AdventureBegins,

I wasn't answering your question, I was addressing your belief that you
have the Holy Spirit.

As I've pointed out before, it's "fill", not replenish. Look it up in
Hebrew. I would say we've done a good job of filling the earth.

I guess I fall in the middle on this part. I believe what the Bible
says. My interpretation is that we are to be good stewards of the Earth
and take care of the gifts God gave us, i.e. the environment, etc.

All mankind has within it the spirit.

It was given in the begining.

So it is. So it will be allways. Accepting Christ merely grants
salvation it does not absolve one of the need to obey the truth.

If you accept Christ one day and committ murder the next have you
accepted Christ or just leaned on his good name.

Abra:

I said to stop ragging on the Bible because (emphasis on the because,
there) it has to be interpreted. I didn't say stop ragging on it if you
disagree with its message.

I am merely saying that if you criticize the Bible simply because it has
to be interpreted, then you would have to equally criticize every piece
of literature (i.e. it is not legitimate to criticize any piece of
writing merely because it has to be interpreted before it can be
useful).

If you feel that the message of the Bible is faulty, or unimportant, or
wrong, or evil, or whatever, that's fine. I even said in my post that I
respect those people who have beliefs that disagree with my own.
Apparently you failed to read that part of my post, and then you took
one sentence (the least meanignful sentence of my whole post) and you
quoted it out of context in order to try to make an argument against me.

That process sounds eerily familiar... it's the same thing that Dan
Brown does with his (preposterous) books about the authenticity of the
Bible. Apparently it is a common theme among people who disagree with
the Bible for reasons of authenticity. You pick some singular quote that
has no meaning without context, and then you forget to interpret it in
the context of surrounding language, and then you draw faulty
conclusions.

I do not advocate (and never have) that people should not criticize the
Bible. However, if your only basis for criticizing it lies in the fact
that in has to be interpreted, then your claims are invalid (because
your claims themselves have to be interpreted by your listeners).

Further, I believe (so please not that this is only my belief) that it's
simply too far-fetched to believe that relgious leaders with specific
agendas could possibly have been capable of organizing not only the
writing of the Bible, but then also the writing of the later books, and
the editing of all the books to make sure the amazingly deep
philosophical ideas were kept entirely consistent throughout the 4000+
years over which it was written. To me, that would require a miracle far
more stunning that walking on water or parting the Red Sea. It's
logically absurd to believe that this book is the organized work of a
small number of people. It is quite obviously the inspired work of a
single author. But that point can (and will have to be) argued somewhere
else, later.

And, to make another comment that is applicable to this post, evolution
actually can't account for the emergence of languages. I am actually
being paid to do research this summer by the National Science Foundation
in order to develop mathematical models of the emergence of human
languages because it is now the consensus opinion among modern
evolutionary biologists that modern, vowel-based, language structure did
not develop until fewer than 5-10 thousand years ago. This, I think,
gives some additional credibility to the story of the Tower of Babel.

And in case you're interested in the topic from a scientific point of
view, it is called emergent behavior. It's the same property that allows
fish to travel in schools, wolves ot hunt in packs, and groups of
lightning bugs to synchronize their lighting patterns.

Ten seconds of rational though will make it obvious that it would be
impossible for such behavior to have an origin, genetically. Take fish
schooling for example. In order for fish to know how to school, they
have to have that particular knowledge transcribed onto their genes.
Clearly then, no single isolated fish could ever have benefited if he
were the only fish to have known how to 'school'. Thus, in order for
natural selection to select genes with knowledge of schooling, a
multitude of fish would have had to have had it. But in order for a
multitude of fish to have the same mutation (i.e. the one giving them
the ability to school) natural selection would first have to choose some
single fish with that trait to survive... which leads to circular logic
and hence a contradiction.

This is just one example. No single fish could ever decide on his own to
be in a school. But if no single fish ever did that, then natural
selection can't ensure that schooling is a property of fish that gets
passed on. This is even admitted in college level evolutionary biology
book. It's one of the most difficult unsolved problems in biology.

