Addai

Straining At Gnat's But Swallowing Camels I am currently working on doing some Apologetics writing on some hot topics most notably "Why Christians worship on Sunday". But in talking to an active SDA member here, it dawns on me the one sidedness of these kind of conversations. It really is "the pot calling the kettle black", "those that live in glass houses should not throw stones". or in terms of the Bible "The Parable of the man with the mote in the eye correcting the person with a sliver in their eye". But one even better analogy comes to mind, and that is Jesus' saying of the Pharisees "straining at Gnats but swallowing Camels". What Are these Camels You Might Ask? They are beliefs you (Seventh Day Adventists) teach with highly questionable Biblical justification. I'm not actually complaining about your worst heresies just the things you accept too easily and things that often are extremely foundational for your unique "Present Truth" doctrines. 1) Hiram Edson's Cornfield Vision. All of Adventism is based on this vision, that explains and rationalizes that "The Great Disappointment" of the Millerites was not wrong on the date setting but rather on the thing being predicted rather than Christ return the real supposed event was Christ changing the role he was doing in heaven beginning his work of Judgement. My question is how do Adventists know that is real or legitimate? In the Charismatic movement I have seen lots of teachings that comes from folks that claim revelation that is dubious. I would say, when I look at Adventism and the failed prophecies of Ellen White, I believe the Occam's Razor Explanation for these events is that Adventism is built on a faulty foundation. And it is extremely easy to make this case when you look at passages concerning the nature of Truth in the Bible (stable and eternal), The nature of the Gospel (only one Gospel, taught in the beginning by the Apostles), and the Foundation of our Faith (cannot be re-laid) vs. the Adventist concept of "Present Truth" which contradicts all of that, and by it's own admission! https://lineagejourney.com/.../hiram-edson-the-farmer-in.../ 2) "The Shut Door" Prophecy / Teaching is another camel. It was around 1844 or so, that the door of heaven was supposedly shut for folks who rejected the Millerites and got extended to the proto-SDA group after the Millerite movement officially collapsed. (Now mind you this group was only around 150 people according to one of Ellen White's Letters!) The Shut door eventually begins to become a thorn in the side of the Adventists, as they add new members, and their members have children. The Shutdoor is the real reason for the extreme Sabbath militancy you guys have because it ends up being the answer for the Shut Door problem (a new vision or visions come speaking of a new door opening and that comes from Sabbath Keeping). Even the Seventh Day Baptists, the people you actually got this distinctive from, are not this extreme. If you consult their actual web site, they are very insistent that Sabbath keeping is not for salvation, but for sanctification. But the whole "Mark of the Beast" teaching on Sunday needs to be biblically justified because I can show lots of scripture why it isn't showing feast days of ancient Israel falling on it, as well as it being important to the NT and Church of the Apostolic Fathers. 3&4) Two other camels, I will mention in passing are "The Investigative Judgement" in light of historic Christian teaching on Soteriology for over 1800s years or so, and another camel is "The Two Stage Atonement", lots of scripture that Christ dealt with our since once, and that was on Cavalry. 5) Ellen White herself is a huge camel. She is treated by the SDA not just a defacto prophet, but some kind of arch prophet greater than all others in the history of the Bible by virtue of the amount of allegedly "inspired material" she has written that comes via visions and other kinds of revelations. In spite of her saying two times "I do not call myself a prophet", the bulk of what she said about herself, and her authority is very grandiose. What I especially find interesting is Adventists accepting her as a great spiritual authority in spite of the words of Saint Paul concerning women teaching in the church, having authority over a man etc. I also find it interesting of Adventist paintings of her in church having visions or preaching, all with her head uncovered which was a big no no in the days of the Bible. Paul insisted women have their heads covered because the hair of woman in ancient times was considered highly erotic, but somehow the extremely Biblically minded Adventists fail to get that! (smile) 6) The Artificial divide in the Torah is another good one. There really is no good reason for trying to talk about "the moral law" aka 10 commandments vs. "the Ceremonial law". All of Adventism needs this for its theology to work because of its "Great Controversy" narrative, but there are a number of bad problems with the eisegesis of Adventists concerning the Tablets of Stone being in the ark of the Covenant vs. The Torah being on the outside. 7) Finally, I will end with Satan as the Scape goat (rather than Christ's ministry represented by both goats). This is important to your end times doctrine and theology of salvation, but it actually has a lot of problems, as well as blasphemous connotations as some folks have spent a great deal of time talking about. I will be quoting a lot of Myles Christian for fans of this doctrine. Things get very quicky into minutia of what is going on in heaven, and in all honesty, things get pretty Gnostic, pretty quickly."

