Title: James Carville explains everything about Mike Johnson Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Nov 12, 2023 Author:James Carville Post Date:2023-11-12 23:48:41 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:3854 Comments:48
I believe it because of a variety of time markers in space and on earth seem to indicate it. The "time candle" quasars appear to indicate certain ages of star systems. Uranium dating seems to indicate that certain things on earth are hundreds of millions or billions of years old. Carbon-14 dating seems to indicate the age of things back to 50,000 years. Continental drift occurs at a measurable rate. Looking at the gaps between the continents, which clearly were once connected, works out to the continents having separated several hundred million years ago. Dinosaur bones, uranium dated, give us indications of life a hundred million years ago. To me, this is convincing, mutually reinforcing evidence that the world and universe are very old, so that's why I think that.
So rather than carping about it, this is what I really believe:
We are spirits that inhabit bodies. When we die we leave our bodies and go on. Ten thousand consistent NDE's tell me this. About 10% of those NDE's are hellish, and those hellish experiences tend to skew heavily towards suicides, and towards people who consciously did hellish things on earth (murderers, rapists - not people who had illicit sex).
My own contacts with God confirm this basic structure. I'll call God "the Holy Spirit" to line it up with Christian thinking, so that others can understand what I say. To me, God is God.
I don't fear death, or worry about my "salvation" (meaning, my going into the light at the end), because I don't murder people, rape them or otherwise intentionally hurt them. I don't have guilt. Sex? Men care about sex. God doesn't. I don't like the endless whining about trans- issues, but to me sex is not the issue - I care as much about actual sex as YHWH did about male masturbation (wash whatever you get spooge on with water and be unclean until evening) or female masturbation (he did not care at all).
In terms of moral judgment, I rely on God (the Holy Spirit) who speaks directly to me. I recognize that I am more violent and implacable than God. God restrains my worse nature in that respect, and I listen to him, because he's God and I know it will be better for me if I do, rather than let my own anger carry me to extremes. I am a military man by training and at heart - I want to see my enemies DEAD. It is God who reminds me that what HE wants is reconciliation, where possible.
That's my religion. I listen to God.
I note that the Shroud of Turin really does seem to show a miracle, and so I allow that Jesus probably was resurrected, and was in some sense the Son of God. So I am drawn to know what he taught. I have every church, and practically every Christian, telling me Jesus taught me what THEY thing. And when I read the Bible for greater clarity, I find eight different Jesus' in the text: Mark's, Matthew's, Luke's, John's, Revelations', Paul's, James', and Peter's. Jude doesn't really talk about Jesus, but he talks about Enoch, which should (therefore) by all rights be included in the canon.
I see the conflicts between these Jesuses, which is to say, between what these men thought about Jesus, and what they asserted was the most important thing. I think that Mark's Jesus is the closest to what Jesus himself actually SAID (it is much closer in time to him, at least). Paul never met Jesus, so what Paul is giving us is his own view of God through his encounters with the Holy Spirit.
If I want to be inspired by Jesus, I read Mark, and I look for passages in the rest that don't conflict with what Jesus says in Mark. And that's as far as I can go.
For actual day to day living, I rely on the Holy Spirit, and do what it tells me is best.
I don't fear death, or worry about my "salvation" (meaning, my going into the light at the end), because I don't murder people, rape them or otherwise intentionally hurt them.
You sound like this
And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: 5For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
You are new age who tries to incorporate his beliefs into the Bible. You take your beliefs throw out 90 plus percent of the Bible and add what you want to it.
I have faith that the evidence of my eyes, ears and mind do not deceive me, and that there may be something of value in the stories of primitive people, but not anything of scientific value.
I like Santa Claus, he's the spirit of Christmas, but I know he's not real.
The only thing I have that makes any of the stories in the Bible REAL is the Shroud of Turin, which contains a miracle, that points to Something inexplicable, supernatural, happening to Jesus' body. The Shroud points at a resurrection in great energy (maybe).
So, I have the resurrection, or the physical dissolution of his body, as the one scientifically demonstrable thing in the Bible. And THAT makes me focus on Jesus. Now, all I've got about what he said are the Gospels, and they contradict. So I look at the oldest gospel, Mark, the one closest in time to Jesus, and I read that as probably the most authentic. And I find (predictably) that the tales about Jesus get taller as we go down the line. The Jesus of Mark calls himself "Son of Man" and hides his divinity and miracles. The Jesus of John, written 70 years later, has Jesus proclaiming himself to be God, and the soldiers sent to arrest him falling back before him.
John tells a great story. So does Luke and Matthew and Mark. But they are all DIFFERENT stories, incompatible in the details. I choose Mark as the oldest and closest and probably most true.
But I only look at Mark at all, as opposed to just setting the New Testament on the same pile of tradition that I set the Old Testament, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, etc., BECAUSE of the physical evidence of the Shroud of Turin. Absent THAT, the only thing I have indicating it's true are people like Watchman, who is so unpleasant I wouldn't want to touch his "God" with a ten foot pole. Any God who causes people to be THAT NASTY to me, when I have never done them any harm at all, looks a lot more like some sort of demon from imaginary Hell. Christians very often make Christ absolutely repellent.
But I have that Shroud with that evidence of...resurrection? So I take Jesus seriously. And the spirit of God that speaks within me. And I inquire about that.
The Churches are no help. They're all out there denying the Shroud of Turin, or shrugging their shoiulders and saying it doesn't matter. But there's no science in those minds, just superstition and mean nastiness that, in early ages, burned witches and taught that blacks have the mark of cain, and all sorts of other evil superstition. Follow THAT? Fuck off.
I've got the Shroud, and I've got God, and I know there's an afterlife from 10,000 NDEs, and I know that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and atheists go there. I know that some people go to hellish afterlives too.
the Bible is not a reliable authority on this to me - too much crazy, violent and evil things in it. But it does contain accounts of Jesus, who is on the Shroud, and who appears to have been...resurrected? Bodily dissolved? Whatever happened, it was a miracle. That makes him worth study. That does no recommend other stories in the Bible to me. They are stories. If I want to know about the origins of the earth, I will look to the evidences in the earth, not stories by ancients who knew nothing at all about it.
I have faith. But not much of it in an old book that I know is full of hooey. To a Protestant like you, that means that I don't believe in God, or have Jesus, and am doomed to Hell. You believe that, for whatever reason. I don't. And I'm certainly not going to be intimidated into it by madmen like watchman.
