No Christian Forum-So I created a Yahoo GROUP!!!

Even forum trolls are allowed to join - if they repent. : P

I'm not a troll, honest! I just express myself in very few words and concepts.

I actually do post in a forum of a Christian organisation that is specifically against porn. And I do so in a civilised way.

For the record, I agree with what Gaybot Foxley said.

1 Kings, 14.10: Therefore, behold, I will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel, and will take away the remnant of the house of Jeroboam, as a man taketh away dung, till it be all gone.

1 Kings, 16.11: And it came to pass, when he began to reign, as soon as he sat on his throne, that he slew all the house of Baasha: he left him not one that pisseth against a wall, neither of his kinsfolks, nor of his friends.

1 Kings, 21.21: Behold, I will bring evil upon thee, and will take away thy posterity, and will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel,

1 Samuel, 25.22: So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall.

1 Samuel, 25.34: For in very deed, as the LORD God of Israel liveth, which hath kept me back from hurting thee, except thou hadst hasted and come to meet me, surely there had not been left unto Nabal by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall.

2 Kings, 9.8: For the whole house of Ahab shall perish: and I will cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall, and him that is shut up and left in Israel:

Fur 13:56

And the furries called upon the Great Cat to summon her servant Strife to smite the evil troll.


Torley Linden:
Ah, a big part of Second Life's beauty is how we've got so much diversity flourishing, especially as the Grid expands greatly. I prefer to focus on what I enjoy instead of butt heads with those who I don't agree with.

A reminder to please refrain from derailing other Residents' threads... please read our Guidelines, as Strife referred to above.

Please note that in the Community Standards, we don't allow Intolerance. Please continue the discussion productively.

Interesting, however I fail to see why my post is intolerant for simply suggesting that a moderator stop someone deliberately trolling the thread. Perhaps a talk with Mr. Alastair, who is the one being intolerant here is in order?

Umm, it seems that Alastair has some kind of "thing" about pissing against a wall. One wonders why. He seems to have done a Google search for the word "pisseth" in the King James version of The Bible, because he has reported all six cases where it appears in that version.

Now, the 20th Century scholarly translation known as the Revised Standard Version, which dedicated itself to being as true as possible to the original ancient texts, does not have any such references at all. Neither does the modern Catholic version. Alastair had to use only the King James version, which is well-known for making "figurative" translations of the ancient texts in order to address the sensibilities and concerns of the age in which it was written. I am not a Biblical scholar by any stretch, but someone I know who formally studied The Bible for three years and is qualified to teach it speculates that the authors of the King James version were inserting condemnations of public drunkenness (the principle causative factor motivating those who might "pisseth against a wall" in Elizabethan, Restoration and post-Restoration times in England, when public drunkenness was indeed considered a significant social problem).

So one has to wonder why Alastair was so eager to home in on six iterations of an arguably silly-sounding phrase in a document containing 773,000 to 774,000 words (depending mainly on how you count hyphenated words), and which is at the foundation of Western Civilization and heavily influences most people's sense of morality and ethics (and not only religious people's) to this day. Surely Alastair could come away from his evidently arduous examinations of The Bible with something more than finding references to bodily functions?

Perhaps Alastair himself is an heroic beer drinker, and never met a public wall he could leave unadorned, but I somehow doubt it. One could remark on the famous Hindu proverb: If a pickpocket meets God, all he will see is pockets. But I suspect there is more afoot here. Nor do the Biblical references to false prophets seem to apply.

Alastair, I suspect you are teetering ever closer to succumbing to your Fate (an ancient Greek concept, so you may have overlooked it). Quit fighting it. Which denomination of Christianity will you finally embrace?

"Umm, it seems that Alastair has some kind of "thing" about pissing against a wall. One wonders why. He seems to have done a Google search for the word "pisseth" in the King James version of The Bible, because he has reported all six cases where it appears in that version."



Truly the Wailing Wall........

Hi Aislinn,
We publish InnerFaith Magazine in Second Life. Please contact JuJudoll Dancer - the Art Director of VooDoo Publications. She will be happy to work with you and develop a logo for your group free of charge. I will also give you a free advertisement in the InnerFaith Magazine. The Magazine explores faith in a virtual environment. You are also welcome to use the InnerFaith Revival Tent Meeting Area for any in-world events. I will send you a invitation to the group so you can post notices on the SL event page. Good luck with your group.

