you might as well listen to Fox News to get an understanding of how a legitimately intelligent conservative thinks, for all the good the TV programming you're watching is doing ;D

True enough lol, I'm mainly just doing it because 1. There's nothing on I want to watch 2. I'm too lazy to get off my ass and get a DVD, and 3. Because they have the Bible's words at the bottom, that's waht I'm paying attention too (and how poor the arguments of the pastor are.)


Today on the Bible, Deuteronomy- What You Can and Cannot Eat!

A LIVELY debate on whetehr or not rabbit counts as an unclean animal!
DO NOT eat pork!
Why, those other Christian sects that teach it's OK because Jesus did something or other- they're all wrong!

Really, this is a focus of the Bible now? Allowing for the big questions about God, at least those are somewhat weighty, it makes sense people would really want to debate on if someone's the savior or the nature of God and yadayadayada...

But it's a big focus for God and the Hebrews and this pastor (apparently) that we are careful not to eat the hare, but it's OK to eat a rabbit, and don't dare eat a camel or pork?

Is this the Holy Bible or Good Morning America- 5 Foods You Shouldn't Eat! XD

...aaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnddddd the pastor jsut clarified that by creeping things God doesn't want us to eat insects and termites.

Again- God REALLY needs to tell this to his children and make such a priority of it to devote a chapter of his Holy Book to it, and have this pastor bang on reading the words?

Does God think his children will be THAT dumb, to bend down and eat a termite?

...again, WHY...?

At least the Hebrews stressing not to eat prok makes historical sense, they could really make you sick back then.

But TERMITES???? XD

Lol, obiwan those are the stupidest shows That ever aired i think. Haha. Im pretty sure that he has taken everything out of context in that entire message.

First, regarding *all* the old testament teachings - just looking to the text and taking out that particular televangelists point of confusion (his not yours) - they were written for a time when there was no sanitation, no refrigeration, and food could be a very tricky and deadly thing. So the laws regarding food were written for a time when those laws made sense because they protected the people from disease and self poisoning. They no longer apply and God didn't intend them to apply for all time. I know some are going to scream I'm sacriligeous, but that's the way I feel. The OT (especially Genesis) is stories to provide moral guidance and allow us to see our way through tough times. Does anyone believe Jonah actually spent 3 days in the whale/fish? Amazing coincidence that time frame and Christ's time in the tomb. What about Noah and the Ark? Do you really think the whole world flooded and Noah could possibly put every animal in 2s or 7s (remember the clean ones to be eaten) in the ark? There were so many species scattered from so far away that God would have had to start sending the animals years in advance for all of them to get there, and what about the animals on North America? Biblically there was no Pangea and even if there had been, it had long seperated into the current continents. How did they get there.

No, the OT provides some historical reference, some parable, and some rules to live by that applied at the time and other that apply all the time ("Thou shall not murder" for instance).

So things about food and food preperation - ignore them. They do not apply in a modern age of refrigeration and pasturization.

Draug +1

At Draug: "Does anyone believe Jonah actually spent 3 days in the whale/fish?" Yes, I do. God can do anything, and there's no evidence against the fact that Jonah was in the whale. God could have also made the universe 6,000 years ago, but there's evidence against that, so I believe he created the universe 14 billion years ago. And the lenght of time Jonah spent was not a coincidence, God planned it. About the ark: The only animals Noah really got on the ark were the animals in the Middle East, as the flood was actually regional. The writer of Genesis (Moses) didn't know about the rest of the world, so he considered the regional flood to be world wide.

"there's no evidence against the fact that Jonah was in the whale"

Oh <insert expletives>

Seriously? How about it's the stomach of a <expletive> whale? That tends to kill you inside 3 days. Seriously, even if you accept miracles (and that's a pretty <expletive> miracle) and disregard the philosophical problems with that, you don't really want to appeal to miracles all the <expletive> time to explain abso<expletive>lutely every <expletive><expletive> thing. Each appeal to a <expletive> miracle reduces the odds that what you are saying is correct.

@Ghost: I'm talking about that particular case. There's evidence that generally people will die in the stomach of a whale, but God could have (and did) protect Jonah.

Poppycock! Does god have a hard on for Jonah? Or anyone else he 'performs miracles' on? Why favour them?

