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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IN_GOD_I_TRUST who wrote (21026)	10/10/1998 1:50:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

Bullshit Steve. The bible is full of errors. There is no proof it is God's word. There is plenty of proof it is mans. Your problem is you. If you want to improve Steve better do it yourself. You haven't the slightest concept of the real pagan truths that were historicised by the bible. And too darn stubborn and lazy to find out the truth. We are not born in sin. That is an outright lie. We are born ignorant but with a brain to reason & learn. It is up to each person to develop his assests instead of begging for someone here or in the nether world to do it for him. Morality is sure not not taught in God's "word." The pornography and eroticism of the old testament is just as bad as an adult bookstore. Rewarding God's people for sneaking, lying, killing, polygamy, and screwing captive women and children sure wasn't heaven for the victims. If that is your God you go worship him and I will try to show others it is a lie not God's word. Want me to send you some daily porn here from the old testament? Women ought to take control and kill this false teaching and take their equal place with men in property rights, worship houses, and employment. They especially need to refuse to bear children for a person who is not qualified as a sharing parent to tend the children and share household duties. This crap about wives submit is mighty convenient. No wonder you don't want to learn the truth. It's also convenient to be able to get drunk, be unfaithful to your wife and abuse her so badly. All you have to to get by with it is say God forgive me in the name of Jesus. Psychology will tell you we become what we think we are. And then you have the gall to take a child to church to hear constantly he is a sinner? PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Try teaching your child b right living and you will have better children than all the churches that ever existed.

To: IN_GOD_I_TRUST who wrote (21026)	10/10/1998 2:05:00 PM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

Futility of Prayer The great basic issue in all this must be faced and it will not be squarely met until we throw off the false persuasions of the religionist and bluntly put the hard question: what right does the human violator of life's good laws have to expect healing from sources outside himself? Life has remarkably equipped its creatures with self-healing powers. The exigencies of existence are designed to develop the creature's power to use those resources. If religion persists in its protestations of the right to be healed extraneously, then we must sadly bewail the wreckage of the moral balance in the life of the world. We have eventually to make our choice between these two positions. Are we going to learn to love the law and seek happiness in obedience to it; or insist on our right to violate the law and then run to the miracle-man to evade its consequences? If by miracle we can dodge the consequences, the moral order of life is shot to bits. Happily for man it must be true that no law of life can be violated with impunity. if mortals can commit crime against nature and then run to deity or his self-constituted trustees and beg off, or pay off, the just consequences, where would be the equity of the universe? That was the issue that was genuine and robust enough to inspire and embolden the Protestant Reformation. Is it not time that Protestants themselves--and all others--rise to protest the sly, subtle, insidious continuance of the same treacherous influence masked behind the disguise of prayer and healing? The great physician sent to heal the ills of mortal man is the God-power in man himself. Man must heal himself, through the Godhood that is in him. The next count in the case against the overweening assumptions of the healing cult is the fact that, if such healing were possible, life under law would be deprived of its educative power and function. This would spell infinite tragedy, again upsetting the moral stability of the world. Life can not take us ahead unless it can teach and enlighten us. Only by burning it upon our consciousness the consequences of our thinking and our action can life instruct us in finality. If any influence interposes to cut the link between action and consequence, nature can not educate us. Her pedagogical power is snatched away from her hands, her rod of discipline is stolen. She can not make her demonstrations to us. She loses control of her school and her pupils riot in disorder. They find they do not have to obey her. Again chaos supervenes. But nature can not resign her teaching prerogative and stay in command. Is life to surrender to the caprice of human nature and a fictitious religious magic? It is unthinkable; yet the temple of all religious faith, prayer and healing rests on this impossible foundation. Never has there been enough competent mental power exercised in the counsels of cult religion to discern the logical anomaly of holding up the claims made for prayer and healing beside the doctrine of strict justice in the cosmic realm. Justice and true healing can not be thought incompatible; yet they have been set almost in opposition to each other. What must be seen is that healing, if it comes truly and is not sheer mesmerism, must come in ways that are wholly in accord with natural law. Nature must be made healing's ally, and not be put in the position of an enemy to be overcome. It can be counted on as next to certain that a cure which is superinduced from without registers no victory, spells no gain, records no progress for the individual concerned. There can be no real vicariousness in the world of life. (The popular idea of vicarious atonement is only an exotericized distortion of the true esoteric sense involved.) No unit of life can perform the work of evolution for another, for only the one undergoing the strains and stresses can reap the instruction. If an individualized center of life's energy does not register its own gains, they simply are not made. Partiality and injustice would ride in on the life economy if it were otherwise. If one be healed by the offices of another, it will fade out and a true healing will still have to be made by the entity itself. It is admissible to think that others may help us to learn how to make our own gains. But only the unit itself can do the work. Modern psychoanalytic understanding and technique have now gone far to introduce into this vast field the principles of a definite psychological science. The good effect already has been to bring the whole range of what were heretofore considered special religious phenomena out into the open world of purely secular character. There is nothing distinctly religious about them. They can be subsumed under the laws governing the operation of consciousness. It is to be hoped that the further perfecting of knowledge and technique in psychology will diminish the area still persistently allotted to religious magic and increase the area of known secular science. The gains registered in the decrease of hysteria and belief in angelic or demoniac supernaturalism and in the increase of sanity and balance in religion will be incalculable. There is, of course, a spiritual healing that is the thing religion should have inculcated instead of the hybrid and spurious cult persuasions that have hallucinated the masses. But this genuine cult achievement demands the knowledge and technical skill of a stout-hearted and confident humanism, a sound faith in man himself as the agent plenipotentiary of all the divine power needed for his salvation. From the human standpoint the procedure is elementary enough; it involves simply the development of sufficient intelligence to cease violating beneficent law and disciplining oneself to obey it. It means learning how to live properly. The tacit implication in religion that any other shorter or easier way than this is available is an empty delusion and must give way to growing knowledge. A religious science that is built on knowledge of the forces operative within the human psyche, without the injection of magic from some extraneous source, is indicated as the true spiritual science of an enlightened humanity. For this science envisages the presence within man's own constitution of a seminal power of divinity. It was sown as seed of God's own essence in the garden bed of man's nature. It must be reared from seed stage to maturity under the tutelary influences of earth experience, which bring its mighty faculties to function. As this principle is gradually unfolded in the individual life, it begins its ministry of healing. Magical enough is its potency to cure our ills and make us whole. All the "miracles" of the Gospels and other ancient Bibles of revered authority are allegories dramatizing the potency of the indwelling Christ power to heal all man's ills. Sensational discoveries in scholarship now authenticate this statement. When man ceases his childish praying to God to perform miracles for him and turns to cultivate the divine powers slumbering within his own temple of consciousness, he will find at last the help, the comfort and the victory he is intended to have. If prayers were answered as believed and healings performed as claimed, there would be perpetual chaos in the life of the world. Happily life's beneficent laws prevail.