If Jesus died to forgive us, then why is there a Hell?

This is how the Bible sees the earth. It is flat. Over it is a vault. In that vault is Heaven and the home of God. Want to see a picture of it; go to the website I previously offered.

You quoted Isaiah 40.
Here is the quote from The New English Bible (40:21,22)

"Do you know, have you not heard,
Were you told not long ago,
Have you not perceived ever since the world began,
That God sits throned on the vaulted roof of earth,
Whose inhabitants are like grasshoppers."

You cannot have a vaulted roof over a sphere but you easily have one over a flat surface.

Your other quote Job 26:7

God spreads the canopy of the sky over chaos and suspends the earth in a void.

What does this have to do with the earth being flat or spherical. They both can be suspended in a void.
Irrelevant quote.

This is the conclusion by Robert Schadewald from the website I posted earlier;

"From their geographical and historical context, one would expect the ancient Hebrews to have a flat-earth cosmology. Indeed, from the very beginning, ultra-orthodox Christians have been flat-earthers, arguing that to believe otherwise is to deny the literal truth of the Bible. The flat-earth implications of the Bible were rediscovered and popularized by English-speaking Christians in the mid-19th century. Liberal scriptural scholars later derived the same view. Thus, students with remarkably disparate points of view independently concluded that the ancient Hebrews had a flat-earth cosmology, often deriving this view from scripture alone. Their conclusions were dramatically confirmed by the rediscovery of 1 Enoch."

Is it not funny that these same Christians, who now know that the earth is a sphere, are now trying to make excuses for or reinterpret the scriptures to make the earth look round. Conservative Christians believe in literal interpretation of the Bible when it agrees with their dogma and their new interpretation of the scriptures when it doesn't.

neologist said;

"Can you think of any vantage point whereby one can envision all the kingdoms of the world?"

Yes I can if I believed as the authors of the Bible believed; that the earth was flat.

Your Biblical quote;

"30 And then the sign of the Son of man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will beat themselves in lamentation, and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory."

Yup, you would expect that from a flat-earther. Everyone on earth seeing him at the same time.

Let's go back to Job. Look at Job 38:12-14.

"In all your life have you ever called up the dawn
Or shown the morning its place?
Have you taught it to grasp the fringes of the earth
and shake the Dog-star from its place;
to bring up the horizon in relief as clay under a seal,
until all things stand out like the folds of a cloak,"

If the author believed in a spherical earth there would be no fringes. But there would be edges to grasp it if it were flat.

Do you know what a clay seal looks like?

It's flat.

Oh, by the way, did you know the earth doesn't move. That's right. Everything revolves around the earth. Why do you think the Christians considerd it heresy when Copernicus suggested the earth moved around the sun?

"Nicholas Copernicus deduced the Sun-centered view of the universe. Before him, the entire universe was believed to move around an unmoving Earth, as it seems to do at first glance. The Sun appears to go around the Earth, not the other way around. If the Earth moves, why aren't we all flung off into space? Copernicus' idea simplified the entire solar system, by the way. But, it conflicted with the Catholic Church. The Bible actually implies, in several places, that the Earth does not move. And so, in order to publish without having to fight the Church (and lose), Copernicus modified his book to say that his theory was only a trick to make the calculations simpler, that he was not claiming that the Earth actually moved around the sun."

http://www.jimloy.com/biograph/galileo.htm

Wonder where the church got that silly idea from?

I Chronicles 16:30: "He has fixed the earth firm, immovable."
Psalm 93:1: "Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm..."
Psalm 96:10: "He has fixed the earth firm, immovable..."
Psalm 104:5: "Thou didst fix the earth on its foundation so that it never can be shaken."
Isaiah 45:18: "...who made the earth and fashioned it, and himself fixed it fast..."

Good work, Xingu. I find little to disagree with except that, in the case of Isaiah, we are witnessing a difference of translators. As for Job, well, I find it interesting that anyone in 1600 B.C. would assert that a solid object could remain suspended in space without any support.

