₦airaland Forum

Danhumprey: I watched the documentary of this man's life sometime last year,and I was shocked. I ask my senior brother if it was real or they were just acting a movie script. He confirmed to me that it was real. What I don't know is whether the man's transformation is real or he is just putting on a show. But come on. It doesn't matter what people say of you when you give your life to Christ. What matter is that you are rest assured that your conscience is free,God bearing you witness,the Holy Spirit also bearing you witness. Don't allow what people may say to bring you down. It goes to show that God is still in the business of saving sinners. No matter the gravity of your sins,He is willing and ready to save you.

Here's the link to the Documentary I think you are talking about

http://www.vice.com/the-vice-guide-to-travel/the-vice-guide-to-liberia-1

Pastor Olu T: But seriously u cant even claim to have hope, u dont believe in God, the spiritual or after life, so what hope n future can u say u have?

I have hope for today and a better tomorrow. I live in the here and now and I have a heightened awareness of my immediate moment because I'm aware that this is the only life I have to live. So I make the best of it and look to make the best of others life as well. Since I'm aware that this is the only time I will be experiencing consciousness. I'm aware how precious life actually is and don't take my own or anyone else's for granted.

I'm not willing to piss my life away in hopes for a better one in the so called "Kingdom of God" or out of fear of eternal torment in "Hell". I know these are all figments of man's primitive imaginations. Maybe there is an afterlife, I'm not disagreeing with you on that. We only disagree on notion of the Bible or any Holy Book by Man as a Guide and Divine Rule book transmitted from God to Man through Revelation.

For years, Joshua Milton Blahyi, better known as General Butt Naked, was one of Liberia's most feared warlords. Then he became a pastor. Today he visits the families of his victims to seek forgiveness for his sins.

On a Tuesday about six years ago, an attempt was made to quantify Joshua Milton Blahyi's guilt. The president of his native Liberia had appointed a nine-member commission of human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and priests to determine what he had done during the civil war. At the beginning of the 132-minute hearing, they asked him a question: "How many victims were there?" The camera images from the hearing show Blahyi sitting there, dressed in white trousers, a white shirt and white shoes, pondering the question. How many had he killed

He looked in front of him, into the large, opulent room in which the hearing was taking place. He seemed both focused and completely relaxed. During the war, the spot where the commission was now sitting had been occupied by an overturned presidential throne, a pile of feces and a shiny black Steinway piano. Its legs had been carefully removed, as if surgically amputated. At the time, Blahyi controlled the streets of the Liberian capital Monrovia and went by a different name
The war, which lasted from 1989 to 2003, claimed 250,000 lives. A million people left the country and up to 20,000 children were recruited as soldiers. Reporters brought home photos of child soldiers wearing Halloween masks and women's wigs, eating human hearts and decorating streets intersections with bones. Families paid for magic spells that they hoped would offer them protection, either with money or by sacrificing a family member. The leaders adopted noms de guerre that could have been taken from films, or nightmares, which they often were: General Rambo, General Bin Laden, General Satan.

Blahyi had a reputation for being more brutal than other military leaders. Everyone knows his nom de guerre, which he says he will never lose: General Butt Naked. He was a cannibal who preferred to sacrifice babies, because he believed that their death promised the greatest amount of protection. He went into battle naked, wearing only sneakers and carrying a machete, because he believed that it made him invulnerable -- and he was in fact never hit by a bullet. His soldiers would make bets on whether a pregnant woman was carrying a boy or a girl, and then they would slit open her belly to see who was right.

Blahyi is now a priest who goes to chess club on Saturdays.

When asked about his victims, he turned his head to the side and wiped his neck. He had only learned to speak English a few years earlier, and he chose his words carefully. He had shaved his cheeks and his massive head, and sweat was running down his forehead. In the end, he said: "I don't know the entire… the entire… the entire number… but if I… if I… were to calculate it… everything I have done… it would be… it shouldn't be fewer than 20,000."

