The Garden of Eden

[2ndpillar]

Have you ever read Marx's Communist Manifesto? The way you are critical of Marxism It sounds like you have. So what is it you don't like about it?

BTW I did read it in college and about 90% of the class agreed with the jist of what Marx said. Tell us what you don't like.

Apparently, you were trained in a Progressive college. 90% of present college students probably won't survive the coming age. They won't have the skills to survive or mental stability for the coming trials. Marx's message is an atheistic humanist message, whereas he is the prophet, and you are your own god, whereas he turns one part of society against another to provide a Utopia (heaven), whereas the have nots now supposedly own the means of production. It ends up with the iron bowl of China, where everyone is to get the same bowl of rice, and ends up with around 80 million starved peasants, with the government being run by thugs, and corruption being the name of the game. The same applies to Stalin, Castro and Maderno. The same applies to the U.S. when eventually no one will exchange real goods for the US dollar. The ramp to that point is called inflation. I expect the world will blow up before the final count down, and it will start at Jerusalem (Zechariah 14). Whatever, the college trained Marxist, will still have no useful skills or mental stability to cope.

 

[F1fan]

The "message" of Yeshua was to treat others as you would want to be treated (Mt 7:12). That is the same message of Budha, and Confucious. The 10 Commandments are summarized in to treat others as you want to be treated. "Jesus", or the proper name, Yeshua, means YHWY saves. Yeshua does not save.

Actually the self saves the self. The self is his own savior. God and Jesus have doen their work and to be saved the self needs to decide to accept the gift of salvation.

Of course this whole scenario is absurd and unbelievable. But believers are wrong to praise God, who caused all the trouble in the first place, and wrong to praise Jesus, because he had no choice in the matter. The only thing standing in the way of your salvation is you. Your act means you are your savior.

When he, as the son of man returns (Mt 24:29-30), it is going to be the judgment upon the nations/world (Rev 19:15). The only ones "saved"/"survive"/"escape" per Joel 2:31-32, are those in Jerusalem, and on Mount Zion, which in general leaves out the Gentile church. As per the parables of Yeshua, the "wicked"/"tares", those who were produced from the "tare seed", "message planted by the "devil", will at the "end of the age", be gathered and thrown into the fire (Mt 13:24-30). The message is to beware of the message you consume/believe. People are in general, uniformed, and misinformed. In today's world, there is little excuse to be uniformed.

Yeah, 2000 years of waiting. Ever get the feeling you've been duped?

 

[F1fan]

Apparently, you were trained in a Progressive college.

You're such a victim of conditioning that you can't understand that people can think for themselves. Of course you have to vilify education and reasoning, it goes against your indoctrination.

90% of present college students probably won't survive the coming age.

Are you planning a murder plot with other Christians? It's not a loving attitude you have there, as a Christian.

They won't have the skills to survive or mental stability for the coming trials.

OK, this is your claim, what is your evidence and coherent reasoning. Or are you just biased against education and reasoning because you feel threatened as a robot, and can't help yourself?

Marx's message is an atheistic humanist message,

True that he was a humanist. Do you understand that Jesus was a humanist? Compare what Marx said to what Jesus taught. Much the same thing, take care of your fellow citizen. If you are opposed to Marx you are opposed to Jesus.

whereas he is the prophet, and you are your own god, whereas he turns one part of society against another to provide a Utopia (heaven),

He never claimed any of this. Disinformation.

whereas the have nots now supposedly own the means of production.

Yeah, how about worker ownership of businesses, much like owning stocks.

It ends up with the iron bowl of China, where everyone is to get the same bowl of rice, and ends up with around 80 million starved peasants, with the government being run by thugs, and corruption being the name of the game. The same applies to Stalin, Castro and Maderno.

None of them really followed Marx. If you knew what Marx wrote you would know this. But you are a victim of indoctrination.

The same applies to the U.S. when eventually no one will exchange real goods for the US dollar. The ramp to that point is called inflation. I expect the world will blow up before the final count down, and it will start at Jerusalem (Zechariah 14). Whatever, the college trained Marxist, will still have no useful skills or mental stability to cope.

So much for the "good news" of the Bible. Yet most everyone who is involved with US commerce is a Christian and loves how things work for profit.

