Interesting. Did he knock at the door or just materialise? Did he look like a typical depiction of Jesus?




And this is where discussions with religious types normally break down. You resort to the - "because god/the bible says it is so" argument. The beginning of circular reasoning.


So they've never been exposed to your god and have become Muslim/Hindu/whatever simply due to their location or family of birth, following possibly dozens of generations before them, and therefore they are all "duped by Satan"?


Just as many other believers claim to have met, or heard the word of, or been touched by, their chosen god. Your claims are NO different to those of other faiths, no matter how genuinely you believe them or vehemently you state your claim.


How?


Or, brainwashing. Indoctrination.


Hang on, we can CHOOSE to have faith? I thought we didn't have free will?

So if god wishes me to have faith in Jesus I get to choose whether to accept that faith?

You've just confirmed free will. Good job.


DOUBLE predestination! Is that better than normal predestination?


Your god, in your opinion. Doesn't make it true.

What's the point in saving people with faith if you've had to bestow that faith upon them? It all just seems rather...pointless.

God: I'll create this race of humans and only save those who believe in me in the name of Christianity, and even then only those I choose to bestow with faith. The rest can do nothing to save themselves and go burn in hell. And everything is predestined from the word go.


That's not an explanation. Again I ask, if all things are predetermined and we have no free will to act as we like, and god has already chosen those he wishes to save (on no particular criteria it seems), and nothing we can do can get us into heaven - what was the point of Jesus? Did he come to save us or not - because if he did, then we must be able to determine our own fate.


Ah, I see. Evidence flying in the face of your beliefs is silly. There are plenty of examples of contradiction in the scriptures. And forgery.


None? Ever? Odd, that academics and scholars have unearthed many mistranslations, yet you choose to ignore that?

Of course there have been mistranslations - the very fact there are differing versions of the bible floating around is proof of that fact. Otherwise they would all be identical.


Really? So prove otherwise. Don't just tell me it's shaky and sit back. I've made a claim that flies in the face of your belief and you just offer a poor rebuff?


Does he deceive everyone, or just a select few?


Eve, having been commanded NOT to eat of the tree, then made the decision to then eat of the tree. A demonstration of free will. Whether influenced by 'Satan' or not, as I'm sure you'll claim.


Nope, you might want to prove them wrong.


So you keep saying.

BTW, is that you in your avatar? I assume you're modelling your hair on the Crown of Thorns?

Verse 12.14
"Behold a message will be delivered unto the donkeys ear'oles via the medium of satnav and he will be sore afraid and probably go in the wrong direction which thee will follow regardless, so sayeth the lord"

So, we don't actually get to choose. The 'choice' is made for us.

We may finally be getting somewhere.

He did say earlier that he looked to be of Jewish ethnicity but didn't elaborate, so he could have looked anything like:



or



even

Well given these kirkstaller revelations, it seems that most people who do follow a religion are getting a pretty poor deal.

They should sue God.
Billy Connelly did.

kirkstaller doesn't believe in religion, I can see why now.

Not too dissimilar, although his facial hair was shorter. The encounter happened in my back garden when I returned home from work one day. I went out to check on my brother's rabbit (he was on holiday, I was looking after it) and Jesus was just standing right in the middle of the garden. I walked up to him and we spoke for about 10 minutes. He then said he had to leave. I walked back to my conservatory and turned around. He was no longer there.



I see where you are coming from, a dry, rationalist point of view, but you must understand that experiencing God and meeting Jesus quashes any doubt whatsoever.



Firstly, may I say that many believers such as I are striving to spread the good news to every single person on the planet. The work undertaken by the TBS and those who translate scripture into every known language is vastly under-appreciated. One of the main reasons I am so patient with people on here is because I genuinely want as many people as possible to come to God.

Secondly, those that are raised in the Islam faith know about Jesus but they deny his divinity. Same goes for most Hindus and Sikhs. They have been tricked into believing lies. So, to answer your question, they have been duped, without a doubt.



The Bible tells us that imposters are very convincing and persuasive,

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves Matthew 7:15



I don't what basis the decision is made on.



No, the Holy Spirit brings us to God.



We make the decision to believe but it is God who orchestrates that decision.



No, if God wants you to be a Christian then you will be a Christian. You can kick, you can scream, but eventually you will become a Christian.



Double predestination is where God selected who would be saved in the beginning.



He is not my God, he is everyone's God.



It's all to bring glory to God. That is the point of life, after all.



That's a harsh way of summarising it.



It is an explanation, the elect are sinners too, and those sins need paying for. The punishment I was due to receive was instead received by Christ, suffering and dying on the cross. As a direct result of this I no longer have a penalty to pay. If God had not delivered justice on his Son then I would have to go to Hell.



