joe4christ:

@huxley NO both foetuses and aborted babies are immidiately carried by angels to the very throne of God the creator of all living thing {Most atimes God shed tears at the site of this innocent souls rejected by their suppose parent} and he instantly put them into right shape where they instantly develope and become living babies and later grow up into adult and waits for the arrival of their parents if at all they are going to be save.

sarmy:

Are you sure of this, how can God be shedding tears!

Hahahahahahaha!   You just gotta love the imaginations of the nigerians faithfuls!Lol! God sheds tears!

InesQor:

@jagunlabi: Go and twiddle your thumbs abeg. If there was a philosophy section this thread would be there. 

Philosophy is not after answers, but it helps spawn viable ideas as tangents of the main discourse. Philosophy is a bottomless pit.

Okay, i see! So you just love to merrygoround all day like a dog chasing it's tail. What a waste of brain muscles. Abeg, when next you open another philosophy merrygoround thread, please do alert people like me so i don't have to bother looking in. I am one of those people on planet earth who love answers producing discussions, atleast discussions that attempt to find answers.

Una do well. 

Kai! You folks just love to brainfart sha! Una like to just siddon for computer and begin dey blow grammar too much without any concrete results. So. . . i am still waiting for "the nature and origins of good and evil" to be clarified after 90 something posts and three big grammar packed pages.

You all think that you can understand the origin and nature of good and evil through the analysis of the contents of the created universe itself? Goodluck!

Lol! @ Mudley

They are a lost cause. Lost people of africa cracking their brains over other people's ancient traditions and gods. What loosers africans are.

To serve God in truth is not to be a religious bigot, but rather to love all of God's creations equally, no matter from whatever background they originate. All is ONE, and the ONE is GOD.

Fhemmmy:

That is where the supreme one come into greatness, that it is not the fault of that person, but that we should love the person regardless.

I did not say it is that person's fault for not being loveable, but rather his own PROBLEM that he has to deal with on his own. That is part of his own personal evolutionary path. You can't help him there, but rahter he has to help himself. All that you can do is judge him not, but show love and understanding.

InesQor:

What is jagunlabi saying now?

I never said Jesus was only a teacher, I said the baseline cross-religion view of him IN THE LEAST places him as a remarkable teacher.

But of course that went over your head, causing the emesis of all that stuff you disgorged above.

Jesus didn't just say he is the ROAD (which would apply to a teacher), but he called himself the DOOR (single), the TRUTH, the LIFE.

Saying Jesus was not a Christian is a rather dimly obtuse statement, in my opinion. It's like saying jagunlabi is not "like jagunlabi". 

The road, the way, the door. . . what is the difference? They all still mean the same thing, no matter how you want to dice it. And just because jesus called himself to be the truth and the life still does not make the christian faith to be all those things.Even if jesus did see himself as all those things, i definitely do not see christianity as a religion being those things too. Jesus was one being, organized christianity is totally another.

The other point i want to make is that, all those nouns that jesus was said to have called himself still point to his status as being a TEACHER first and foremost. A teacher, even in modern terms, can still represent the truth, the door and the life to his students because their future hangs on him and what he teaches them. Jesus the teacher is just the same to his students and that was what his statement indicated in my view. It still did not have to have meant the self-proclamation of divinity. That would have been egotistic of jesus would it not? And jesus was supposed to have lived in the highly evolved state of egolessness. An egoless being neither blows his own trumpet nor go totally egotripping like your average rapper.

While Jesus was a man who lived in an egoless state of being throughout his life and taught his followers to live in such a state as well, the christian faith was founded totally on a state of complete egoism, and that is still clearly reflected in it's characteristics today.

Fhemmmy:

There is a difference btw fake and being thought to do something, cos if not cos of the grace of that God, some people are just not loveable.

Anybody who is not loveable has him or herself to blame. That is not your problem, but theirs.

Fhemmmy:

The best way to wanna love is to think of the supreme being that never said, we have to love him and dont care about anyone else.

