Religion
The
Catholic
Bible
The Catholic religion was established in the Mediterranean region during the first century CE by a small group of Jewish men and women, one of several sects which were all bent on reforming the Jewish faith. The word "Catholic" (which means "embracing" or "universal") was first used to refer to the early Christian church by the bishop and martyr Ignatius of Antioch in the 1st century.
Key Takeaways: Catholic Religion
•Catholicism is a Christian religion, a reformation of the Jewish faith that follows the teachings of its founder Jesus Christ.
•Like other Christian religions as well as Judaism and Islam, it is also an Abrahamic religion, and Catholics consider Abraham as the ancient patriarch.
%bull;The current head of the church is the Pope, who resides in Vatican City.
•There are 2.2 billion Catholics in the world today, 40 percent of whom live in Latin America
What Catholics Believe
The Catholic religion is monotheistic, meaning that Catholics believe that there is only one supreme being, called God. The Catholic God has three aspects, known as the Trinity.
The Supreme Being is the creator, called God or God the Father, who resides in heaven and watches over and guides everything on earth. He is known as the lord of heaven and earth, and referred to as almighty, eternal, immeasurable, incomprehensible, and infinite in understanding, will, and perfection.
The Holy Trinity is made up of the Father (God), who has no origin and holds the sole power of creation; the Son (Jesus Christ) of God, who shares the wisdom of the Father; and the Holy Spirit, which is the personification of goodness and sanctity, arising from both the Father and Son.
The legendary Founder of the Catholic Church was a Jewish man named Jesus Christ who lived in Jerusalem and preached to a small group of followers. Catholics believe he was the "messiah," the son aspect of the Trinity, who was sent to Earth and born to redeem those who sin against the true religion. Christ is said to have had a human body and a human soul, identical to other humans except that he was without sin. Important religious events which are said to have occurred in the life of Christ are a virgin birth, miracles he performed during his life, martyrdom by crucifixion, resurrection from the dead, and ascension into heaven.
11-22-17
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version
The King James Version (KJV), also known as the King James Bible (KJB), or simply the Authorized Version (AV), is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611.[a] The books of the King James Version include the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha (most of which correspond to books in the Vulgate Deuterocanon adhered to by Roman Catholics), and the 27 books of the New Testament.
It was first printed by the King's Printer Robert Barker and was the third translation into English approved by the English Church authorities. The first had been the Great Bible, commissioned in the reign of King Henry VIII (1535), and the second had been the Bishops' Bible of 1568. In January 1604, James VI and I convened the Hampton Court Conference, where a new English version was conceived in response to the problems of the earlier translations perceived by the Puritans, a faction of the Church of England. The translation is noted for its "majesty of style", and has been described as one of the most important books in English culture and a driving force in the shaping of the English–speaking world.
James gave the translators instructions intended to ensure that the new version would conform to the ecclesiology and reflect the episcopal structure of the Church of England and its belief in an ordained clergy. They wanted to retain power!! The translation was done by 47 scholars, all of whom were members of the Church of England. In common with most other translations of the period, the New Testament was translated from Greek, the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Apocrypha from Greek and Latin. In the Book of Common Prayer (1662), the text of the Authorized Version replaced the text of the Great Bible for Epistle and Gospel readings (but not for the Psalter, which substantially retained Coverdale's Great Bible version) and as such was authorized by Act of Parliament.
OK. so a person born to royalty, picks a selection of writings out of hundreds, puts them into one book, declares this is the one you will follow, (or else).
Why those books? As explained above, because they ‘fit’, best politics, and declared it the
bible to be used. So an individual, with no qualifications other than birth rights, decided what a bible is and what it contains. Tell me that isn't true? So a Christian today is doing a King's bidding? So you must have a book to tell you to be nice to each other? It isn't a bad thing, but I don't know why you have to have a book to tell you that.
On top of that, it is all worshiping a supernatural being. Look it up, ‘
supernatural’, it fits perfectly. The bible even smugly warns against worshiping ‘other’ ‘false’ (supernatural) gods.
su·per·nat·u·ral (so͞o′pər-năch′ər-əl)
adj.
1. Of or relating to existence outside the natural world.
2. Attributed to a power that seems to violate or go beyond natural forces.
3. Of or relating to a deity.
4. Of or relating to the immediate exercise of divine power; miraculous.
5. Of or relating to the miraculous.
Now, something I just learned, some say; "God has also been conceived as the source of all moral obligation". Now that hit me that god is what we like when we refer to "Mother nature", she doesn't really exist but we gave it a name and a persona to help us deal with it and its actions.
That could work, as long as we are not expecting him/her to actually do something.