He performs miracles because A. It needs to happen as part of His plan (as with Jonah) or B. Someone prayed to Him, and the miracle would not interfere with His plan.

@The Original Topic: Those preachers that say that we have to follow the Old Testament Laws are ignoring Mathew 19: 16-30 and the entire Book of Galatians. They are false teachers.

"He performs miracles because A. It needs to happen as part of His plan (as with Jonah) or B. Someone prayed to Him, and the miracle would not interfere with His plan."

If the plan involves dousing your chosen person in hydrochloric acid and fish, you need a better plan.

@Ghost: God would have protected him from all that stuff.

Don't watch televangelists, ok? I've never heard one informative, edifying thing from them. I just got through listening (out of curiosity) to some guy named John Hagee talking about how Ezekiel theoretically predicts Russia and Iran are going to clobber Israel and nuke America. And he called it a SERMON!

PS He performs miracles because this is a broken world. Some outside intervention is needed, since the world is not going to fix itself. The main miracles are the Incarnation and the Resurrection. Maybe back up and look at the big picture instead of these little things?
PPS The author of Genesis knew about the outside world. The Hebrew word used there can mean the "world" as in "Rome ruled the world."

@Baumhauer: Most televangelists are wrong. However, the guy you mentioned probably was right, and it most definitely was a sermon.

@Baum: And Moses did not know anything outside of Norhtern Africa and the Middle East pretty much, and that was the area that was flooded. To Moses, it seemed the whole world had been flooded.

How was it a sermon? He used the word "bomb" more than he used the word "Jesus", for crying out loud. There was not one thing about Salvation, the nature of God, how then we should live, etc...

And no point in arguing about Moses' geographical knowledge.

That's the thing, though--first, why would God have made it so difficult and unsanitary to begin with for his children (though if that Tower of Babel story is to be taken into consideration, mankind builds this great tower to show their power and everyone speaks the same language and there are now wars...so God says "Screw THAT, you're getting high and mighty, how dare you do so well to build towers and have no wars, I'm shattering that tower and making you all speak different languages, thus ensuring war and destruction THAT'LL teach ya to dare question my Godhood by...building an enormous tower...and not killing one another...which is a sin...but ANYWAY, BOOM!"

But even if we allow for the fact that the OT, for all it's horrors and wrath, WAS designed for a very ancient time by a then-semi-nomadic people in the Hebrews, so sanitation and what to eat and all that really was important...why put it in your HOLY Book? Or, if we want to play to both ideas of the Bible's construction, why would GOD decided to put his Word on the subject in his HOLY Book? It's not as if that was the only book for the Hebrews, they put tons of their history and cultural ideals into The Talmud (which actually I think is worthwhile...maybe I'm biased a as a Jew here, but at least that's a history, it's a slanted and corrupted history but no more so than Herodotus or Pliny and the other Greco-Roman historians, and it's nice to have a not-solely-religious account of those years and that group of people...) so why not put the food ideas in there? Or better still, since they had a Holy Book and History Book in the Talmud, at the risk of sounding cliche...why not have a Cook Book?

ESPECIALLY if we're supposed to take that as God's word...after all, if YOU were an Almighty, All-Benevolent (though your mileage might vary on that one) God, and you were dictating your Word that you'd want your people to know for eons to come...are cooking instructions really all that holy and important? Maybe some room instead to, say, give a logical reason to go with the faith-baed reason to believe in you, or at leat give some explanation why when Adam and Eve were about to eat the Apple you out in the Garden, and you knew their doing so could damn your creation forever, you didn't slap their hand away like a parent slapping a five-year-old's hand away from a fire as they don't know any better (and if we're to take they were totally innocent before the Apple, and God's the Father of Creation, I think that's a fitting analogy, any good human parent, free will or no, would slap their little five year old's hand way if they were about to scar themselves forever over an open flame...why not God?) or why you made man have different languages to ensure war when there was none and they were peaceful, and the one side affect of that is they DARED feel powerful and build a huge tower to show their power?

And who up there seriously said that perhaps Jonah DID live in the belly of a whale three days, how can we disprove it?

First...since the Bible's trying to make their argument, it needs to PROVE IT, it's not our burden to disprove it, they say it's true, it's up to them to make it stand up.

