Christians and Anger

[sky dancer]

it would be hard for a Christian not to recognize God with a personality....because all of us have our own personalities and we believe we were made in the image of him, both male and female....not in the physical, but with our emotions.

What was the iranean's description of God, and your experience as well?

and how can something like God, be described without personality....without feelings, without emotions?

care

First of all. He and I are poets. We share a love of poetry. Poets aim to describe non-conceptual experience.

What you describe is a conceptual experience of God as a personality outside yourself with omnipotent powers.

I'll offer a short sentence from the heart sutra that illustrates where Perham and I met. I wrote this, and he wrote back a poem.

"Indescribable, inconcievable and inexpressible, the perfection of sublime knowing is unborn and unceasing, the very nature of space. It is the realm of your own self-knowing timeless awareness. I pay homage to the Mother of the Buddhas of the three times." Prajnaparamitra (Heart Sutra)

It is this open presence of love that cannot be described, is not a personality because it is not limited by the personality, it is open and free and accessible moment to moment 24/7.

We connected Perham and I about this essence nature of being, suchness itself.

 

[Care4all]

Care, first off: Please stop putting your responses in my quotes, makes it a bit difficult to respond to.

ok, let's try it this way.....

Ok, now to respond:

1.) If Jesus was not here to be involved to what was going on in the world but show us the way to the next life then why did he speak out against certain injustices (like the capitalists using his father's church) and not slavery? He was involved somewhat in what was going on, just more related directly to the church.

because what they were doing involved the Spiritual world. The Jews had certain earthly requirements, for a Spiritual reward...they gave penance and asked for forgiveness of their sins in a precise manner....that was asked of them, scripture wise.

The money changers were taking advantage of these MAJOR REQUIREMENTS and even breaking the backs of those who wanted to make their Spiritual amends...

outside of that, I don't know what else to say.

2.) It wasn't free will on our part for the 2004 Tsunami. Free Will had nothing to do with the Tsunami even if was the oilers. That would be science and the reactions of the earth.

right, but if it were the oilers, then freewill caused it....choosing to drill on THAT tenuous spot was a choice, the eartquake and tsunami was the consequence.

3.) Prayer is in many ways useless. Think about this: God has a divine plan correct? And if what you pray for is not in his divine plan, then should he change the divine plan just for you? Now imagine that but times a trillion or whatever number of plans he gets a DAY. Add in Sundays, the sabbath; his day off. Now lets say this, what if what you asked for was in the Divine Plan and happened or it wasn't and didn't happen. What happens from the person? Same response: It was God's will. So if it was God's will and in his plan; no point in praying in the first place if you look at it that way.

because He is the Alpha and the Omega, he knows the beginning and the end. this is so hard to comprehend, i admit...

buttttt, if i understand this correctly since he knows all from the beginning to end, He already knows what choices we will make in life....it doesn't mean He made these choices for us, but he knows them, because we are to believe he knows all.

so, taking this view, then you can't say that prayer won't work....because our different prayers could have been a factor in His overall plan outcome.

4.) I'm not talking about things that were outside the realm of God or Jesus's powers (such as the Bible being written in their words or Jesus being on earth) with actions like the Holocaust, Vietnam, or 9/11. Hitler himself used the unclear bible many times to justify what he was doing.

but these things still beg for an answer of why didn't God intervene for most any of us....? And it comes down to ALL THINGS happening for a reason...we just are not able to see the reason in the small arena of the whole picture we really are...of the beginning to the end story.

I'm not saying God has to take part in today's world by doing things. Because it is free will by us that determine our actions. It has been determined there is enough food in the world to feed everybody, people just misuse it and waste it.

some like to blame God for this, but i just don't see it that way!

HOWEVER, God and Jesus either should spoke out against such injustices like slavery in his time or none at all like you are saying he did.

And here is one more argument in this post that I will leave you thinking:

What if God has already predetermined everything we do? What if our "free will" has already been determined by God and he/she knows what we are going to do? What if "free will" is merely a myth and we are all doing predetermined events set by us. It's not outside God's realm, especially since God is supposedly omnipotent. If anyone would know/could do such a thing then it's God

i think i might have hit on this in my answer above....

the whole thing is hard to understand....i hope i understand it correctly, if i don't, i am certain i will be forgiven for it, because my Faith is strong.

care

 

[Care4all]

First of all. He and I are poets. We share a love of poetry. Poets aim to describe non-conceptual experience.