A Murderer with Few Peers

There are only a few people in the world accused of a similar number of murders as Blahyi. But no one responded to the accusations against him in the same way he did. Kaing Guek Eav, the head of the Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia, where about 15,000 people were tortured and murdered, referred to himself as an ordinary secretary who had obeyed orders, like everyone else in the machinery. Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, accused of acts of genocide that led to the deaths of 8,000 people in Srebrenica and 11,000 in Sarajevo, called the accusations "monstrous words" that he had never heard before. And General Augustin Bizimungu, who helped write the death lists in Rwanda, said nothing at all.

Blahyi answered each question conscientiously, even when he was asked about the taste of human flesh. The record of the hearing, in which he is confronted with his earlier statements, is kept on file in Liberia's national archive.

'I recruited children who were nine or 10 years old.' Is this correct?"

"Yes."

"'I planted violence into them. I explained to them that killing people was a game.' Is this correct?"

"Correct."

"'When I shot and wounded an enemy, I would rip open his back and eat his live heart.' Is this correct?"

"Let me be more precise…I also laid down the body and had my child soldiers cut the person to pieces, so that they wouldn't have any feelings for people."

"Are you the same Joshua Milton Blahyi they now call Blahyi the Evangelist?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Why did you decide, in light of this … past, to come to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?"

"For my faith. I was told that I should tell the truth, and the truth will set me free."

Man of God, or Fraud?

On a Sunday in July, five years after the hearing, Blahyi is preaching to his congregation. The odor of slaughterhouse waste permeates the church in Monrovia. Outside, a child is urinating in the sand. It's the rainy season, but the church is filled with young women in colorful dresses, businessmen wearing ties and parents cradling their children. They have spent three hours singing, dancing and praying. It was more like a festival than a church service, and now, as the event reaches its climax, the man they have been waiting for appears: Pastor Blahyi. He is wearing a white vest. He takes the microphone in his hand and says: "Take your seats. Hallelujah. I want to talk to you about blessings. Praise the Lord!"

He now calls himself Joshua, after the biblical successor to Moses. He preaches the Word of God. He has built a mission for former child soldiers he finds in the streets, and he gives them food and clothing. He has adopted three children. He has more than 2,500 friends on Facebook. He is grateful when he is praised, and he is as happy as a small child when someone embraces him. "He is a good boy," says his mother, who now cooks for the former child soldiers. "Generous and funny," say his children, who now live with him. "A new person," says his wife.

Is it possible that a war criminal can become a man of God? Or is he a fraud? That's the accusation: that he puts on the mask of a preacher every Sunday, but that beneath the mask he remains a murderer.

Blahyi, 42, is sitting on the terrace behind his house in the northern part of Monrovia. He is a heavyset man who once had the body of a fighter. Neighbors are hanging up their laundry. Children are shouting in the garden of the house next door. His daughters, who are on school vacation, are in the kitchen making a salad for the chicken dinner that is about to be served. Blahyi likes having his family around him. He talks about his eldest son Joshua, who is now 12 and about to enter high school, and who wants to become an aeronautical engineer. Blahyi watches a butterfly flying over the palm trees. His eyes become soft when he talks about his children. "I think they're proud of me," he says.

"Do you sleep well at night?"

"I am blessed with good sleep."

"Are you happy?"

"Yes, very."
"Will you go to heaven?"

"That's what it says in the Bible. He who believes in Jesus shall not be condemned."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/general-butt-naked-warlord-blahyi-seeks-forgiveness-in-liberia-a-930688.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer=

Pastor Olu T: Smile, soon enough we shall see!

Case in point!

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com


http://www.evilbible.com

Two great resources for all of us to keep this thread going.

It is posts like these that make the rest of world look at Africans as a primitive people. It's bad enough that every white missionary group goes into our poorest & most rural backwards villages & slums to get their million dollar photo ops to take back to the US to raise enormous proceeds for their fake tax free charity.

Then you have investors thinking that Africa doesn't have the creative ingenuity to sustain development so they send us their aid instead of their manufacturing jobs so we can buy cars & Electronics made in Nigeria.

The whole evangelical atheist movement goes way beyond getting you to wake up to reality. It's about convincing the rest of the world we are not some living experiment of how primitive people behaved in ancient times. Educate yourselves for the good of Nigeria & PLEASE I BEG YOU! KEEP YOUR FOOLISH EMBARRASING WITCHCRAFT BELIEFS TO YOURSELF!

Lord God, Creator of All, caught thousands of Sumerian farmers and mathematicians somewhat off guard.