One thing people don't realize is that manuscript preservation traditions differ across cultures and empires. In the Western Roman empire the Jews and Christians tended to bury the old manuscripts, while in the East manuscripts were treated more like Americans treat the flag (Your suppose to burn a damaged flag), they carefully recopied the text that was showing wear and burned the original when it was completed. The problem with these kind of discussions is many Christians etc. have a mind set that mirrors that of Atheist Evidentialists, its a kind of "seeing is believing" materialistic empiricism. That approach would be fine if manuscripts preservation traditions were universal, but unfortunately they are not. I will also add that there are certain variances between the ancient Greek codexes that do not make sense if Greek was the original language. Besides the quote from Josephus, Eusebius also quotes from Papias who mentions of sayings of Christ in Aramaic and a gospel written "in the tongue of the Hebrews".

OK more thing I've found reading the various Aramaic NT boards etc. I've read there seems to be more poetry etc. found in the words of Christ in the Aramaic. Christ really does come across as "The Son of David" as someone who is a gifted poet, and not just some kind of wise sage. There are various poetic structures like acrostics, puns and rhyming found in a number of the red letter verses of Christ where he seems to be making his point not just in the literal message but through the poetry, rhyme, puns etc.

Another insight from George Lamsa's work (which is admittedly flawed in some areas). One of the old chestnuts comes about the saying about "It's Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven". The word for camel, in Aramaic is something like "gamla" and that word also means "rope" (There is less vocabulary in that language where words often have to do double duty etc.) Anyway that passage you might have guessed was rendered as "It is easier for a rope to go through an eye of the needle than a rich man to go heaven". In theory a rope can be pruned down to the size of a single thread that can go through the eye of an needle, so it is suggested that the passage is a statement about people's willingness to part with such things for the sake of the kingdom of God.

I've read Aramaic translations before ocasionally they do make a big difference. here's an example Romans 5:7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. reads more logically in Aramaic translations as "Very Rarely will anyone die for a unrighteous person, though for a righteous person someone might dare to die." This sort of thing actually is easily explained if Aramaic was the original source language the words look almost identical except for one letter and the letters fro righteous and unrighteous are very similar to each other. If you are interested in this sort of thing you should check out some old web/ message boards like. http://peshitta.org/

I will respond to the Sabbath part of the OP by posting my response to an email from my brother who asked a few weeks ago a number of theological questions including that one. quote 2) Why do we not keep the Sabbath day holy? Quote There’s actually several issues involved in this question that I will break it down into a number of different answers based on various points. 1A) Because this was not a formal requirement given to the Gentiles that received the Gospel in the “Jerusalem Counsel” recorded in the book of Acts 15: 19 “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. 20 Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. 21 For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” Commentary: if you notice the Gentiles were going “to church” so to speak where they heard such things preached “on the Sabbath”, but this is not laid out as a formal requirement made by the Jerusalem counsel in the book of Acts (which was presumably speaking by the Holy Spirit). 1B) If the previous point is insufficient, I would also add other verses of saint Paul where he speaks of the necessity of keeping Jewish Holy Days such as: Colossians 2:16, Galatians 4:9-10. 1C) Besides all that there is the “Judaizer” conflict that is all over the New Testament and early Christian history. All the verses where Paul is speaking against people “using works” are essentially referencing people who rejected the Jerusalem Counsel of the books of Acts and were requiring believers to be circumcised, go Kosher, etc. including all the Sabbath keeping stuff. 2) My second answer is that Christians DO KEEP THE SABBATH IF THEY FOLLOW THE LITURGICAL TRADITION OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY. This is the exact reason we have a “weekend”, instead of just having the Jewish Sabbath off, we get the Jewish Sabbath and “The Lord’s Day” (The Day that Christ rose from the dead) off. So, this is actually better than just having one day off, we as Christians get 2 days off. The problem however is that people have taken these days purely for themselves thus they don’t get the spiritual benefit from them.

It all based on the supposed prophesy of saint Malachy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophecy_of_the_Popes

It's funny how this guy's suspension for "offensive" and "insensitive" remarks is not stopping the network from running a holiday Duck Dynasty marathon.

