He was preaching and he mentioned something that both me and my gf were repulsed by. He said since all authority is founded by God, that we all need to shut up and listen to the government: the same government that forced COVID down our throats, lies about everything, uses propaganda against its own people. Part of me wonders if he got paid off or was given a big break to spout this horse crap.
Part of me wonders if he's compromised or was given a bag of cash to spout this dogma
Why would an all powerful deity need to make himself known via "prophets"? Why wouldn't every civilization all get the same message? What's more likely, that Yahweh is just another case of people making up self-serving bullshit, or only the Chosen People with a Promised Land were given the straight dope?
The all-powerful deity must become known through His immanence in the world, and not directly, since God, in His nature as God per se, is incommensurable with physical existence (rather, with the state of experience that you and I currently represent). We can understand a prophet as a person who comes to understand something about the divine nature that is not 'given' (so to speak) to others to intuit on their own (to them it must be taught). In other words, if you think there is a God, and your views about God have any sophistication at all (they understand God in the way that theologians have understood God for roughly the last two-thousand years), then it is a logical impossibility for God to be directly revealed to the world; this isn't even a coherent concept. So, if God exists, and it is possible for us to know something about God at all, it is necessarily knowledge gained indirectly. Call these indirect forms 'prophecy', if you'd like, or use any of a number of other terms. It's not likely that the oldest religious traditions, say, the Egyptians, conceived of things as 'prophecy', but they would have had their own concepts for how God is revealed. Revelation is the concept we should be asking about, not prophecy, which is just one approach to understanding what revelation is.
Why wouldn't all civilizations get the same message? Why don't all civilizations get the same message from nature itself? We live in the same world, with the same laws of nature. Why do some civilizations 'get more' from their interaction with nature than other civilizations?
I think it is likelier that Yahweh is a case of one civilization conceiving of (developing a model of) God in the way that they conceived God was revealed to them. In the same way that we come to understand nature itself differently across time, the way we conceive of God changes through history.
My own beliefs about the 'chosenness' of the Jews is that this says more about the Israelites than it does about God. In reality, the Bible is not about the Hebrews. It just isn't, and believe it or not, the most educated Jewish religious scholars and rabbis know this. They know what the Bible is. It has nothing to do with a literal 'people', i.e., an ethnic class in bio-psycho-social terms. The meaning of the Bible dissolves these categories. It's about the individual mind/soul; human beings per se are God's 'chosen'. Incidentally, that notion fits quite well with the teachings of Jesus Christ, who explicitly expanded the covenant to include all people and not just a single ethnic group.
CHIRO 0 points 1.8 years ago
The all-powerful deity must become known through His immanence in the world, and not directly, since God, in His nature as God per se, is incommensurable with physical existence (rather, with the state of experience that you and I currently represent). We can understand a prophet as a person who comes to understand something about the divine nature that is not 'given' (so to speak) to others to intuit on their own (to them it must be taught). In other words, if you think there is a God, and your views about God have any sophistication at all (they understand God in the way that theologians have understood God for roughly the last two-thousand years), then it is a logical impossibility for God to be directly revealed to the world; this isn't even a coherent concept. So, if God exists, and it is possible for us to know something about God at all, it is necessarily knowledge gained indirectly. Call these indirect forms 'prophecy', if you'd like, or use any of a number of other terms. It's not likely that the oldest religious traditions, say, the Egyptians, conceived of things as 'prophecy', but they would have had their own concepts for how God is revealed. Revelation is the concept we should be asking about, not prophecy, which is just one approach to understanding what revelation is.
Why wouldn't all civilizations get the same message? Why don't all civilizations get the same message from nature itself? We live in the same world, with the same laws of nature. Why do some civilizations 'get more' from their interaction with nature than other civilizations?
I think it is likelier that Yahweh is a case of one civilization conceiving of (developing a model of) God in the way that they conceived God was revealed to them. In the same way that we come to understand nature itself differently across time, the way we conceive of God changes through history.
My own beliefs about the 'chosenness' of the Jews is that this says more about the Israelites than it does about God. In reality, the Bible is not about the Hebrews. It just isn't, and believe it or not, the most educated Jewish religious scholars and rabbis know this. They know what the Bible is. It has nothing to do with a literal 'people', i.e., an ethnic class in bio-psycho-social terms. The meaning of the Bible dissolves these categories. It's about the individual mind/soul; human beings per se are God's 'chosen'. Incidentally, that notion fits quite well with the teachings of Jesus Christ, who explicitly expanded the covenant to include all people and not just a single ethnic group.