The methods of love being shown are questionable in cases of homosexuality and other religions for example.

I agree, who are we to say one group of people has the market cornered on God? If God is everywhere and available to everyone, then it stands to reason anyone who seeks Him no matter what they believe will find Him. Course the whole problem is, people upon finding Him think then their religion is right, when God simply just is to all.

No we love homosexuals and people of other beliefs. That is why we tell them of the good news and the way to achieve heaven.

[EXAMPLE]

Say you knew someone was on a road that just dead ends at a cliff, but the cliff can not be seen till you're right up on it. There would then be no room to stop and turn around to take a different path.

What would be more loving? Allowing this person to continue on the path he/she is on and drive right off the cliff. Or would it be more loving to call the person on his/her phone and tell them of what they are doing?

God is just to all. But if you lived in Texas would you find the mall using an Oklahoma map? No you would need the Texas map to reach your final destination.

Too bad those who think they have the map are wrong, huh?

Yes very true.

God is God. We cannot create nor design God.
HE ALONE is the creator and designer...
we are not learned or knowledgeable enough to challenge God
on any subject at any level.
Anyone would do well to set aside
the preconceived notions and false information;
put aside your hate and malice toward Christians,
then take some time out of your precious days
to learn of Him.

Jam_1:5, If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God,
that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not;
and it shall be given him.

Jam_1:6, But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering.
For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea
driven with the wind and tossed.

Psa_111:10, The fear of the LORD is the beginning
of wisdom: a good understanding have all they that do his commandments: his praise endureth for ever.

Pro_1:7, The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge:
but fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Pro_9:10, The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom:
and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.

By placing his truth in a book written by men though, aren't you guilty of the same thing we supposedly are? How do you know what you know of God isn't preconceived or false information? You're not God any more then any of the rest of us are after all.

God will show you the world and all that's in it if you open your heart to our father and let him in.

That is one reason I just love my meetings as we are given the option of finding a loving God of our own understanding. I have a married friend there. He says that he is an Alcoholic and his Al-anon wife has become unmanageable.

I agree with what you say here.

But then why are you trying to design God for other people by dictating to them which legends and myths to believe in?

You keep posting verses from Hebrew mythology, but who's to say that they speak for God?

You're trying to DESIGN GOD for other people.

Let everyone find God in their own way. Who are you to tell other people how they should think of God? I'm sure that everyone who has a religion believes that their religion is correct. Just because the mythology that you believe in has an exceptionally egotistical God who takes temper tantrums like a spoiled brat when people don't worship him doesn't give him any more merit than any other God.

Any religion could have been written up with that same kind of arrogant religious bigotry.

I personally reject such religions as being the obvious product of mortal men and clearly not the least bit divine.

If we're going to study God, we should study the universe, not the writings of men. After all, when we study things like cosmology and evolution we know that these things are the "works" of God, because there were no men living back then to lie about it.

So you can know that the universe was created in a hot big bang some 13.7 billion years ago, because God tells us so via his TRUE BOOK, "The Universe". You can know that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old because God tells us so in his TRUE BOOK. You can know that we evolved from lower animals because God tells us so in his TRUE BOOK.

A book that cannot possibly have been written by mankind. It's the universe herself speaking to us in no uncertain terms.

In a very real sense, scientists are the only people who genuinely read the "Real Bible", the Universe Herself. The writings of God in the stars. No men around to contaminate it. You can rest assured that it's the TRUTH of God.

We know that the bozos in the Mediterranean region have always written silly myths of Gods who are appeased by blood sacrifices. That's a GIVEN. You can rest assured that those are man-made myths.

It's the THEORY of evolution my friend. A theory is nothing more then an educated GUESS. So nothing FACTUAL about it, just merely guesses that are accepted to possibly be true.

Whoever taught you that lies to you Cowboy.

Yes, there is a THEORY of evolution. That's just an intellectual understanding of how it can work. In fact that theory began with the observations of Charles Darwin.

However, since that time evidence has been collected and the theory itself has been deeply expanded upon. Today there is overwhelming evidence that evolution is necessarily a fact of nature. It can no longer be denied.

