There are several interpretations of the Bible, hence multiple religions. Period.
You and I could read the same passage in the Bible, and get different meanings.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obama: You Betcha, My Friend!

God may be the ultimate and final judge for YOU, as a believer. You must realize that there are other beliefs & while you may not agree with them, they do exist.

Oh- and let me add that I really applaud anyone who believes in any religion and truly feels it adds value to their life. That is really a wonderful thing.

Nicely said Candy!!!

The Bible is a product of the times & places it was written. It IS NOT the word of God, it is man's interpretation of the word of God. And that interpretation is based 100% on the time & place of the author and must be understood accordingly.

Bible is Holy Spirit inspired, he inspired men to write down what He told them to write- how else would you explain away the prophectic warnings these men and women gave, sometimes hundreds of years before those exact things actually happened? How would you explain those away, sashak? We really can't. Jinx and Candy- I do realize,of course, that there are other beliefs than mine. They just are not my beliefs and I do not consider them to be the truth, and I will never say that I do consider them to be the truth...

"To be able to worship our creator on earth is a beautiful thing,
to be able to worship Him forever in the heavenlies is exquisite."

Hermeneutic of suspicion my friend, hermeneutic of suspicion. EVERY widely respected Biblical scholar recognizes & understands that what we now call "The Bible" was compiled over thousands of years from thousands of sacred texts. Which were (again) written by men & women who were products of their times. It just isn't possible to separate a text from the time & place it was written

I can't explain anything away. Faith doesn't require explanation. It requires understanding.

Thank you Sasha for adding your many years of education in Religion to this blog.

You are quite welcome, Candy. I honestly am not trying to belittle anyone's belief in any faith. I was raised in a Christian household & went to parochial school from k-12 & wholly respect anyone of faith.

Paul Tillich about Faith - "without doubt there is no faith".

Me too, Sasha. I respect people who's lives are benefitted from faith. (Is benefitted a word? If not, you know what I mean.)

sasha, it's shameful to try to discredit the Bible by saying this or anything else meant to cast suspicion- first and foremost, I am a child of God not a Philosophy student - the Hermeneutic of suspicion was written by A HUMANIST. I am sure you are well aware of Humanism and how it opposes the Bible. Others who do not have Masters Degrees such as you and I do may not have been able to be blessed with so much education so for them this is what sasha is taling about:

"In the history of western philosophy, the most penetrating and radical questions asked by modern philosophy came out through the defiant treatises of what the French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur in his Freud and Philosophy (1970) calls "the masters of the hermeneutics of suspicion"
namely, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
According to Ricoeur, the hermeneutics of suspicion is "a method of interpretation which assumes that the literal or surface-level meaning of a text is an effort to conceal the political interests which are served by the text.

The purpose of interpretation is to strip off the concealment, unmasking those interests."[1]

It unmasks and unveils untenable claims. It suspects the credibility of the superficial text and explores what is underneath the surface to reveal a more authentic dimension of meaning.

Marx's analysis of religion exposed and opposed the illusory character of the transcendent realm conceived and taught by religion to ease the misery and hardship experienced by dehumanized people exploited in work places by the new slave-drivers of the Industrial Era — the capitalists.

Hence, Marx concluded that religion is the opium of the people.

With an equally devastating attack against the religion of his time, Nietzsche saw in it a determination to elevate weakness to the level of strength thereby making weakness honorable and worthy of praise.

In such situation, the character of the religious human being is led to a state of domestication where the full potential of being human is not explored, much less realized. Because of the "moral values" of humility, pity, hospitality, kindness, among others, the human being has been deprived of the natural flow of the "will to power" which, according to Nietzsche, is the sole factor that makes humanity the bridge stretched between the "Unmensch" [beast] and the "Ubermensch" [Overman].

Religion in the hands

of Freud was critically presented to distinguish "the real" from "the apparent". Though religion could be a source of comfort and feeling of assurance, getting one's self in a serious problem in the warp and woof of life exposes the illusions that inhabit this house of cards.

In Freud, religion is simply an expression of one's wish to be protected and defended by a father-figure called "God".