It is just short of weird how we deal with it and its shortcomings. If there is a car wreck, it is an individuals fault but if you survive it is because god saved you. God the all powerful, we thank him for not getting a disease when technically he would have caused the disease, not dying in a plane wreck that technically he caused?
Sorry, I just don't go for the supernatural where if it is good, it is because god did it and if it is bad, it is my fault and it all varies depending on what particular mystic you choose to believe. It just doesn't make sense.
Interesting that often religious people don't want to associate with non-religious people, even though in the bible it specifically says to love and forgive everybody.
So, do I believe in the bible? Sure, see above, fiction or possibly there was someone like Mohammad, or more than one, but it makes people feel good to pretend there is life after death and that all sinners go to hell. Isn't that curious?
What are we so weak of mind we must invent a supernatural being so we feel better about our eventual demise? or maybe even to deny death? King James puts a collection of books together, some out of many, that sort-of agree, with each other, and now all of a sudden we take it literally? We don't know most of the things that happened with the Clinton administration and you're telling me these 1800-year-old-books, translated several times, can tell you word for word and step by step about someone that lived 2000 years ago? Just because 40 million others have this need also? The Muslims have a “bible” and in it it says to kill anyone that doesn't follow it exclusively. The Christian leaders say all religions believe in the same god. So love each other and ignore the fact that islam wants you dead!
See also
koran
See also
Islam
See also
Muslims
See also
More on Islam
The Bible, KJV or AV
Gnostic Gospels
What you need to realize is that the early days of Christianity are just one big scholarly black spot, when it comes to verifiable, documented facts. But if there isn't much we can definitely say did happen in the holy land almost 2000 years ago, there's one thing we do know: none of the 4 Gospels that make up the New Testament were written by contemporaries of Jesus. Which never fails to take followers of the faith, by surprise.
The earliest of the four, the Gospel of Mark – or rather, the one we refer to as the Gospel of Mark, since we don't even really know who wrote it, as it was common practice at the time to attribute written works to famous people – is thought to have been written at least 40 years after Jesus is death. That's 40 years without CNN, without videotaped interviews, without a Google search turning up scores of eyewitness reports from those who actually knew him. So at best, what we are talking about here are stories that are passed on by word-of-mouth, over 40 years, without any written record. So you tell me, if you were running an investigation, how accurate would you consider such evidence, after 40 years of primitive, uneducated, superstitious people telling stories around their campfires?
Far more troubling, if you ask me, is a story of how these particular four Gospels actually came to be included in the New Testament. You see, over the 200 years following the writing of the Gospel of Mark, we know that many other Gospels were written, with all kind of tales about Jesus's life. As the early movement grew more popular and spread among this scattered communities, stories of Jesus's life took on local flavors that were influenced by the particular circumstances of each community. Dozens of different Gospels were floating around, often at odds with one another. We know this for a fact because. In December 1945, some Arab peasants were digging for fertilizer in the Jabal al – Tariff mountains of upper Egypt, close to the town of Nag Hammadi, and they discovered an earthenware jar almost 6 feet high. At 1st, they hesitated to break it, fearful that a dijinn – an evil spirit – could be trapped inside. But they did break it into it, hoping to find gold instead, and that led to one of the most astonishing archaeological discoveries of all time: inside the jar worth 13 papyrus books, bound in tooled gazelle leather. The peasants, unfortunate, didn't realize the value of what they found, and some of the books and the loose papyrus leaves went up in flames and the ovens of their home. Other pages were lost as the documents found their way to the Coptic Museum in Cairo. What did survive, though, were fifty-two text that are still the subject of great controversy among biblical scholars, as these writings – often referred to as the Gnostic Gospels – refer to sayings and the police of Jesus that are at odds with those in the New Testament.
Among the text found at Nag Hammadi was the gospel of Thomas, which identifies itself as a secret Gospel and opens with the line: "these are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, in which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down." His twin. And there's more. Bound in the same volume with it was the Gospel of Philip, which openly describes Jesus relationship Mary Magdalene as an intimate one. Mary has her own text – the Gospel of Mary, in which Mary Magdalene is regarded as a disciple and a leader of a Christian group. There's also the Gospel of Peter, the gospel of the Egyptians, the secret book of John. There's a gospel of truth, with this distinct Buddhist undertones… The list goes on.
A common thread in all these Gospels, apart from the attributing acts in the words to Jesus that are pretty different from those in the Gospels of the New Testament, is that they consider common Christian believes, like the virgin birth and the resurrection, to be naïve delusions. Even worse, these writings were also uniformly Gnostic, because, although they refer to Jesus and his disciples, the message they conveyed was that to know oneself, at the deepest level, was to know God – that is, by looking within oneself to find the sources of joy, sorrow, love, and hey, one would find God.
