truthislight:

REPENTANCE IS DIFFERENT FROM BEING 'BORN AGAIN'.

alexleo:

I said it before and I'm saying it again- a robber(whether armed or not is not a Christian). No amount of tithing can make a robber a christian. You don't even know what it means to be a christian.

InesQor: *Yawns and stretches on thread*

PastorAIO:


Ol boi, you talk talk talk talk u, still you no address the points wey the guy dey make. The OP was not about his credentials as a pastor, or deep believer or whatever. Whether or not you are satisfied with the depth of his belief that doesn't have any bearing on the points he is making.

By God dabbling, I understood that he was talking about God getting involved in people's lives. full stop. You seem to understand something else by 'dabbling'. Almost like it's an insulting word to you. Does god get involved in people's lives or not? If he does then how do you explain the issues that he then brought up.

I believe that the issues that he addresses here are implied by Jesus too here:

43Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. 44But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; 45That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. 46For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? 47And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? 48Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
Matthew 5.

The fact is that our fortunes in this life seem to be totally random. God does not seem to discriminate in favour of those who are believers or just.

The question is, if some people experience favour and others do not, what is the reason behind it. Is it because 'God has a plan for them' implying that he doesn't have a plan for the others? If this is your concept of God that he has a bias in favour of certain people then the facts apparent to us contradict the existence of a God thus conceptualised. Furthermore it contradicts the understanding of God presented in this chapter to us by Jesus.

Image123:

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the Bible teaches or explains about God's mercy/mercies. The Bible teaches that everything we are permitted to do is by God's mercies. That is why it is said that you are alive by God's mercies, and whatever else you do or are permitted to do is just God's mercy. Having children, joy, promotion, health, whatever good thing is by God's mercy which is upon the just and the unjust. You shouldn't even have been born in the first place, according to the Bible that is. So that you are even born, or see a new day, or are chanced to repent, or have some 'hope' of going to Heaven is extra.

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If you care to understand what i posted about perspectives, the veil of undue emotionalism and sentimentality would be dropped and progress made. There is more to life than life(physical) itself. All that favour and mercy shown on the just and the unjust are little compared to God's greater plan and blessing. Being saved from accident, material success and bodily health are child's play compared to God's riches in glory. What God offers the just includes Eternal life and resurrection, Peace that passes understanding, Joy unspeakable and full of glory, Holiness the divine nature. These are God's real gifts and they are not a dime a dozen, or for every random fellow.
1Co 15:19 If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

The blessings of the just or righteous believer are not limited or the same to just this physical life.

PastorAIO: "I've been a deep believer my whole life. 18 years as a Southern Baptist. More than 40 years as a mainline Protestant. I'm an ordained pastor. But it's just stopped making sense to me. You see people doing terrible things in the name of religion, and you think: 'Those people believe just as strongly as I do. They're just as convinced as I am.' And it just doesn't make sense anymore. It doesn't make sense to believe in a God that dabbles in people's lives. If a plane crashes, and one person survives, everyone thanks God. They say: 'God had a purpose for that person. God saved her for a reason!' Do we not realize how cruel that is? Do we not realize how cruel it is to say that if God had a purpose for that person, he also had a purpose in killing everyone else on that plane? And a purpose in starving millions of children? A purpose in slavery and genocide? For every time you say that there's a purpose behind one person's success, you invalidate billions of people. You say there is a purpose to their suffering. And that's just cruel."

http://www.humansofnewyork.com/post/90268158526/ive-been-a-deep-believer-my-whole-life-18-years

Please let's discuss this.

mnwankwo:
The purpose for which God - the creator created and imbued us with the talents or faculties is for us to find supreme joy and radiant happiness. The ultimate goal of spiritual evolution is to transform the talents inherent in the spirit (man) into abilities. Once these abilities become alive in a man, they will naturally place him or her in sync with the power of God, the creator. A man who have established this link with GOD will sense inner happiness and supreme joy. Whether such a man is rich or poor, healthy or sick, he bears peace within himself for the power of GOD to which he is linked will show him with clinical precision the how and why of his present situation. God doesn't will suffering or evil for any of his creatures, Suffering and evil simply arose as a consequence of misapplication of the power of GOD by those creatures that are blessed with the ability of free will. Man who is spirit is one of such creatures.

