Bruce Moen wrote on Jul 31^st, 2007 at 7:12am:

Oic, I thought that was the only way.. Wow, I've got a lot to learn.. I need to get your books Bruce.. It's just I"m busy with Neale Donald Walsch's right now..

peace

Bruce's works make good reading - spend a few bucks and check them out.

Bravo Bruce!

You have painted quite a visible picture. There is no need for my coment here, fore it would just mirror your statment.

Getting this message out to people, that we and we alone are responsible for the reality we create for ourselves, through our beliefs, be it in the physical, while we experience this physical state, or after the transistion, by the Earth term called death, as we enter the non phsyical realms.

The realm of imagination is our next true home, and all those that transistion there, find out in a hurry, how, and why, they must control their thoughts.

It would be benificial to all human kind to explore this next realm while still having a physical body, so they can return to the physical and analyze this next realm, to better have a greater understanding of both worlds, and the whole truth about Earth's religions, and the earthly beings that created them.

On the other side, for all those that have explored there, whether conscioussly, or through a NDE, have all come back changed, being more loving, more understanding, less judgemental, and more caring about themselves, and to all human, animal, vegetable, and mineral Life, including the great spirit energy of the Earth.

Thoughts are powerful things, that need to be controlled in the physical state first, before one ventures to the next realm, although most are never enlightened by this information, due to the narrow mindedness of their current belief system.

It would be wonderful if everyone was.

Thannks Bruce, For all that you do to help make this a reality, for those that seek.

Dimensionally Yours,
Rick

You'll have to decide for yourself about whether Christainity has the right answers or not - for myself, considerable Bible reading and study of early church history and Christian doctrimes, plus other religions , has left me thinking most of Christainity is nonsense. For one thing, the Jews did not believe in Hell or in the conecpt of original sin, which according to Christian doctrine is the reason we deserve it. And jesus himself was a Jew, who said he did not come to do away with one jot or tittle of the old Testament writings.

Most likely Hell was an invention of early Christians who wanted to get their own back on non-believers, especially those who (sporadically) persecuted them. Tertullian, for example, gloated at the idea of looking down from Heaven and seeing the roasting sinners, including people like dancers, singers and actors, who he joked would be even more nimble, tuneful and eloquent in their screams and jumps as they tried to avoid the flames

hello laffingrain. What a nice post  i honestly don;t know, at this stage in my life, if there is any sort of god or not, but i still believe in beauty and love and stuff - if you don;t you might as well go jump off a cliff. we can all try a little bit to make the world better. I agree a baby is a pure and innocent thing, and I also like to believe any of us can make a fresh start and be pure and innocent too. The useful christian ideas include not judging others and repenting of sins so as to start anew etc, even if they are bound up with lots of unhelpful other stuff (just one among many, I dislike the association of sexuality with sin, which i think has a lot to answer for. some people seem to feel that somehow only small children are innocent and adults have fallen from grace). On the other hand there's no point beating yourself over the head for not being "perfect". Who is? I don;t think the Jesus depicted in the gospels was, for example (how about the bit where he has a fit of anger and drives the tradres out of the outer court of the temple with a whip!! and they were only - historians suggest - money changers (so people could, as required, use the local currency to buy sacrificial animals), or selling  animals to be sacrificed in the temple - not T-shirts and souvenirs, or drugs and porn or something!!
I had a Pagan phase and used to pray to the Goddess but then something very unjust and painful happened to me after I had prayed for a good outcome to the situation and I don;t know any more if there is any real intelligence or benevolance to the universe at all. Would still like to think there could be... still, intelligent and benevolent people are a start

LaffingRain wrote on Jul 31^st, 2007 at 11:52am:


Well Christian doctrine as we know it was settled at the Council of Nicea which was called by the Roman Emperor Constantine (4th century bc) who was a new convert to Christianity and wanted to sort out a set of official beliefs at a time when there were various competing ones. That's where we get the Nicene creed from. It was also the start of people who had differfnt ideas being persecuted as heretics. in order for Christianity to eventually become the official  religion of the empire it had to be all neatly formulated so as to say who had the right version and who did not

Still, I think it is pretty bogus that just by thinking you're going to hell, you'll get what you expect.. 

This thread is just another example of this site’s unadmitted status as a hate source.  Fortunately, many non-religious posters have recognized this and expressed their horror to me in private messages.  Most of them no longer post here.  I regrettably find it necessary once again to expose Bruce’s mindless generalizations and the goose-stepping minions who gurgle their ignorant approval.

[Bruce:] “Our Christian God was then modeled on emperors and kings."
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This pontification betrays Bruce’s lack of qualifications to address this subject.  In fact, the biblical God eagerly distances Himself from anthropomorphic conceptions.  God twice refuses to disclose a name to prevent anthropomorphism (Genesis 32:29; Judges 13:18).  In that pivotal moment in history when God commissions Moses to free the Hebrew slaves, God is appropriately evasive when Moses requests His name: “Tell them, I will be whatever I will be has sent you (Exodus 3:14).” God is precisely distancing Himself from the use of the regal model to conceptualize the divine. God also distances Himself from this anthropomorphic model in Isaiah 55:8-9:   “My thoughts are not like yours, and my ways are different from yours.  As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways and thoughts above yours.”  In John 1:1, 14, Jesus is conceptualized as “the Word” (Greek: Logos) in the sense of the rational self-expression of God in contrast to God in His unknowability.  The biblical use of regal language for God is figurative and subordinate to this anti-anthropomorphic underlying understanding.  

