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I'll give one thing to John Chau, he has put North Sentinel Island on the map, comes up early on most Google searches now.
Looks like Indian authorities are not going to recover the body now either:
I think it's crazy how zealous some Christians are to spread the "word of god" I mean, I was reading a Christian website which supports proselytizing in North Korea of all places. You know the country where if you have a bible and talk about religion, you are tortured in brutal excruciatingly painful ways. Just freaking nuts some Christians are. I was talking about my dad who was a practicing Mormon about this, and he said the reason why some Christians think this way is because they are no different than muslims, they think if they do something for god even if it leads to actual harm to real people, then they will be rewarded in heaven.
There is no punishment, Thrill, just remorse, regret, and/or any unresolvable guilt over unremediable hurt or genuine irreversible harm your willful actions may have wreaked upon others. If none of that applies to you, you are fortunate. If every one of your willful actions has been done with consideration for the well-being of everyone affected, you are a genuinely unique individual. This is the result of the typical and generally ubiquitous worldly or carnal focus on the content of human consciousness. You demand that any evidence of God's influence on human consciousness be reflected in the accuracy of the worldly or carnal content which has zip to do with the spiritual content and impact that is God's concern.
You take no significance from the widespread acceptance and impact of these myths and legends on human society and the concept of spirituality itself. But they are the primary focus for spiritual development and they chronicle our spiritual evolution as a species. The virtual ubiquity of spiritual concern across millennia, eras, generations and cultures speaks to God's influence. Historicity is irrelevant. There never were any strings attached. It is not about rewards or lotteries. It is about fulfilling our species' collective purpose in existing.
The problem never has been that we are incapable of doing what Jesus achieved but that we were not evolved enough spiritually to even try. In theory, we are all capable, but in practice, none of us came close. The issue was that at least ONE of us had to achieve perfect resonance (Identity) in their human consciousness with the consciousness of God. Some of us chronicled in the spiritual fossil record came close, but only Jesus achieved it rendering all the collective human consciousness in resonance with God despite our individual imperfections.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
Yes, but how does an imaginary being "just happen"? There is no Jesus today. He died 2000 years ago and then was mythologized just as Mithra was 1000 years earlier.
Now I learn in a docu from Tom Harpur entitled "Pagan Christ" that the entire story of Jesus can be found in earlier sources which proves that the Jesus legend had been fabricated from bits and pieces of previous legends of other gods. In other words, the entire story found in the gospels was a patchwork jimmied together by creative writers eager to promote this new man/god that gradually took on the name Yeshua.
What you call "mythologizing" is the way we transmitted human history and knowledge (usually orally) between generations. We tell stories and they are influenced and embellished by many things not just our imagination. One of those influences is the consciousness of God. That is why there is a consistent theme across generations and cultures that you call a patchwork and others call plagiarizing. It is syncretism and is evidence (to me) of God's influence. As we evolved, the theme evolved to more sophisticated versions but the underlying avatar (Savior) theme remained.
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So zealous parents are feeding a lie to their children and then the children grow up and either flip out psychologically or become so entrenched in the Jesus mythos that they can never shake it. I think this is exactly what happened to John Chau. He never would have turned out as he did if his mother wasn't this nutcase entrenched in Christianity up to her eyeballs.
I can't argue about the reason Chau became what he was because Christianity as his mother understood it was undoubtedly a factor. Your criticisms of Christianity are valid and Christ's Gospel has been corrupted by primitive ignorance and barbarity into bad news instead of good news. So it isn't so much that children are being fed a lie. They are being given a corrupt misunderstanding of what God wants us to become.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte
There are only two groups of people who benefit from Christianity:
Losers and opportunists.
Half of all Christians were atheists or agnostics prior to "getting saved". They were living a godless life style doing alcohol, drugs, sex, thieving, murdering--the whole nine yards. Something in them snapped. Living this kind of pointless life on the edge can break a person mentally, psychologically emotionally and everything else. Jesus becomes a way of escape, a "thing" to commit one's life to--a safer form of all the things they previously were. So instead of wasting their lives on the former they choose to waste it on the latter.
You do have a tendency to resort to oversimplification and extreme conclusions, Thrill, as in this unnecessarily negative false dichotomy you draw.
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Jesus is not a real person, he's an icon--an avatar that a lost soul can have imaginary conversations with and believe this "thing" is actually listening and helping him through whatever troubles he's got. Like I said,
"Jesus---you can’t see him, you can’t hear him, you can’t smell him, you can’t feel him. Thus, Jesus only exists in your imagination---he is not “real†in any normal sense of the word".
This particular issue has the potential to draw us way off topic so I will only say that your conclusion about the "reality" of the cognitive content of our consciousness is overblown. I take your negatively presented dichotomy of benefits from Christianity with more than a grain of salt because it suffers from your general resentment that God has not manifested to you personally in ways you can relate to.
