1 Timothy 5:23
Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.
Discuss.
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So god wants everyone to be a wino? That just means the park down the road from me here must be full of very penitent people.
If you are traveling in some places, primitive as the Roman Empire and found yourself with gastritis, wouldn’t the water be a reasonable suspect?
One of the charming things about Christianity is that it is a religion based not on a revealed word of God… Such as the Torah, the book of Mormon, the words of the Rev. Moon, or the Koran. None of the Christian texts ever claims to be My word.
Of course, this collection is all from an era before even the printing press. Even literacy in that era was restricted to a very small part of the population. It is not at all hard to imagine how easily impressed illiterate peasants were when the “word of God” was read to them by someone claiming to be a priest.
Still, for those who claim to wish to know the truth, I am not like the Christian God. I Have no credo. You will never be rewarded or punished by Me for your belief or disbelief in Me.
Now back to Timothy’s recommendation. Isn’t this just common sense?
I am that I am.
The bible finally says something that makes sense!
The bible’s the world’s first self help book. It’s a good place to turn to if you need help with Bronze Age issues.
Bubbelah …
The “bible” you refer to here is anything but bronze age. That bible, the Torah, is supposedly written by Me and is mostly a history of the Jews. It was never intended for anyone else, but if you have some reason to seek guidance then I suggest you convert.
This Timothy guy lived about 1600 to 1700 years after Moses and I collaborated on the Torah. Tim, along with Jesus, Paul, Mark, the Popes, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Joseph Smith, and the Rev Moon lived well into the “Iron Age” and will after such other sources of your society’s wisdom as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cincinnatus, Cicero, Buddha, Confuscious, etc.
From my immortal point of view, the mutterings of Timothy and his ilk were precursors of your modern soap operas. I understand a lot of your morality comes from there?
Or .. if you prefer My words from within the Iron Ages I suggest you read Spinoza, Marx, Jefferson, and Gandhi … all My favorites.
I am that I am.
@1 It was the only medicine they had in those days. The Medicare prescription drug program hadn’t been enacted yet.
@2 True enough. Alcohol is an effective sterilizing agent. After all, what do hospitals use to kill germs? If the local water is bad, instead of going to the unnecessary work of adding alcohol to sterilize it, why not just drink pre-sterilized bottled water?
@4 Is “will” in the second paragraph a typo? Aren’t You supposedly perfect?? And a Perfect Being doesn’t make typos??
The people who preach it claim the bible is the word of Jesus Christ Himself, and that dude lived in the bronze age. Personally I think they’re full of crap and that the Christian god is one of the more lame lame god myths that are out there. I prefer the the Nordic stuff, myself.
@6 “I prefer the the Nordic stuff, myself.”
Not me. The Vikings behaved like Republicans, and we have enough of that already.
Regardless of whether Jesus was a divine being or just a 1st century “holy man” (akin to a Buddhist monk or Native American shaman), the ideas propounded in the New Testament are among the best prescriptions for living that anyone has yet come up with:
Love your neighbor.
Love people, not money.
Make peace, not war.
Be merciful and forgiving, not vengeful.
Be generous to the poor and afflicted.
Live a spiritual, not materialistic, life.
Not bad for scribes who didn’t have word processors or spreadsheets, and had to write everything down on parchment with sharpened reeds and ink made from soot, olive oil, and gall nut extract (which makes editing very difficult).
However you feel about the New Testament’s origins (divine or secular), it’s an admirable document, and the sort of thing you’d get from a Thomas Jefferson as opposed to a committee.
I like the Odin myth. God, as Odin, also is in favor of beer drinking and fighting on Saturday nights.
http://www.pantheon.org/articles/o/odin.html
The Norse myths are much the same as the above. People were always getting in trouble for coveting things, lying, and such. In the bible people got smote, boils, and turned into pillars of salt. In Norse myths they got their heads lopped off.
Stephen Stills said that Jesus Christ was the first nonviolent revolutionary. I’m sure Stills was wrong about that, but his sentiment was right.
The only act of violence on Jesus’ part depicted in scripture is running the moneychangers out of the temple.
I don’t think he and Ayn Rand would have gotten on very well.
As far as the New Testament is concerned, there’s the story of the wedding at Cana–somehow I’ve always pictured Mary pestering a reluctant Jesus to help out the host (was the bride’s father Lazarus–that Lazarus?) who’d greatly underestimated his guests’ thirst when ordering food and wine. It’s pretty easy to picture Jesus grumbling, “Mo-THERRRRRRR!”, not wanting to reveal his divine powers over something so banal. He finally did it, though…maybe he decided he wanted another glass, too.
An all-seeing, all-knowing God exists. It’s called the NSA.
According to this former NSA employee and whistleblower, the NSA is intercepting and storing every e-mail there is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....ure=g-logo
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing the NSA to stop the unconstitutional warrantless spying on U.S. citizens that began under Bush in 2011.
https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying
@13 Maybe the EFF should instead try and persuade the NSA to turn water into wine.
“The only act of violence on Jesus’ part depicted in scripture is running the moneychangers out of the temple.”
Artfart … by MY criteria sado masochism is violence. Unlike the Budha who died peacefully and not of his own hand, Jesus chose a very violent death.
For what its is worth, he also conspired with the roman occupation forces and, if you choose to believe Paul, as a ghost Jesus advocated the oppression of his own religion.
Of course, the Christian view is that their bible, the ROMAN bible, is the word of this same Jesus. So does Jesus get blame or credit for the Book of Revelations?
@10
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I do not know who Stephen Sills s bit he would have to be ignorant of Judean/Israel history to make that comment.
While he is correct that much of the teaching written ib the name f Jesus are from a VERY modern movement for non violent resistance to the Romans, Jesus .. if he even existed .. has never been seen as a leader of that movement or even as a participant.
The name of the movement was … The Pharisees.
The Pharisee meme was passive resistance, accepting the inevitability of Roman rule while resisting Roman efforts to destroy Jewish culture and not collaborating in the Roman effort to profane the Temple.
The Pharisee movement is at least a century older than the time of Jesus. In his lifetime it was led by the greatest scholar of Jewish history .. Rabbi Hillel. (FWIW Jesus was never a Rabbi). Followers of Hillel later led the military resistance to Rome and, after the destruction of the Temple created Rabbinic Judaism as a way to keep the Jews alive despite Roman terror.
You need to remember that Chirstianity began, not with Jesus, but with Paul and his effort to build a religion that would be popular in the Greco Roman culture. Havinf a Pharisee as your God would not have sold well. Millions of Jews have died because of Paul’s calimny of the Pharisees.