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization."

I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."

"Everything is here already," the pictograph continues. "We do not need more stars."Historians believe that, immediately following the biblical event, Sumerian witnesses returned to the city of Eridu, a bustling metropolis built 1,500 years before God called for the appearance of dry land, to discuss the new development. According to records, Sumerian farmers, priests, and civic administrators were not only befuddled, but also took issue with the face of God moving across the water, saying that He scared away those who were traveling to Mesopotamia to participate in their vast and intricate trade system.

Moreover, the Sumerians were taken aback by the creation of the same animals and herb-yielding seeds that they had been domesticating and cultivating for hundreds of generations."

The Sumerian people must have found God's making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else," said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. "If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week."

According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God's most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings."

These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant," one Sumerian philosopher wrote. "They must be the creation of a complete ignoramus. "

However, you may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you.  You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land.  You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance.  You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way.  (Leviticus 25:44-46 NLT
    
If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve for only six years.  Set him free in the seventh year, and he will owe you nothing for his freedom.  If he was single when he became your slave and then married afterward, only he will go free in the seventh year.  But if he was married before he became a slave, then his wife will be freed with him.  If his master gave him a wife while he was a slave, and they had sons or daughters, then the man will be free in the seventh year, but his wife and children will still belong to his master.  But the slave may plainly declare, 'I love my master, my wife, and my children.  I would rather not go free.'  If he does this, his master must present him before God.  Then his master must take him to the door and publicly pierce his ear with an awl.  After that, the slave will belong to his master forever.  (Exodus 21:2-6 NLT)
    
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.  If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again.  But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her.  And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter.  If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife.  If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment.  (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)

When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished.  If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property.  (Exodus 21:20-21 NAB)
    
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear.  Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ.  (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)
    
Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed.  If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful.  You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts.  Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them.  (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)
  
The servant will be severely punished, for though he knew his duty, he refused to do it.  "But people who are not aware that they are doing wrong will be punished only lightly.  Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given."  (Luke 12:47-48 NLT)

The hopelessness of the blind believer. No matter what factual evidence you present to them in efforts to heighten their understanding of the real world. They rebel in fear of leaving their Bubble. Scared & feeble minded they cower to the notion of giving up their imaginary freind & lash out with vindictive damming language when confronted with the truth that supernatural claims from the myths of our ancestors where nothing more than folklore from an irrelevant & ignorant age.

By ROB WILLIAMS
Thursday 10 October 2013
A controversial American biblical scholar is set to make his first appearance in London next week to present a discovery that he claims proves the story of Jesus Christ was invented as a system of mind control to enslave the poor.

Joseph Atwill, who is the author of a book entitled 'Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus', asserts that Christianity did not begin as a religion, but was actually a sophisticated government propaganda exercise used to pacify the subjects of the Roman Empire.

At the 'Covert Messiah' conference, to be held at the Conway Hall in Holborn a week on Saturday, Mr Atwill will present his theory that the New Testament was written by first-century Roman aristocrats and that they entirely fabricated the story of Jesus Christ.
Outlining his ideas in a blog posting on his website Mr Atwill writes: "Christianity may be considered a religion, but it was actually developed and used as a system of mind control to produce slaves that believed God decreed their slavery."

Mr Atwill says that acts of insurrection by Jewish sects, who were awaiting the arrival of a so-called 'warrior Messiah' in Palestine, were a perpetual problem for the Roman Empire and that after the Empire had exhausted all traditional means of dealing with the problem they resorted to psychological warfare.

"They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system," Atwill told PRWeb.com
"That's when the 'peaceful' Messiah story was invented.
"Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to 'give onto Caesar' and pay their taxes to Rome."

Mr Atwill continues: "Although Christianity can be a comfort to some, it can also be very damaging and repressive, an insidious form of mind control that has led to blind acceptance of serfdom, poverty, and war throughout history.

To this day, especially in the United States, it is used to create support for war in the Middle East."
Elsewhere, Mr Atwill also writes: “In fact he [Jesus] may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there’s simply nothing left.”
Atwill says he made his discovery when while studying the New Testament alongside the 'War of the Jews' by Josephus - the only surviving first-person historical account of first-century Judea.
Mr Atwill claims that he began to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts.