I will be posting some threads on my favorite Christian chants here and there in the weeks and months ahead. Why chant? some of you might ask... Well besides being beautiful, I think there is often more theological and biblical content in them than what can be typical of modern Christian music. And since many have not really listened to them before they are also new and exciting (relatively speaking). My favorite version of the Beatitudes, unfortunately its only a 30 second sample http://www.liturgicamusic.com/store/public/demos/AJ096_05.mp3 You can find the full album here and they also sell the songs separately. http://www.liturgicamusic.com/store/process.php?pname=ShowAlbumDetailsProcess-Start&CategoryID=6&AlbumID=61 A pretty good you tube version of the full chant

To the OP I subscribed to the preterist view that the number of the beast is a reference to Nero Cesar(Neron Kaisar) coming from the Hebrew and Greek numeric system. (To some degree the literal man, but also that person as a type of a future leader).

Not sure I can tell you a specific of Faith. When I was a teenager I was in your boat. I doubted my faith and really considered my self a secret agnostic from my Junior high school year into transferring into college from my local junior college. I basically attended church because it was "politically correct" as far as living with my folks went. I tried experimenting with things. Mostly looking at some Eastern religious ideas, Taoism was my favorite in college. Basically what happened to me was I found out that I was better off with God than without him. I of course had a charismatic christian friend that witnessed to me during that time. I don't think he really fully knew my condition about considering myself an agnostic at this time, since he knew my back in my former Lutheran days. Anyway, I think it important to get to the place where you can choose things for yourself. Being raised Christian is a blessing, but at times it can be counter productive (when it seems your being coerced into it).

To the OP Turning the other cheek, prayer, trying to love people unconditionally is all good and should be encouraged. But coming from my own experience, I also believe in "setting boundaries". Many people come from bad childhoods, have had bad parenting, or are otherwise immature for some other reason and they end up taking that with them into adolescence or adulthood. These people can make careers out of trying to push your buttons, manipulate you, push you around etc. Because of this I think it is the duty of any good Christian to set some firm standards of what is tolerable behavior. This can be done in a Christ like way (at least with practice) and in many ways you can actually be doing the person a favor as far as helping them develop some social skills and emotional maturity that are necessary ingredients for success in life.

To the OP Yes Christians should be nice. I think most of the damage does not come from the average "Christian on the street" (with exceptions given to people like the Westboro Baptists naturally), but Christians in specific areas of authority. 1) Christian Parochial schools and "Christian" parents. 2) Clergy (Especially those that make the papers and TV with scandals, or who have outlandish ministerial TV shows). 3) "Christian" Nations that do not live up to their Faith. (i.e. - Gandhi being turned off from Christianity because the cruelty of the British, the treatment of the Native Americans and African slaves by the U.S. etc.)

I believe that the Fall is one of the major causes for suffering in the World. (I actually liken the affects of original sin to be a bit like radioactive fallout that we all must live with to some degree or another) Romans 8 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that[h] the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Besides that there are issues of human agency and responsibility. People by their own actions cause a lot of it. People likewise can be victims of the actions and negligence of others. (God allows some of this for reasons of free will. And ultimately can use it for the higher good). Suffering can at times be directly "part of God's redemptive plan" (like the pool of Siloam. Captivity in Egypt etc.) There are a number of potential benefits that can be attained from it. But even that I see is God ultimately taking the curse of the Fall and using it for good. God is like a martial arts master of Judo, Akido or Tai Chi who is able to turn the attacks of the enemy against them and thus prove his ultimate mastery.

To the OP I don't believe in debating with atheists. I do believe in discussing issues including aspects of faith and life with them if they are open to such things. And I agree with the basic notion of apologetics and practice it myself. Debating though has a lot of one-upmanship, which is problematic and counterproductive. Not to mention there is the issue of "who frames the issue" (as far as stacking the deck in their favor, leading horses to water etc.). I will qualify a bit, and say that on occasion I think debating is beneficial. If you are facing an opponent who has a very stereotyped view of things then that is something that can be readily dealt with by presenting various counter evidence. But in general I think it's better to handle things in a friendly contrarian manner, rather than trying hard "to set the person straight". But in general I do agree with this scripture as far as arguing is concerned (including debating) Proverbs 26:17 Like one who grabs a stray dog by the ears is someone who rushes into a quarrel not their own.

I've heard some anecdotal account that suggest he was, or more accurately he was a willing vessel of the devil. (He may not have known he was possessed but actively cooperated with such an entity or entities). He could mesmerize people. There was suppose to be a tangible quality of excitement to being in his presence that made you want to agree with him, be his friend etc. Some of his plans for the early invasions of places like France etc. came by way of dreams or intuitions that he believed were prophetic. He also suffered from uncanny strokes of good luck where he was saved from death by narrow margins. He had an interest in various occult subjects, and did his best to try to establish a German neo-pagan cult as the national religion. That is besides all the Holocaust and World Conquest stuff that everybody knows about...

early Jewish tradition states it was as thick as a man's hand. does this mean it was as thick as a man's hand is long, or wide? Yes that is my understanding of it. It was inches thick, but it's hard to get good sources on this sort of thing you really have to look hard or be lucky enough to already own books that cover it in depth.