The problem with many people as the look at events in their own life and the world is that they look at externals and judge with only the physical faculties. Like the quotation in the opening post, they cannot find sense in what is happening in the world and question why God allow all these evil and injustice. A subplot to this assertion is that in their view, God doesn't exist if these terrible things happen to people. The origin of what many people are experiencing does not lie in the form or physical manifestation of the experience but in spiritual acts of free will which the person is not even conscious in the earthly sense. The origin of these spiritual decisions lie in most cases in a previous earth-life or from decisions taken in a non-physical plane. As the Igbo`s say, if you ask a man who didn't witness when a corpse was buried to exhume a corpse, he will start digging from the knee (wrong position). Before we were conceived, we are already in existence and we will be in existence after the so called physical death. In reality we have been in existence for millions of years both in physical and non-physical planes and with multifarious sojourns on earth (reincarnation). These experiences in various planes is one single continuum, and these experiences which are a consequence of our free free will form the tapestry of our fate. Billions of new threads are added to this tapestry of fate every hour as we make decisions and these new threads affect the sound and color of the tapestry of fate. In a single earth-life, only some few threads have ripened for harvest, and thus only the consequences of a small section are experienced in one earth life. Now a man who judges only by the faculties of the brain do not see the entire tapestry of fate, do not even seen the few threads that has ripened for harvest, but only see the physical manifestation of these few threads. Without knowing how the come about, how they were formed, how the matured and ripened for harvest, they stand confused at the fruit since they are not aware in the earthly sense of who, where, when the seeds were sowed. If this harvest is bad, they say it is evil and if it is good, they say its providence. But the reality is that God does not send blessing or curse to anyone, rather his adamantine laws (the will of GOD) return to each individual, groups, nations, the entire humanity the fruits of the seeds that they sowed. The adamantine laws of GOD are inherently imbued with the twin attributes of love and justice. Therefor no injustice can be found in the manifestation of the divine will. Whatever happens to us is a consequence of our free will. It can be (i) the fruits of the seeds we sowed, (ii) fruits of the seeds that others sowed but we accepted prenatally to experience them for the purpose of our own development, as a mission karma or as a result of accepting to experience on earth where both good and evil dwell side by side.

It is still a bit of surprise to me that some men think they will enter heaven with national flags or religious anthems. You religion, sex, status, nationality, etc is of no consequence to the laws of GOD, rather it is the activities of your spirit that the laws of GOD animate and which in turn will either lead one to the luminous kingdom of GOD or propel one to the realm of darkness and eventual spiritual death. Our motive, words, imagination, thoughts and intuition are what count before the laws of GOD. What a man sows, he reaps and his religious or nationalistic beliefs will not alter that. A christian who sows yam will harvest yam, the same goes for m.oslems, Buddhists, atheist, etc. A murderer remains a murderer irrespective of his religious beliefs. An act of genuine love remains the same and it is immaterial whether the perpetrator of such an act is a christian, m.oslem, Jew or an atheist. Look around and you will clearly see that good and bad things happen to people of different religions and beliefs. This should already be a pointer that the laws of GOD are quite different from what many think it is, and that these laws have nothing to do with the cloak of religious beliefs or affiliation. Stay blessed

DeepSight: ^^^ Sir, Don't waste ya time.

mnwankwo:
The purpose for which God - the creator created and imbued us with the talents or faculties is for us to find supreme joy and radiant happiness. The ultimate goal of spiritual evolution is to transform the talents inherent in the spirit (man) into abilities. Once these abilities become alive in a man, they will naturally place him or her in sync with the power of God, the creator. A man who have established this link with GOD will sense inner happiness and supreme joy.

