Force Powers

Fyxe wrote: Why would I have to give up anything?

One of the most important and life altering aspects of learning is giving up ideas, expectations, assumptions, demands, and even hopes that we are attached to. Here are some questions which you might mistake as being insults or attacks but which are in fact real and serious questions that i hope you can really consider and answer honestly: 1: do you think that everything you believe is correct? 2: do you think you are smarter, wiser, and more experienced than everyone else? 3: are you capable of admitting when you are wrong?

Everyone assumes they are already right, but theyre wrong. Its not until we admit that we’re mostly wrong that we open the door to becoming right.

Hi

In regards to the critique about miracles, I'll have to do my digging, but it's my belief that miracles pointed to a lesson in the end or a fulfillment of prophecy or as a way to get people to understand that they were taking the law and making it Lord.

I guess I should have waited for rex to make that thread.

Rex wrote: Star Wars was never supposed to be taken literally. The Bible claims it is.

Chapter and verse?

I actually have a post about literary criticism of the Bible coming out eventually, that might hit a lot of the hermeneutics points (which will hopefully spill over into star wars and other text discussions as well). I'll be discussing how each book has slightly different purposes in part.

Off the top of my head, 2 Tim 3:16
"All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man of God will be thoroughly equipped..."
Utility is a key feature which defines fact from fiction. Rowling doesn't tell people to run full speed into platform 9.75, because there's no factual claim about it. So unless this letter written in a Christian mentorship context is essentially an inside joke, I think there is a strong factual claim here.

Which of the parts of that verse indicate a claim to be taken literally?

The God breathed part?

What about the first part here:

https://www.gotquestions.org/God-breathed.html

It indicates that the word "theopneustos"

means "inspired by God" or "due to inspiration of God"

Even if we were to use John 20:30-31
"30 Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. 31 But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

This is a declaration of John, but does not necessarily extend to the whole collection of books contained in the Bible.

There are people and denominations for whom the idea that the Bible as the unerring Word of God is a fundamental part of their statement of faith, but those are the two scriptures that are typically used. Besides the scripture that you mentioned and the one that I have mentioned I haven't found any others, so I am looking forward to your post on the matter

In my opinion, modern Christians face two nearly insurmountable barriers in attempting to decipher the Bible: first is that we (all modern people) are too far removed from the cultural context of the ancient Hebrews or the early Christians to fully appreciate (and understand) their writing. Ancient people saw the world in fundamentally different ways from us and that gap is probably impossible to bridge. They wrote those stories for themselves and from within their own frames of reference. The tales they told and themes they put forward were relevant to their own experiences as individuals and as societies. We interpret them through the lenses of our experiences and this drives our interpretations into areas they never intended or conceived.

Literalism vs Allegory is only one example of many and maybe not the most important, but it IS pretty important. Simply put: we dont know the degree to which ancient peoples drew distinctions between literal and allegorical narratives and in the event that they did, we often cant tell when they meant to use one over the other. Todays Christians take everything literally but there are scholars of Judaism who insist that the Genesis stories were intended as allegory from the the beginning (the beginning, see what i did there :lol:). Which segues nicely into the next point.

Today’s Christians are typically oblivious of the cultural and historic evolution of both Christianity and of Judaism from both from a doctrinal standpoint and a societal one. I really want to go into a rant about how terrible bible colleges are as academic institutions but i wont: i will only say that they are terrible (“He who knows one, knows none” -Mueller) and leave it at that. Early Judaism’s ideas about sin, the Covenant, and the afterlife (as examples) are vastly different from what modern Christianity teaches. Christians today dont understand - and from what I can tell, don't WANT to understand - that/where those differences exist or the social/cultural events which precipitated them. Which is probably why they take everything literally, because they dont realize the extent to which they are practicing Zoroastrianism or the likelihood that the Book of Revelation was a coded critique of the Roman Empire.

Rosalyn J wrote: Which of the parts of that verse indicate a claim to be taken literally?

The God breathed part?

What about the first part here:

https://www.gotquestions.org/God-breathed.html

It indicates that the word "theopneustos"

means "inspired by God" or "due to inspiration of God"

I have to strongly agree with your post. Christians often prioritize their own version of "the bible" as if it always existed in some pre-eminent construct. It emphasizes their religion over reality and their religious institution over any commandment of the biblical God.