The early Christian movement was illegal and needed to have some kind of theological structure is going to survive and grow. The proliferation of conflicting Gospels risk leaving it to a potentially fatal fragmentation. It needed a leadership that was impossible to achieve if each community had its own police and its own gospel. But in the 2nd century, a power structure started to take shape. A 3 rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons emerged in various communities, claiming to speak for the majority, believing themselves to be the guardians of the only true faith. Now I'm not saying these people were necessarily power-hungry monsters, they were actually very brave and what they were trying to do, and they were probably generally scared that without a set of widely accepted, rigid rules and rituals, whole movement would wither away and die.
At a time one being a Christian meant risking persecution and even death, the very survival of the church meant containment on the establishment of some kind of order. This grew until, around the year way under the leadership of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, a single, unified view was finally composed. There could be only one church with one set of beliefs and rituals. All other viewpoints were rejected as heresy. Their doctrine was straightforward: there could be no salvation of the true church; its members would be orthodox, which meant "straight thinking"; and the church would be Catholic, which meant "universal." This meant that the cottage industry of Gospels had to be stopped. Irenaeus decided that there should be 4 to Gospels, using the curious argument that as there were 4 corners of the universe and 4 principal wins, so should there before Gospels. He wrote 5 volumes, entitled the destruction and overthrow of falsely so-called knowledge, in which he denounced most of the existing works is blasphemous, silly on the 4 Gospels we know today as the definitive record of God's word – – an errand, infallible, and more than sufficient for the needs of the religions adherents.
None of the Gnostic Gospels had a passion narrative, but the 4 Gospels Irenaeus chose did. They spoke about Jesus's death on the cross and about his resurrection, a link the story being promoted to the fundamental ritual of the Eucharist, the Last Supper. And they didn't even start off that way, and the earliest version, the 1st of them to be included, the Gospel of Mark, doesn't talk about a virgin birth at all, nor does it have the resurrection in it. It just ins with Jesus empty tomb, where a mysterious young man, a transcendental being of some kind, like an angel, tells a group of women who come to the tomb, that Jesus is waiting for them at Galilee. And this terrifies these women, and there are often don't tell anyone about it – which makes you wonder how marker whoever wrote that gospel would have ever heard about it in the 1st place. But that's how Mark originally ended his gospel. It's only in Matthew --50 years later – and then in Luke, 10 years after that, that elaborate post Rican post-resurrection appearances were added to Mark's original ending, which in itself then rewritten.
It took another 200 years – to the year 367, in fact – the list of 27 text that compromise what we know as a New Testament to be finally agreed upon. By the end of that century, Christianity had become an officially approved religion, and possession of any of the texts considered radical was held to be a criminal offense. All known copies of the alternate Gospels were burned and destroyed. All, that is, except for the one spirited away in the caves of Nag Hammadi, which don't showed Jesus to be supernatural in any way. They were banned because the Jesus of these text was just a roving wise man who preaches a life of possession of us wandering and a wholehearted acceptance of fellow human beings. He's not here to save us from sin and from eternal damnation, he served to guide us to some kind of supernatural understanding. And once a disciple reaches enlightenment – and this notion must be given Irenaeus and his cronies a few sleepless nights – the master is no longer needed. The student and teacher become equals. The 4 Canon Gospels, the ones in the New Testament – they see Jesus as their Savior, the Messiah, the son of God. Orthodox Christians – the Orthodox Jews, for that matter – insist that an unabridged chasm separates man from his creator. Gospels that were found in Nag Hammadi contradicted this: for them, self-knowledge is a knowledge of God; the self and the divine are one and the same. Even worse, by describing Jesus as a teacher, the enlightened sage --they consider him a man, someone you or I could emulate, and that wouldn't do for Irenaeus and his lot. He couldn't just be a man, he had to be much more than that. He had to be the son of God. He had to be unique, because by his being unique, the church becomes unique, the only path to salvation. By paying him in that light the early church could claim if you want with them, following their rules, living the way they wanted you to, you were doomed to damnation.
Basically everything Christians believe in today and have believed since for a century, all the rituals and observe, the Eucharist, the holy days – none of it was part of what the immediate followers of Jesus believed in. It was all made up, it was all tagged on much later – rituals and supernatural beliefs, which in many cases were imported from other religions, from the resurrection to Christmas. But the church's founder did a great job. It's been a runaway bestseller for almost 2000 years, but… I think the temperature right. It had already gotten way out of hand in their days and with people getting butchered if they chose to believe in something different.