You don't have to think of any being before loving, just become that love and the rest will follow. You don't need any approval from above to do that, and if you do, then your love is nothing but fakery.

We don't have to love "him". All we need do is just become love in order to truly love. The rest will follow.

Fhemmmy:

What other way to do that than to " love the way He has ordered us to" love your neighbors as yourself and even your enemies, what other way makes the world better than we met it?

The "way" he "ordered" is neither here nor there. We should just love our neighbours as ourselves simply because it is a compassionate thing to do, and not because we have been "ordered". The very act of loving should have a merit on it's own.
Another way to serve is to stop thinking that you have enemies, then you won't even have to love them because they wouldn't exist, anyway.

jesus.:

what gives u such impression that God doesnt have enemy(s)? Do u know God?

I don't have to personally know God to know that it has no enemies. If GOD is an intangible, a spirit, a force of creation, almighty, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, the alpha and the omega, the creator of the whole universe and all therein . . . .   HOW CAN SUCH A BEING HAVE ENEMIES??!!

Such a being would have evolved way beyond the ego to have all those "omnis" as it's titles, hence it cannot have enemies. Only beings who have not evolved beyond the ego become enemies of others, as well as have enemies of their own, because spiritually, they are unevolved.

streetwize:

It is easy to find. . . and my man I tell you the laurels are sweet. . . paying off awesome I swear. . .
The problem is that, that thing uve been searching for is right there in your hands
but u know we human beings we think. .  haa, its too easy now. Are you sure I dont have to use complex numbers to find 2 + 2  
we can't blive God wants us to know him and would make it as easy as that for us. . .

If it were that easy to find, the woes of the christian world would have ended, as well as the woes of the world at large. But we can all see that the reality is far far away from that. so, bro, quit deluding yourself and resume that search.
Peace out.

streetwize:


your answer simply contradicts itself, absolute truth is universal and cannot be relative. Absolute truth cannot be haggled between different conceptions, it is either the absolute truth or it is not, black or white, no grey area. . . the perfect man or not, not a lot of pieces of different imperffect men joined together. . .

and on the contrary, It takes nothing to not believe anything or to hold a ground that states that who cares??. . . everything is right. . .
It however takes great courage to be able to choose and say. . . This is the truth that I have been searching for. . . It takes audacity to put away every other answer and run headlong unto one path, it takes some kind of effrontery that cannot be found in most men, it takes temerity, will. . .
hehe. . . no mind me. . . jus got a little caught up there 

It takes a tired man to say. .  u know what lets just pick everything eh??. . . If the world turns out to be spherical, pah, we said it. . . wait what if it turns out flat. . haha. . . we said that tooo!!!. . . then they hi-five each other and take a swig of beer  - its like the redneck view. . hehehe

It does not take any amount of courage to take the easy way out, bro. It takes cowardice to do that. You are merely justifying and glorifying a cop out mentality that the christian clergy merrily feeds on and having them smiling all the way to the bank. But that is your call sha.
Peace out!

streetwize:

Please Gabry, I am not trying to condemn u or anything. I came here becuz when I heard your story, I felt that you are really searching and are really interested in knowing

I didn't come here to fight or anything. I came here to urge you not to stop searching, hopefully u'll be successful in finding the truth.
Only when I was pushed did I even pitch christainity at all. . .

Convenience of accepting all answers is just ignorant, and I'm sure at the back of your mind somewhere u know this. . . Probably Jagunlabi also does  
But there is True and False, and all you have to do is search, maybe a little more. . . maybe a lot more. . . just don't give up  

Search, isn't that what we are all supposed to be doing, streetwize? So why have you abandoned your own search and now resting on your laurels thinking that you have found the absolute truth? If only the absolute truth is that easy to find. You better resume the search and get out of the comfort zone of that damn minuscule box you've been stuffed in and spread out your mental wings to their full capacity. There is vastly more to know.

noetic16:

I dont have a pastor, so there is no basis for comparison . . . . .are u an enemy of God?

GOD has no enemy because it does not have an ego. Only ignorant and egoic beings like some jewish deities that i know and some ignorant human beings have enemies, because their egos need enemies to feed off on.