As for the scriptures I cited, I suppose I could take them one by one, but it would surely end only in a quibbling match.

So consider this: When Galileo was tried by the inquisition he affirmed his strong belief in the bible and claimed his heliocentric concept of the solar system agreed with the bible. Because he rejected the church's interpretation of scripture based on Greek philosophy, he was condemned.

Also I am sorry that I won't go to any of your posted sites or read any of your posted books.

Present company excepted, of course, but I resent being bludgeoned with an avalanche of words to make a pebble of a point.

I post my source for any who wish to know where I get my information. I don't want anyone to think that I fabricate my information and they should have the right to evaluate them. It's the readers choice to use them.

For me knowing is what is important, not just one side but all sides. If you only know one side well you'll end up being a Rush Limbaugh "Dittohead".

Xingu, I can see how you don't find any consistancy in the bible. I warn you on the fact that your attitude, if applied to every book you read, would lead you to complete chaos. Think about what predjucices you bring into you interpration of the bible, are you reading it, and then looking for errors, or reading errors into the text?

Explanation understood and accepted.

thunderrunner -- do you claim to be free of prejudices? You know that intellectual process does not enter into decision making, but rather in the rationalization of the decision made.

Thunder_runner

I don't base my life's philosophy on just one book supposedly written by a God. Most books I read are on history and they are far more logical and believable than the Bible.

Rarely do I read science fiction. I would put the Bible in that category.

By the way, if the Bible was error free I would find no errors. But there are many errors and contradictions in the Bible.

For example back on May 6 (page 21) neologist said;
Then there was the practice of child sacrifice. According to Merrill F. Unger: "Excavations in Palestine have uncovered piles of ashes and remains of infant skeletons in cemeteries around heathen altars, pointing to the widespread practice of this cruel abomination." (Archaeology and the Old Testament, 1964, p. 279) Halley's Bible Handbook (1964, p. 161) says: "Canaanites worshipped, by immoral indulgence, as a religious rite, in the presence of their gods; and then, by murdering their first-born children, as a sacrifice to these same gods. It seems that, in large measure, the land of Canaan had become a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah on a national scale. . . . Did a civilization of such abominable filth and brutality have any right longer to exist? . . . Archaeologists who dig in the ruins of Canaanite cities wonder that God did not destroy them sooner than he did."

This isn't the first time I've heard Christians defend their God for killing the Canaanites.

But look what the Bible says (and this requires no interpretation).
"Under the ban they destroyed everything in the city; they put everyone to the sword, men and women, young and old, and also cattle, sheep and asses."
Joshua 6:21

Let us continue;
"The Lord said to Joshua, 'Do not be fearful or dismayed; take the whole army and attack Ai. I deliver the king of Ai into your hands, him and his people, his city and his country. Deal with Ai and her king as you dealt with Jericho and her king; but you may keep for yourselves the cattle and any other spoil that you may take."
Joshua 8:1

So how does God punish those who practice child-sacrifice?

HE KILLS ALL THE CHILDREN! It is an abomination when the Canaanites kill children but it is just and right if the perfect God of the Christians does it.

I think what God did was evil and wrong, but then I'm not a Christian.

Here's another one.
God kills and slaughters Egyptian men, women and children, including babies, because they are making slaves of his people. So after killing all those people what does God do? He has them become slaveholders, not only of Canaanites but of their own people.

To me this is not only barbaric but two-faced hypocrisy, but then I'm not a Christian.

If I have to believe in a God that practices this type of ethics and morality then I don't want to have anything to do with the Christian religion.

My point is that you can make contradictions out of anything if you don't have a clear understanding of the point of the text. Give me any book and if I think and want it to have errors, I can find and/or makeup anything I wanted, wether it was true or not.

thunder_runner -- You need to examine yourself. Walk into virgin territory.

That is putting the cart before the horse. Generally the purpose of text is to make a point. Help me out here. What is your view of the point behind God's order to kill all the Canaanite children?

