This thing called forgiveness

[Rosie]

I will listen to that today.

[Rosie]

So then if he is right then God and Jesus are really who we think they are and not who is described in the Bible.  Then that would mean that when I say I don't think God is really like a father but is more like a King on a throne ruling over people I could have it right.  Mr. W told me that history proves that Jesus existed but maybe he isn't right about that even.  I never heard about the Gospel of Thomas but does that Gospel not believe Jesus died on the cross?  You see this is one of the reasons I don't think God can honestly be a loving father because a father doesn't want to confuse his kids and he wants them to know him.  God is fine with being a big mystery that people even fight about.  What parent is okay with there kids fighting each other and killing each other?  And also what kind of a father can be called loving if he is just making kids and knowing they will be going to hell for eternal punishment?  It just don't make any good sense.  Now I want to know how come the Catholics have more in the Old Testament.

[Rosie]

When I was a kid and just starting to want to get to know God I used to go by myself outdoors because God is more outdoorsy than indoorsy and I would get very quiet and just breath in real deep and think I was feeling him all around me in everything.  I didn't never picture him as human but more like a summer breeze that touches everything and brings relief to suffering.  I know it is just a kids way of thinking but God was a lot less complicated then.  

[Vince]

Jan 1, 2022 10:58:29 GMT -5 Rosie said:

When I was a kid and just starting to want to get to know God I used to go by myself outdoors because God is more outdoorsy than indoorsy and I would get very quiet and just breath in real deep and think I was feeling him all around me in everything.  I didn't never picture him as human but more like a summer breeze that touches everything and brings relief to suffering.  I know it is just a kids way of thinking but God was a lot less complicated then.  

There are plenty of adults who see "God" not as a human, but a spirit that moves through and in everything. In some ways it's a more complicated notion of God as something you can't see or touch than a God that looks like us. So your view of God has changed but it may continue to change.

The guy who did the video I shared has done more videos on religion, including whether Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad were historical people who really existed. I think the broad conclusion is that Jesus and Mohommad were likely real people who existed, even though there's not a ton of historical evidence (like non-religious writings that mention them) but there's enough documentation that is close enough in time to their estimated lifetimes to demonstrate that they were historical figures of note.

One of the more interesting things for me to consider as I have been looking at various resources on faith is that even long-established faiths are constantly evolving and changing shape. Judaism used to be a much more temple-sacrifice type of religion (similar to other competing religions at the time) and depending on where you were, wasn't even necessarily monotheistic. Now it is very rabbi-oriented and concerned with the study of scriptures and other rabbinical writings. And it has many different major branches - orthodox, conservative and reform Judaism - with very different ideas about God and which scriptures are more important than others.

Christianity during the first several centuries after the death of Jesus wasn't a single unified concept, but a wide variety of different sects with wildly different views of who Jesus was and what his teachings meant. Those different sects flourished in various parts of the world, competing against each other, and it wasn't until the 4th or 5th century that the form of Christianity we're most familiar with today began to be the more dominant one. It's often said that history is written by the winners of wars; the losers don't get much of a chance to tell their side of the story. I think the same could be said for Christianity - the contents of the Bible as we know it today were determined by the "winners" in the race/struggle for which Christianity was the "most correct". Writings of the "losers" like The Gospel of Thomas and The Secret of John and The Gospel of Judas don't get taken with as much weight.

And still Christianity has continued to change and evolve, with various groups breaking off at different points because of major disagreements about various concepts of scripture. Some of these disagreements have certainly been political - the Methodist church split into north and south denominations based on their beliefs concerning slavery (there are plenty of Bible verses that support slavery and the concept that slaves should obey their masters).