Fhemmmy:

If i dont serve He that is greater than the greatest, who else would i wanna serve?

Serve mankind? Serve humanity by leaving this world in a better shape than you met it? Show me a better way to serve the creator.

streetwize:

Basically u say there can be no absolute truth, the world is both spherical and flat. . . I love your "open-mindedness". . . that is why your teacher will tell you you are right when you say 6*6 = 66, because everyones answer is right. The guy who kills his friend is "right", because everyone is right.

I am open-minded, but as a great man once said, be open-minded, but not to the point where your brain falls out of your skull  

Kai! You just love misinterpreting written texts, streetwize. That bad habit must come from misinterpreting the scriptures very often.
Please point me to where i alluded to anything close to, "there can be no absolute truth".

What i stated was that there is an absolute truth, but it is spread out in different areas, as well as being well embedded in the creation itself. If one wants to truly find it, then one has to search far and wide with broadly opened consciousness or one will miss it. You can never come close to the absolute truth with a closed mind looking inside one single area of thought like the christian religion. But if you are afraid of stepping out of your shell, i really do understand that, because it takes real courage and spiritually maturing consciousness to step out of comfort zones in order to explore and freely search for the absolute truth.

Lol! I had to laugh at the, "such was it with Enoch" statement. I have read some excerpts from the book of Enoch and Enoch was not transported to any immaterial world or intangible realm or whatever. Where he went, according to that book, was very very physical place that is every bit as physical as the interior of any big multi storey jumbo jet, lika a Boeing 767 for example. According to the highly detailed description of that socalled abode of jehovah, it looked very suspiciously like a huge mothership orbiting the planet earth at that time.

Enoch was led on a tour inside the mothership and he described what he saw thus, it was a 10 storey interior with each floor dedicated to different scientific disciplines (can you believe that). One floor was dedicated to cosmology and astronomy, while another floor was dedicated to horticulture. Another floor was some kind of prison for rebel crews or angels. On the topmost floor, Enoch finally came face to face with "the lord" and his description of how this "lord's" face looked like was most interesting, and the description was interestingly cut short because the book excerpts ended at this point.

So using this tale from the book of Enoch as an example for a possible physical being entering the non- material realm is a total fallacy. Besides it is not possible in my own opinion.

InesQor:


[size=20pt]Joh 14:6  Jesus said, "I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. [/size]

Atleast you admitted that Jesus was a TEACHER, inesqor. Might i add that Jesus was neither a christian nor did he belong to any religious organization when he supposedly made that statement, so whatever he said, he said it as a wandering and freelance teacher and not as a christian preacher or leader. Whether he was the greatest teacher or not is of no relevance at all. It was his message that counted and not his status.

Any teacher or lecturer would have said exactly what jesus said to his "students". It is not uncommon for a teacher or a lecturer to say to his students that the only way they are ever going to make their grades and get their degrees is through him, which does not mean that his students should now have to start following him wherever he goes and start worshipping him as a deity of some sort. It only means that the lecturer is saying to his students that they have to take his materials and lectures more seriously in order for them to make their grades.

Jesus was telling his disciples the very same thing with that statement, but in a different and cloaked fashion. The grades, in jesus case, was the kingdom of heaven, and in order for his students to reach that kingdom, they must focus on the message itself (and not the messenger) thoroughly and take the message very seriously as well as live it.

But organized religion took that and twisted it with a totally upside down interpretation saying that jesus was using that statement to both declare his own divinity and that CHRITIANITY (which was not even in existence when jesus supposedly made that declaration) is the only way.

I believe that the organized religion simply hijacked this statement and used it to it's own advantage to hold people hostage and live off of them for two millenia and counting.

streetwize:

if there are multitudinous pieces that are a part of a whole, then each piece should fit right in with the next, support it, their tenets should oil each other and strengthen such that as they are laid side by side they fit perfectly to form the mirror.
If u think this is analogous to religion hahaha u must be seriously deluded. most religions account of God and his nature, what he wants from us, and the way to get to him are in complete contradiction to the others. . . .

your half mirror analogy also points to the fact that each religion should tell only a little about God. . . maybe one religion should talk about his nature, another should talk about the way to get to him, another should talk about his commandments, another should talk about creation, and thats how religions should be. . . thus u can see how misconceived the analogy appears to be.