It could be said at this point that the masters of the hermeneutics of suspicion though "destructive" in their methodology did not actually aim to destroy institutionalized edifices of culture and civilization just for the senseless sake of destroying them. They embarked in their respective projects to "clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a 'destructive' critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting."[2] It is only in destroying the false assumptions and the untenable platforms of awareness that new liberating paradigms of thought may arise to allow the human being a better interpretation of her/his reality. In the process, such hermeneutics of suspicion leads to a bi-focal critique — a critique that is not only trained towards the participant in a system but likewise towards the system itself.

However, the hermeneutics of suspicion in the post-modern climate is an expression of the same spirit of philosophic resistance to "a profound disenchantment with modernism (and its conviction to reason, rationalism, scientism, objectivity and progress) much earlier in Western history."[3] Modernism is generally perceived to be predominated by the key principles of linear progress, absolute truth, knowledge standardization and rational formation of states of affairs.

Nietzsche's Imagination of Resistance: Reality as Interpretations

Of the three sources of the hermeneutics of suspicion in the modern era, Nietzsche's "prophetic pronouncements" are hailed by contemporary philosophy as most expressive of the post-modern temper — the most pregnant of post-modern ideas

Nietzsche's imagination of resistance is profoundly expressed in both his minor and major philosophical works. In an unpublished essay, "On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense," which he wrote in 1873, Nietzsche argues that that which is claimed to be objective truth is nothing but a barrage of metaphors. Objective truth, the basis of scientific theories, is only an illusion. Hence, if 'truth' is relative, no amount of scientific hypothesizing can capture it.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Nietzsche goes a step further in asserting this relativity. No absolute moral standards objectively predominate the human situation, a priori. There is nothing inherently abhorrent in exploitation; its moral suitability largely depends on the social status of the person who perpetrates the exploitation in society.

In another book, On the Genealogy of Morals, A Polemic, Nietzsche presses further on in his attack of objectivity. Traditional morality for him is tremendously influenced by the Christian valuation of weakness and hence should be torn down. The human "will to power" is tragically devastated by one's mind-set of guilt and remorse. Christianity has contrived them to control the natural occurrence of human flourishing. Nietzsche maintains that there is no absolute, objective, supernatural and universal perspective. The human existential reality is relative: "There are no facts, only interpretations." The very absence of a definite and absolute moral influence in the human existential realm, bestows on the human being the lonely task of setting his own normative guidelines.

Nietzsche's imagination of resistance is likewise reflected in his other works which he later produced like The Case of Wagner, A Musician's Problem (1888), Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer (1888), The Antichrist, Curse on Christianity (1888), and Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is (1888).

Among the philosophers of the contemporary period, the imagination of resistance that preoccupied Nietzsche's life of defiant philosophizing has had a massive extent of influence on the philosophizing of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard among others.

Heidegger's Imagination of Resistance: Hermeneutics as Existential Understanding

Heidegger's imagination of resistance is shown in his Being and Time as he challenges the Husserlian concept of objectivity in phenomenology. "Husserl argues that objective interpretation is possible using his transcendental phenomenological method that requires bracketing the subjectivity inhering in the interpreter's life-world (Lebenswelt), the world of personal experience and desires."[4] Heidegger argues that such bracketing is not possible on the ground that "the understanding of a situation is directly mediated by a fore-knowledge, or sensitivity to situations, that is comprised by the understander's life-world."[5] Hence, holding that Lebenswelt in abeyance would even make understanding impossible. In this connection, Heidegger concludes that "as a necessary part of human 'being-in-the-world' (Dasein), things are perceived according to how they are encountered and used in one's everyday routines and tasks. Perception and apprehension thus move from fore-knowledge to an existential understanding, a largely unreflective and automatic grasp of a situation that triggers a response."[6]

In so doing, Heidegger transforms hermeneutics from a theory of interpretation (epistemological hermeneutics) to a theory of existential understanding (ontological hermeneutics).