 

[DavidSMoore]

Mao and Stalin used Marx, and Hitler took his ques from Roosevelt, when using the same Democratic isolation of people/blacks (Jim Crow) on the Jews. Hitler also took ques from Mussolini, who considered himself a revived Julius Caesar. Keep in mind that Roosevelt was a Progressive Marxist/socialist. The Marxist are simply Atheistic humanist, who substitute themselves for being god. The same goes for other false prophets, such as the self-proclaimed apostle Paul. Forget God's commandments and follow your own twisted heart to your own destruction, usually in the form of a long-drawn-out death. Caesar is simply the king/beast of Revelation 13:4-8, who received his "authority" from the "dragon"/"devil". If you live in the U.S., you don't live in a Democracy, you live in a constitutional Republic, in which the Progressives are trying to change, and make it into a Democracy, so they can take everyone's rights away. Their modus operandi is to change the elector system into a majority wins all, and make the corrupt cities, the power centers of the country, leaving the deplorables in the lurch, and turning the country into a gender confused, DEI, Me Too, drug infested, illegal migrant voting hell hole. If you want a democracy, go to Russia. If you want a hell hole, let Progressive media and Social media control the narrative, let the rich (Google) and the politicians (Biden load forgiveness) buy the votes, and then ship in illegal voters, mixed in among the dead and multiple vote voters in blue cities, and you have the democracy the Democrats pray for. Give D.C. two Senators, and raise the number of Supreme Court judges, and your Democrats will think they have a died and gone to heaven.

Wow, what a load of rubbish. I can't even begin to sort through the massive confusions in the above. I'll just let Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the authors of Tyranny of the Minority, explain a few facts about the American national government:

• America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College, rather than directly by voters. Only in America can a president be “elected against the majority expressed at the polls.”
• America is one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber that is severely malapportioned due to the “equal representation of unequal states” (only Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most important, it is the world’s only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities.
• America is one of the few established democracies (along with Canada, India, Jamaica, and the U.K.) with first-past-the-post electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be manufactured into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that win fewer votes to win legislative majorities.
• America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. All other established democracies have either term limits, a mandatory retirement age, or both.
• Among democracies, the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change, for it requires supermajorities in two legislative chambers plus the approval of three-quarters of the states.

Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 217

The American Constitution was a marvel and a tremendous innovation when it was written in 1789, but it has fallen far behind other democracies throughout the world. We need to revamp it. Here's what the authors of Tyranny of the Minority have to say about the stability of democracy:

Scholars have discovered two virtually law-like patterns regarding modern political systems: rich democracies never die, and old democracies never die. In a well-known study, the political scientists Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi found that no democracy richer than Argentina in 1976-- its per capita GDP, in today's dollars, was about $16,000-- had ever broken down. Democracy subsequently eroded in Hungary, which had a per capita GDP of about $18,000 (in today's dollars). The United States' per capita GDP was about $63,000 in 2020-- nearly four times that of the richest country ever to suffer a democratic breakdown. Likewise, no democracy over fifty years old has ever died.
Tyranny of the Minority, pg. 7

So democracies are inherently stable forms of government. We need more democracy, not less.

 

[DavidSMoore]

Have you ever read Marx's Communist Manifesto? The way you are critical of Marxism It sounds like you have. So what is it you don't like about it?

BTW I did read it in college and about 90% of the class agreed with the jist of what Marx said. Tell us what you don't like.

Yes, I read the Communist Manifesto. Marx got some things right-- but he never imagined what the American labor movement would achieve.

 

[DavidSMoore]

Your example of the Rotary is not compelling. As Pew research recently revealed, Christians give 50% more to charity than any other group. In fact, research shows Christians lie less, cheat less, and commit adultery less than other groups.

Since 1985 Rotary International has been working to eliminate Polio in the world. Rotary has many partners, including the World Health Organization and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But Rotarians have put more than $1 billion into the polio eradication effort. Here's a link that describes the history of polio and of Rotary's efforts:

Rotary and the Fight Against Polio

With your help, we can end polio for good.

www.endpolio.org

 

[1213]

The serpent was wrong about the not dying part, but he was exactly right about the rest. So God punished the serpent for largely telling the truth. That should be all the evidence you need to see that God was trying to conceal the truth from the human residents of the garden.