Imagine we want to build the perfect man:
should we get men with perfect characteristics and join them together. should we get a man with the perfect hand, another man with the perfect eyes, another man with the perfect mouth. . . . and join them all together??
That will not make the perfect man. . . that will make a confused constitution made out of the perfect parts that cannot combine to form a perfect whole

Be wise. God is absolute. He is.

And of course all religions have truths just as If I want to prove to you that 2+2=5, I could start out with 2 = 1+1 (which is true), however not all proofs giv us the right answer, which is what we need.
God has given you the right answer, not a bunch of impurities that have to be filtered then joined together to constitute a not-so-absolute God

You responded exactly the way a closeminded person would, and i understand why you have to hold your ground to defend the reasons for your closemindedness. That is your own call, but a more expanded mind and consciousness already picked up on what i meant and processed the meaning in a proper way.

The analogy is mostly figurative which conveys an important message that in every area of philosophy or schools of thought, there hide bits and pieces of truth. One has to look at a broad range of these disciplines to get a whiff of the overview of the truth in it's vastness(does not have to be the whole truth), an act that demands a highly expanded consciousness. The truth can never be contained in one piece. Only the mentally lazy and the narrowminded will see the whole truth in one single piece.

Evang. Olu:

@jagunlabi
[size=14pt]Acts 1:11[/size] [size=15pt]Which also said, Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? this same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven.[/size] The Bible is True.

So you are waiting for the white, hippielooking jesus, then?The image that the white colonialists created for your mind? Have you ever asked yourself, sir, how you would recognize jesus when he returns? Do you know how the real jesus physically looked like? Or are you just going to accept any image presented in front of you? I wish you goodluck in your future idolatory acts. I am sure not everybody is going to be such a chump.

Mudley313:

I dont think if there was an existing creator entity, he/she/is would care that much for the servitude, worshiping or praises of mere mortals n be bothered about the trivialities of u serving another non-existent entity. only egoistic, tyrannical "human" rulers are concerned wit such trivialities

Excellent reply, mudley.
The poster has just stated why he has to worship God, "because God provides nice things for whoever worship him". From that statement, you can see that egoistic and materialistic reasons are usually the main grounds for the urge to worship a being that neither asks nor needs their worship or servitude in the first place.
Nigerians have managed to convince themselves that they have to worship God by force(or atleast pretend to) before this god can bestow his materialistic blessings on them. And failure to worship means zero material blessings.
In that sense, the relationship between a typical nigerian churchgoer and his/her god is purely materialistic, very much like the relationship between a golddigger and a wealthy person.

Gabry:

Awwww. . . . ,  . . .    U reminded me of a friend. And now I can see why you have a different mentality compare to the rest. Well my dear, I just want you to remember one thing. When you enter a church or a mosque or a temple, u need to remember that you are dealing and meeting and coming across different types of people with different preferences, different likings and dislikes and different mentality. When you go to church, always remember that you are going there for God and no one else. I once got really sick and tired of the church which I go cause there seem to be alot of hypocrites and alot of them complains of the choir . music I do in church but the weirdest thing is outsiders from other church and of course quite a number in my own church praises the music and songs I do for mass. The so called leaders of the church immediately set rules on how should I do my music and such. And also donations which I have collected for the church and pass to the leaders for the church, what they do? They put the money in their pocket and there was no report about the money being donated and they say they misplace the money and seek forgiveness from God.

