The scriptures teach that God calls all people unto Himself... requiring repentance toward Him and faith in Messiah, the Savior, Jesus Christ, in order to be converted and saved. Why is it so many perverted people hide behind the scripture? You would think God would strike down false prophets in the church. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKqAtUTK1v4

roadiemort wrote:
The scriptures teach that God calls all people unto Himself... requiring repentance toward Him and faith in Messiah, the Savior, Jesus Christ, in order to be converted and saved. Why is it so many perverted people hide behind the scripture? You would think God would strike down false prophets in the church. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKqAtUTK1v4 Funny how one word can introduce the 10FT. Pole rule

We live in a fallen world!

RM, another excellent question!

God has given us His Word in the scriptures. It is for each of us to read them and to ask Him for understanding and guidance from out of them for ourselves. So many are not willing to do that 'work', and would just as soon let someone else do it for them... and then they follow these maroons!

A key thing anyone is to desire and ask for is wisdom, insight and understanding into those things that are of the utmost importance. He promises to give it to those who ask... and are willing to make the effort to dig them out. The more you do so, the clearer it all becomes!

We read in the Book of Acts of those who were more noble and actually went back to their Bibles to check out what it was that the Apostle Paul was teaching/preaching to them. Imagine that! This guy was a specially chosen 'Sent One' of the Lord's, but they still went to the Word to check HIM out!!!

Hey everybody... I'm an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ... you all just listen to me, and I'll set you straight. Trust me... would I ever try to deceive you!

If it doesn't square with the Word... reject and expose such charlatans! It even tells us what they will say... and people STILL listen to them today!!! Go figure.

(Oh, and if their message seems to have an awful lot about sending them money... HELLO?!?!?!? But, don't you worry any. Cuz IF you do, God will make you rich!!! Of course!!! )

tapeit59 wrote:
I don't think this is about religion, It's about faith!

EXACTLY...I am one of the least religious people I know...but the older I get the more faith I have...I'm a big guy...in my younger days I was strong as an ox (some might say as smart as one too)...my Dad told me two things that have stuck with me all my life...first, if you get into a fight remember they always blame the big guy, no matter who started it...second, there's always going to be someone bigger and badder than you. The second thing I apply spiritually as well as physically

roadiemort wrote:
I was born into religion and spoon fed this thing that is supposed to bring people together and all I seen growing up was a cancer put in normal peoples minds that turned them into the most dishonest judgemental disagreeable people you could know. Yes I as raised in a religious fanatics home, one that was more worried what other people in the church thought of him that his family suffered because we all had to tow the fanatics line. So I left home at 17 and never visited religion since.I live by the 10 commandments and that is good enough for me.

Once again, exactly...I don't need a congregation to tell me how to live my life...I just try to be the best man I can be and I figure in the end that should be good enough

Questcap wrote:
Ah, I see. So, it would seem that you've let people put you off from what is the truth, and thrown the whole thing over for what some people did with it. I get that. I've known a good number of folks who've pretty much done the same.

Living by the 10 Commandments is all well and good, but they are also the Final Exam, and what we will be judged by. Did you ever take what wasn't yours... that's a breaking of the 8th Commandment. Ever told an untruth? That's a breaking of the 9th, and so on.

It wasn't meant to be so much our rule for life, but the measure of how far short we've fallen. An honest examination usually reveals that we have each broken all 10 of them!

Being good enough for you, may not be... good enough for the One Who judges. And, that's the real point.

This isn't about rules, do's & don'ts... it's not about Commandments, or what's good enough for you, me or anybody else.

While those are there, and there's a partial truth to all that... it's about a relationship that was broken, and how that the means of restoring it has been made, and is open and available to everyone who is willing to receive and enter into it.

It's a totally voluntary thing, and ought never to be put on anyone else by any means of others' machinations.

And, Bruiser... I mean no offense, but, I know both Darwin and real science well... and, Darwin was entirely mistaken in his theorizing. Evolution never happened, and, in fact, can't happen. Genetics was unknown in 1859, and had it been known, he would have been forced, by scientific observation, to alter his views. Any amateur study of genetics will conclusively demonstrate, by the very scientific means that he outlined in his own book, that he was in error. Evolution has NO mechanism by which it can even theorize that it ever took place... and, from that which is now known of genetics, it never did take place, and, as best anyone can determine at this point in time... it cannot.

Darwin's theory as to how he thought it might have taken place has already been conclusively proven to be false.

I disagree...theoretically, the exercise of free will is bound to get us all into trouble...an imperfect mind will always misjudge, misinterpret and misbehave...I've never met anyone with a perfect mind. That is why the concept of repentance goes hand in hand with free will...we all do things that are wrong or bad or ill conceived but we can, ultimately, be forgiven if we are truly repentant for those failings. Thus, trying to live a good life and being truly sorry for our failings at such is, in my humble opinion, "good enough"...at least it better be or I am up Shit's Creek

Jesus was not crucified because He taught the we should try to live a good life, and be truly sorry for our failings.

It may be perfectly good enough in your humble opinion, but I just want you to give consideration to this... The Biggest Guy says your opinion, and mine, don't matter to Him. He's already given us His 'opinion', and at some point in time... we need to get to that place where we 'agree' with Him! When we get there, there is an appropriate response that He would like from the truly penitent one, so that He may fulfill His promise to do that which He promised He would do for such a one.

I come back to the first issue of righteousness... we all know that there has to be this sense of good enough, but it seems that we are each content to hold our own opinion as to what good enough is... and, of course, we all also hope that our good enough measures up, and is... well, good enough.