The serpent said "your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil". That does not necessary mean the fruit was the reason. After doing wrong, people will usually see that they have done wrongly, as in this case. And to me that is not enough reason to think God didn't want them to know the truth.

 

[1213]

And yet he cast them out of the garden of Eden and thereby condemned them to a mortal life.

According to the Bible, everyone has a chance to get back into the life.

Well he said it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Are you claiming that Adam and Eve did not know what the word "knowledge" means?

I am claiming, the fruit itself doesn't give anything. But, after eating it, people saw that what they and the serpent did, was evil and not good. It could have been any tree, if there is the same condition, it would have the same result.

 

[Sargonski]

Interesting thing is, there is no Biblical reason to think God would not have wanted people to know. People could have asked anything directly from God. Also, it is the serpent, who lied, who told that people will know by eating the fruit.

The Serpent did not lie --- the Serpent told them the Truth .. that if they ate the fruit 1) they would not die 2) eyes will be opened knowing good and evil. Both things were true. it is the trickster God that lies. .. The Serpent God tells the Truth.

 

[DavidSMoore]

Sorry, but once again you ignoring that scripture is to be understood with tradition. This was all decided two thousand years ago and has been proclaimed as truth since then.

One of the traditions that was baked into early Christian belief was Greek Astrology and its concomitant support system the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion. That model held that the earth is fixed and immobile at the center of the universe. The Bible itself explicitly says that the earth cannot move in Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and Psalm 104:5, among other passages. Pope Urban VIII cited such passages as "proof" that the earth cannot move when he turned Galileo over to the Papal Inquisition for the investigation of heresy.
The Catholic Church no longer claims that the traditional belief in the immobility of the earth is true. So there's a clear example of the fact that tradition is no guarantee of truth, regardless of how many eons ago it was proclaimed to be so.

 

[jimb]

All of Genesis is allegorical. You have utterly, completely misunderstood.

Not all of Genesis is allegorical. Do you consider the stories of Abram/Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, etc. allegories?

 

[jimb]

One of the traditions that was baked into early Christian belief was Greek Astrology and its concomitant support system the Ptolemaic model of planetary motion. That model held that the earth is fixed and immobile at the center of the universe. The Bible itself explicitly says that the earth cannot move in Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and Psalm 104:5, among other passages. Pope Urban VIII cited such passages as "proof" that the earth cannot move when he turned Galileo over to the Papal Inquisition for the investigation of heresy.
The Catholic Church no longer claims that the traditional belief in the immobility of the earth is true. So there's a clear example of the fact that tradition is no guarantee of truth, regardless of how many eons ago it was proclaimed to be so.

You completely misunderstand the Bible if you consider parts of it to be a science textbook.

 

[DavidSMoore]

I am claiming, the fruit itself doesn't give anything.

???
God said:

"You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."
(Genesis 2:16-17, NRSVue)

It's a fruit tree. People eat the fruit of fruit trees. They don't eat the bark or the leaves. I'm baffled by how you are reading this. You seem to be trying to make this story far more complicated than it is.

 

[2ndpillar]

So democracies are inherently stable forms of government. We need more democracy, not less.

Your Progressive Argentina example came within a hairs breath of collapse, before a social conservative in the Libertarian party pulled it from collapse, and fired your Progressive non-working elements in the government to make the country economically stable. As for "democracies", there are around 2000 different types of democracies, ranging from full democracies with 23 countries, to authoritative democracies with 57 countries, with scores ranging from rich Norway with an 87% rating, which lives off its energy wealth, such as oil and gas, to Yemen with a 22% rating. Norway is stable because it is rich and made good investments. Democracy Ranking - Wikipedia Obama with his pen and cell phone, turned the U.S. into a straight dictatorship, with Biden over taking Obama his number of executive decisions. Why don't you go to China with a 38 democracy rating, and participate in their democracy, which gives you a one-party choice, which is the aim of the Democratic party of the US in trying to raise the number of appointed Supreme Court Justices, the elimination of the electoral system, and the making D.C. a state, and exclude the opposition candidate through any means possible. As for rich democracies which turn dictatorial, Venezuela is at the top of the list, because of bad decisions, based on the Marxist theory. How Venezuela went from a rich democracy to a dictatorship on the brink of collapse Don't go there now, because they ate all of the Zoo animals. I would suggest you going to Cuba, which is considered a system which reflects the Marxist-Leninist principle of democratic centralism, except that energy prices just went up 500 % and a minimum subsidized food level no longer exist for all of the population, and they are asking the U.N. for milk to feed their children. Maybe you could make a plea for someone to purchase you a one-way ticket.