I use to be that person which hated the church but my bf told me that I shouldnt let some people to bring me down. Than I thought to myself, I guess this is a test to see how strong my faith can be for God. So u know what I did? I wrote a letter to the Bishop telling him about the missing Donation money and there was no record, i told him about the leaders whom should be at retirement age and that the church should employed someone more fresher to run the church. My father and mother is now handling the finance of the church and its getting better and as for my music, I dont give sh . .it what they wanna say. I do my thang and theres no way they can stop me!  They mock me and I make as if I did not hear anything or that I hear a mouse squeeking. Besides, I dont worship them. I worship God. My Father.

You know what, even though i still attend church services occasionally, i never attend services to meet God because i know i carry God all around with me. God is within all creation and not caged in buildings. That is one of the first thing i learned about God. If God is omnipresent, then it has to be everywhere, so why go to some particular temples to meet it? Totally senseless and false teaching. If i need to get close to my creator, i simply meditate. I bury myself in the stillness. Be still and know that i am God. I don't need a church service for that.

I go to these services strictly to socialise, that is all. Church services offer great opportunities to socialise and make friends with new people. I don't go there to get any spiritual food for my soul because i know i won't get it. A person like me needs teachers and not preachers.The latter abound in the christian faith and i don't listen to them because they never have anything new and of any spiritual depth to say.

Gabry:

Lol! The way you say it makes me feel like making a movie out of this   

Really? Are you in the moviemaking business?

Gabry:

Yes naaa. Jagunlabi, I was wondering, for you what religious background do you come from?

I was once in the christianity business . . . more like an observer(i have to admit) than anything else because i was never really into it. When i got tired of the whole circus, i simply walked away because my mind got too big for what i am being asked to believe in.  My mind simply refused to reside in the tiny cage that was being put before me. I knew that there has to be much more to God than what this religion was teaching me. I just found the whole christian faith thing to be one big fakery, so i walked away from it all to learn more about myself, my creator, and the world around me on my own. In other words, i became a freethinker, a rebel, a heretic(in christian speak ). And i am loving it moment by moment.

Gabry:

DAMN. . . . I like you!!!     


DAMN! . . . I wish I could have explained it that way!!     


DAMN!. . . U are a very intelligent persin and I respect you

Thanks for the compliment, gabry. That is what opening up one's consciosness and mind does to people. We can see things with so much more clarity. It is not a special gift of mine alone, we all have it.

All we need is just to open up and get out of these tiny mind boxes that societies have created for our minds through religious indoctrinations for example(there are many more methods of mind narrowing) to limit the scope with which we can think and perceive things in our reality.

It is all about controlling of the mind by the societies in which we live in through what is called, MIND PRISONS. Prisons without physically visible walls in which you think that you are free, but in actuality, you are not.

tpia.:

love is love , intimacy is intimacy.

neither depends on the other, imo.

Wow! What weird and twisted outlook ! I guess that is what an overdose of religious indoctrination like that of christianity does to people's minds. Tpia cannot connect love with intimacy. Poor thing!

It is once said by a wise man that the "truth" is like a gigantic mirror smashed on the ground into hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pieces. Each person comes along and pick one single piece from the multitude of pieces of this mirror, calls it "THE ONLY TRUTH", and build a whole religion or philosophy around that single piece . And not only that, as more people come along and pick one piece each, they all declare they have the only truth and then they inexplicably start battling each other for supremacy over who has the real truth, the whole mirror, not knowing that what each of them have in their possession is only a piece of the broken mirror each. They shout, curse, judge, maim, kill and destroy each other over who owns the only truth when they are all holding only parts of the whole mirror, the whole truth. Is that not madness borne of ignorance? Is that not insanity in it's most extreme form? You will find such madness going on here on nairaland religion forum. It can be truly hilarious sometimes to watch people argue on whose piece of broken mirror is the whole mirror!Hahaha!

To ever get close to the "truth" a man needs a vastly open mind, a vast consciousness, and not a caged  and narrow mind that causes nothing but a very very very limited tunnel vision that can only allow the sighting of one single piece of the truth at a time.

