-----Original Message----- From: Judah McAuley [mailto:ju...@wiredotter.com] Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 4:17 PM To: cf-community Subject: Re: Forget 2012. BP's gonna kill us all before Christmas!
On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Sisk, Kris <ks...@gckschools.com> wrote: > Some may not agree, but I don't consider Judaism to be a separate > religion. After all, Christ himself was a Jew. As for the Gnostics, most > of them were rejected for good reason (for instance many of them didn't > appear until centuries after their supposed authors were dead). I'll > grant you some of them were chosen or not chosen for more editorial > reasons, but it's still the best we have. What is your opinion on the Gospel of Thomas? It doesn't seem to be any later than the canonical gospels, yet represents a drastically different way of viewing early Christianity. **** I would agree with that...most of the New Testament is 300-500 years after the fact and written by multiple people even within the same book. > Absolutely a personal relationship is the most important thing, but a > church serves an important role as a place to gather with those of like > faith. You may question the importance of that but I've feel it's very > important. Definitely a matter of personal preference. I think that the Church (as a set of institutions) has done more harm than good. Faith, within the loose definition of a "religion", as a sort of small-c church seems more important and useful to me. Of course I make the same argument about political parties, I favor the notion of republics and democracies, not so much the Republicans and the Democrats. ***ditto >>Still, I find it hard to believe that any modern religion has sprung >>up fully formed. Human institutions change through time, borrowing >>ideas, changing ideas and discarding ideas. That isn't necessarily a >>good thing or a bad thing, it just is. I suppose I can support the >>idea that you want your religious institution to be "more pure" but >>shouldn't that purity be based on what you feel God wants rather than >>tossing aside ideas because they were also used by other institutions? > > Actually that's exactly it. We feel that what God wants is in the Bible > and the paganism that's seeped into the church over the centuries is not > it. Hmm..still seems to me like the paganism was there from the beginning but it is largely a matter of how you want to define things. I figure that if you believe something with absolute faith, then the faith is the important thing. If you're happy with your relationship to God and you've got a set of rules, books, rituals, habits and whatnot that works for you, that's what is important. ****Like they say Christianity has Pagan DNA ;-) Paganism evolved with humanity. Many modern scholars believe that the Israelites were a subset of Canaanite society and that was why, after they left Canaan and wandered and were subjugated by several of the big middle eastern Empires, was the promised land...they were coming home. *********************************************** Cheers, Judah ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology-Michael-Dinowitz/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:323011 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/unsubscribe.cfm