 

[2ndpillar]

It's a fruit tree. People eat the fruit of fruit trees. They don't eat the bark or the leaves. I'm baffled by how you are reading this. You seem to be trying to make this story far more complicated than it is.

"The leaves of the tree were for healing" (Revelation 22:2).

 

[2ndpillar]

True that he was a humanist. Do you understand that Jesus was a humanist? Compare what Marx said to what Jesus taught. Much the same thing, take care of your fellow citizen. If you are opposed to Marx you are opposed to Jesus.

Yeshua's message to "keep the Commandments", which was not to steal or covet your neighbors goods. Marx was into creating revolution whereas you can take everything. The best guy for the job was Stalin, because he was already a convicted bank robber.

 

[2ndpillar]

You completely misunderstand the Bible if you consider parts of it to be a science textbook.

One of us misunderstands, and apparently has no insight into the bible, as Genesis was the book of creation. Isaac Newton used it well, others, not so much.

 

[2ndpillar]

Actually the self saves the self. The self is his own savior. God and Jesus have doen their work and to be saved the self needs to decide to accept the gift of salvation.

Well, apparently you haven't accepted it well, for you are going to die for your own "iniquities" (Jeremiah 31:30). The work to come is descriptively described in Revelation 19:15, when the son of man, the "Word of God" returns, and the "many" (Mt 7:13) are destroyed and thrown into the furnace of fire (Mt 13:42), and ruled with a "rod of iron" (Revelation 19:15), all at the "end of the age".

Revelation 19:15 From His mouth comes a sharp sword, so that with it He may strike down the nations, and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty.

 

[2ndpillar]

Yeah, how about worker ownership of businesses, much like owning stocks.

You are now free to buy stocks and become an owner and a suppressor of the workers in the mind of Marx. Marx followers seem to create chaos/revolution, much like was done by the trained Marxist, the leaders of BLM, and then just try and take the means of production, which were accumulated by those making wise investments, rather than sleeping in mom's basement, and then black mailing corporations, before buying multimillion dollar homes. Did you notice the antifa rift raft were sons and daughters of the elites, who went to your elite colleges, and apparently only learned to create chaos in their effort to destroy what is to be able to create their own Marxist Utopia and do cardboard gardening in the streets.

 

[F1fan]

Yeshua's message to "keep the Commandments", which was not to steal or covet your neighbors goods.

Which is a basic social rule. You don't think these rules didn't exist before the Hebrews wrote them down, do you?

Social order and religious rules evolved at the same time.

Marx was into creating revolution whereas you can take everything.

No he didn't. He advocated for all citizens having their basic needs met, much like Jesus taught.

The difference was that Jesus lived in a simpler time with smaller populations, and it was up to other citizens giving charity. By the time Marx lived societies had millions of people, and a big disparity between the rich and poor, and as the rich benefitted from the rule of government he saw the role of a democratic government help create equality for all citizens, and eliminate poverty since the overall resources were availble.

The best guy for the job was Stalin, because he was already a convicted bank robber.

I'm not sure where you heard that. He was studying to be a preist when the Russian Revolution happened. In the 1930's he did a lot of work to modernize Russia and build factories, and build road networks. He made efforts to work with the rest of Europe and build trade. Stalin worked in alliance with the USA and even adopted the Christie tank chassis that ended up as the Famous T-34, and helped defeat Germany. He was also paranoid, and ended up killing all upper ranks in the military because he feared they would overthrow him. This is why large nations need stable leaders, not egomaniacs who show unstable and reactionary behavior. The USA faces one such disturbed candidate at the moment, who actually is facing trial now.