“[Bruce:] They have an omnipotent, omniscient loving God who sits on a throne…”
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Actually the Bible never intends this image to be taken literally.  On the contrary, it champions God’s more sophisticated metaphysical status as the ground of all Being: e. g. “God is actually not far from any of us….In Him we live and move and exist (Acts 17:27-28).”  The biblical God is omnipresent, not confined to a throne as Bruce suggests.

[Bruce:] God “must be obeyed without question lest he become angry…”
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Another mindless generalization that ignores a far more subtle truth!  The Bible teaches that Jesus, being fully human, had to learn by trial-and-error like the rest of us.  This means that even Jesus was at one stage deficient in wisdom and less in divine favor than He later became (Luke 2:52).  More dramatically, it means that Jesus went through a DISOBEDIENT phase (Hebrews 5:8).  Despite all this, He was considered “sinless” (Hebrews 4:15). Sin is a state of chronic separation from God and nothing in Jesus’ learning curve caused such a separation for Him.  The same can theoretically be true of the rest of us.  Paul constantly refers to his weaknesses, but never once does he label them sins.  In fact, Paul has no guilt over his prior life as a persecutor of the church.  He freely admits that he sinned but rationalizes his sin by insisting that he had no yet come to faith and persecuted the church in ignorance.  In many ways, he is quite proud of his prior life as a non-Christian Jew (Galatians 1;13-14; Philippians 3:5-7)

The story of Adam and Eve is the story not of original sin and Paradise Lost, but of Paradise Outgrown and the birth of conscience.  Precisely for this reason, the “Fall” of Adam and Eve is nowhere treated in the Old Testament as a sin.  The doctrine of original sin implies that to be human is to be a sinner.  Indeed, even unbaptized babies are damned, according to this doctrine.  But the doctrine cannot be traced back before the 4th century and is the invention of Augustine.   In fact, the Bible teaches there can be no sin without a moral law that we knowingly and willfully violate (Romans 5:13), that we are judged according to the spiritual light we have received (Luke 12:48), that salvation is possible apart from formal profession of faith in Christ (Romans 2:7), and indeed that we in effect judge ourselves because we—not God—set up the standards by which we are judged (Matthew 7:1-2).  Nowhere does the Bible allow us to blame Adam for our own sins.  Rather, it teaches that we are responsible for own shortcomings and indeed for the afterlife that our choices help create.

God always wanted Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit as part of their developmental process.  Only by disobeying do Adam and Eve become `like God´ and learn the difference between good and evil (Genesis 3:22).  In other words, their status as glorious creatures made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27-26) depends on the Fall!  In fact, God wants to save everyone (e. g. 1Timothy 2:6).  God wanted Adam and Eve to disobey so that the human quest for union with God would be fueled by gratitude in response to grace and mercy rather than by some sort of unctuous meritocracy: “God locked them into disobedience so that He might have mercy on them all (Romans 11:32).”  As Paul makes clear, God’s desire to save everyone is part of His goal to ultimately restore all of His creation back to union with Him (Romans 11:36).

[Bruce:] “His dungeon is portrayed as never-ending torture and pain for all eternity.”
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For those with a clean conscience but non-Christian values, Jesus’ poetic image of “few stripes” implies a very temporary sojourn in hellish planes (Luke 12:47).  Elsewhere Jesus employs the image of a debtor’s prison from which release can be gained by paying the debts owed (Matthew 5:25-26; 18:34).   The Bible envisages the possibility that even everyone in Hell will ultimately find union with God and worship God and Christ in Heaven (Philippians 2:9-11; Revelation 5:13). To that end the gates of Heaven are eternally open for traffic coming and going (Revelation 21:25).  The biblical term for Hell "Gehenna" refers to the trash dump outside Jerusalem in Jesus' day.  It is a symbol for wasted lives, not a literal realm of fiery torment.

Bruce’s ignorant pontifications overlook the obvious fact that in neither Hebrew nor Greek do the words translated “eternal” mean “forever.”  Rather, they simply mean “for an indefinite period of time.  This image is quite appropriate for ancients who can’t wrap their minds around the notion that God and the afterlife contain timeless realms.

Bruce prefers to ridicule as “psychotic” what he does not understand. How ironic that he overlooks the fact that the early church provides the earliest literary evidence for the doctrine of soul retrievals.  Paul approves the doctrine of proxy baptism for the unredeemed dead (1 Corinthians 15:29), which is based on the Jewish teaching that prayers for the dead can be effective (2 Maccabees 12:41-46).   Indeed, Peter teaches that retrievals from hellish planes can be performed by Christ (1 Peter 3:19-20) and apparently others as well (1 Peter 4:6).   In the early 2nd century, the church celebrates the possibility of soul retrievals from Hell much more explicitly as their understanding of New Testament teaching (see e. g. Apocalypse of Peter 14; Sibylline Oracles II), 

[Bruce:] “The only reason people experience the Hell that religion describes is because their religion created the place by getting them to believe it exists.”
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Bruce overlooks the fact that many who experience a hellish plane  (e. g. atheists) experience it as a shocking refutation of their earthly skepticism about such planes.

Don