Reply to: Take an extra second to reflect on 2005

[Jabberwocky]

Your small minds are musclebound with suspicion. That's because the only exercise you ever get is jumping to conclusions.

[AlfredJPruffock]

Correct, there's more to quantify this but I think thats enough.

No not at all.

The first part of the article is a condemnation of the abuse of religion by the corrupt human being, and given Mans predeliction for sin comes as no surprise.

But the second part shows the revealing and supreme nature of God.

The contrast between the absolute Divine and the temproral secular no least, how richly ironic that your cut and paste conclsuion confirms absolutely the reality of the Godhead !

That which cannot be spoke of must be passed over in silence

Wittenstein

PS as for your notion that everybody gains heaven because Christ died for our sins, it aint necssaily so , there must be genuine repentance before forgiveness.

And you must therefore acknowledege ,in your heart, not with your mind ,that Christ,through his infinite Love will pardon our sins.

Christ said:

"So every one who acknowledges me before men, I will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me before men, I also will also deny before my Father who is in heaven." (Mathew 10:32-33)

[TGAOTU]

If God had a name, what would it be
And would you call it to his face
If you were faced with him in all his glory
What would you ask if you had just one question

JHWH, but nobody knows how to pronounce it, and that's just one of seventy-two.

[Jabberwocky]

My goodness JW ?

Did not I,the creator of this thread,say unto ye this thread had endeth ?

But as you are a man of Christ, you can join me on the last bus to heaven

I am not a man of God, I am Walter Mitty. Just time for a walk out in the Woods, My Darling. I may be some time.

[AlfredJPruffock]

And just what do those 5% offer the mortal - a sneer of contempt, the futility of death, and the eternal, whisperless void. Some hope.

My goodness JW ?

Did not I,the creator of this thread,say unto ye this thread had endeth ?

But as you are a man of Christ, you can join me on the last bus to heaven

All aboard now !

If you repent," the Parson said,"
Your sins will be forgiven.
Aye, even on your dying bed
You're not too late for heaven."

That's just my cup of tea, I thought,
Though for my sins I sorrow;
Since salvation is easy bought
I will repent . . . to-morrow.

To-morrow and to-morrow went,
But though my youth was flying,
I was reluctant to repent,
having no fear of dying.

'Tis plain, I mused, the more I sin,
(To Satan's jubilation)
When I repent the more I'll win
Celestial approbation.

So still I sin, and though I fail
To get snow-whitely shriven,
My timing's good: I home to hail
The last bus up to heaven.


Robert Service

[Jabberwocky]

Darmstadt - there is not a word in your postings that isn't true.

And so there we will have to leave it. There are 2 types of people in this world. The vast majority, say 95%, are credulous victims of ancient superstitions.
The remaining 5% represent the hope of the rest of humanity.

And just what do those 5% offer the mortal - a sneer of contempt, the futility of death, and the eternal, whisperless void. Some hope.

[AlfredJPruffock]

As I said

Just what the truth is,you will know in the End

Nothing remains to be said.

Go home in Peace and may your System be with you.

A Grand 2006 to us all,each and everyone of us.

And here endeth the Thread,and Alf saw it was good.


If God had a name, what would it be
And would you call it to his face
If you were faced with him in all his glory
What would you ask if you had just one question

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us

Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

If God had a face what would it look like
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like heaven and in jesus and the saints and all the prophets

And yeah God is great
God is Good

What if God was one of us
Just a slob like one of us

Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

He's trying to make his way home
Back up to heaven all alone

Nobody calling on the phone
Except for the pope maybe in rome

And God is great
God is Good

[darmstadt]

Given the gist of the article, I assumed that last statement was ironic. So the irony of it is true, if not the literal words.

Correct, there's more to quantify this but I think thats enough.

[sasguru]

Well if you agree that his posintgs are true, read the bottom line of DAs last ie

That is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and divine church.

PS For those who are curious,just what the truth is , you will know in the End.

Given the gist of the article, I assumed that last statement was ironic. So the irony of it is true, if not the literal words.

[AlfredJPruffock]

Darmstadt - there is not a word in your postings that isn't true.

And so there we will have to leave it. There are 2 types of people in this world. The vast majority, say 95%, are credulous victims of ancient superstitions.
The remaining 5% represent the hope of the rest of humanity.

Well if you agree that his postings are true, read the bottom line of DAs last ie

That is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and divine church.

PS For those who are curious,just what the truth is , you will know in the End.

[sasguru]

Darmstadt - there is not a word in your postings that isn't true.

And so there we will have to leave it. There are 2 types of people in this world. The vast majority, say 95%, are credulous victims of ancient superstitions.
The remaining 5% represent the hope of the rest of humanity.

[darmstadt]

Just can't stop it today...

All religions, with their gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties. Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers his own image, but enlarged and reversed-that is, divinized. The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they discovered, in the course of their historically progressive advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a power, a quality, or even any great defect whatever, they attributed them to their gods, after having exaggerated and enlarged them beyond measure, after the manner of children, by an act of their religious fancy. Thanks to this modesty and pious generosity of believing and credulous men, heaven has grown rich with the spoils of the earth, and, by a necessary consequence, the richer heaven became, the more wretched became humanity and the earth. God once installed, he was naturally proclaimed the cause, reason, arbiter and absolute disposer of all things: the world thenceforth was nothing, God was all; and man, his real creator, after having unknowingly extracted him from the void, bowed down before him, worshipped him, and avowed himself his creature and his slave.

Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth Christianity, better than all other religions that exist or have existed, understood, not excepting even the old Oriental religions, which included only distinct and privileged nations, while Christianity aspires to embrace entire humanity; and this truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the Christian sects, has proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That is why Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent, legitimate, and divine church.

[AlfredJPruffock]

As The Bible says

"For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice." James 3:16

All I can hear
I Me Mine
I Me Mine
even those tears
I Me Mine


And how are we to put and end to envy and selfish ambition Chico ?

Is not through the grace of Love ?

And to work for those who suffer, those scarred by War, those without food and shelter ?

That to me is the true Christian, he or she who sacrifces all self gratification to devote themselves to others.

But doing this without Love has no value at all.

I ieave you to reflect Chico if you truly have Love in your heart.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give all I possess to the poor, and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

[darmstadt]

More cut and paste...

Yes, our first ancestors, our Adams and our Eves, were, if not gorillas, very near relatives of gorillas, omnivorous, intelligent and ferocious beasts, endowed in a higher degree than the animals of another species with two precious faculties-the power to think and the desire to rebel.

These faculties, combining their progressive action in history, represent the essential factor, the negative power in the positive development of human animality, and create consequently all that constitutes humanity in man.

The Bible, which is a very interesting and here and there very profound book when considered as one of the oldest surviving manifestations of human wisdom and fancy, expresses this truth very naively in its myth of original sin. Jehovah, who of all the good gods adored by men was certainly the most jealous, the most vain, the most ferocious, the most unjust, the most bloodthirsty, the most despotic, and the most hostile to human dignity and liberty-Jehovah had just created Adam and Eve, to satisfy we know not what caprice; no doubt to while away his time, which must weigh heavy on his hands in his eternal egoistic solitude, or that he might have some new slaves. He generously placed at their disposal the whole earth, with all its fruits and animals, and set but a single limit to this complete enjoyment. He expressly forbade them from touching the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He wished, therefore, that man, destitute of all understanding of himself, should remain an eternal beast, ever on all-fours before the eternal God, his creator and his master. But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.

We know what followed. The good God, whose foresight, which is one of the divine faculties, should have warned him of what would happen, flew into a terrible and ridiculous rage; he cursed Satan, man, and the world created by himself, striking himself so to speak in his own creation, as children do when they get angry; and, not content with smiting our ancestors themselves, he cursed them in all the generations to come, innocent of the crime committed by their forefathers. Our Catholic and Protestant theologians look upon that as very profound and very just, precisely because it is monstrously iniquitous and absurd. Then, remembering that he was not only a God of vengeance and wrath, but also a God of love, after having tormented the existence of a few milliards of poor human beings and condemned them to an eternal hell, he took pity on the rest, and, to save them and reconcile his eternal and divine love with his eternal and divine anger, always greedy for victims and blood, he sent into the world, as an expiatory victim, his only son, that he might be killed by men. That is called the mystery of the Redemption, the basis of all the Christian religions. Still, if the divine Savior had saved the human world! But no; in the paradise promised by Christ, as we know, such being the formal announcement, the elect will number very few. The rest, the immense majority of the generations present and to come, will burn eternally in hell. In the meantime, to console us, God, ever just, ever good, hands over the earth to the government of the Napoleon Thirds, of the William Firsts, of the Ferdinands of Austria, and of the Alexanders of all the Russias.

.....

Such are the absurd tales that are told and the monstrous doctrines that are taught, in the full light of the nineteenth century, in all the public schools of Europe, at the express command of the government. They call this civilizing the people! Is it not plain that all these governments are systematic poisoners, interested stupefies of the masses?

......

Nothing is more natural than that the belief in God, the creator, regulator, judge, master, curser, savior, and benefactor of the world, should still prevail among the people, especially in the rural districts, where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the cities. The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily labor, deprived of leisure, of intellectual intercourse, of reading, in short of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that develop thought in men, the people generally accept religious traditions without criticism and in a lump. These traditions surround them from infancy in all the situations of life, and artificially sustained in their minds by a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts, priests and laymen, are transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral babit, too often more powerful even than their natural good sense.

......

There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at least make a semblance of believing. This class comprising all the tormentors, all the oppressors, and all the exploiters of humanity; priests, monarchs, statesmen, soldiers, public and private financiers, officials of all sorts, policemen, gendarmes, jailers and executioners, monopolists, capitalists, tax-leeches, contractors and landlords, lawyers, economists, politicians of all shades, down to the smallest vendor of sweetmeats, all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire:

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, "the people must have a religion." That is the safety-valve.

[sasguru]

As The Bible says

"For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice." James 3:16

The hypocrisy is stunning and unbelievable. Do you have a career? And do you want to progress up the ladder? I suggest you quit your disorder and evil practice and resign to concentrate on non-materialist and unpaid charity work.
Don't worry about your family - God will surely provide.
Or else you can join the army and do some "good" in Iraq?

Chico you are making a fool of yourself with your incoherent ramblings.