He 'depsychologizes' hermeneutics by dissociating it from the empathetic perception of other beings. Understanding now appears as a no-longer-conscious component of Dasein; it is embedded within the context of specific situations and plans, with, in effect, finite computational resources. Therefore, interpretation (Auslegung) which depends on such existential understanding (Verstehen) is not the general logical method found in classical philology, but refers to a conscious recognition of one's own world. Dilthey's methodological hermeneutic circle is consequently supplanted by the more fundamental ontological hermeneutic circle, which leads from existential understanding situated in a world to a self-conscious interpretive stance. This self-consciousness, however, cannot escape its limitations to achieve a transcendental understanding in the sense of Hegel, who considered rationality the ability to reflectively accept or reject (transcend) the received socio-cultural tradition. According to this reading of Heidegger, fore-knowledge is accumulated over time and constrains successive exercises of existential understanding. But self-conscious understanding cannot choose which elements in the experience based foreknowledge are respecified in the bootstrapping process.[7] "

Now that we all understand what sasha is referring to,I will correct her theology.
Which is off. The Bible obviously has cultural references all throughout. But The Holy Spirit is not limited by or boxed in by time or culture He inspired what the authors wrote.

This is not about YOU and how much YOU think YOU know- this is about GOD who created the universe and everything in it with a snap of His fingers, out of dust......!..... Let me know when you can do that!............

Man ( or woman) can never know what God is capable of, can never fully understand His abilities and you my friends will never trump God with your Humanism, you can quote Freud and Marx untill your tongue falls off or your fingers fall off from typing but you will never, never, never, ever know more than God and you will never, never,never,never ever be able to box Him in to fit what your understandings are and what your ability to conceive of Him is . As a self-proclaimed Christian, you should know this sasha, and what in the world are you doing in the Humanist camp? You have rejected your faith, if you ever had any, somewhere along the way. This is why you can reconcile being a Humanist and still proclaiming to be Christian....

Beach, I am pretty sure by now that you are not a Christian, but even so I will say that your quote is not a word that the Lord would give us - rather, He says that faith with doubt mixed in is double-minded faith, that there can be no faith when doubt is present. ...

sasha now that I look at your page I see that you have purposely not filled out the education section- maybe you are not as educated as you believe you are. Not that this matters ultimately anyways, because man's/woman's wisdom is nothing compared to the knowledge of God; we are but mice and He is like a lion. We are a puddle, He is the Ocean. A bazillion oceans,LOL. I say this to remind you that what man knows is a tiny pinch, what God knows is EVERYTHING.

If God knows everything, you think he would have known about the dinosaur bones buried deep in the Earth, that Man would discover.
And I doubt Sashak "purposely" didn't fill out the education section.

Some people are so closed minded.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obama: You Betcha, My Friend!

Jinx : How do you know that God didn't know about dinsaur bones buried deep within the earth? Didn't He plan to readicate them from the earth? Then how do you propose that He wouldn't know what happened to their bones? This is one of the craziest arguments I have heard to try and discredit God....

Then why did she leave it out? It had to be purposefully not filled out. Just saying.

If by close minded you mean singly focused on the word of God then THANK YOU that was a huge encouragment for me to hear you say that

your avatar is making me LOL, that's how I feel your are towards hearing about God's sovereignty...close minded, right?

I can't "listen" to you anymore, you make me ill.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obama: You Betcha, My Friend!

Oh, and my avi?
It's a picture of a singer I like, and I have had it about three weeks.
He's pulling on a hat...
It has NOTHING to do with you?

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Obama: You Betcha, My Friend!

I can imagine you are tired LOL . Have a nice day.

"If the lion lies down with the lamb, the lamb must be replaced frequently." --Attributed to Martin Luther In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist violence of September 11, 2001.

he still looks like I imagine you to be, closing your ears lol

"If the lion lies down with the lamb, the lamb must be replaced frequently." --Attributed to Martin Luther In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist violence of September 11, 2001.

________________________________________________________________
Behind every great man there is a woman rolling her eyes

Have anyone seen Evan Almighty???

That movie is sooo freaking hilarious Morgan Freeman plays the best God!!!

________________________________________________________________
Behind every great man there is a woman rolling her eyes