Verbose nonsense.

Of course, Deep Sight agrees. The more woo woo involved, the happier deep sight is.
I wonder if you two reincarnated as mountain goats in your previous lives.

mnwankwo:



Hi Martian. Thank you for your comment. Ofcourse, I do not share your sentiment. But you are welcome to comment or even mock my posts. As always stay blessed.

@ mnwankwo

As always I enjoy reading your posts. Long time since though. Nice to see you again.

I often find myself... almost agreeing with you, but not quite. I start out thinking, YES he's got it!! This part I absolutely love:"Man is that he might have joy"

Then suddenly I'm not quite sure anymore. I don't discard anything you say, mind you. I simply have, as yet, to embrace all of it. I do like the way you think though. We are all in different places spiritually, and I can appreciate most views.

I wasn't going to share this outside my diary, but what the heck..,people think I'm crazy anyway.


https://www.nairaland.com/1342944/tex-talk/2#24499334


As always... A pleasure.

mnwankwo:

Hi Martian. Thank you for your comment. Ofcourse, I do not share your sentiment. But you are welcome to comment or even mock my posts. As always stay blessed.

mnwankwo:
Before we were conceived, we are already in existence and we will be in existence after the so called physical death. In reality we have been in existence for millions of years both in physical and non-physical planes and with multifarious sojourns on earth (reincarnation)

DeepSight:

Class..

mnwankwo:

Hi texanomaly. Thank you for your kind words. Nice to read from you too.



It is essential that you follow your own intuition. Thus if your spirit do not agree with some of the things that I say, then, reject them even if they are the truth. However, If your spirit is unsure, then do not ponder or analyse. Simply switch off all brain activity and your spirit will gain connection to the power of GOD and in this connection you will sense and know the Truth.

mnwankwo:
I could not access the link you provided because it seem the thread is locked. As always, stay blessed.

Dulcet7:
A human's true religious objective is to achieve maximum efficiency in all spheres of life (there is no religion in death).

Efficiency can only be maximized according to the manufacturer's standards, and this is where God comes in.

By the etymology of "re-ligion", it attempts to "bind back together" (establish 100% efficiency by design standards).

This process of "Unit testing" is the common object which can take various courses called religion. The object is same, but the objective is often lost in the excitement.

For every religion, one should be able to ask, 'Does this really increase my efficiency as a creation of God?' i.e. Am I 'helping' God do what he planned when he created me and everything else?

This is why I have little respect for so-called religious persons who have no respect for nature in itself, or for those who use the name of religion to deprive others of their lives and belongings.In either case, they are not only failing at their inaugural objectives, they are destroying other Creations' efficiencies as well.

Our sole purpose is to maximize the efficiency of our lives' design. Jesus came to show us a tangible form and he gave himself up in the process because it was necessary and THAT was what maximised his own efficiency (he is totally respected across Eastern and Western religions), but I assure you there are some people who have not seen or heard this tangible form and yet they are somehow doing things right!

Dulcet7: Religion is like various means of transport to explore a land. Some people have horses, other have trains, planes, cars, others are strolling on foot, some are jogging. When you are travelling to a destination and the destination matters, then speed or transport method will matter. But when you need to explore, you can go slowly or speed through - your means of transport does not matter - everyone has a chance to enjoy the exploration one way or the other. It is not how fast you get there - in fact there is no "there" to go to in the experience of salvation - it is the experience itself that counts - so this is why I said on another thread that there is no RIGHT religion and there is no WRONG religion. All we have are right hearts and wrong hearts. Compassionate hearts that predominantly love inside out and selfish hearts that are predominantly wicked inside out. Some religions create fanatics out of people and they start focusing on the religion rather than their salvation within the religion - which is the most paramount thing. One should never allow his or her views on religion to harm another person or distract or destroy their own walk of salvation.