Anyway, human language is the same. No single human could have been the
first one to start basing language on a system of vowels, because if the
others didn't adopt that language convention, then it could not properly
develop. Hence, you have to presuppose that a large group used the same
vowel system (and remember that in language theory 'vowel system' might
have a different meaning than you think. A vowel system could even
include the system of clicks and noises used by some primitive tribes in
Africa. It might seem primitive to you, but it's really amazingly
sophistocated. Just remember how the army used the Navajo language as a
code in world war 2).

So, please don't go assuming that science can somehow explain where
languages came from. It's one of the most difficult unsolved problems
facing biologists right now. The general idea is called emergent
behavior, and it presents the biggest challenge to evolution (in
addition to irreducible complexity).

Anyway, that's just a summary of why I feel that

1. claiming the Bible is wrong merely because it's interpreted is not
legitimate.

2. the Bible was not written by an organized, small group of people
based on personal agendas.

3. evolution cannot account for the emergence of vowel structure in
languages.

Ely.

The bible may have been written by a varied and large number of people.

However as it is currently bound and distrubuted the words selected in
its inclusions were selected by a small group of people in an effort to
place doctrine and control on the spread of the church.

Such doctrine and control as was intrepeted by men in council under the
guidance of the person that called the council.

God did not preside over that assemblage a man did. That assemblage
declared themselves to be accurate by prayer. That assemblage declared
the validity of their cutting and pasting and selecting and binding.

How then can we trust that assemblage. For they have placed a binding
on the word of God.

Nay I will trust God.

I agree that after the large body of literature was built up, only then
could a small group act on it. But reading the Bible that sits on my
desk, I can clearly see that the themes in it are so interweaved that
they couldn't possibly have simply selected which themes to leave in and
which to leave out.

Additionally, we keep finding very old (3-4 thousand years) versions of
the documents and they turn out to barely be different from the version
on my desk (usually there are never more than a few verses difference...
which I consider to be totally OK given that the books are roughly 4000
years old).

One other thing though that I feel I should say is that the council of
Niceas DID NOT have a significant impact on theology at any point in
time. The events portrayed by Dan Brown relating to that council are
ridiculously (super ridiculously) blown out of proportion specifically
for the purposes of selling books).

The council of Nicea never voted on whether Christ was a deity or not.
There were 2 members (just 2 out of over 200) that wanted to, and as a
silly formality to appease those "crazy 2 members who just couldn't drop
the issue" they "voted" on it (but no one really took the vote
seriously... everyone there already believed that Christ was a deity,
except those 2 guys who kept arguing it). The result of the vote merely
said that they would keep on considering Christ a deity as they always
had been.

That is ALL that Nicea is known for, but Dan Brown does a nice job of
trying to make it look more controversial than it is.

A simply great book that deals with some of this is called "The Problem
of Pain" by C.S. Lewis. It is a philosophical book that gives an
amazingly insightful answer to those people who think God's not real
because of the pain that exists.

But for a while it talks about why and how the belief in God ever got
started in the first place. Quite obviously, even primitive human beings
easily saw how painful the world is. Why do we tend to think that "back
then" they were somehow "sillier" or "dumber" and so to explain the
world, they made up grandiose tales about God and strange, weird myths?

To me, that is nonsensical. Just because they were primitive, does not
mean they were dumb or silly or irrational. In fact, I am quite sure
that they were very rational thinkers. Thus, why in the world did that
one single first human being who ever first came up with the concept of
God, why did he attribute goodness to God?

How could it possibly have developed that this painful, death-infested
world got to be attributed to a wise and loving God in the first place?
This leads to plenty of interesting debates, but for me it is quite
obvious that unless there actually was such a God, we would have never
been prompted to make him up. Unless God interfered with our existence,
we would have never dreamed up a good, or all-powerful force to be the
cause for the world around us.

Ely I agree with what you say. I think man is no smarter now than he has
ever been. There is more accumulated knowledge now but look at pyramids
in South America. Huge boulders that fit so close you can't slide a
piece of paper between them. They had intricate canal systems. There are
examples of this the world over. Sometimes I wonder what things they
might have known that got lost and we don't know.