It not at all unlike the THEORY of Relativity. We still call it a THEORY, yet the predication that it has made concerning the dilation of time and space have since been measured extremely accurately and undeniably. So even though we still call it a THEORY, the fact of the matter is that time does indeed dilate when the speed of light is approached.

So it's false to say continue to say that evolution is merely a THEORY. That's now just a teeny tiny part of it. It's the intellectual explanation of how it occurs. But now we also have the EVIDENCE of evolution, and that evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. No unbiased modern scientist today even remotely questions the truth of evolution. The ONLY people who continue to question it are evangelists who would rather believe that some guy was nailed to a pole to pay for their sins.

Those are the only people who are still in the dark.

According to the 'theory' above, a person can read the Bible and the best that person can possibly do is make an educated guess about what it says.

If that is the best any reader of ancient scripture can do than there is nothing FACTUAL about it - is there?

Science taught me that. That is why it's considered a theory rather then a fact. If there was no way it could be wrong it would be a fact. But it's a "Theory" and a theory again is nothing more then an educated guess. Some speculations someone sees at MIGHT being true.

Not necassarily. If people of different denominations were to get together and study the bible together and share what they know and how they take things the way they take them. We could do away with "denominations". Reason for different denominations is cause of different cultures and different readings of the scriptures. Which commonly happens with everything. I could write a paragraph of something, have 5 people read it, and you would get 5 different meanings. But if these 5 people were to come together and share why they feel it says this or that and give evidence of such through the scriptures people may come to a different conclusion and again do away with denominations. But unfortunately don't know what it is, maybe ego or pride. But this probably won't happen for each denomination thinks they have the knowledge. Instead of fighting and bickering at each other we really should come together and open our hearts and minds and let the spirit lead us.

No, that's your own personal misunderstanding of how science defines a "theory". Just because they continue to refer to something as a "theory" doesn't mean that it isn't supported by evidence and that it is nothing more than an educated guess.

That's a false conclusion on your part. Yes, it's true that some theories are indeed at that stage of development and may very well turn out to be incorrect. However, this is not true of all theories. Many theories have indeed been overwhelmingly confirmed by observational evidence, and evolution is one of those theories that has indeed been overwhelmingly confirmed by observational evidence. Just as the predictions of the "theory" of relativity has been confirmed.

There is still room for improvement in the details of these theories, but there is no question that their overall descriptions are indeed true.

Besides, look at what you are doing:

Science is an ongoing study relentlessly pursued by independent scientists all over the world who would each love nothing more than to be able to prove all the other scientists wrong. That's the greatest thrill for a scientist, prove other scientists wrong and you can potentially win a Nobel Prize and be recognized as on of the smartest scientists around.

So the competition to disprove the theories of other scientists is a passionate pursuit for all scientists. Although no secular scientist is naive enough to believe that they could disprove the theory of evolution. At best all they could hope to do is contribute understanding it and helping to explain it in even more detail.

Of course religious zealots will question evolution and try to 'prove it wrong', they have and they have always failed to do so. But it's clearly that they are only doing this because they have an agenda to support a totally unreliable mythology.

Now let's talk about the unreliable mythology:

You have an ancient collection of highly questionable authors who clearly had an agenda to make a case that Jesus was some sort of "Christ" predicted from a previous mythology.

How many actual people were involved in these writings? Well, for the most part you have Mark, and then Matthew and Luke basically rehashing his story and adding their own opinions to it. Then you have John, and Paul, and a couple other highly questionable authors who may or may not even have been the actual authors.

So you're talking basically about a story that was written by potential only 4 or 5 totally biased religious zealots with absolutely NO INDEPENDENT SUPPORT from unbiased sources. They weren't out to question each others claims, but clearly they were out to support the original agenda.

How can you even begin to compare that with science where thousands upon thousands of independent investigators are diligently working to find FLAWS in the works of other scientists? And in most cases, after years of hard work and diligent studies and observation they finally confess that they can do nothing other than confirm what has already been observed and reported.

Sure, once in a great while someone comes up with something new, that usually adds or expands upon a particular theory, like Albert Einstein did with Newton's theory of gravity. But even in those cases the older theories are seldom proven wrong, just expanded upon.