Your criticisms of Christianity are valid and Christ's Gospel has been corrupted by primitive ignorance and barbarity into bad news instead of good news. So it isn't so much that children are being fed a lie. They are being given a corrupt misunderstanding of what God wants us to become.
It is very difficult to use that phrase, "Christ's gospel has been corrupted..." Mystic because we don't even know what Christ's original gospel was. I've said repeatedly that nothing of what was Christ said survived the 1st century. The earliest fragment we have, the P52 is dated to 150 CE and this fragment is all of about 12 words purportedly taken from the gospel of John at Jesus' trial. Anything having to do with Jesus' actual philosophy doesn't appear until the 3rd century in bits and pieces and it isn't until the Codex Sinaiticus in the 4th century that we have what look to be whole copies of the gospels. You're being extremely naive, Mystic believing that what appears in the Codex is EXACTLY what Jesus said 300 years earlier. You take at face value that 300 years didn't change an iota of Jesus' philosophy when we know from church history that the churchmen were corrupt evildoers who worked only to get Christianity--and by extension their power--as widespread as they could and they resorted to every trick in the book to accomplish that as evident by all the interpolations we now know were added to the gospels to create the greatest appeal to the masses. All this is FACT. It's not theory, it's fact. If you could produce an original gospel dated to within 20 years of Jesus' crucifixion signed and dated by one of the genuine apostles then I would eat every last word I ever wrote about the fraudulence of the New Testament. But I won't have to because it is so well-documented that the creation of the New Testament is so mired in corruption that Christ's original gospel has been lost for all time.
And Jesus and God the Father themselves didn't lift a finger to stop it from happening. That's the irony! That the God who wanted us to know about His son didn't lift a finger to stop the corruption of His precious gospel from happening.
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Originally Posted by MysticPhD
You do have a tendency to resort to oversimplification and extreme conclusions, Thrill, as in this unnecessarily negative false dichotomy you draw. This particular issue has the potential to draw us way off topic so I will only say that your conclusion about the "reality" of the cognitive content of our consciousness is overblown. I take your negatively presented dichotomy of benefits from Christianity with more than a grain of salt because it suffers from your general resentment that God has not manifested to you personally in ways you can relate to.
I have to resort to oversimplification to capsulize what is a very complex topic but the points I make in the simplification are still true even if the nuances are left out for brevity. What I say about why a person gets drawn to Christianity are very true because I have read hundreds of case histories of the reasons people come to Christianity as well as the reasons they leave it. I do not resent God because He doesn't intervene. I always remind myself I have no good reason to be angry at God because I have come to realize God is a deist God. He simply doesn't intervene in our lives in any way shape or form. That's proven by the absence of any supernatural activity in this world, by the total ineffectiveness of prayer, by the pending collapse of Christianity as millions of people leave it years after year and thousands of churches close all over America and Europe for lack of tithes and attendance.
God's total lack of interest in what goes on down here is on display for all to see.
It is very difficult to use that phrase, "Christ's gospel has been corrupted..." Mystic because we don't even know what Christ's original gospel was. I've said repeatedly that nothing of what was Christ said survived the 1st century. The earliest fragment we have, the P52 is dated to 150 CE and this fragment is all of about 12 words purportedly taken from the gospel of John at Jesus' trial. Anything having to do with Jesus' actual philosophy doesn't appear until the 3rd century in bits and pieces and it isn't until the Codex Sinaiticus in the 4th century that we have what look to be whole copies of the gospels. You're being extremely naive, Mystic believing that what appears in the Codex is EXACTLY what Jesus said 300 years earlier. You take at face value that 300 years didn't change an iota of Jesus' philosophy when we know from church history that the churchmen were corrupt evildoers who worked only to get Christianity--and by extension their power--as widespread as they could and they resorted to every trick in the book to accomplish that as evident by all the interpolations we now know were added to the gospels to create the greatest appeal to the masses. All this is FACT. It's not theory, it's fact. If you could produce an original gospel dated to within 20 years of Jesus' crucifixion signed and dated by one of the genuine apostles then I would eat every last word I ever wrote about the fraudulence of the New Testament. But I won't have to because it is so well-documented that the creation of the New Testament is so mired in corruption that Christ's original gospel has been lost for all time.
And Jesus and God the Father themselves didn't lift a finger to stop it from happening. That's the irony! That the God who wanted us to know about His son didn't lift a finger to stop the corruption of His precious gospel from happening.
Christ's Gospel was revealed in the narrative that describes His consciousness ("mind of Christ") as the way to know the "mind of God." It is NOT the beliefs ABOUT Him that are claimed to be necessary and the barbaric interpretation of the reason for His scourging and crucifixion that are the Gospel (Good News). The Good News is that God IS agape love and He is NOT counting our sins against us. Jesus even forgave His torturers and murderers. We just need to love God and each other every day and repent when we don't. Easy peasy!