Ely I agree with what you say. I think man is no smarter now than he has
ever been. There is more accumulated knowledge now but look at pyramids
in South America. Huge boulders that fit so close you can't slide a
piece of paper between them. They had intricate canal systems. There are
examples of this the world over. Sometimes I wonder what things they
might have known that got lost and we don't know.

sorry my puter hiccuped.

ely do you think that the earlier church elders were watched over by god
when they decided the Nicean Creed?

Spider wrote:
"Because you interpret the words and Christians interpret the spirit.
That is why you two and anyone else who isn't saved are not qualified to
interpret scriptures. You must have received the Holy Spirit to
understand those things which are of the spirit."
--

I don't care too much about the story of Babylon; it doesn't make that
much difference to me. But Spider's statement that Christians (i.e.,
the "saved") are the only ones qualified to accurately interpret
scripture seems a bit odd. That suggests that _all_ Christians are able
(by the grace of God, or whatever) to correctly interpret the Bible.
I'm not so sure. If we took 100 Christians (i.e., the saved) who are
NOT biblical scholars and do not have formal biblical training and had
each one individually provide an interpretation of 20 passages that the
rest of us (i.e., hell-bound sinners) find tremendously confusing and
contentious, will we have 100 versions of each of the 20 passages that
are perfectly consistent? (I don't mean exact wording — just so long as
they each provide a detailed explanation that doesn't differ in core
meaning from the other 100 Christians.) According to Spider, all who
receive the perfection of the Holy Spirit will have full understanding
of scripture and be fully qualified to interpret it.

I have sometimes received contradictory answers from my Christian
friends about various aspects of the Bible that I determined _ I _
wasn't qualified to interpret and so enlisted their help in my
understanding. Does this mean that the _spirit_ of the text is somehow
subjective? Or does it mean that some of the people who place their
complete trust in Jesus and believe in the inerrancy of the Bible are
actually _not_ saved, despite having fully devoted their life to the
Word? Or if it's an issue of me being so devoid of the Holy Spirit that
not only can I not interpret the text, but those who _can_ interpret the
text cannot present it in a way that I can even understand, then how can
a heathen as godless as I am ever encounter the spirit and thereby
become saved? According to Spider, the spirit is revealed only to those
who are already saved, since none of the rest of us is capable of
interpreting the "things which are of the spirit" and, apparently,
cannot even gain a satisfactory understanding when Christians present
their superior understanding to us. What hope have any of us who are
not already initiated into the exclusive club of the saved?

I'm, of course, being somewhat facetious here. But I'm trying to make a
point — that most Christians know the details of their faith from the
guide by which they live their lives, i.e. the Bible. If those of us
who read the Bible looking for answers — but are not yet saved — cannot
interpret the Bible and cannot get our answers from those who _have_
been saved, it appears that we can never become saved. In addition,
those who follow the teachings of Jesus as set forth in the Bible but
who differ in peripheral theological beliefs (e.g. Catholics,
Episcopalians, Eastern Orthodox members, etc.) must be lacking the
spiritual gift of interpretation as well. It seems that none but a
select few can ever attain salvation. If Christianity is supposed to be
about love and forgiveness and inclusion (think of the new convenant
that involved spreading the Word to the Gentiles), isn't the notion of
exclusivity in interpretation contradictory? Were many Paul's letters,
for example, not written for those who were not already saved?
Certainly he wasn't setting up his audience for failure, was he?

resserts,

Those who seek, find. Simon Greenleaf was an athiest who read the Bible
in an attempt to disprove it, he was saved. Clyde Thompson, the
"meanest man in texas" was locked into a cell that had been welded shut
to protect inmates and guards from him. He had no books or tv. A guard
gave him a Bible and months later he was saved. You can't read the
Bible like you are reading a text book or a novel, you have to read it
with your mind open to truth. If you open the Bible and think "I'll try
to believe this, but if God doesn't like x sin, then I'm out", because
why would God reveal the truth to you if you love sin? God wants you to
accept that you are not good enough. That you are not wise enough.
That you will never be good enough or wise enough, so that you finally
break down and give yourself to him.