Dulcet7: The journey called Salvation means an exemption. Exemption from what? From wickedness. Wickedness is the only form of evil that exists. It manifests in various shades: greed, jealousy, hatred, envy, pride - all boil down to wickedness and the only cure to all of them is love - when applied to the person from inside-out till salvation begins in that person too.

Dulcet7: Salvation is progressing when the person gets more exempted from wickedness. This does not mean wickedness does not [b]flow [/b]from outside-in, but it doesnt [b]flow [/b]from inside-out. [b]Flow [/b]meaning a consistent and continuous pattern. Outside-in e.g. "bad things" happening in the world to "good people"; "Inside-out" e.g. thoughts, intentions and actions that are not in line with love. Your outside-in experience of wickedness is someone else's inside-out manifestation of wickedness. It is outside-in because it comes from the outside of your heart and attempts to harden your heart against love and become wicked like it.

God's concern is not in the outward actions of people but in their inner world, the impulses that lead to those actions. God's concern is the heart of a man and not his/her religion. It is the impulses coming from inside-out that comprise aspects of his salvation and that is what God wants to know about.

During salvation, wickedness in the heart is continuously replaced by love and there will always be traces of wickedness left but the love will cover it up unless the person deliberately decides to frustrate his own salvation by emphasizing the wickedness. Wickedness is like poison - just a little in a heart filled with love - if emphasized upon - can ruin the entire heart.

InesQor:
I don't believe Jesus was created by God the Father. Rather, the pre-incarnate Jesus (i.e. Jesus before he came to be born on earth) was the method by which other things were created (in my mind, I think of it like how you use a formula to solve an equation / fix a problem). In your Yoruba religion, a close analogy might be the Ori, but more like an Ori for ALL of creation.

macof:
I personally like this analogy but what does it have to do with a Jewish man??
Ori by Yoruba philosophy is the reason for existence not just one individual...Ori concept is a vast study
Ori is simply consciousness, not only of you or I but the entire universe.

macof:
Sorry for the late reply.
Before I take this against christianity, is this what you just believe or what the Bible tells you.
If it's through your knowledge of the Bible, pls provide Bible passages to support this

macof: I personally like this analogy but what does it have to do with a Jewish man??
Ori by Yoruba philosophy is the reason for existence not just one individual...Ori concept is a vast study

macof:
Ori is simply consciousness, not only of you or I but the entire universe.
It is by Ori that Olodumare initiated Akamara
Kind of like "the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God"

macof:
God (Olodumare) is literally everything, I am in God as it is in me, but the beginning started with Ori. So Ori has always been since the beginning with Olodumare but at a point, Ori was used to perform something resourceful or something resourceful was finally achieved
Another question for you..
Do u consider "the word" literal as Genesis 1 denotes?

PastorAIO: Please, if I may ....



Arjuna.: Lord! of the men who serve Thee- true in heart-
As God revealed; and of the men who serve,
Worshipping Thee Unrevealed, Unbodied, Far,
Which take the better way of faith and life?
Krishna.: Whoever serve Me- as I show Myself-
Constantly true, in full devotion fixed,
Those hold I very holy. But who serve-
Worshipping Me The One, The Invisible,
The Unrevealed, Unnamed, Unthinkable,
Uttermost, All-pervading, Highest, Sure-
Who thus adore Me, mastering their sense,
Of one set mind to all, glad in all good,
These blessed souls come unto Me.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/gita/bg12.htm

The translation that I have at home which I can't find online reads like this:
Arjuna: My Lord! Which are the better devotees who worship thee, those who try to know Thee as a Personal God, or those who worship Thee as impersonal and indestructible.

mnwankwo:
The purpose for which God - the creator created and imbued us with the talents or faculties is for us to find supreme joy and radiant happiness. The ultimate goal of spiritual evolution is to transform the talents inherent in the spirit (man) into abilities. Once these abilities become alive in a man, they will naturally place him or her in sync with the power of God, the creator. A man who have established this link with GOD will sense inner happiness and supreme joy. Whether such a man is rich or poor, healthy or sick, he bears peace within himself for the power of GOD to which he is linked will show him with clinical precision the how and why of his present situation. God doesn't will suffering or evil for any of his creatures, Suffering and evil simply arose as a consequence of misapplication of the power of GOD by those creatures that are blessed with the ability of free will. Man who is spirit is one of such creatures.