What do you think, Thrills? is there anything in this parcel of faith claims that is based on any evidence at all (the belief in some divine being being universal, we would accept, but see it as an evolved human delusion) or whether it's stuff he has pulled out of his ass, invested faith in it and dismissed any objection - like the ones to his his 'learning -curve' theory of religious evolution or the Cosmic Consciousness theory that he had to modify to individual blobs of consciousness -one per human - because he had to exclude Animal consciousness?
Christ's Gospel was revealed in the narrative that describes His consciousness ("mind of Christ") as the way to know the "mind of God." It is NOT the beliefs ABOUT Him that are claimed to be necessary and the barbaric interpretation of the reason for His scourging and crucifixion that are the Gospel (Good News). The Good News is that God IS agape love and He is NOT counting our sins against us. Jesus even forgave His torturers and murderers. We just need to love God and each other every day and repent when we don't. Easy peasy!
But where are you getting all this, Mystic. Your beliefs, since they cannot be supported by authentic scripture we can assuredly trace back to Jesus or his apostles, are reduced to pure conjecture--without foundation. Therefore, like all Christians' beliefs/interpretations about what the New Testament is saying, they are subject to the whims and personal interpretations of the corrupted scriptures contained in everything from the Codex on. The fact that the story of the woman taken in adultery in John 7:53-8:11 was an addition made by a monk sometime in the 7th-8th centuries proves that what originally was thought by Biblical scholars to be a beautifully inspired passage that could only come from the mind of God has been shown that anyone could invent a beautiful story and stick it somewhere into the scriptures.
And if Mark 16:9-20 can be proved to be an interpolation and John 7:53-8:11 can be proven to be an interpolation then how much else can be interpolation? How can you trust what's written in the scriptures? How can you make the claim "This is the inspired word of God written by God Himself through His Holy Spirit?"
Therefore how do you know that "God IS agape love and He is NOT counting our sins against us." What authentic text do you base this belief on????? I've just said none of the text is authentic. That's the truth. I've just said that much of what forms the core beliefs of Christianity might have been added by monks and scribes centuries later. That's the truth. So again I ask: "How can you trust that Jesus' message is agape love" when we don't even have the original texts and forgery and tampering were rampant back then??????
The claim actually becomes ludicrous when it it can be proved just exactly how much tampering went on with these supposed "inspired" scriptures. Don't shoot the messenger. All this is fact. I am just conveying facts and I try to always be truthful about what I say no matter how much or how painful the truth about the scriptures really is.
What do you think, Thrills? is there anything in this parcel of faith claims that is based on any evidence at all (the belief in some divine being being universal, we would accept, but see it as an evolved human delusion) or whether it's stuff he has pulled out of his ass, invested faith in it and dismissed any objection - like the ones to his his 'learning -curve' theory of religious evolution or the Cosmic Consciousness theory that he had to modify to individual blobs of consciousness -one per human - because he had to exclude Animal consciousness?
Not in any evidence as we describe evidence, Trans. Dawkins was once asked "If there is God and you meet him what is the first thing you would say to Him. And Dawkins answered, "I suppose I would ask, 'Why did you hide yourself so well?" I personally believe there's something out there. It certainly isn't the Christian God--what a horrible thought having to meet yahweh. But I think there's some sort of higher cosmic power or supreme being who maybe created the universe and set life in motion. I've come to the conclusion based on studies that life is too complex to have evolved on its own--what with the hundreds of thousand of chemical transactions the human body undergoes every second and aa strand of DNA containing more information than the Encyclopedia Brittanica. How He came about I have no idea and I don't lose sleep at night trying to figure out what cannot be answered, but I have to think so, given all the circumstantial evidence. Whether there's an afterlife or not I have no idea again. We'll just have to see when we get there, if we get there.
I think it's crazy how zealous some Christians are to spread the "word of god" I mean, I was reading a Christian website which supports proselytizing in North Korea of all places. You know the country where if you have a bible and talk about religion, you are tortured in brutal excruciatingly painful ways. Just freaking nuts some Christians are. I was talking about my dad who was a practicing Mormon about this, and he said the reason why some Christians think this way is because they are no different than muslims, they think if they do something for god even if it leads to actual harm to real people, then they will be rewarded in heaven.
I disagree with your father. That is a disparaging and inaccurate thing to say. We are taught that the blood of all those who do not hear the word of Jesus is on our hands. Never are we taught that harming anyone in pursuit of this goal is ever ok. Some people take it too far, with that I totally agree.
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That the God who wanted us to know about His son didn't lift a finger to stop the corruption of His precious gospel from happening. 
- because he had to exclude Animal consciousness?