The truth is, there are parts of the Bible that are too hard for some
believers. As your spirit grows in strength, you can tackle more
difficult concepts and scriptures. Becoming a christian is a
never-ending process. Nobody can just sit down and understand the
meaning of all scriptures on the day they are saved. I doubt many are
spiritual enough to understand the whole Bible by the time they die.
It's a growing and learning process.

Thank you spider. Well said.

No, Christians are not the only ones with the insight to what the Bible
is saying. I'm not so sure I am one. I do know that I tried to
understand it for a long time. Didn' get it. Couldn't get it.

Thank you spider. Well said.

No, Christians are not the only ones with the insight to what the Bible
is saying. I'm not so sure I am one. I do know that I tried to
understand it for a long time. Didn' get it. Couldn't get it.

Thank you spider. Well said.

No, Christians are not the only ones with the insight to what the Bible
is saying. I'm not so sure I am one. I do know that I tried to
understand it for a long time. Didn' get it. Couldn't get it.

Thank you spider. Well said.

No, Christians are not the only ones with the insight to what the Bible
is saying. I'm not so sure I am one. I do know that I tried to
understand it for a long time. Didn' get it. Couldn't get it.

Hiccup, not finished.

resserts, I must agree with the main text of your argument. If one is
seeking, but has not been saved, how are they to find the answers, if
they are not endowed with the ability to so due to some lack of literacy
or logic?

But this topic started out discussing the infamous Tower of Babel.

We pretty much, speak the same language here at JSH. Even those of
differing countries communicate here in english. Yet we can not, in
this written format, all agree on what is being said.

Now what occurs to me is this. If all these poeple who had once been a
single society, with similiar heritage, in fact the same heritage,
suddenly found themselves speaking to each other but not understanding.
What would make them get together and say ' To heck with all this, it's
too hard, lets take a potentially deadly journey to a country as far
away as we can go and develop our own nation' ?????

And then, on top of that, there is this qustion that HAUNTS one's sense
of logic. First God created humans, then God puished his creation
because they did not follow his word. But then because of that
punishment humans could never be perfect again. Now there mush be a set
of rules. Rules God knows will be impossible for the imperfect human to
ever live up to, but still they must try. In so trying, their
imperfect nature leads to mistakes. God does not correct the misakes,
God add more conflict to the rules. By making it even more difficult to
communicate, by placeing distance and physical appearence into the
already impossible equation.

The logic I have as a human, existing on this planet with other humans,
tells me that most of our differences for thousands of years, has come
from the lack of abiltiy to communicate, from physical appearence.

What has been the suffering, what has been the death toll, what, I ask
you all, has been the purpose of such a discipline?

If I adopt a Korean child to live in my American family, will I not
teach that child the language that will enrich it's life the most? What
purpose whould it serve to segregate that one child from the others in
it's new family? How could such choice give that child peace? How
could such a choice bring that child closer to the family unit that all
parents try to form?

Unless a Christian parent chooses to deny some scriptures, unless that
parent interprets scripture to their opinion, I can not imagine a less
likely set of teachings for any parent than the Bible. I can only
imagine a child who has used profanity, forbidden to ever speak in their
native language again. When a simple time out would due.

Perhaps I, some, we, process the words of the Bible in some simpler way.
Perhaps with no concept whatsoever of the times in which the Bible was
written, we can never totally glean the same exact meaning from a single
text. Perhaps, God could have forseen all this, saved the misery and
suffering to multitudes, if only 'time out' had been a God concept
before it was a human concept.

No matter how much I tried, it just wasn't clear. I wanted to learn, I
though I wanted to learn. So how come it wasn't coming to me? I tried
and tried to read it and understand it. Then there came a time I was
ready for something good and loving in my life. I needed answers. I
needed help. I began to read, and read until it seems that one day, the
words and the meanings I was looking for just popped out and hit me. As
I read and search for meaning, I find more and more than I found before.
Everytime I read it, I become with more knowledge, understanding and
kinder more loving ways.

It doesn't make me a damn what people think about it or feel about. It
has helped me. It has changed my spirit, my life, my ways.
It isn't something that is what it is when you read it. It is what is is
supposed to be when it is time to understand. That's as clear as I can
say it in my way of thinking.

Peace on.
Kat