As I posted earlier it depends if you believe God and his Word. Me quoting PETER saying we ought to obey God rather then man is simply quoting the scriptures that teach that man made teachings and traditions that break the commandments of God do not supersede God's Word
Yes, I understand that. Perhaps I should have addressed by response to Peter, but he's not here, and it was you who quoted them, so they become your words as well.
Roman numerals is not numerology. Some people do not know the difference.
No, Roman numerals are not numerology, but numerology can be done in any number system, and numerology is what you offered the thread. I don't mind. I deal with it like all of the rest of theology.
Assigning numeric values to the letters in a word, adding them up, and showing that they add to 666 is numerology unless you think like I do that that means nothing. If you see significance there, as if a god or something else were trying to tell you something, then you're into numerology, which is just a variation on astrology, except using words and numbers in place of the positions of stars.
I believe it is true if you do not believe in God or his Word you will not understand it according to the scriptures as the scriptures that teach that the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God
And I believe that is false. I believe that I understand what the scriptures say better than believers for reasons already given. I have no need to sanitize them and try to make them sensible or morally sound. I'm free to say that the flood story is a story of moral and intellectual failure on the part of the god depicted, and that is exactly what it is with all of that unnecessary cruelty and the idea that this mistake would be corrected using the same breeding stock. You are not free to even consider that much less believe it, so which of us can give the better interpretation of that story?
I'm also free to tell you that earth does not contain enough water to submerge all of its mountains, and that if it did, they'd be submerged now. You won't get that from a believer. They simply don't allow themselves to think like that.
And then they try to disqualify the opinions of those who see what they cannot or will not by simply claiming that those unbelievers who don't agree with you are wrong without ever provifding any evidence or argument.
And I'll bet that your Bible is the only book about which you would make that claim. If I read the Iliad (in English) and gave an opinion about the words of Hector or Achilles contained therein with which you disagreed, which would be very unlikely as simple English is easy for either of us to understand, you'd merely give your contrary opinion along with a reason for holding it rather than all of this talk about powers of discernment and who does or does not have them. It's your attempt to disqualify dissenting opinion, and I'm pretty sure that you don't do that with any other book.
Sorry this is your opinion because you do not know God therefore you do not understand His Word so for you there is only contradictions and ambiguities because you do not know the scriptures. For me I see no evidence of this only misinterpretation of the scriptures because you do not know God
No, it is you that does not understand biblical scripture. You lack the power of discernment because you have a faith-based confirmation bias encasing your mind and deforming your judgment. It shows you what you want to see - an accurate and internally cohesive tale of a loving god, but that is not what the words depict.
You don't know God, either. Nobody does. The God of the Christian Bible is logically impossible by virtue of being said to possess mutually exclusive properties at the same time such as being perfect, yet making errors that it regrets. Therefore, this god cannot exist - another truth you won't get from any believer.
What you know is what you have been told and believed, and you have no reason to believe it, but do anyway.
we all live by faith if we have no definitive evidence for what we believe.
Yes, but it isn't necessary to believe anything without evidence. One can train oneself to think critically and eschew faith-based thought entirely. We can believe that astronomy is valid knowledge and astrology not based on evidence.
Any other belief would be faith-based (both valid, neither valid, only astrology valid). It is perfectly possible to shape one's thinking so that only the evidence-supported belief is held and the others rejected.
Many faith-based thinkers seem to be unaware of this other way of processing information and deciding what is true about the world, and believe that everybody is thinking by faith like they are. They're the ones that tell us that our evidence-based beliefs are only faith like theirs.