For example: When the NT refers to "the church" its referring to a congregation, not a new religion or a denomination of a new religion. There is no biblical prophecy of a new religion replacing Judaism and out of thousands of denominations one of them would be the chosen one. No, what happens is that if someone wants to implant themselves into the bible then they simply reinterpret words that were originally meant to talk about nations, to talking about religions instead. I know how common this kind of interpretation is because I grew up with it.

Another example is the subject of the bible itself; mainly what did they mean when they said "scripture"? Was was scripture to a Jew or to even an early Christian before for the council of Nicaea? I would argue that Christianity wasn't even born yet and they didn't have their own bible. There was no "New Testament". They would, after 2 Timothy was written, decide which books and letters would be included in THEIR [Christian] bible. So is this what Jews were talking about when they said "the scriptures?" Why would any Jew, even Jesus, categorize the personal letters of apostles equal with what they previously had established to be their holy scriptures?

Is it because people print the words "Holy Bible" on the cover?

No offense, but that doesn't really mean anything. That's what HUMANS did. Who did God tell to do that? We're just making assumptions that God agrees and cosigns all this stuff because it happened. So did Sodom and Gomorrah. They were both allowed to get to a point where God said they had to be destroyed. So he doesn't prevent people from doing the wrong thing. So there's no reason for us to assume it was what he wanted.

Jews do not even recognize the entire Old Testament as equal in value. Are the words singing songs of praise to David, holy writ? But according to 2 Timothy all that was inspired. But you have to understand what inspiration means. In Christianity is most often means (due to literal interpretation) that God told someone exactly what to write. This is important because Christians (in general) prefer to remove the human element so that their bible is the "inerrant word of God". This is the same as when the Catholic church declared the Pope to be "infallible". This is basically the height of dealing in absolutes. Why do you need to deal in absolutes? Ego. **I** cannot be wrong and so its not good enough if the bible is subject to my interpretation.

I understand the desire to protect the bible, but what are you protecting? If the original writers didn't mean what you think they said then you're protecting a false misunderstanding that has become the norm.

The reality is that the people who often wrote about miracles were not the ones who actually saw them. The reality is that most of the Hebrews were illiterate and only certain people could read and write and there were plenty of mistakes just making copies of the scriptures so that kings and wealthy people could have their own copy. It was always a human process and inspiration simply meant that they were inspired by God the same way an artist inspired to paint something; inspired most likely, presumably, by the thing he's painting. This makes perfect sense, but when you add that layer of religious dogma it is unnaturally forced to mean something else, just so that an institution can claim that it has the truth and all the answers because everything they teach comes from God.

In star wars the "magic" of the Force captures people's imagination. It therefore provides the exact same inspiration that the bible uses for the EXACT SAME PURPOSE. Bible writers knew how people reacted to "miracles". Which is why they weren't the first ones to invent miracles. It was already a thing. They didn't introduce the concept. When the prophet Elijah had a face off with rival priests nobody said "miracle? what's that?" EVERYONE knew what that word meant because it wasn't their first rodeo.

That's why the bible doesn't even go deep into the Egyptians and why their priests could do magic. It simply accepted that they could. But who was their gods that enabled them to use magic? Why isn't their story relevant? And why were they using magic if not to cause their citizens to believe in their gods as literal entities? Why? Because then, if their gods were real entities, then that means that the priests, BECAUSE they could do magic, EXACTLY like the Jedi, meant that these gods were "with them" and the people would take care of the priests, giving them free wealth and power because they were afraid of the gods.

Moses could have shown that he didn't think this way. However, when given the opportunity he used miracles to prove that the God of the ancestors of the Israelites, though he'd been AWOL for 400 years, was what.... say it with me.. that "God was with him". In fact, the name Emmanuel literally translates to "God with us". And it is ONLY because of this idea why Moses was allowed to commit genocide on his own people when they did not CHOOSE to follow this (version of) God.

