What Are Abrahamic Religions? (Page 2)

Zanjan: Wow, 7 posts in a row......you don't have to make a new post for each new sentence.
...........maybe try to give others a chance to respond before you claim it's silent around here.

Well, unlike some people, I try not to sound like a stuck record.

According to scriptures, Gabriel had quite a few chats with people - he really got around and it seems everyone knew his name. Was just reading about Zechariah today. One verse of the scriptures says he prophesied John's future but if you look at the previous verse, it was Gabriel who did the prophesying. We agree the Bible has some glitches, but not so big it changes the substance.

I've never claimed God has spoken to me directly - Baha'u'llah, yes, not God, Himself. I saw an angel once but he didnt give me his name. So I guessed. I'm fairly certain it wasn't Gabriel.

ED> inserted first paragraph

ghostgeek: Zanjan, I thought you claim to have met God. Are you saying He didn't speak to you?

ghostgeek: He sounds more stuck up than the Queen.

Zanjan: Meeting God isn't the same thing as standing in the Presence of God.

Zanjan: When one attains the Presence of God, they've entered into and stand in His Holy Court......sorry, can't explain that to you.......it's one of those things where you have to be there to know.

ghostgeek: "Stand in His Holy Court?" Reminds me of Satan popping in to see God in His Divine Council, as recounted in Job. Rather too much substance and not enough spirit to be believeable.

Zanjan: Unfortunately, we all drag a bit of Satan around with us - we wouldn't realize it if not for the testing. Occasionally, I still feel the devil's odd poke but I tell him to go to hell, eh.

Auphirah: Duality within us which is good vs evil.

ghostgeek: Zanjan, have you ever spoken to Ereshkigal, queen of the dead and the sister of Inanna? I've been wondering of late what happened to her.

Zanjan: Nope. My Great Grandmother and I once had a chat though - it was in a dream. She'd passed away about 9 years before I was born. She was conveying something to me but I didn't understand what it meant until 25 years later, when I had an AHA moment.

ghostgeek: If only I knew what an AHA moment was. Ha, thank Father Christmas for Google. I see it means a moment of sudden insight or discovery. Yep, I've had one or two of those. Like when I realised that Moses was an old fraud.

ghostgeek: Shame to hear that you don't know what's happened to Ereshkigal though. Seemed like an interesting gal.

shadowline: I doubt Moses was a fraud, whatever else he may have been (like a myth, for example). If Moses existed he was probably sincere to a degree that a modern can scarcely even understand. Since the name is Egyptian, though, historians today are inclined to think that Moses was probably an Egyptian folk hero of some kind who was adopted by the Israelites, or rather the Canaanites, who were slaves in 13th century BC Egypt.

ghostgeek: Well, the old buffer stated that the plague of flies was due to the intervention of God. Now, seeing that flies plague Egypt each and every year, there seems little reason for thinking that God had a hand in that irritation. Same with the frogs, divers insects, dust storms, hailstones and assorted nasty diseases. So we must conclude that Moses was either cookoo or, more likely in my view, taking advantage of natural phenomena to further his own agenda.

In other words, he used natural events to constructed a tissue of lies with which to bamboozle some rustics into believing that he was God's representive on earth.

ghostgeek: Simply put, Moses was a fraud.

shadowline: That is a very modern view, ghostgeek. An anachronistic view. In all likelihood, whether Moses existed or not, familiar enough natural phenomena got mythologized as part of the story that got woven around him, and a legend was born. That's what happened to King Arthur too. That doesn't make King Arthur a fraud, it makes him a product of the imagination. And he is that whether he existed or not. The human story is full of such things.

ghostgeek: Considering how accurate the details are, I would find it remarkable that the central character in the story was fictional. Far, far, easier to believe that Moses was some runt on the make. He could serve as the prototype for any number of modern day cult leaders.

ghostgeek: The story contains a terse but compelling description of an active volcano in what would now be called Saudi Arabia. Such events do occur in that region but they are far from being everyday occurrences. Unlikely, therefore, that anybody scribbling away in Jerusalem would know anything about them. Much more convincing is the notion that somebody actually saw a volcano go pop because they had been led to it by a Moses like individual.

shadowline: I don't remember any volcano in Saudi Arabia in the story. But if there was such a thing, the Canaanite slaves who probably crossed Sinai into what the Bible calls Midian may indeed have seen it.

Zanjan: Ghost, has it ever occurred to you that it's because the Egyptians didn't listen to God or Moses, that they've been plagued by these plagues ever since? After all, Egypt used to be green, now it's all desert. Just a thought.

ghostgeek: Zanjan, go talk to some scientists. If you find the right ones, they'll be able to explain to you why Egypt suffers from flies, frogs, sandstorms and all the other afflictions mentioned in Exodus. Find the right ones and they will be able to explain to you why Canada has snow in the winter. Believe it or not, it doesn't require God to make it snow in Canada, just as it doesn't require God for flies to appear in Egypt.

ghostgeek: As for volcanoes in Saudi Arabia.

First thing; north west Saudi Arabia is littered with extinct volcanoes, and there are written reports of them happening in the not so distant past. And north west Saudi Arabia is generally credited as being the location of Midean, the place Moses is said to have fled to. So it is not impossible that anybody journeying to that part of the earth might have seen an active volcano.

Second thing; the various descriptions of the Mount of God in the Bible have suggested to quite a few people, not just me, that what is being portrayed is an active volcano. Back then, over three thousand years ago, there would have been next to no understanding of the real nature of a volcano. Easy then to accept that people would have thought they were viewing the actions of a deity.

shadowline: I suppose so. But it is just speculation. Anyone who has studied religion at all can tell you that its concepts derive from far deeper in the human psyche than just reacting to volcanoes.

ghostgeek: People have worshiped volcanoes, and still do, in quite a few places. No reason to think that the Hebrews of old would have reacted any differently than, say, Hawaiian islanders, when confronted with the awesome power of a volcano. Even a people as sophisticated as the Romans believed the god Vulcan had his forge in a volcano.

Zanjan: "it doesn't require God to make it snow in Canada, just as it doesn't require God for flies to appear in Egypt. "

It does require God to let humans know that they'll be responsible for destroying the earth's environment, killing off tons of species, polluting the air and waters - and to tell them that a couple thousand years in advance.

It does take God to tell humans not to mess with a poisonous element, newly discovered deep in the earth, an element that could be exploited and send a poisonous cloud over the earth - it takes God to tell people this 100 years before nuclear power was invented. Did you guess right? Uranium.

I could go on and on about the crap people do and how they've needed God to warn them against it long before they began to dabble. Nobody listened to God about that; it's only been in the last 5 years that they've started listening to global warming. Yes, this was strictly man's fault through greed an denial. Now many generations will have to pay for their negligence.