A contradiction is only a contradiction if there is absolutely no way both statements could be true. I've yet to find any scriptures that meet this criteria.



The KJV by my bedside is the uncorrupted word of God.



Well no, seeing as two words can have the same meaning and convey the same message.



Tekton has never meant solely working with stone, it was an overarching term for a whole range of industries, including carpentry which many early Christian writers associated with Jesus.



Most but not all.



How do you know that it was a demonstration of free will? How do you know that God did not preconfigure her brain to be rebellious? This is what scripture teaches.



You are the one relying on them. You probably haven't even read them.Just have a look at this one which you've quoted:

Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God John 1:12

How does that show that we have free will? How does it refute predestination?

Here's another one you quoted:

but glory, honor and peace for everyone who does good: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. Romans 2:10

How does that support your argument?

Admittedly, a couple on your list can potentially be difficult for 5 point Calvinists who believe in limited atonement. I myself subscribe a more balanced 4 point view of limited/unlimited atonement. But seeing as you have demonstrated that you have no idea what you're talking about, I won't bore you with my theological musings.



I see you are getting personal now

So what happened to the rabbit ?

And did this bloke mention anything about having some spare tarmac after doing a local job and offering to do your drive for cash ?

Did he mention how he had learned to speak in modern English? Did he have an accent? Did he, like im sure we all imagine, have a voice like Morgan Freeman?

when he said he had to leave, did he explain where he was going and why the rush?

Also, considering the billions of people alive right now, and billions if not trillions who have lived before do you not find it quite strange that he chose to visit someone like you, who, no offence intended, has a limited amount of power? Why not Cameron or Obama or Hitler or King John or Henry the 8th or Shakespeare or the framers of US constitution, or Chairman Mao or Ghandi? Why in your back garden whilst you are tending a rabbit and not the UN? Considering that he supposedly loves us, does it not seem quite strange that he is wasting his time speaking to some no-name in kirkstall when he could, quite easily, improve the lives of billions of people drastically, and achieve his aims, by doing the same thing, simply elsewhere to someone else?

He works in mysterious ways!

What utter bollox.

First of all I offer apologies. I may well have misread or inserted a false memory on the Judeah/Bethlehem thing. You are right it doesn't mention it in our Art Bible and I can't find the other two Bibles we have so, as I can't be bothered trawling through all the others, I defer to your knowledge on that point.

But, and here's the kicker, it doesn't matter. Irrelevant of anything else they were returning to Judeah not Nazareth they traveled to Nazareth in Matthew as an after thought. Luke doesn't even have them fleeing to Egypt (note some Bibles state they fled to Isreal others name the area of Judea as Isreal) he has them return to Nazareth after Jesus' birth. He doesn't even mention the massacre of the innocents. that's one big discrepancy there. As is the location of Jesus' birth Matthew a house, Luke a manger.

On the Where did Joseph and Mary live? Again whether they lived in Bethlehem or not doesn't matter. You are right in Matthew it doesn't explicitly say where they lived, but there are many towns and cities they could've lived in; the odds are far more on the side of them not living in Nazareth as against. You have one town on your side, I have 100's. Law of chance say they didn't live in Nazareth. PS Matthew states they travelled to Nazareth to fulfill the prophecy. Odd wording if they had lived there before. Something you seem to ccompletely ignore.

Nice story about your cousin, real cute. Kinda like that Jehovas Witness who knocked on my door and said "If humans are descended from Apes why is my wife not covered with fur?". However like that it's not relevant. Last time I looked Cornwall, London and the South of England weren't an occupied warzone under military rule. Palestine at that time was. People didn't go on holiday, you couldn't even travel without the Romans permission. I'm fairly sure "We have to nip to Bethlehem in order for my wife, who is still a virgin, to give birth to the person who will overthrow you." wouldn't wash as a reason. Of course Luke got round this by inventing a "tax census" which required you to return to the town of your father's. Perhaps Matthew lackes his imagination. It isn't a Hollywood epic, the Jews were a troublesome lot for the Romans, they refused to accept their society and the idea of the Jewish god and the whole lack of statues and Tetragrammaton thing was a complete anathema to a people who had a far more personal relationship to their gods.

The Gospels are not contempary historical accounts and therefore there are holes in them. That is my issue with them. You may as well claim the plays of Shakespeare as valid historical accounts (I know some people do that, I find it equally as odd). It wouldn't help that Yeshua was a fairly common name in Isreal/Palestine, maybe they were talking about different people. It must have been difficult finding one person to pin the whole "Son of God" Romanic idea on. After all being a Jew Jesus/Yeshua wouldn't have claimed that himself during his lifetime.