No matter how much I mess up, I know that O THEOS (God in Greek) will guide my steps to a better future. I just have to keep on improving myself knowing that as long as I keep on trying, ADONAI ROI (the Lord my Shepherd in Hebrew) will lead this flawed silly human to a great future. Even if it’s not the future I expected. Thanks for making something like this, sometimes I need to remember that even if I have obstacles, there is always hope.

@BumpyBeatz  
Not trying to be like him in a narcissistic way, but trying to show his nature, pure love, to the world as much as possible. Being more loving is the same as being more like God.

@UserAccount  
I wouldn’t say they’re trying to be like god. More that they’re trying to be better than each previous year.

@Background Pony #1BB4  
Certain authors of the Bible definitely supported slavery, yes. It was the only world they knew and imagining one without it was likely inconceivable. But that doesn’t mean it was ever intended as an absolute eternal reality. It also does not mean God changed his mind, just that humans came to understand him more.
 
In the letter to Philemon, Paul instructs him to accept his former slave Onesimus (who by all legal standards was the rightful property of him) back into his home after he’d ran away, but not as a slave, as a brother in Christ. It’s likely Onesimus had even stolen things from his owner before he ran away, which Paul offers to pay back by himself. While he didn’t come right out and say “Slavery is bad”, we can see the idea of living by love leading to that idea. When reading the Bible, you should know that the moral commandments are evolving as flawed humans try to become more and more like God.
 
The Hell concept is not something I buy into. The Greeks actually invented that idea. I believe that every time the concept is mentioned in the Bible, it’s used rhetorically, using language and ideas that the audience would’ve understood at the time.
 
I strongly recommend you look into the work of Peter Enns. I recommend his book How The Bible Actually Works for anyone who’s believed the bad ideas about how the Bible is intended to be read. Additionally, Rob Bell is a great teacher for explaining how the Bible should be understood. I recommend his book Love Wins for anyone who’s been turned off from Christianity due to the idea that it’s all about making sure we aren’t tortured forever after we die.

@Background Pony #1BB4  
The Bible supports reality. Not all that.  
The Bible is a lesson to accept that humans can be absolutely evil. But there’s still ways to accept and redeem those people.
 
Jesus Christ was probably the first notable figure in history, aside from Buddha, to accept people in such a forgiving manner.
 
The whole story is to teach the future to not be so damn heartless and to learn to have better morals and be more kind to one and another.

@UserAccount  
Also, the God of the Bible sends people to Hell for using their “free” will. I believe there is no free will, only will. I believe that if we could go back in time, erase everyone’s memory of what happened and have every single atom in the exact same place, every single choice that was made before we went back in time would happen again, and we couldn’t have chosen anything different, because we erased our memories of what we chose before we went back in time.

@UserAccount  
I hope you don’t feel insulted by anything I said, because I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about a book filled with immorality.
 
The Bible clearly said that you could own slaves, and that you could beat them all you want as long as they survived and got up again. The Bible meant you could literally own other people as property and treat them however you’d like, as long as they didn’t die. The Bible states that you’ll be punished only if a slave dies, and that you’ll not be punished if the slave doesn’t die after a few days.

@UserAccount  
The Bible says that slavery is okay, and it actually tells you how to treat your slaves, and Jesus never came out and said slavery is immoral, but the book continued to condone it. You should watch this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mqU_ApL5siw. I have researched this and thought about this a lot, and I’ll never stop philosophizing about it. The only thing I care about is truth, not what I want to be true, I care only about what is true.

@Background Pony #1BB4  
There’s no evidence that Jesus supported those things. And as Jewish people have seemingly always understood but became lost on many Christians at some point, the Biblical laws were always intended to be adapted and improved over time, with a focus on justice and love. This is why Jesus said that the most important law is to love God and love your neighbor.
 
It’s also why he had no problem with arguing against laws such as “an eye for an eye.” Taking the laws literal in modern day would be barbaric and horrible, but it’s also not what the authors ever intended. The laws in the Old Testament were significantly better than the laws of the people around them, but still very flawed. They believed that God wanted us to listen to him as we improved our laws over time to make a more loving society.

The Bible supports slavery, killing homosexuals and other bad things. There is no reason to believe in the Bible, or any other so-called Holy Book, because there needs to be evidence.

@BumpyBeatz  
I’ve not heard about that, but I do know that there’s evidence that some of the more regressive parts about gender roles were later additions within the New Testament. One example is Paul’s comment that he doesn’t allow a woman to teach. That comment seems in conflict with the way he talks about Phoebe elsewhere and even though not all scholars agree, there’s good evidence that the sexist part was added in much later by a sect that wanted an excuse to use the church to oppress women. So it’s very possible the Church leaders didn’t want a book written by a woman to be included in the Bible.
 
