Commandments?

[Eric the Green]

(08-29-2018, 02:16 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(08-29-2018, 11:48 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Cheap grace is a mistake. I find it hard to believe that God would damn to Hell some unobjectionable person (except for rejecting Jesus) who died in a Nazi murder camp for being Jewish, and then forgiving some Nazi war criminal who 'gave his soul to Jesus' while standing on the platform of the gallows for putting Zyklon-B into the gas chamber.

So is Calvinist predestination, the idea that if you are destined to Heaven, then wonderful things will happen all your life. No -- one is simply lucky or good at what one does.

Maybe I give God less credit than I might, but unforgivable sins, like many committed by Nazis, Stalinists, Ba'athists, and ISIS exist. I certainly don't want to go where the Nazis are.

Yep.  The lack of logic and self contradiction of many organized religions is a good part of why I describe myself as a devout agnostic.  I was brought up Catholic, ran with the Born Again crowd during my college years, and tried Neo paganism and Taoism as an adult.  It is not that I didn't try or don't care.

Or maybe you gave up too soon?

It's yours and anyone's business what they believe and think. Good ethics can be found in many places, and the best of these principles have much in common anyway. Myself, I don't think the obvious errors in the thoughts about the divine among many religious writers and leaders, have any effect on the reality or not of what we call "God." Nor is it "God's" fault if we mistake a convenient image or myth of God for the reality. 

This is only about our own human evolution of consciousness. What we need, I think, is higher consciousness; though I myself only see a glimpse of it enough to know that it's there, and that the usual debates among those who are not accustomed to considering mysticism, leave out what is closest to reality, and engage in debate about the old false authorities, scriptures, preachers, myths and images instead.