So here you are wanting to totally dismiss all of science, in favor of trumping it with the extremely biased view of a handful of highly questionable authors who had absolutely no independent confirmation of what they were reporting. Moreover, even the culture in which they lived REJECTED their claims. So there obviously were many opposing view that are NOT EVEN INCLUDED in the Biblical book report. The bible itself has been canonized in an extremely biased way to support the agenda that Jesus was "The Christ" and to even remotely suggest otherwise was considered heresy!

There's no comparison between the Bible and the knowledge of science. The bible is extremely biased and outrageous stories by less than a dozen extremely biased authors who's competition was SILENCED.

Science is the result of everyone trying very hard to discover TRUTH and to expose anything that might not be the TRUTH. And we're talking about thousands upon thousands of individuals who would LOVE to be famous for disproving a theory.

There's just no comparison at all between science, and an ancient mythology that was written by less than a dozen religious zealots whose claims were even rejected by their very own culture as being clearly false.

You're dreaming there.

Seriously Cowboy, that's just an idealistic dream of your own personal wishful thinking.

Other Christians on these very forums have already disagreed with some of your views. I know for a fact, that even when I was a Christian I would not have agreed with many of your views.

I'm not even prepared to accept your notion that "Jesus fulfilled the Laws of the Old Testament". I personally feel that is utter nonsense, and I would continue to hold that view even if I were a Christian.

Especially, if you're going to continue to hold up things from the Old Testament, like God hating homosexuality. That would law would have been "fulfilled" by Jesus, and Jesus never reinstated it.

Therefore, there's very strong reasons why many people would disagree with your views.

Based on your posts it doesn't appear to me that you are prepared to give-in to the ideas of various other Christian.

So exactly what is your utopia dream for Christianity? That everyone accept YOUR VERSION of it?

I used to have a dream like that myself when I was about your age.

That's never going to happen. I personally wised up and realized that the things that I truly wanted to support from the Bible was simply the moral teachings of Jesus anyway, it's all the stuff from the Old Testament that was contaminating the teachings of Jesus.

As I learned more about other spiritual philosophies I realized that the moral values that Jesus taught can be found in Buddhism precisely, and that there truly is no need to even drag the Old Testament into it.

So I realized that it makes far more sense to just offer people Buddhism, rather than trying to fix a broken religion.

I even save Jesus by recognizing that he most likely was a Jewish Buddhist. That makes perfect sense in so many ways. Many ancient Jews actually had a far more pantheistic or mystical view of Yahweh anyway. And Jesus was an ancient Jew. I doubt very seriously that Jesus viewed "God" as being Zeus-like. And he clearly wasn't in tune with the teachings of the Torah, and even supposedly referred to it as "Your Law" when speaking with the Pharisees according to the Gospels. He didn't call it "God's Law".

As far as I'm concerned, if everyone gave my view of Jesus some serious consideration with a genuinely sincere open mind, they should all agree that this is at the very least PLAUSIBLE. And, that's really all they need to recognize. We don't need to know what the real truth is, (we can never know that), but if we can show plausible explanation (as I have) then we know that they may potentially be the TRUTH.

That's all we can really do in the case of such an ancient and questionable fables that make such outrageous claims. Just look at the possibilities and acknowledge them.

The scenario I offer for the stories of Jesus makes perfect sense and has as much merit as any other explanation.

And that's all it needs to have: equal or better merit than the original fables. It needs nothing more than that to be acknowledged as a potentially true scenario. "Potentially True" is all it needs to be.

Matthew 5:17
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.

It's not just old testament that God looks down on homosexuality.

Jude 1:7

7Even as Sodom and Gomorrha, and the cities about them in like manner, giving themselves over to fornication, and going after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Notice going after strange flesh
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1 Corinthians 6:9-10

9Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,

10Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.

Notice effeminate. Effeminate is feminine characteristics. And homosexuals generally have those, they speak like a woman, they present themselves like a woman, and so much more.
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1 Timothy 1:9-10

9Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,

10For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;

Again with defiling themselves with mankind, this falls into the category of strange flesh.
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Can find more if you wish but I think this is enough to show homosexuality being sinful. Unless you're one that has to be told a million times before you start to listen. God has told us many upon many times homosexuality is wrong in both the old and new testament.