What Do Reformed Christians Believe?

JohnnyK · Apr 11, 2006

Quote from jem:

P.S. Johnny K if your friend is better than bach or beethoven send me some tracks. I know some people in the record industry with major distribution.
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I'll have my people contact your people. Can you get us a better deal than we got on the Bible?

marketsurfer · Apr 11, 2006

Quote from JohnnyK:

He only knows about the golden age to come!

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i should of guessed, no practical application!

thanks anyway,

surfer

Free Thinker · Apr 11, 2006

Quote from Aapex:

Because I believe that the Bible is divine rather than human in origin I can not reason with you apart from it. I believe that the Bible is the word of God and you don't so it makes no sense attempting to reason with you apart from it. Unless you can prove WHY you believe that the Bible is not the word of God using Scripture then we really do not have anything more to discuss. This thread is about what Reform Christians believe and why we believe it. Not about debait and persecution of Reform Christians beliefs.

Unless we can have civil discouse about the Text of Scripture then we have exhausted ourselves of this discussion.

I'd like to speak with those that sincerely want to understand what we believe and why we believe it.
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if the bible was divine there wouldn't be mistakes in it. the easiest bible fable to falsify is the global flood. geology.meteorology,archeology,hydrology,anthropology,zoology dendrochronology
genealogy,entomology, physics and mathematics all tell us the flood never happened and never could have happened as described. so we know that the bible has many mistakes, we know that there are no copies of the bible earlier than about 300 years after jesus, we know that when the bible was put together many similar christian writings were excluded,http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ we know that even the originator of the Protestant movement martin luther rejected the book of revelation. hardly divine.

once you know that one of the major stories in the bible is a fable all of the supernatural events in the bible become suspect. here is a good site to help flush out the truth and free you mind from a life of belief in superstition.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm

jem · Apr 11, 2006

vhehn please list the exact words in the flood story that are incorrect.

Free Thinker · Apr 11, 2006

Quote from jem:

vhehn please list the exact words in the flood story that are incorrect.
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since its a proven fable that would make the whole story incorrect. i will stipulate that the fable probably started from some kind of local river flood.
there are many flood myths throughout history but most predate the bible text indicating that the bible writers borrowed the story from earlier flood myths.
the closest flood myth to the bible story comes from The Epic of Gilgamesh. http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/
and most scholars believe the bible story started there.
http://alexm.here.ru/mirrors/www.enteract.com/jwalz/Eliade/073.html
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192835890/002-9958055-2166448?v=glance&n=283155
Myths from Mesopotamia : Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
by Stephanie Dalley "Atrahasis the wise man, who built an ark and saved mankind from destruction, is a figure of immense prestige and antiquity to whom various literary..."

http://ancienthistory.about.com/gi/...istory&zu=http://www.piney.com/Gilgamesh.html

JohnnyK · Apr 11, 2006

Quote from marketsurfer:

i should of guessed, no practical application!

thanks anyway,

surfer
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Sorry I think I misunderstood the question.

Genie in a bottle is three doors down to the left.
Aladins lamp is two doors past that.
The ATM machine is on the corner next to Starbucks.

Hope that helps.

jem · Apr 11, 2006

so we should understand that since you cite similar fables, a flood could not have really happened?

JohnnyK · Apr 11, 2006

Quote from jem:

so we should understand that since you cite similar fables, a flood could not have really happened?
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I'm putting it on the backburner as a story with potential if interpreted correctly.

What all my sources indicate is that there have been catastrophes on earth, continents sinking, polar shifts, magnetic pole shifts...all of which could produce widespread flooding. There is a finite amount of water on the planet, and we can be fairly certain that not all land can be flooded at the same time.

But there is a story of how the Annunaki, who come around every 3600 years on the planet Nibiru, had a hard time finding a stable dry place to land after the upheavals that occured during the last passage of earth through the photon band 13000 years ago.

I may have caught wind of some other Ark possibility from other sources I find credible...and that it may be revealed in years ahead.

Whether it's true or not does not seem to affect my path or opinion about the bible. But I'm sure we can all agree that upheavals have been so widespread, that at one point, rivers like the Nile were flowing easterly accross the Sahara desert. Imagine polar ice caps melting and assembling somewhere else on the globe. Imagine violent tsunamis engulfing huge swaths of land. But 40 days of rain sounds to me like a metaphor or code for some other reality.

JohnnyK

Aapex · Apr 12, 2006

Quote from vhehn:

much of the calvinists self loathing and ideas that all men are worthless and depraved like dirty rags in gods eyes comes from the writings of paul. paul was a mentally unstable person who hijacked jesus message and changed it to his own message. this article explains why paul was such a self loathing person. it is unfortunate that the men who made up and voted on the bible based so much of it on pauls writings.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/142/story_14299_1.html
Was the Apostle Paul Gay?
What accounts for Paul's self-judging rhetoric, his negative feeling toward his own body? An Episcopal bishop mulls the issues.