When you wrestle with a pig you both get dirty, only the pig likes it.

Off topic?

... maybe you read it wrong, or maybe you just don't get it.

Seems pretty On-Topic to me, look harder

Lifechurch.tv just opened an awesome community.

It`s down on "experience island". They`ll be doing live broadcasts and such, some members Rl are even joining SL just to be involved virtually.


Worth a check out. Nicely done.

XXX church also has a little set up on the SIM.

""Let me respond to this notion of answered prayer, because this is a classic sampling error, to use a statistical phrase. We know that human beings have a terrible sense of probability. There are many things we believe that confirm our prejudices about the world, and we believe this only by noticing the confirmations, and not keeping track of the disconfirmations. You could prove to the satisfaction of every scientist that intercessory prayer works if you set up a simple experiment. Get a billion Christians to pray for a single amputee. Get them to pray that God regrow that missing limb. This happens to salamanders every day, presumably without prayer; this is within the capacity of God. [Warren is laughing.] I find it interesting that people of faith only tend to pray for conditions that are self-limiting.""


excellent article here.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17889148/site/newsweek/page/1/

A believer explained it to me once: Prayers are always answered; sometimes the answer is "No."

Those who insist on disbelieving make arguments just as strained, fallacious and artificial to support their beliefs as anyone does attempting to "prove" their religious faith is true. But believing something is false is also still just a belief. The only logical position is agnosticism, pending proof one way or the other.

Any knowledgeable scientist will tell you we don't even have any idea what 90% of the matter and energy in the universe actually is, let alone what (or who?) might have caused the so-called Big Bang scientists BELIEVE (from what little they do know) started the universe off, and of course, no idea why it all happened. So, proof is still unavailable.

In the absence of proof, believe what you want. But remember, if you're an atheist you are as much a *cough* believer as any deist you mock, and you make yourself fair game and you deserve what you get.

Pragmatically, I have met "born-again" Christians who "believe" out of personal experience: They report having had a transcendant religious experience involving a perceived "presence" or "closeness" of "God." The thing is I have seen it make them better people with happier lives. I haven't met any atheists who have reported any similar transformations for the better, but do see plenty who seem to be trending toward worse lives. So, I'm an agnostic, FWIW, and much in The Bible seems pretty likely the accumulated legends and traditions of a certain nomadic people who arrived in Judea thousands of years ago, FWIW. But I wasn't there either. I think we all need to be a little humble about what we presume to "know" or not "know" when we are still so abysmally ignorant about our own universe.

BTW, The believers that amaze me the most are the people who believe anything they see on televison. Whatever could they be thinking? : P

The article at http://www.netscape.com/viewstory/2007/04/02/faithful-build-a-second-life-for-religion-online/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Ftech%2Fgaming%2F2007-04-01-second-life-religion_N.htm&frame=true might be interesting to some of y'all religous folks.

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

If you are an atheist - why does it matter to you whether she has a christain group or not? If you are right, in the scheme of things it wont matter.

Ive never understood athiests who have decided they need to basically inform believers they are wrong.

I mean if they are right and there is no god and no afterlife, why bother? The aethiest will have gained nothing except depressing someone about their eventual fate.

Perhaps that it. Many athiests are miserable and want more people to be miserable with them.

Im not a devout Christain. Im more someone that wishes I could have belief like that.

It would help clear out the worry the entire human race, including me will blink out into nothing and the universe, both physical and spirtual wont care.

You are reading your struggle into my posts. I reject no "gods," nor believe in any. The "gods" of this world are human constructs, and a serious deist will tell you that. That includes serious Christians. To a sophisticated Christian, the Holy Spirit is ineffable, beyond human understanding. Ditto the Supreme Consciousness proposed by Hindus and Buddhists, which is far above the circus of (lesser) deities both religions include in their pantheons. Ditto the "Tao" in Chinese spiritual thought. One could go on and on: The Plains Indians posit a Great Spirit beyond the lesser spirits they believed in who is the ruler and I think the creator of all things. The concept of a realm of the spirit with a Supreme Being seems to be built into people, whatever form it takes in particular cultures.