Not to mention Egyptian children.

Really, what were these children guilty of that they had to be killed by this most perfect God? Being born to the wrorg parents? The wrong civilization?
Did they have a choice?

Did you?

Excuse me for jumping into this discussion, but:
Indeed killing innocent infants seems like a common thing in the bible. Wasn't Abraham surprised when his god asked him to sacrifice his son? Does it mean it was a common thing in those days? And why on earth should he be thankful for the fact that the lord let him use a lamb as a substitute? That is not an act of mercy. A decent god wouldn't have asked him such a sacrifice in the first place. Or should we look at it as a relative improvement in barbaric times?
What annoys me even more is the way god made/let Herodes kill all those innocent contemporary babies when Jesus was born and fled to Egypt.
If he orchestrated all this in the first place he could have written a better script, couldn't he?

Biblioteque.

Euthenasia.

Two words that just seem to go together

... in the library of assassinated souls.
Orchestration was the death of our own improvisational lives.






Smoke is on the water, and water is under the bridge.
Move along, cry deeply and move along.

"Killed" is such a vague term, filled with semantics and subjective interpretation. Could we, in kindness, prefer to say gently "murdered" or "slaughtered"?

Thank you for your tolerance and consideration.




.

Semantics yes. But by whose cultural values are the pious using to pass judgment; our or theirs?

If you have not felt their pain, experienced their fears then how could you say what they did was wrong. Do you think they had such a disregard for life that they would sacrifice something that was so near to them for no reason then to see human suffering? Or perhaps they have suffered such uncertainties, pain, fear and death that they felt this one thing, this sacrifice of something so dear to them, would bring them and their children relief.

We will never know what these people lived through or suffered to make them make this decision to sacrifice a few of their children.

So the religious pious passes harsh judgment on them for acts their very own God committed; the slaughter and murder (if you prefer that) of children.

Interesting logic. When The Baal worshipers sacrificed their children, it wasn't their priests. They just had a hard life.

Don't blame the clergy for the abominations of history. Blame God. No, blame the God of the bible. That's it. We wouldn't dare hold man responsible for his own errors.

BTW; if you actually read the bible, instead of reading what other people wrote about the bible, you would know that Noah was six hundred years old at the time of the flood. The door of the ark was open to anyone until it was closed. Folks mostly just thought Noah a raving fool.

Child sacrifice is hardle unknown. Archaeologists finally resolved that child sacrifice occurred regularly at Carthage in what is now Libya, I believe, which isn't that far from Israel.

In the New World, child sacrifice was fairly common.

Indeed, the Slaughter of the Innocents is a part of the New Testament.

Excuse my 300 year mistake. 600 or 900, it's all fiction. I can understand ignorant people 2500 years ago believing that; but today?

As mentioned previously human violence are caused by circumstance. However, your God is suppose to be on a higher moral threshold. Humans will do what they do out of fear and ignorance. If your God of the Bible does the same then we can safely conclude that the God is as ignorant as the humans; hence, a false God.

By thunder-runner and, I assume, your assessment of God he is suppose to be all knowing and perfect in every way, otherwise it would not be a God. There is no ignorance in God. God knows all. We should expect this God to behave in a manner that exemplifies perfection. Sad to say but God of the Bible fails miserably. He doesn't cut it.

By the way, what is it that man does that makes him so evil. Kill other humans? Kill children? Make wars; slaughter and murder others.

This is what the most perfect all-knowing God of the Bible ordered his tribe to do. He ordered his people to slaughter others in the same manner the Nazis slaughtered the Jews. Kill them all. No guilt for their slaughter. No remorse. Kill them as if they were animals.

We judge humans for behaving this way. We judge Hitler. Do you suggest we should never judge God of the Bible?

Yes humans do terrible things because of their ignorance, fears, religious prejudices and insecurities. They slaughter children.

What's the perfect all-knowing Biblical God's excuse?