Excerpted from "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism" with permission of HarperSanFrancisco.

Nothing about Paul was moderate. He was tightly drawn, passionately emotional, filled with enormous feelings of self-negativity, seeking to deal with those feelings in the timehonored way of external controls, unflagging religious zeal, and rigid discipline. He could not, however, master the passions that consumed him What were these passions? There is no doubt in my mind that they were sexual in nature, but what kind of sexual passions were they? Searching once again through the writings of Paul, some conclusions begin to emerge that startle and surprise the reader. Paul's passions seemed to be incapable of being relieved. Why was that? Paul himself had written that if one "could not exercise self-control" that person should marry. "For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion" (1 Cor. 7:9). But we have no evidence from any source that Paul ever married. Indeed, he exhorts widows and the unmarried to "remain single as I do" (1 Cor. 7:8). A primary purpose of sexual activity in marriage, according to Paul, was to keep Satan from tempting people "through lack of self-control" (1 Cor. 7:5). Why, when Paul seemed to be so consumed with a passion he could not control, would he not take his own advice and alleviate that passion in marriage? He did write that marriage was an acceptable, if not ideal, way of life. Still, however, marriage never seemed to loom for him as a possibility.

Paul has been perceived as basically negative toward women. He did write that "it is well for a man not to touch a woman" (1 Cor. 7:1). The passion that burned so deeply in Paul did not seem to be related to the desire for union with a woman. Why would that desire create such negativity in Paul, anyway? Marriage, married love, and married sexual desire were not thought to be evil or loathsome. Paul's sexual passions do not fit comfortably into this explanatory pattern. But what does?

Obviously there is no way to know for certain the cause of Paul's anxiety prior to that moment of final revelation in the Kingdom of Heaven. But that does not stop speculation. The value of speculation in this case comes when a theory is tested by assuming for a moment that it is correct and then reading Paul in the light of that theory. Sometimes one finds in this way the key that unlocks the hidden messages that are present in the text. Once unlocked, these messages not only cease to be hidden but they become obvious, glaring at the reader, who wonders why such obvious meanings had not been seen beforeSome have suggested that that Paul was plagued by homosexual fears. This is not a new idea, and yet until recent years, when homosexuality began to shed some of its negative connotations, it was an idea so repulsive to Christian people that it could not be breathed in official circles. This is not to say that our cultural homophobia has disappeared. It is still lethal and dwells in high places in the life of the Christian church, and it is a subject about which ecclesiastical figures are deeply dishonest, saying one thing publicly and acting another way privately. The prejudice, however, is fading slowly but surely. With the softening of that homophobic stance we might consider the hypothesis that Paul may have been a gay male.(more)
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This is the very reason why so many people are blinded today.
You have just taken Scripture and butchered it to fit your own philosophy. Apostle Paul was not gay. There is no evidence to suggest that in Scripture. Scripture is against Homosexuality and even the Apostle Paul spoke against it as a work of the flesh.

In order to have been a Pharise in Paul's day he would have had to been married according to Jewish law. It is believed that Paul was widowed. When Paul mentions not touching a woman it is in direct reference to sexual imoralaity - the taken of a woman in sex that is not ones own wife.

Again, you refuse to deal with the text of Scripture. You would rather argue from rational means because you have no argument and can not prove your beliefs within the text of Scripture.

Aapex · Apr 12, 2006

Quote from vhehn:

if the bible was divine there wouldn't be mistakes in it. the easiest bible fable to falsify is the global flood. geology.meteorology,archeology,hydrology,anthropology,zoology dendrochronology
genealogy,entomology, physics and mathematics all tell us the flood never happened and never could have happened as described. so we know that the bible has many mistakes, we know that there are no copies of the bible earlier than about 300 years after jesus, we know that when the bible was put together many similar christian writings were excluded,http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ we know that even the originator of the Protestant movement martin luther rejected the book of revelation. hardly divine.

once you know that one of the major stories in the bible is a fable all of the supernatural events in the bible become suspect. here is a good site to help flush out the truth and free you mind from a life of belief in superstition.
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/dmd.htm
More...

You have not disproven the the global flood did not happen. Science is very limited and I think its about time you admited it.

That is illogical reasoning. We know that it did happen and that the Bible is reliable and the infallable World of God. You have not dealt with M.A.P.S. in its entirety. Rather you are attempting to isolate something that you can't disprove.

You have brought a case against the Bible and now you can't prove your case. If you intend on blasphemy against Holy writ then you must be able to prove your case beyond any reasonable doubt.