Can't know for sure, of course, but I think your war is not so much with the proposition that there may be an Ultimate Intelligence who created and orders the Universe (who the hell knows? Could be, on the available evidence, or not), as it is with today's generation of Pharisees: These were the class in ancient Judea for which Jesus had particular scorn. They were the ones who had learned and especial knowledge of the the Scriptures in a largely illiterate age, lived outwardly "by the 'Book,'" often hypocritically, and claimed a social status over other people saying, "Thank God we are not as other men." There are plenty of people like that today, both religious ones and non-religious (don't get me started on the really insufferable versions on the "progressive" side of the political spectrum). Some things never change. I suspect there have been too many Pharisees in your life.

It would probably help you to separate the issues. Whether there is a spiritual aspect to Reality and whether there is an Ultimate Being is a very different matter from whether one should knuckle under to whatever rigid, self-righteous people may have existed in your life, shoving their particular constructs and codes down your throat. I say this because I detect a lot of unfocused anger in you, which ends up directed at people you do not know who have done you no harm, nor anyone else as far as either of us can see, and to attack one of the world's great religious traditions, which has done far more palpable good overall than the palpable harm it has also done over the last two thousand years. Your anger has become displaced, attacking persons and things that do not deserve it. This not only attacks them and it and clouds the issues; it gets in the way of your own development. I think you need to get the negative personalities in your life and your anger at them behind you.

I personally think the world (the West, anyway) is beginning a new upward turn in the spiral in spiritual development that will take it beyond dogmatic, ultimately arbitrary beliefs. But that is just my opinion. More to the point here, I think you are personally struggling to find an upward turn in your spiritual spiral. I hope it turns out well for you, but in any case I am pretty sure that anger, resentment, and mockery of those who also are striving upward in their own way are not going to help you with your struggle.

Har this seems a fairly well thought out post- Im not sure your right as to his motivations but ...


In any case - why does an Aethist care what people beleive? They should only care if people are persecuting them as aethiests. Or to a lesser extent persecuting others.

Since if theres no God/Spirtual force as they beleive, Then there will be no reason to beleive or not beleive.

At all.

Trying to get people to give up their beleifs is pointless. Trying to get people to be more tolerant of others beleif's is worthwhile.

I contend Alastair has thus far proven to be intolerant of other's beliefs. And thus why should he expect people to be tolerant of his own?

Sorry. It’s just by page 3 I had forgotten what this thread was about.
Good work Aislinn.

DK

I'm actually delighted this thread has not been locked yet. Please let's not get nasty with the Christians here. The overarching beauty of Second Life is that it allows ordinary people like you and me to organize worldwide on the cheap, in a wonderfully useful and aesthetically pleasing way. People like the Brights and the Pagans got organized in SL long before many Christians did, so we're all here together and is this cool or what? yes it is.

Dude. Chill.

1) Atheists and agnostics seem to be in the majority in SecondLife. You're not in some victimized minority that needs to resort to civil disobedience to avoid being crushed by some bully telling you what to believe, or else.

2) Religion isn't "all about god(s)", sure that may be a big point but most religions and congregations focus on building a community of people that work and live together well. The 'God' thing may be little more than a collective hallucination, tolerated by some, vervently beleved by others.

3) Since when did atheists need to proselytize? Show me in the "Atheist dogma" where one needs to be an insufferable ass in order to convert other people to "Save" them from their foolish beliefs? You push hard enough, you'll make yourself into a martyr, which is, if anything, something that only the faithful would resort to.

A call for an assembly of Christians is no threat to you or your idealism. Give it a rest.

--
I'm somewhere between agnostic and atheist...
and resent when people like you make the rest of us look bad.

Oh MY!!! You mean we can acutally talk about my Yahoo group? LOL


I don't mind the friendly Discussion! And with with all this forum exposure, just means more members signing up for us!

If you all ever get board and want to have this discussion in world, I have a great beach we can chat at, as long as we are kind and respectful to each other.

So Alastar!.......come visit me at Spiritual Reboot, I'd be more then happy to talk with you. I've had more then 1 conversation this week about why I believe. But be warned, if you think your going to talk me out of it....no way...I'm hooked for life-Eternity that is! LoL!

Blessings everyone!

: D