the "Most High", the immenance of the Antichrist and the dynamic "Cosmic Consciousness" uniting and directing his followers. Just shooting from the hip, but that's how it looks to me...
 
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The problem in articulating the Trinity is rather like my issue when I do a painting. Transposing the view I see to paper and pigment on a flat surface is so much less than the reality of the view I see, but the only language I possess.

I trying to articulate the Trinity we are attempting to transpose something unique, unlike anything else and transcendent from our own experience into human imagery and examples. At best we can get a whisper of a likeness in the analogy, but it always falls short...
Let me just reemphasise my point here
articulating points as supplementary notes to understand the NT is perfectly allowed, but defining the core testament of a person's faith on the basis of their acceptance of a creed is definately against God's Wisdom. If God wanted that, He would have revealed that if not through Jesus then one of the apostles.

In islam the shahada/testament of faith was defined by the Prophet SAW.
A person who believes in it is a muslim.
We cannot define a person as a non-muslim because they do not accept a creed from 250 years after the Prophet SAW.

This is pretty simple to grasp isn't it?
look im probably the only muslim who sees truth within the trinitarian doctrine but still see it as a forced upon foolish thing to share openly with people who may not understand it's mystical roots.
 
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I meant in three dimensions. The greatness of God not diminished by the immenance of Jesus or the dynamism of his Spirit. I know your vision of God differs from this btw ;-)

P.s. As a liar an a counterfeiter, it struck me that Satan also wishes to mimic God, Cube worship with him as the "Most High", the immenance of the Antichrist and the dynamic "Cosmic Consciousness" uniting and directing his followers. Just shooting from the hip, but that's how it looks to me...
immenance of Jesus or the dynamism of his Spirit.
you've just invented another belief.

 
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it's the ego in these people, when you challenge the absurdity of the trinitarian doctrine, they don't even hold back....

the immanence of Jesus

Jesus the Transcendent and Immanent supreme Godhead



Jesus
 
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@Red Sky at Morning you wrote
P.s. As a liar an a counterfeiter, it struck me that Satan also wishes to mimic God, Cube worship with him as the "Most High", the immenance of the Antichrist and the dynamic "Cosmic Consciousness" uniting and directing his followers. Just shooting from the hip, but that's how it looks to me...

do you mean cube worship like when God had a holy tabernacle that looked like this




or a temple that looked like this






have some shame man.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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@AspiringSoul -

Matthew 18 - immenance?

20For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

John 3 - dynamism?

8The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
 

Red Sky at Morning

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@Red Sky at Morning you wrote
P.s. As a liar an a counterfeiter, it struck me that Satan also wishes to mimic God, Cube worship with him as the "Most High", the immenance of the Antichrist and the dynamic "Cosmic Consciousness" uniting and directing his followers. Just shooting from the hip, but that's how it looks to me...

do you mean cube worship like when God had a holy tabernacle that looked like this




or a temple that looked like this






have some shame man.
I hope you have noticed that counterfeiters of £10 notes tend to make very similar £10 notes. Perhaps I am assuming too much shared experience here.

If you have noticed how frequently a cube pops up, well done, but which is the original, and which the copy. Your answer may be personally important.
 
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I hope you have noticed that counterfeiters of £10 notes tend to make very similar £10 notes. Perhaps I am assuming too much shared experience here.

If you have noticed how frequently a cube pops up, well done, but which is the original, and which the copy. Your answer may be personally important.
dear wise genius of the internetz, did it ever occur to you that there are £10 notes but also $10 and 10 indian rupees and 10 whatever else?
does the mere fact they represent the number 10 make them imitations of some original 10 currency?

A counterfeight in your wonderful analogy would only hold true if there was literally another claimant to the temple in Jerusalem claiming to BE the true temple.
There isn't one, the Quran attests to the fact the one they had was destroyed.
 

elsbet

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@AspiringSoul

"They believed in God and lived a righteous life because God's Grace was on them."

My understanding is that their Faith saved them. There was no arbitrary Grace that turned them into auto-believers with good behavior.

Faith >>> Counted as Righteousness >>> Salvation
 
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