Take a look at nigeria. Let us make Nigeria a case in point. The most religious country, but at the same time the most corrupt. How does that fit together? How does that work? The simple answer is that the inner state of nigerians, the inner republic is rotten, compromised, unsane, and the state of the society itself is the outward mirroring of what we nigerians have become inside, what our inner republic has become. Unless we sanitize the inner republic, no peaceful, prosperous and tranquil society is ever going to be created by us, NEVER. And the religions that we have inherited from the outside are not helping one bit. They are only making our inner state dirtier and more unsane by feeding us with much of the old consciousness, as well as taking our focus away from the inner journey and living totally in the present moment.

Bobbyaf:

@ jugunlabi

You speak of man as if he just popped up into existence all on his own. For you to talk like you do about man's inner state of being and this new consciousness, you'd need to address the reality of who made man. There has to be a reason for the worsening social chaos we see from day to day. You are not in a position to say that things will get better based on man's inner state, because you have no evidence of that.

You are also not in the position to say that i am not in the position to say what i said.
The reality of who made man is irrelevant to this topic. This is about man and his inner state of being which has been totally compromised by the ego.
Like i have already stated, man's inner republic is responsible for generating or manifesting the chaotic outer republic which is the outer world he lives in.
I don't need to present any evidence to prove this. It is a well known fact that man creates from inside out, and man is the creator of the societies that he lives in, hence if he is compromised inside, he will create a chaotic world for himself, which he has already been doing for the last three millenia or so.

Bobbyaf:

@ jugunlabi

From the look of things life is becoming more difficult for humans, and this of course is based on man's selfishness. The desire to please self at all odds, is what is causing all this. The only literature I know from the get go, that points to man's ills and the general trend of evil, is the bible. All this was written long before there were social anthropologists, or psychologists, to explain away what the bible has been saying for ages upon ages. 

No, not man's selfishness but man's EGOISM. These are two different words. The fact that man has lost his center, his true self, is the cause of the difficulties and sufferings that man creates for himself to wallow in.
Wrong again.You cannot please what you have lost touch of, which is the self. The true self, man's center, has been replaced by the EGO and that is what man is pleasing, the EGO, hence all the chaos that man is wallowing in.
That means that you have not read too many books if you say the bible is the only literature that points to man's ills is the bible. Many books that are far more ancient than the bibles treated the same ills in much more details. You should read more broadly.

Bobbyaf:

@ jugunlabi

Its very simple. Our first parents sinned. Their off springs developed the tendency to sin as well as can be seen today. God's plan was introduced and became a reality some 4,000 years since it was first introduced, and its been over 2,000 years since that plan was executed. The choice is simple. Humans must either accept the plan and receive eternal life when Jesus returns again, or choose otherwise and receive damnation.

This is just the christian concept. It is much more complex than that. The origin of man's problem goes way back and beyond 4000 years ago claimed by christians, way beyond. Again try and read other literatures instead of sticking to one.
Man must find his center back, his true self, meaning his way back to his maker which is what his center means, or else he will eventually self-destruct. That is the hell or damnation that is being talked about. There is no other "plan" than that.
The eternal life that jesus was offering was the way of finding the true self nd not becoming a christian and worshipping jesus. It goes way deeper than that. The journey is inwards and not outwards into the things of this world like belonging to a religious group or worshipping of images and names and entities or whatnot.

Bobbyaf:

@ jugunlabi

We owe it to ourselves to do our own research. We have to take that solo journey for ourselves.

I am with you on that one.

And, by the way, who was doing the recording of the creation tory? How i wish that that person filmed the whole creation instead of writing it down.

Deep Sight:

^^^ God is an intangible being who is the compound of a transcendental reality and as such it makes no sense to ask after his address as though he is the boy next door.

Mazaje get serious.

I think mazaje is referring to the bible god who is not anything you described. The bible god is the kind of boy you don't want to have living next door. Lol!

davidylan:

the idea that Gabry's serious spiritual confusion is an example of having a "tolerant nature" is absurd. So what if i kept going from girl to girl with no purpose . . . would you also hail me as having a "tolerant nature" towards women and intimacy?

David, quit being an idiot. Being tolerant has nothing to do with being sexually loose or amorous, atleast not in this thread.