Although, I’d assume she wouldn’t have been able to write it herself, so even if she told of the events she knew about, someone else probably would’ve had to write it down. I’m not positive, but I don’t think many women at all could read or write at the time. I’m not 100% sure of that, but I think the politics of the time made it almost impossible for a woman to get educated. So it is possible that one of the canon Gospels have stories given to them from Mary and written down by someone else. I’d have to check the evidence that you’re talking about, but it may be talking about stories Mary gave people that others wrote.

@UserAccount  
I’ve read very few books out of the events of Christ. But as far as I know, the book of Mary isn’t actually available. And is suggested to be lost in the libraries of the pope. But that can’t be proved.
 
Enough evidence suggests that she definitely wrote her version of events though. A few unmentioned scholars talk about her time as if she had her own event history wrote out.
 
So it’s either the book of Mary never made it, it was removed, it was never archived or it was archived but was destroyed or lost after the Christian and Pagan religious attacks on one another.

Yes

@BumpyBeatz  
Saying that the books were taken out of the Bible is bit of a mismomer. There was no set canon at the time these books were popular, meaning that there was nothing really equivalent to the Bible yet, just different people’s writings that different churches accepted. The ones that ended up making it were for the most part the most widely accepted ones.
 
The Old Testament books are a bit of a different story, though. It’s very likely that Jesus and his disciples had read or were familiar with the Book of Enoch, plus all the books that are only in Catholic Bibles were popular at his time too and we can see how they influenced the Bible.
 
But even then, there wasn’t really a set canon and when it came time to make an Old Testament canon, the Christians just accepted the books that Jewish people considered worthy enough. The ones that made it in were by far the most popular, but without books like 1 and 2 Maccabees, much interesting Jewish history went unmentioned in their canon, like the origin of Hanukkah. I think the Jews at the time it was decided cared more about their more ancient tradition and things like the Maccabean Revolt were too recent and irrelevant to them.
 
I agree that it’s worth reading as much of the stuff that didn’t make it in as possible, but doing it chronologically would be super hard to figure out. Which is why it’s a good idea to get a good Study Bible with the Apocrypha, then try and read as many of the Pseudepigrapha books as possible, but there are a lot of them.
 
If you tried to read just the canon books chronologically, you’d still be confused, because most scholars agree that the Torah was written sometime after the exile, which places its writing sometime after the majority of the books of the prophets but most of them also agree that it’s based on an oral tradition that dates back before Hebrew even existed. A good Study Bible will tell you what seems likely to be from the oral tradition and what seems to be a much later addition by the scribes.
 
As for this verse, I don’t think too many people deny that it’s an authentic letter from Paul and they’d also be in agreement about the main point he’s making. There would be some disagreements, though. Some would probably say that a line like this shows evidence he thought Jesus would return in their lifetimes and others would disagree and they could argue for hours about it without one side convincing the other. But the point is something that almost all scholars will agree that the text is saying and that Paul indeed wrote it, though.
 
For me personally, I think that all religious text is worth reading and thinking about. I don’t believe it’s all true, but I keep an open mind about these things.

@tehwatever  
@UserAccount  
Even then. A lot of verses are still incorrectly included with the wrong translations.  
Many still believe that the evil fruit was an apple(which the fruit was never actually identified in the Bible’s original verses) and that Mary was a forgiven whore. (Which also was never directly referred to. It was never stated in the original Hebrew text that she was a whore. That’s a mistranslation that was never corrected.)
 
 
There are also entire books that used to be included, but were removed by past Popes.(they’re the only ones who could have edited the contents in large scale successfully, making them the culprits) like the Book of Mary. The woman who was there until the end.
 
All in all, the original translations were flawed and never corrected or were known to be flawed. And later, the corruption of many began to edit the contents of the Bible to support a profitable message. Not a just one.
 
 
There’s still plenty of truth in the Bible! But you want to read it chronologically to actually understand. Otherwise it might get confusing or be contradictory.

@tehwatever  
It means that through the lives of people that accept Jesus, God has started to bring salvation to the Earth and he’ll complete what was started in us when he finally returns to save the whole world.
 
Similar to Jesus’s analogy about the mustard seed. Followers of Christ are the stems and roots growing out of the tiny little seed that will blossom into the mustard plant (the largest plant that the people at the time of Jesus knew of), which represents the redeemed world with no pain, sin, death, sickness, or evil.

Someone give me the exegesis on this? What’s the context and the mainstream interpretation of the verse?

@Background Pony #09C5  
And starswirl said: “once a villain, always a villain”, and then at the end of “shadow play” he was kinda in the wrong, and has seen the meaning of true friendship.

Christians say once a communist always a communist.

I’ve seen a lot of things on Derpibooru. But a quote from the Bible is actually the first time I’ve seen it! xD  
Legit.

The School of Friendship must be the good work!

That’s some holy advice there.