Spare me your righteous indignation and grow up, would you? It's all so ludicrous, we're still in the realm of fantasy, here, today, and the 21st century. We're really no more advanced than those poor bastards in Troy. The whole planet script in by mass delusion. Christianity, Judaism, Islam… People are ready to fight to the death to defend every word in these books they hold sacred, but they are really based on? Legends and myths going back thousands of years, Abraham, a man who, if you leave the Old Testament, fathered a child at the tender age of 100 and live to be 175 years old? Does it make sense that people's lives would still be ruled by a collection of laughable hokum?"
Polls consistently confirm that the most Christians, Jews, and Muslims today are unaware of their religious shared roots in Abraham, the patriarch of all 3 religions and the founder of monotheism. Ironically, according to the Book of Genesis, God had sent Abraham on a mission to heal the divisions between men. His message was that regardless of the different languages or cultures, all of mankind was to be part of one human family, before one God who sustains the whole of creation. Somehow, this lofty message got perverted," Vance said mockingly, "like something out of a bad episode of Dallas. Abraham's wife, Sarah, couldn't have children, so he took on a 2nd wife, his Arab maidservant Hagar, who gave him a son they called Ishmael. 13 years later, Sarah manages to have a son, Isaac. Abraham dies, Sarah banishes Hagar and Ishmael, and the semitic race is split between Arab and Jew.
The galling thing is that all 3 religions claim to believe in the same God, the God of Abraham. Things only got screwed up once people started squabbling over whose words were the truest representation of God's tradition. The Jewish faith got its beliefs from the prophet, Moses, whose lineage the Jews trace back to Isaac and Abraham. A few hundred years later, Jesus – a Jewish prophet – comes up with a new set of beliefs, his version of Abraham's religion. A few hundred years later, yet another man, Mohammed, shows up claiming that he is, in fact, God's messenger, not the first two charlatans, and he promises to bring about a return to the founding revelations of Abraham – as traced through Ishmael, this time, mind you – and Islam is born. No wonder, Christian leaders at the time considered Islam a Christian heresy and not a new, or different, religion. And after Mohammed died, Islam is so split into – Shiites and Sunnis – because of a power struggle over who should rightly succeed him. And so goes on, on and on.
So we have Christians looking down on Jews, considering them to be followers of an earlier, incomplete, revelation of God's wishes; Muslim D writing Christians in much the same way – although they, too, revere Jesus, but only as an outdated messenger of God, not as his son. It's so pathetic. Did you know that devout Muslims bless Abraham 17 times a day? The harsh – the pilgrimage to Mecca, every Muslims holy duty – millions of them braving stifling heat as well as the distinct possibility of getting trampled to death – do you know what it's it all about? They are there to commemorate God sparing of Ishmael – the son of Abraham! You only need to go to have gone to see how absurd the whole things become. Arabs and Jews still killing each other over the most hotly contested piece of real estate on the planet, all because supposedly the site of Abrahams grave, a small cave that has separate, isolated viewing areas for each group. Abraham – if he ever really existed – must be turning in his grave at the thought of his squabbling, small minded, pay decedents. Talk about dysfunctional families…
I know it's easy to blame all conflicts in our history on politics and greed, and of course they play a role… But beneath it all, religion has always been the fuel that keeps the furnace of intolerance and hatred burning. And holds us back from better things, but mostly from coming to terms with the truth about who we become, from embracing everything science has taught us and can even be used to teach us, from forcing us to make ourselves accountable for our own actions. These primitive tribesmen and women, thousands of years ago – they were scared, they needed religion to try and understand the mysteries of life and death, to come to terms with the vagaries of disease, weather, unpredictable harvest, the natural disasters. We don't need anymore. We can pick up a cell phone and talk to someone on the other side of the planet. You can put a remote control car on Mars. We can create life in a test tube. And we could do a lot more. It's time we let go of our ancient superstitions and face who we really are and accept that we have become someone from just 100 years ago would consider a God. We need to embrace for capable of, and not rely on some arcane force from above that's going to come down from the sky and make things right for us.
All I see is the unnecessary pain and suffering it caused to millions of people over the centuries. Christianity served a great purpose when it was conceived. It gave people hope, it provided a source of social support system, it helped bring down tyranny. Serve the needs of the community. What needs does it serve today, apart from blocking medical research and justifying wars and murder? We laugh when we look at the people that the Incas or the Egyptians used to worship. Are we any better? What will people think when they look back at on us in 1000 years? Will we be a subject to the same ridicule? We’re still dancing to tunes created by men who thought that a thunderstorm was a sign of God's anger. In that all needs to change.