"What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of [Emperor] Titus Flavius as described by Josephus," Atwill claims.
"This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern", he continues.
"The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar."

These theories commonly include the suggestion that secret societies, mystery schools and other religions used the fictional story of Christ to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/story-of-jesus-christ-was-fabricated-to-pacify-the-poor-claims-controversial-biblical-scholar-8870879.html

http://uk.prweb.com/releases/2013/10/prweb11201273.htm

Read this at your own peril. You might be a different person afterwards.

Eze Promoe: [color=crimson]God doesn't recognize any of these denominational divisions. They are just wordly made. God is a God that searches the heart, and the God of those who truly follows him, despite the denomination or religion.
His ways are righteousness, holiness, love and endurance. [/color]

I like that! God doesn't recognize denominations or books or creeds! Now we're on the same page. Just be a good person & that's all you need to worry about. Welcome to the wonderful world of Atheism.

We kind of hijacked this thread too. I think we all came to the consensus that God had nothing to do with the hurricane in the Philippines

"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing." - Hypatia of Alexandria (370 - 415 AD)

WASHINGTON DC – USA – Scientists at the Institute of Historical Research have finally released their findings after five years of dedicated research.The scientists, headed by Doctor Julius Sanreso, welcomed the research findings and said that it would be in the interests of those who believe in such nonsense as organised religion or creationism to accept the fact that religious books were written by men as a control system.“

Just think for one second, if ‘God’ or a ‘messenger of God’ had written that particular religious book/bible, how come the writings only occur within a very limited period in human history? Also, consider the fact, that a human writing on a piece of paper, or a few pieces of paper, is not the word of ‘God’. If they were really written by a universal God or entity, the books would not be limited to some pre-medievel costume drama but would encompass all universality, history, the future and science. Language is something created by man, not an all-seeing, all encompassing entity. God would presumably be universal and timeless as well as all-knowing, as is the universe, therefore these man-written books and scriptures, are just that, man-written linguistically created nonsense used to control men and women thousands of years ago. Why would ‘God’ write anything anyway? One must consider the fact that, even now, there are religious zealots and ordinary people still entrenched in a control belief system that is so far removed from reality that it borders on madness. There is no rational or scientific way that organised religions can have a modicum of truth or factual reality because of the very reason that these books are entombed in the time that they were written. These books should therefore simply beviewed as limited parables and historical fiction, as well as a lesson in how millions of people can be so easily controlled.”

The research paper also came to the conclusion that reward/punishment religions, as control systems, were losing their grip on most of the population of the world and only a few die-hard fanatics and delusional maniacs were carrying on with the flame of idiocy.“The game is up for all religions, how long can this sham carry on, with their ridiculous outdated ceremonies? The priests are deceivers, and they need to come up with some pretty radical solutions to their thousand year old magic trick. People aren’t as dumb or easily swayed as they used to be thousands of years ago, they actually have reasoning powers and can see through the utter nonsense of organised control systems like religion.”

The problem for the world’s political leaders, is that slowly, humans who were controlled for so many years by fictitious writings, may suddenly lose their controlled ‘faith’. This could be quite dangerous, because it would mean that these people would suddenly wake up and realise that they have been fooled for so long by being communally hypnotised. “

We must ensure that the people who have been fooled for so long by fictitious belief systems utilised to control humans do not get too angry when they realise that what they believe in is nonsense written by humans utilising human created language. This could be dangerous for society, so we must either let them carry on believing their fiction or try to somehow support them when they realise the truth,” Dr Sanreso said.

http://www.dailysquib.co.uk/sci_tech/3102-scientists-prove-that-all-religious-books-are-man-made-nonsense.html

Eze Promoe: [color=crimson]Anything that's not of God is of the devil.
My brethren, quit beating around the bush and convince me that you are not of devil.[/color]

I'm confused? Anything is not of "which" God or God's is the devil? According to Islam your the one being deceived by the devil. Anything that is not of Allah is of the devil. So you my friend are an atheist without even knowing it because you boldly declare there is no Allah. I don't go that far. I just say there is no evidence of any supreme being & I'm willing to stand corrected if evidence is presented that can verify A specific God or Gods existence