So this is the power that comes when people believe that God is with you. When order 66 happened, it proved how fragile the Jedi actually were. This is what Palpatine wanted. He wanted to expose the Jedi as being entirely human so that people wouldn't be afraid of their power and wouldn't hold out the HOPE that their power would save them. Before this, Jedi could lead armies and they were very influential because people looked up to them and, through them, believed in the Force, and that it could guide them. But who did that guidance have to come through? The Jedi. This was a threat to anyone seeking power. But it illustrates the value of miracles as it relates to POLITICS. And this, hopefully, exposes the fact that religious leaders, like the ancient priests, but also like Billy Graham and Pat Robertson, are often drawn into political influence and intrigue. And so the more that people believe in their connection to God the more they can get away with telling people what God says.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/448687-franklin-graham-i-think-god-was-behind-the-last-election

Evangelist Franklin Graham said in an interview that divine intervention might be the reason President Trump won in 2016.

“I think God was behind the last election,” Graham told conservative news site The Western Journal,

OB1Shinobi wrote: Which is probably why they take everything literally, because they dont realize the extent to which they are practicing Zoroastrianism or the likelihood that the Book of Revelation was a coded critique of the Roman Empire.

Yes, absolutely!

And I think we too often, because we separate them, fail to see the politics behind it. We fail to see how they USE God and the bible in order to gain power. But if you look at history it should be somewhat obvious.

Arguably, Christianity only officially started under Constantine who was a sun worshiper. So sure, why not celebrate the birth of the most important figure in your religion on the same exact day as Constantine would have celebrated the Winter Solstice? Why not intertwine this holy occasion with pagan Christmas trees and the idea that the sun "dies for 3 days" and is resurrected? I mean, it makes perfect sense. Hell... while we're at it, no body really knows or seems to care when he was born so let's change his entire story to fit into this sun-god narrative and foretell it using astrology instead of God simply talking to a prophet? Why not? I mean its not like the biblical God, YHWH, has any problem with mixing his religion with paganism.

(for the record, there is 0% chance YHWH, after threatening to kill the Israelites over the golden calf incident, was ever okay with this)

It was always about power. The kings could claim power by birth. But priests and prophets could claim power by virtue of their relationship with God. They could tell kings and queens what to do. Cities were built for the Levitical priests and they (in spite of what God told Adam about working the ground) didn't have to work. Wealth and power were theirs. THAT is why, when Jesus of Nazereth came along, he was seen as a threat. They didn't want a messiah; real or not. And understand this.... Messiah meant "KING". Because messiah meant anointed with oil which is what they did in coronation of the man God had chosen to be king. THAT is why Jesus was given the garment and crown of thorns. Because it wasn't a strictly religious title with religious implications. That's why Jesus talked about what he and his disciples would do when he came into his KINGDOM. People have massively misunderstood this story because they wanted Jesus to save them, not save and rule over his own people.

It is about POWER. Always. Understand this. That's why we have separation between church and state because state is afraid, rightfully so, of the church. Because the honest truth is that the institution of every church in the Mosaic tradition, is designed to rule the nation. That is the underlying subconscious directive even if people don't consciously grasp this truth.

ZealotX wrote:
Yes, absolutely!

And I think we too often, because we separate them, fail to see the politics behind it. We fail to see how they USE God and the bible in order to gain power. But if you look at history it should be somewhat obvious.
....
It is about POWER. Always. Understand this. That's why we have separation between church and state because state is afraid, rightfully so, of the church. Because the honest truth is that the institution of every church in the Mosaic tradition, is designed to rule the nation. That is the underlying subconscious directive even if people don't consciously grasp this truth.

Christians today dont usually realize the politics behind the development and spread of Christianity and I agree with most of the specific points you raise. I think it would be inaccurate to lump everyone in the early Church as being driven by thirst for power, however. I dont know if thats what you intend to say but it appears that way from the wording. But yeah, the whole Constantine just suddenly converting and then having to "save" the rest of the world was....something to look closely at, lol

Rex wrote: Off the top of my head, 2 Tim 3:16
"All scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man of God will be thoroughly equipped..."

See, I read that as just "The Scripture helps build us up and prepare us," not "take this book literally."

In context, the vast majority of this scripture was written by and for a storytelling people. Sure, there are bits that line up with history, and sure there are bits like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes that are to be taken more literally than others, but on the whole it's just a book of multi-layered allegories and metaphors.

No religion of this age started as something to be taken literally, it's just that fundamentalists demand that interpreting it so is the only proper way. Which is very false.