On the anti-christ. Since so many christians are not being very christ like... if Jesus came back today, would he be branded the anti-christ?
Why destruction? Because it is the in-breath and the out-breath. They are two parts of the continuum.
Life does not end at death, it is but a doorway into a larger realm.
The stories all come together. They just do, as you collect more of them. It is not the specific words that are important, it is the meaning they are trying to convey.
How do we know we aren't reading it similarly because we are similar and not because the text meanings are? How do we know the similarities in sacred texts don't come from sharing the same condition as humans? (both rethoric)
Can you point out something good that would necessarily need to be learned by using Abrahamic texts because it can't be found anywhere else? (not rethoric)
I do not know what you are asking here. I do not know what "it" stands for.
Are you assuming that the sacred texts all stem from the same original text?
Are you trying to ask if all the sacred texts are different tellings by different people who experienced the same phenomena?
Yes, ancient holy texts try to take the divine and distill it down into human understandable terms. Very similar to someone trying to describe an acid trip, of some importance, to a gathering of people. Humans are very linear. We think of time and space as linear. Even our math is linear. However, space is curved and time is a loop. However, humans don't really have ability to stop thinking linearly. So, the best of our books are attempts to distill what happened down into human understandable terms.
The bible has many good stories. It is not unique in that. Seek and you will find, and it may be a totally normal book that no one considers sacred, that gives you your answers.
Reading the Bhagavad Gita is difficult for western people. Because it assumes a Tibetan mindset. Such as, if you do not practice meditation you may think that many of the stories are euphemisms, when they are describing reality that a meditater intimately knows.
@tommycordero
Sorry, no more nested levels to respond to your question "Is there anything unique at all to the Bible?" so I'll post at the same level.
It should be obvious that whichever text(s) are written by God Himself would be inherently unique and ... priceless.
The problem is that anything that good would be counterfeited a thousand different ways by people who think like most in this thread. (i.e. that their thoughts are just as valid as the words of our Creator.)
So our task is to sort out the wheat from the chaff. There is no substitute for study here. In some cases it's easy: a self-proclaimed prophet emerges, pronounces a bunch of teachings that only he can vouch for and these are used to enhance the persons own power, wealth, and glory and perhaps the earthly benefits of his followers. Nothing backs up his story.
On the other extreme, the Bible is a collection of 66 consistent and self-reinforcing writings from 44 authors over 1500 years covering 6000 years of past and future history. This is coupled with plenty of eyewitness testimony about those authors and the supernatural things some of them were able to do. Nothing else is like it.
So, if God did communicate with man, there are very few choices out there that can plausibly compete. And it's not hard to tell which one of those is real... if you do your homework diligently. Don't believe the statements that we can't be sure what the writings said. The Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Old Testament hasn't changed in over 2200 years.
On the other hand, if God wanted there to be certainty so that everyone would have no choice but to believe, he would give each of us our own personal copy etched in stone while we watched with lots of other follow-up miracles just to make sure we were certain.
Since He clearly doesn't do that, He clearly wants to leave room for those who don't want a relationship with Him to walk away.
We see those kinds of folks throughout this thread.
They will be allowed to walk away.
I am just trying to find whether there is anything unique at all in the bible. Is there any good lesson we can learn by reading the bible that we can't learn by other means?
The bible is chok-full of good stuff. And it is written for a european mindset.
That said, there is nothing in it that is not found elsewhere.
If you go all around the world, and talk with many aboriginal tribes, they will tell you very similar tales of the origins and will tell you many similar prophecies of our times today. It is all drawn from the same well (of knowledge) so to say.
This is why I suggest reading many texts. When you have several different views of the same thing, you get a better understanding of it.
Such as, the story about adam/eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Most christians believe this is a real tree. And most describe the fruit as an apple. Do you know the kabbalah's tree of life? It is a symbol representing the structure of the energies of this universe. That is closer to the way tree is used in that bible story. And if you understand the Tibetan teachings of the dualistic universe, you will understand what is meant by good/evil far more. (and you will not translate them into good and bad)
And that's the thing. Having read some other books I can tell that there's nothing good in the bible that I can't find somewhere else, if I am looking. However, I think there are certain confusions that can generate from these particular books (all that follow Abraham) and the way they are written which in my opinion is enough to avoid them.
It's like in Steemit, I might FOLLOW some blogs with authors that have spoken some truth about a subject and yet I don't agree with on another. Because I don't agree with them it doesn't mean I don't think they can't contribute, I've seen them do it in the past and that is why I am following them. But then there are other authors I don't follow because what they speak doesn't resonate with me and this doesn't mean they are lying, but they are not speaking to any truth I can understand. This could change later on and if that were the case I wouldn't have a problem subscribing.
But then there are those I have followed and they get stuck in one message, and they keep posting the same article over and over again that still doesn't make sense regardless of its wording, at some point I'd feel that they are taking too much of my ATTENTION with a message I may have even confronted them about and still makes no sense. It is a problem when my attention is diverted from the stuff I want to focus on to stuff that I may consider to be irrelevant, and this is why we can UNFOLLOW.
If the user keeps spamming (because that's how I consider lies) the new tab and I feel they are still distracting me even when I am not following, then I can go ahead and MUTE them which I'm glad I haven't had to do here on Steemit yet.
But what happens when it's several users that are posting the same non-sensical stuff? The only way to avoid it is to cathegorize it, but even if you could name it we still don't have a feature to MUTE TAGS on Steemit, hopefully soon. IRL it would be a little more difficult mute a subject when it bothers us without keeping the speaker from their right to expression because we can't disconnect our ears or sight. But I like the options that we have on the internet, things can be more flexible here.
I don't mind the believers of this stuff, I don't want to mute them or anyone, I'd just like to be able to individually/personally avoid certain circles/cycles of repetition that in my understanding don't lead anywhere. By the same token we also need the ability to follow the subjects that we want to focus on, not just the people who may have spoken once about them.
If we could mute tags I would mute #bible along with other similar texts, but I am sure others would follow the subject, and that's okay as long as I have an option not to.