The problem with many people as the look at events in their own life and the world is that they look at externals and judge with only the physical faculties. Like the quotation in the opening post, they cannot find sense in what is happening in the world and question why God allow all these evil and injustice. A subplot to this assertion is that in their view, God doesn't exist if these terrible things happen to people. The origin of what many people are experiencing does not lie in the form or physical manifestation of the experience but in spiritual acts of free will which the person is not even conscious in the earthly sense. The origin of these spiritual decisions lie in most cases in a previous earth-life or from decisions taken in a non-physical plane. As the Igbo`s say, if you ask a man who didn't witness when a corpse was buried to exhume a corpse, he will start digging from the knee (wrong position). Before we were conceived, we are already in existence and we will be in existence after the so called physical death. In reality we have been in existence for millions of years both in physical and non-physical planes and with multifarious sojourns on earth (reincarnation). These experiences in various planes is one single continuum, and these experiences which are a consequence of our free free will form the tapestry of our fate. Billions of new threads are added to this tapestry of fate every hour as we make decisions and these new threads affect the sound and color of the tapestry of fate. In a single earth-life, only some few threads have ripened for harvest, and thus only the consequences of a small section are experienced in one earth life. Now a man who judges only by the faculties of the brain do not see the entire tapestry of fate, do not even seen the few threads that has ripened for harvest, but only see the physical manifestation of these few threads. Without knowing how the come about, how they were formed, how the matured and ripened for harvest, they stand confused at the fruit since they are not aware in the earthly sense of who, where, when the seeds were sowed. If this harvest is bad, they say it is evil and if it is good, they say its providence. But the reality is that God does not send blessing or curse to anyone, rather his adamantine laws (the will of GOD) return to each individual, groups, nations, the entire humanity the fruits of the seeds that they sowed. The adamantine laws of GOD are inherently imbued with the twin attributes of love and justice. Therefor no injustice can be found in the manifestation of the divine will. Whatever happens to us is a consequence of our free will. It can be (i) the fruits of the seeds we sowed, (ii) fruits of the seeds that others sowed but we accepted prenatally to experience them for the purpose of our own development, as a mission karma or as a result of accepting to experience on earth where both good and evil dwell side by side.

It is still a bit of surprise to me that some men think they will enter heaven with national flags or religious anthems. You religion, sex, status, nationality, etc is of no consequence to the laws of GOD, rather it is the activities of your spirit that the laws of GOD animate and which in turn will either lead one to the luminous kingdom of GOD or propel one to the realm of darkness and eventual spiritual death. Our motive, words, imagination, thoughts and intuition are what count before the laws of GOD. What a man sows, he reaps and his religious or nationalistic beliefs will not alter that. A christian who sows yam will harvest yam, the same goes for m.oslems, Buddhists, atheist, etc. A murderer remains a murderer irrespective of his religious beliefs. An act of genuine love remains the same and it is immaterial whether the perpetrator of such an act is a christian, m.oslem, Jew or an atheist. Look around and you will clearly see that good and bad things happen to people of different religions and beliefs. This should already be a pointer that the laws of GOD are quite different from what many think it is, and that these laws have nothing to do with the cloak of religious beliefs or affiliation. Stay blessed

macof:

Sorry for the late reply.
Before I take this against christianity, is this what you just believe or what the Bible tells you.

