Posted by Stephen Charchuk on January 01, 1997 at 23:34:00:
In Reply to: Re: Scripture (was: Unlikely Existence of God) posted by Lynn on January 01, 1997 at 12:20:40:
:: I do not consider you my enemy, Jason, but when the time comes for the anti-christ to be revealed he will decieve many, "even the elect, if that were possible". There are already many who see Christianity as dangerous and the source of many social ills, and worse. Perhaps they won't participate, but they may turn a blind eye.
The Book of Revelations is nothing more than a collection of letters which sent to the 7 major Christian Churches during the first century by John of Patmost. They were mainly his interpretation of the Book of Daniel (If you read the two you will see many simularities.)
Although, atheists and freethinkers my be persecuted too if they do not worship the Beast.
The beast in the BoR is Nero Caesar, in those days numbers were interchangacle with letters and the number 666 with a smybol for Nero's name. It was the recent translators who made it a reference to the Devil, or Satan. The name Satan is taken from two nature spirits Sat and Tan.
: The latter half of Deuteronomy 13:4 says, "...that man has tried to draw you aside from the way in which the Lord your God commanded you to walk. So shall you put the evil away from your midst."
Standard warning to scare followers into staying in line.
: Worshipping false gods is about the worst thing you can do in God's eyes. Spiritually speaking, these false worshippers were already dead. To put them physically to death served two purposes, one was to keep the Israelites undefiled, and two was to keep those destined for punishment from stacking the charges against themselves even higher.
There are around 6 billion people on this planet now, out of this # there are around 1.5 Christians/Jews, about 1 billion Muslims, around 1 billion people without any religious beliefs (Most live in Russia and China.), less than 1 billion Hindi with the rest being different. ALL have a different idea on the topic of what god is or isn't. Any religion will "warn" its followers against "false" gods, it is a standard practice.
: I wonder if you, or anyone else here has ever played the game "MYST". Unlocking the Bible is a lot like it. To play the game you go in, look around, and at first glance nothing makes sense, but you keep searching, thinking, and experimenting in order to solve the mystery because you go into it knowing that the answers are there if you look hard enough. Once you discover the answer to one of the riddles it seems so simple that you can't believe you missed it in the first place. If you didn't know for sure that the creators of the game had actually made the puzzle solvable, you might be inclined to give up, and quick! The Bible is a mystery also, and I suppose it takes a certain amount of faith just to look for the meaning and truth of it because you have to believe that it is a solvable puzzle before your start. I hope this analogy makes sense. I'm having trouble putting it into words, although I understand it completely in my head.
The bible is like a Rubic's Cube where the person, when having trouble matching up the correct colors, will take it apart and reassemble it in the desired order and say that they had "solved" it correctly.