What you describe is a conceptual experience of God as a personality outside yourself with omnipotent powers.

I'll offer a short sentence from the heart sutra that illustrates where Perham and I met. I wrote this, and he wrote back a poem.

"Indescribable, inconcievable and inexpressible, the perfection of sublime knowing is unborn and unceasing, the very nature of space. It is the realm of your own self-knowing timeless awareness. I pay homage to the Mother of the Buddhas of the three times." Prajnaparamitra (Heart Sutra)

It is this open presence of love that cannot be described, is not a personality because it is not limited by the personality, it is open and free and accessible moment to moment 24/7.

We connected Perham and I about this essence nature of being, suchness itself.

ahhhhhh, LOVE, God is Love...

i'm with perham on his description up to the point of him paying homage...it falls with me saying i doubt i could or would ever know Him in FULL....

care

 

[Care4all]

Gosh! Darn, you guys have worn me out! hahahahahaha! I should sleep well tonight, I'm exhausted!!!! Feel like i just went through a 4 hour verbal exam!

Good night you guys!

Care

 

[sky dancer]

ahhhhhh, LOVE, God is Love...

i'm with perham on his description up to the point of him paying homage...it falls with me saying i doubt i could or would ever know Him in FULL....
care

Actually, that was NOT Perhams poem. It is a Buddhist sutra. That's where we seem to part company. That is a specific stance in your training, but it differs from mine and Perhams. My question is "If you can never know God in full, what's the point?" Isn't the point of all spiritual practice to get closer to God?

What we 'pay homage to' in Buddhism is the inseparability. No God out there. God or Buddha nature is within. To pay homage means to respect, to bow down before, to place in an honored position, this essence, the truth of our own true nature. The truth of being.

At least, this is the place Perham and I came to agreement on.

There's a popular saying, that someone made into a book title. It is "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

What that means, is if you think Buddha is anywhere separate from you, you are deluded.

Buddha cannot be found anywhere else than in your own mind and heart.

It's ok that we may see this differently. We do practice in different traditions.

Usually, with sincere practitioners of faith, it's pretty close. I can see you have some wonderful qualities. That's what I look for and respect. Does your spiritual path actually help you develop qualities like love, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity?

 

[Modbert]

ok, let's try it this way.....



because what they were doing involved the Spiritual world. The Jews had certain earthly requirements, for a Spiritual reward...they gave penance and asked for forgiveness of their sins in a precise manner....that was asked of them, scripture wise.

The money changers were taking advantage of these MAJOR REQUIREMENTS and even breaking the backs of those who wanted to make their Spiritual amends...

outside of that, I don't know what else to say.



right, but if it were the oilers, then freewill caused it....choosing to drill on THAT tenuous spot was a choice, the eartquake and tsunami was the consequence.



because He is the Alpha and the Omega, he knows the beginning and the end. this is so hard to comprehend, i admit...

buttttt, if i understand this correctly since he knows all from the beginning to end, He already knows what choices we will make in life....it doesn't mean He made these choices for us, but he knows them, because we are to believe he knows all.

so, taking this view, then you can't say that prayer won't work....because our different prayers could have been a factor in His overall plan outcome.



but these things still beg for an answer of why didn't God intervene for most any of us....? And it comes down to ALL THINGS happening for a reason...we just are not able to see the reason in the small arena of the whole picture we really are...of the beginning to the end story.


some like to blame God for this, but i just don't see it that way!



i think i might have hit on this in my answer above....

the whole thing is hard to understand....i hope i understand it correctly, if i don't, i am certain i will be forgiven for it, because my Faith is strong.

care

I'll # mine to make it easier:

1.) Is not having slaves brought by the owners into the church not part of the spiritual world? If Jesus did speak out, he had an objective to speak only about the church and not about other injustices of the world. If there was any other time for God to make clear about anything else in the O.T that he found wrong, wouldn't that be the time to say it?

2.) Free Will didn't cause it if we go by what you say. The results of Free Will. Free Will would of been they knowingly had an idea that would be the result of their actions and went ahead with it anyway.