Second...no oxygen, all those forces acting on you, and I'm no whale biologist, but...wouldn't, if nothing else, even if we ant to say there's oxygen in there and everything else is miraculously OK, wouldn't the stomach muscles of a whale crush a man, or the enzymes and stomach acids, um, "digest" him?

hahahaha christian television? oh come now i'm a believer and even i can;t stand the stuff. definately not the place to give Christianity a chance.

@Obiwan: I said that Jonah lived in the whale. I ask you this: Do you believe that God can work miracles?

@Baum: It was a sermon about prophecy. It's sad that most churches don't do those more often.

Jonah is not the only one to survive being eaten by a whale. There is record of Gepetto also being eaten by a whale and surviving. So, we now have two confirmed cases. I don't see how there could be any more debate over this.

PS about obiwan's objection to God's action at the tower of Babel, which was a good question: no war? Perfect peace and harmony? One government?

Here are my thoughts: I disagree with that assumption, mainly because someone could try a coup against the rulers, there could be a dynastic struggle, civil war, political strife in general, labor strikes (or conscripted labor) on the tower. The one government (king, oligarchy, or whatever it was), especially before democracy or anything like that, effectively ruling the entire world, could very easily and quickly morph into a dictator-ship (for instance: you--you're the one doing the actual building of the tower! Don't want to? I'll cut off your food supply, which I can do because I'm/we are the ruler(s).). Have you heard the saying, "Power corrupts, and total power corrupts totally"?

@Conservative Man:

I stand by what Hume said imfamously in his "On Miracles."

A miracle is only that for which we have not YET any explanation.

Could God perform a miracle?
...Well, as it could be perhaps explained via God-science (if that makes any sense) I'm not sure if anything of that nature actually qualifies as a miracle, but besides that...
Yes, of course God could perform a miracle, it's part of his description.

But that leaves open the questions 1. IS there a God? 2. DOES He care, if he exists? and finally 3. Even if #1 and #2 are answered with a yes and can somehow be rpoven to be yes, still, in this case can we attribute this to an act of God/Miracle? How can you make that claim/assessment with any degree of certainty beyond pure belief, or, to put it another way, how can you PROVE God performed a miracle, and this isn't simply explanable via science?

Miracles--they don't exist, that do not occur, for either there is no God, or there is and then it is not a miracle, but discernable via whatever "method" God uses or, to put it another way, if you were God it wouldn't be a miracle as you'd know how it was done with your God logic and God powers...the same way a magic trick isn't really magic, as obviously there's an answer, even if it's one only the magician knows, and if you KNEW what the magician knew, then it'd become common logic and explanable knowledge, not a miracle or magic at all.

@CM: a sermon about prophecy that was not tied into salvation, witnessing to others, living in our personal lives, or anything spiritually substantial. Then he went on to make multiple references to a book he had written and could be bought.
There was not a cross even in the "sanctuary" (at least not that I noticed). Instead of artwork, or an alter for symbolism, there was this raised area in front that he stood on, facing the congregation for the entire time with a HUGE poster with pictures of Ahmadinijad in front of a mushroom cloud, US and Israeli flags, a tombstone that said "the death of the dollar", and, on top of it all, the name of his sermon series: "CAN AMERICA SURVIVE?). It draws the mind to Hagee, not God.
How does imminent death and destruction uplift the soul? Where's the message of Christ's atoning sacrifice? That is what all televangelists whom I have ever seen lack.

@Baum: Whatever made you believe that all sermons have to be about salvation?Sermons just have to about the Bible, and prophecy is a very important part of the Bible.
However, when you describe the background, I realize it is a twisted up sermon (but a sermon nonetheless). It would have been better in a normal church setting.

@CM - I disagree with calling it a sermon. It is a speech. And, in fact, a political speech.

From Merriam-Webster:
Main Entry: ser·mon
Pronunciation: \ˈsər-mən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French sermun, from Medieval Latin sermon-, sermo, from Latin, speech, conversation, from serere to link together — more at series
Date: 13th century
1 : a religious discourse delivered in public usually by a clergyman as a part of a worship service

Unless this was part of a worship service (which it sound like it *wasn't*) then it wasn't a sermon.