Is it? If you don't know how much good is required, how can you know whether you are good enough, or not?

The Final Exam is already in the Book... have you taken it yet? It's a pass/fail test, and there's no grading on a curve!

Questcap wrote:
Darwin had theorized that evolution took place by the tiniest of little alterations over the course of countless cumulative generations. He did not know of genetics, and he could not have known that every aspect of the life of every living cell within every living thing in determined from its first living function, until it dies, by instruction derived from the encoded information within DNA. No code, no instruction means no function... and, no chance or possibility of evolutionary change. If it is not in the code, it isn't going to happen. End-of-story.

For evolution to take place, new, massive quantities of new code must somehow be introduced, and included within the existing code. No one knows how that could happen, where new code could come from, how it could enter in, or how it could be incorporated... mutations don't do anything like that. A mutation is always only the corruption of some of the already existing code, and always results in a net loss of some of the useful information.

Evolution has NO mechanism by which it can be physically explained as ever having taking place. It's not so much disproven, if that was what I had said, as it has never had anything approximating any adequate explanation as to how it could have ever happened.

We are told everything evolved, but they have absolutely no explanation by which they can tell us how they believe it happened. Everything known about genetics to date says that it did not, and cannot, happen. There is no known, or even theorized, means or mechanism for it.

You know that since Darwin was published, they've tried to support Darwin... but, by means of their research, and the later discovery of genetics, and the explosion of understanding in that field, what they really found... was that Darwin could not have been correct.

I may or may not speak for others here, but some of us really wish you would leave items like this off the table. You know a hell of a lot more about bikes than I do and I enjoy learning from you, but when you start to debate science there are people like me who nearly hurt themselves from rolling their eyes so hard. I would never debate another man's religion or beliefs unless asked to, as those are fundamentally your right to believe. But when you bring scientifically inaccurate information into a conversation and treat it as fact, all because you read it in some 40-odd books whose authors' had an agenda to prove their religious explanation trumped that of science, just know that some of us typically make a noise and move on with our day.

I think a mistake you're making is you're coming at the subject assuming that an evolutionary biologist is going about his job in an attempt to disprove religion. When in reality, most scientists will admit to being believers, and many are going about their daily work attempting to reconcile their beliefs with the physical evidence they are attempting to explain. Our evolutionary biologist in this example might very well believe that human life is in no way a random circumstance of accidental mutations, and might believe that the hand of his Creator guided the process. But this scientist can see the fossil record quite clearly, and "believes" that other earth sciences are doing their job correctly (i.e.; geology, physics, astronomy, what have you), and therefore is looking for the physical and scientific explanation to account for exactly how God created man over billions of years out of primordial ooze. In other words, they might believe in intelligent intent, but that God also works through physical and reality-based processes to affect His will.

But when you come at it from the premise that only one book in the world is historically and scientifically accurate, you're going to lose that battle. You'll never believe you have lost, which is great for you! I hope you live out the rest of your days overwhelmingly convinced that you are literally smarter than every scientist on earth because you believe the earth is only 6000 years old and therefore none of them are anything but fools and frauds.

If you're going to deny the Theory of Evolution and Plate Tectonics (the theory that over billions of years the earth's crust shifts and is the basis for most geology), I would also like to see you deny the Theory of Gravity, Heliocentrism (earth orbits the sun), Quantum Theory, General Relativity, and actually most physical sciences. In fact, there's absolutely no way you can believe that science can accurately describe the combustion of fuel vapor and oxygen in a vacuum based carburetor, so any further discussion on how fuel and air mix to combust can only be attributed to "because it's God's Will that it happen." Any attempt to explain it mathematically has to be immediately thrown out, because what do scientists know, right?

I think about it this way: There are 4,200 some odd religions in the world, according to Google. I can't pretend to know which of the 4,200 actually got it right. Thanks to 12 years of Catholic school, I tend to doubt its the Catholics. Every single religion has a different explanation for how the universe, the earth, animals, and people came to be. A fundamentalist adherent of any one of those religions will fervently believe that their own religion's explanation is the ONLY correct explanation. But every evolutionary biologist on earth, no matter if they are Baptist, Catholic, Muslim, Confucian, or whatever, "believes" the same theory of evolution, just as every physicist from every religious background, no matter what language they speak, "believes" Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. They might be working as hard as they can to disprove it, because that's what science does, but they don't work to disprove it with an agenda, unless, of course, they have an agenda. And then the rest of the scientific community should, and will, treat their results as highly suspect. Which is why the only "scientists" "disproving" evolution also very coincidentally happen to be associated with some creationist or fundamentalist religion looking to prove a point which just so happens to coincide with their own beliefs. It would mean a lot if a dispassionate atheist came out in support of creationism as science, but I haven't seen that yet.

Anyhoot, I know full well you didn't bring some of this up in this discussion, and that I'm reaching into older debates you've fostered here for the geology and 6,000 year old earth bits. My opinion probably doesn't matter to you much, and it shouldn't really. The only reason I'm speaking up at all is because I honestly can't believe we're still having this debate in the 21st century, and it drives reasonable, rational people like myself insane that we have to debate this in front of school boards with well-meaning but ultimately ignorant people who want to foist their beliefs onto our children.

Welp my entire coffee break is over. It's been real, and I'm going to disappear back into the hole I've been in for the last 6 months. Be safe and keep the shiny side up.

Well said.