My point about Prayer is you cannot expect God to change his plan if you pray. God gets billions if not trillions of prayers a day, how can you expect the man to change his "Divine Plan" billions of times a day? It wouldn't be so divine anymore. Rather, God set events to be predetermined and knows which actions will take place. The only thing prayer will do for God is to show him/her that you're praying to him to ask for something. It's not like too many people pray to God other then their own selfish reasons but rather only when they want/need something. But to put it a better way: If God answered the prayers of people then why would kids be starving not only in Africa but in America?

Because the next life will be so much better? Why not let us make the most of this life? Especially since we only have one.

3.) I'm not blaming God for our mismanage of food. I'm simply stating it's free will that has caused us to not be able to feed everyone in the world when we have the ability. It's also free will that one day we will be fighting with our fellow neighbors for things like water because of overpopulation.

4.) And same here. I hope I understand it correctly, but I may not.

 

[Modbert]

Gosh! Darn, you guys have worn me out! hahahahahaha! I should sleep well tonight, I'm exhausted!!!! Feel like i just went through a 4 hour verbal exam!

Good night you guys!

Care

Good night Care. And I'm glad I have held up with you this long.

Though I'm sure I could go another 3-4 hours.

 

[sky dancer]

I thought desire was the root of all buddhist evil. That and ego

Sorry dilloduck--

I must have missed this post of yours.

Ignorance/delusion is the root of all evil--so to speak. Desire(aka grasping or fixation) is how we get stuck. Because of ignorance we go back and forth between grasping/desire/wanting and aversion/not wanting/ pushing away. "I want that--I don't want that". This is how we make karma.

The connection is that we may an essential mistake in perception early on. We do this in ignorance. We literally do not see the truth of how things really are--because we see things through the filter of our fixations.

We think we ourselves, are real, solid, and everything else "out there" is real and solid too. It is this mistake of separation that traps us in cyclic existence.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Does Christianity say that anger is good? I'm just curious. It's a big subject in my path, what about in Christianity?

Anger is natural, neither good nor evil in and of itself. It is what you do about it that is good or evil. Righteous anger, for example, can prompt one to feats of heroism or charity that benefit many.

 

[Cecilie1200]

Christian love is charity? Hm

Buddhist love is the sincere desire for another being to be happy.

I don't necessarily want people to be happy, though. What I want is for them to have what is best for them. That isn't always what makes them happy, at least in the short-term.

 

[sky dancer]

I don't necessarily want people to be happy, though. What I want is for them to have what is best for them. That isn't always what makes them happy, at least in the short-term.

I think wanting what's best for people is wanting their happiness. Don't sell yourself short.

I agree the short term desire is not usually the path to happiness.

 

[garyd]

First thing you must understand Robert is that slavery was a much different animal in Jesus time then it later became.

2nd slavery has been around roughly since the time people discovered there were groups of other humans around other than their own and that you could do things with them other than cook them.

3rd God takes humans where they're at and tries to move them towards a better direction hence we find an awful lot of rules in Leviticus limiting the terms of slavery as to length and harshness of treatment of slaves.

4th slavery in many cases at the time of Christ was simply an exchange of freedom for the likelyhood of regular meals. People sold themselves into slavery to keep themselves and their loved ones from starving during hard times.

 

[Shadow]

First thing you must understand Robert is that slavery was a much different animal in Jesus time then it later became.

2nd slavery has been around roughly since the time people discovered there were groups of other humans around other than their own and that you could do things with them other than cook them.

3rd God takes humans where they're at and tries to move them towards a better direction hence we find an awful lot of rules in Leviticus limiting the terms of slavery as to length and harshness of treatment of slaves.

4th slavery in many cases at the time of Christ was simply an exchange of freedom for the likelyhood of regular meals. People sold themselves into slavery to keep themselves and their loved ones from starving during hard times.

Yes, he has been told this numerous times with multitple bible verses and quotes backing it up.. he just ignores things he doesn't like and pretends they don't exist..

 

[Neubarth]

I don't remember what book or chapter, but Jesus also got angry when he saw people gambling in the house of the Lord. He overturned the tables and scolded them for their behavior.

Anger is a natural response. It is only when logic is given way to anger that it can be harmful. Skydancer, do you think christians are angry?