If it's through your knowledge of the Bible, pls provide Bible passages to support this


I personally like this analogy but what does it have to do with a Jewish man??
Ori by Yoruba philosophy is the reason for existence not just one individual...Ori concept is a vast study

Ori is simply consciousness, not only of you or I but the entire universe.
It is by Ori that Olodumare initiated Akamara

Kind of like "the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God"

God (Olodumare) is literally everything, I am in God as it is in me, but the beginning started with Ori. So Ori has always been since the beginning with Olodumare but at a point, Ori was used to perform something resourceful or something resourceful was finally achieved


Another question for you..
Do u consider "the word" literal as Genesis 1 denotes?

InesQor:

Interesting quote from Krishna. Not sure if my interpretation is fit but it sounds like this moves to suggest that it is better for one to distance one self from a form of "idolatry" in worship (basically saying it's possible to worship in truth and yet be in idolatry because one is focusing on the wrong elements / attributes rather than the very essence of truth itself).

I remember in my comparative studies on religion that Krishna, Buddha and Christ are referred to as the "Suns of God". Of the three, my knowledge on Krishna is the most sparse. I will take up some further reading one of these days.

davidylan: I wonder if the folks here took out time to see Germany annihilate Brazil last night... take a chill pill folks.

PastorAIO:
I was going to address this more thoroughly but then I got distracted by what was happening on the tv screens. A whole Brazil!!! Haba!!!
Now I've forgotten what it was that I wanted to say about the post.

Sarassin: From what he (krishna) says I don't really get the distinction between how he regards those that worship him as a seen personality and those that worship him as something abstract and unseen./quote]

There really is no distinction as such. However in order to truly approach "Blue Man" one must remove all inclination of the subjective "I".

Kay17:

In other words, human suffering is not in God's plan, since the plan is to produce supreme joy and happiness whereas human suffering is the direct opposite to that. Yet without the prelife actions which you believe sufficiently explains the suffering and evil we see today, you would agree with most atheists like Seun that meaningless suffering and evil is an antithesis to a loving God. Right?

PastorAIO:
From what he (krishna) says I don't really get the distinction between how he regards those that worship him as a seen personality and those that worship him as something abstract and unseen.
However of all the deities in this world I find that Krishna ought to be the most interesting to Christians. The parallels to christianity are just so astounding. I remember as a kid I was sitting next to my mother and she was reading a book about Krishna when she mused to herself aloud that Could it be that the Krishna cult was a derivation of christianity and that Krishna is just a different pronounciation for Christ. What she said stuck with me. Of course after the death of Jesus christianity spread abroad. We have the story of how it spread westwards into the rest of the Roman empire. But it also spread east. The political situation was different in the east. East of the Roman empire was the Persian Empire. It is on record that Christianity also had an impact there. It was also a time of great religious upheavals in the persian empire too. And similar to constantine and Theodosius' Empire there was a need to sort it out and reinvent the state religion. An orthodoxy needed to be established.
In the Denkart (a persian religious book) we are told what happened.

The King of Kings, Shapur, son of Hormizd summoned men from all lands to an unprejudiced disputation to examine and instigate all creeds. After Aturpat had been vindicated by the consistency of his argument, he issued a declaration before all those representatives of the different sects, doctrines, and schools in this wise: "Now that we have seen the Religion upon earth, we shall not tolerate Falsse religions and we shall be exceeding zealous (in intolerance)", and so he did.
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eJw3AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=denkart+aturpat&source=bl&ots=Ynl0ojYduO&sig=TM13MUOvRklsYQt9kUgP8Y0Fw0w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=cQq9U8uaCcOP7Ab3kIGYCQ&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=denkart%20aturpat&f=false
I would imagine that in the persecution that ensued many christians would have fled, most likely into India because it was, and probably still is to this day, the most tolerant place for all kinds of diverse religions. Perhaps the Krishna cult is just another form of christianity that simply evolved in a different direction from the christianity of the Roman empire.
Check out this Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6J8hPr58Qc
I went along with this hypothesis for a while until one day it dawned on me that the cult of Krishna preceded Christianity by about 4 or 5 centuries if not more.

davidylan: I wonder if the folks here took out time to see Germany annihilate Brazil last night... take a chill pill folks.