One of the largest issues leading to the great schism of Christianity in 1054 that split the church into West (Roman Catholic) and East (Eastern Orthodox) was essentially over a single Latin word (filioque) in the Nicene Creed - does the Holy Spirit come from only God the Father (Eastern view) or from God the Father and God the Son (Western view)? And of course the Western church went through the Protestant Reformation; maybe there wouldn't even have been an America as we know it without the Reformation since the people who came over on the Mayflower were religious Puritans who were products of the Reformation.

The bottom line is I think you should expect your faith and beliefs to change as you learn and grow and experience new things and new ideas. Change is hard and a lot of times we are afraid of change because it means doing something new or different or uncomfortable.

[scarlette]

Heck you need to come teach my theology class. 

[Vince]

I've been going down the rabbit hole on this the past couple of days and I'd forgotten how many other gospels were out there besides the four canonical ones. At least 30, probably more. Actually, when compared to Matthew/Mark/Luke/John, the Gospel of Thomas isn't that wild, in fact it's really just a collection of 114 sayings of Jesus, no narrative or anything, and quite a few of them are paralleled in the canonical gospels.

Now the Gospel of Judas, that one is way, way out there. Has a lot of Sethian/"Gnostic" cosmology in it - very, VERY different worldview than of "mainstream" (Nicene) Christianity. But definitely shows that in the 2nd/3rd century, there were a lot of different interpretations of Christianity out there.

[Rosie]

You know Judas had to betray Jesus or maybe he wouldn't of died on the cross to rise from the dead and there would be no Christian stuff.  Judas was doomed before he was even born because that was all God's plan.  I don't understand so good what gnostic is supposed to mean but when I Googled it I found something saying it thinks God is evil.  I can't agree with that you know.  
Do you think not having all the Gospels part of the Bible and only picking some is like censoring?

[Vince]

Jan 2, 2022 13:22:10 GMT -5 Rosie said:

You know Judas had to betray Jesus or maybe he wouldn't of died on the cross to rise from the dead and there would be no Christian stuff.  Judas was doomed before he was even born because that was all God's plan.  I don't understand so good what gnostic is supposed to mean but when I Googled it I found something saying it thinks God is evil.  I can't agree with that you know.  
Do you think not having all the Gospels part of the Bible and only picking some is like censoring?

Well, Gnostic beliefs are a little more complicated than that. It's not that God is evil, it's that there is a supreme divine spirit who is unseen and unknowable who reproduced, creating lesser divine beings; one of these lesser beings (Sophia) then tried to reproduce on her own and created a flawed divine being. Sophia was ashamed of her creation and hid it, and as a result her creation was unaware of other divine beings and therefore thought it was the only divine being, and it was this god who created a flawed earth and created flawed humans (but those humans still have the divine spark). Jesus was supposed to have been sent by the supreme divine spirit to redeem flawed humanity. Like I said, way out there, far away from orthodox Christianity. 

Anyway, the fact is that the four canonical gospels were the most popular and most widely circulated in the early church, and were mostly circulated as a package together. So it's no surprise that as the New Testament canon was formed, those four were picked because they all had a consistent message that represented the most popular and accepted vision of Jesus and Christianity. Others that were "off message" were rejected. Again, the "winners" get to tell the story their way. Would you want a history book that covered World War II by saying in one chapter that the Allies fought against fascism and then in the next chapter saying that Hitler was actually a good guy and the US and Great Britain were just jealous of his fabulous ideas? Or a science textbook that talks about the space race and the moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s in one chapter, then in the next chapter says that the earth is actually flat and all the moon landings were staged and filmed in the Nevada desert?

[Rosie]

I want books that tell the facts you know?  But if the facts aren't real facts then maybe let me see it all to decide for myself.  You know in school I learned in science class about objective stuff and subjective stuff.  Objective stuff is able to get proved and measured so that would be the books about history I think and subjective stuff can't be measured or proved and that would be more like the Bible I think.  The Bible can't get objective until Jesus comes again and clears up all the confusion so just give me all the information and I will decide.  It is kind of like FOX news or CNN.  My dad won't let FOX news be on in our house.