They were not gambling. They were money changers changing foreign coin into local coin to be given to the temple for the poor. I doubt that it was ever effectively used for that, but that was the intent.

Meanwhile, Jesus did not scold them. He whipped the shit out of them, threw their tables about and had them running and screaming away from a wild man whom they thought to be totally out of control.

Jesus had a problem with the local religious leaders of the day and called them all sorts of vile names. They were not very fond of him either.

 

[Cecilie1200]

They were not gambling. They were money changers changing foreign coin into local coin to be given to the temple for the poor. I doubt that it was ever effectively used for that, but that was the intent.

Meanwhile, Jesus did not scold them. He whipped the shit out of them, threw their tables about and had them running and screaming away from a wild man whom they thought to be totally out of control.

Jesus had a problem with the local religious leaders of the day and called them all sorts of vile names. They were not very fond of him either.

That was sort of the point I was making. There are many things in the world at which a Christian - or any decent person, for that matter - SHOULD justifiably be angry, and if they aren't, it betrays something very fundamentally wrong with them. Child abuse, for example. Massive starvation in third world countries caused by abuse of power by evil despots. Slavery. Oppression. Christianity is not pacifism, nor is it being a happy, loopy doormat.

 

[ABikerSailor]

They were not gambling. They were money changers changing foreign coin into local coin to be given to the temple for the poor. I doubt that it was ever effectively used for that, but that was the intent.

Meanwhile, Jesus did not scold them. He whipped the shit out of them, threw their tables about and had them running and screaming away from a wild man whom they thought to be totally out of control.

Jesus had a problem with the local religious leaders of the day and called them all sorts of vile names. They were not very fond of him either.

Thus.....the reason that the Jewish leadership (the High Priest) got into bed with the Roman Emperor, and volia.......

Yeshua was crucified.

Might have been better had He called a meteor strike on the money changers. Unfortunately, Yeshua didn't want to cause a mess in His Father's house.

 

[Care4all]

They were not gambling. They were money changers changing foreign coin into local coin to be given to the temple for the poor. I doubt that it was ever effectively used for that, but that was the intent.

Meanwhile, Jesus did not scold them. He whipped the shit out of them, threw their tables about and had them running and screaming away from a wild man whom they thought to be totally out of control.

Jesus had a problem with the local religious leaders of the day and called them all sorts of vile names. They were not very fond of him either.

When you say Jesus "whipped the shit out of them" can you please show PROOF in the Bible where it says that Jesus WHIPPED them?

Jesus DID NOT TOUCH one hair on their bodies, did not hit them, did not slap them, did not twist or break any arms on them nor did he pick up a whip and whip them.

I call bull crud on what you just implied Neubarth! Except the part where you said he scared them with the flipping of their tables.

Also, not once did Jesus call anyone a VILE name....he reprimanded the ideas of the religious and he mocked some of their interpretations of God's words, and He continually was tested by the Pharisees but He ALWAYS answered them with a parable that showed them the errors of their ways....

HE GENTLY explained to the crowd where they went wrong in their "thinking".

You are making TOOOOOO MUCH stuff up Neubarth that is not in the Bible....imho!

Care

 

[strollingbones]

i find it amusing that the people who claim the title of christians are also the posters, who have posted threads calling for killing....either by religion or by political leanings....
plus what does the bible say about man boobs and showing them? is there no modesty in the bible? but alas just like any religion there are many who claim it without knowing anything about what they are saying or doing.

 

[AllieBaba]

First thing you must understand Robert is that slavery was a much different animal in Jesus time then it later became.

2nd slavery has been around roughly since the time people discovered there were groups of other humans around other than their own and that you could do things with them other than cook them.

3rd God takes humans where they're at and tries to move them towards a better direction hence we find an awful lot of rules in Leviticus limiting the terms of slavery as to length and harshness of treatment of slaves.

4th slavery in many cases at the time of Christ was simply an exchange of freedom for the likelyhood of regular meals. People sold themselves into slavery to keep themselves and their loved ones from starving during hard times.

I've already tried explaining this, multiple times.

Per usual, the anti-Christian crowd just ignores the facts.

 

[sky dancer]

The anti-christ crowd?