You need to draw the difference between judging in terms of condemning someone vs. "exercising discernment", prudence etc. Clearly we are not to condemn people. We should not show contempt for them etc. But that doesn't mean we have to accept their actions, associate with them, or agree with them when we have serious doubts about their spiritual condition coming from their actions. God gave us a brain and our senses for such things after all.

To the OP I'm not a Cessationist. But from personal experience its two things. 1) Official church teaching. I was originally taught Cessationism in the Lutheran church that I was catechized in even though as far as I know it was not a historic teaching of Martin Luther. Saint Augustine in one of his writings speculates that miracles and other supernatural gifts might be waning. (Perhaps they were only intended to help the early church get its start), but he never proposed a formal doctrine of it. John Calvin however did. He found himself debating a Catholic apologist who brought the issue up "that there were no miracles that could be claimed by Protestants" of the day, but Catholics did have various saints that had them therefore that proves that God is on the side of Catholics and not Protestants. But to that claim, Calvin answered back that Protestants did not have any miracles "because they went away with the death of the last apostle" (He took Augustine's tenative hypothesis and turned it into a full blown teaching). 2) Personal experience. Lots of folks don't see any miracles etc. and this can reinforce the teachings of Cessianism. I will also add that while I am Charismatic or at least open to that sort of thing. Not everything that is claimed to be by the Holy Spirit is. I'm not even talking about demons (though that is an issue), but just things like placebo affects, altered states of consciousness, psychosomatic illness etc. For a number of years I had my own doubts about the legitimacy of supernatural gifts. I thought charismatics etc, "read a lot into things" and imagine a lot of things because a lot of the Pentecostals and others I met seemed a bit squirrelly.

I think you would probably need to read some Josephus works on the issue of the Roman/Jewish wars that happened after the violation of the temple, AD 70 But from what I can tell in reading about the fall of Jerusalem it was important to to get out at the first sign of trouble before the siege started (Which Christ's prophesy is about). Doing this would allow you to avoid the danger and suffering that came starvation and fires started by the siege engines and the chaos of war. If you however did stay behind in the city and went through the siege it was important to flee the city quickly when it fell because the survivors of the siege were enslaved. Naturally mother's with young children would be sitting ducks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Jewish%E2%80%93Roman_War

Well I guess that is one interpretation... My understanding is however that the abomination happened way back around AD 70. When the Romans captured the temple, rededicated it to the god Jupiter and defiled it according to rules of the OT by slaughtered a boar on it's altar.

I started looking at the dynamics one And saw the short one where he talked about his views as far as the existence of God is concerned.

That sounds OK to me. The downer made the donation for a specific purpose that never happened. Since the condition was not met, the money should go back, especially since he is asking it be returned. Different cultures can handle things differently, but in general I think it is good to keep your word and not do any kind of "bait and switch" thing.

Yes if you remember the conversation I had with Alpha a few days ago we were talking about that. But I thought according to Mitso Kaku those infinites are mistake or defect in the theory and not something that is real. The equation or theory is failing or "having a nervous breakdown" as he put it.

I agree with the basic OP. Of course I believe that sort of thing is true of most other people as well (People see things from their subjective standpoint and try to do what makes sense according to that view). I do however think much of atheism can be construed as a type of Faith. For a science there is an awful lot of trust in the unseen (so far its been tough to witness, test or reproduce most of what is described in the various atheistic creation beginning of life hypotheses). And its interesting the kinds of trust atheists can put in their great theorists even when they seem to be just spit balling. That kind of blind trust on the surface can look a lot like what believers put in their own clergy. And now that we are starting to have "atheist churches", "evangelical atheists" etc. I believe this initial hypothesis all the more. I would also note that a decent chunk of the time folks become atheists in the West seems to come from all the stuff in Christianity, the Bible, etc. that they don't like or doesn't make sense to them (And some Christians don't help matters either in this area). But anyway you end up with them taking atheism as a default because they don't like the problem of Theodicy, they think some stories like Noah's ark are silly and so on rather than they think the atheist position is so awesome to start with. PS - if not for the legacy of the Scopes Monkey trial etc. I think atheists would be in a weaker position in the U.S. (Their would be less of a stereotypical image in the media concerning how Christians think. The trial itself created polarization which caused some churches to treat young earth creationism as a holy dogma or necessary tenent of the Faith)