Liberating the Oppressed

Tecumsehsbones

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Dexter Sinister

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Scholars qualify nearly 1/3 of the Bible as prophecy.
Depends on the "scholars." The Hagee MInistry (a Texas fundamentalist outfit) says 1/4, for instance, and somebody there went to the trouble of counting the verses considered to be prophetic and came up with around 8500 if memory serves. Doesn't really matter though, the quantity has nothing to do with its credibility as prophecy, which is zero. Fitting events to match previous statements after the former have happened, when nobody knew what the latter meant until then, is the same kind of fallacious reasoning that's been applied to Nostrademus' little verses. Means nothing.
 

Dexter Sinister

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We don’t know what we don’t know. That’s the nature of spiritual oppression, TB. It is rife with deception.
So we can't know we're spiritually oppressed until we've been freed from it? That's the inevitable retreat into mysticism where these discussions always end up.
 
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Motar

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To the oppressed in the subject passage (poor, imprisoned, blind, widowed, chronically ill and Gentiles), Jesus proclaimed good news, freedom, recovery and the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19, NIV).

To the Jewish synagogue audience, Jesus told the truth: “Truly I tell you,‘ he continued, ‘no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.‘ All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this” (Luke 4:24-28, NIV).

Why did the synagogue audience respond in furious unison at Jesus’ words to them?
 

Motar

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Why did the synagogue audience respond in furious unison at Jesus’ words to them?
Luke and Jesus reminded the assembled offspring of Israel that He and they were called to be a light for revelation to the Gentiles (Isaiah 42:6, 49:6; Luke 2:32; Acts 13:47, 26:23), even the Roman Gentiles who oppressed them and the Gentiles (Samaritans) whom they oppressed.
 

DaSleeper

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To the oppressed in the subject passage (poor, imprisoned, blind, widowed, chronically ill and Gentiles), Jesus proclaimed good news, freedom, recovery and the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19, NIV).

To the Jewish synagogue audience, Jesus told the truth: “Truly I tell you,‘ he continued, ‘no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.‘ All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this” (Luke 4:24-28, NIV).

Why did the synagogue audience respond in furious unison at Jesus’ words to them?
My prayer is, Lord deliver me from internet forum proselytizers......(Wannabe Preachers) who profess to know what happened or what someone said 2 to 4 thousand years ago
If I want to get preached to, I'll go to a church or synagogue !
And he who quotes himself has a fool for a source!
 
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Dexter Sinister

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Christ liberates completely and eternally.
If that's so, and I don't believe it is, in fact I believe it's not, then he liberates us from a situation god deliberately and knowingly created and let us suffer in for millennia before deciding that a particularly brutal human sacrifice was the way to fix it. It's always seemed to me that an all powerful, all knowing deity should have been able to come up with a better plan than that. And really, on the evidence I'd have to conclude there's no plan at all, we're on our own here. The logic of Christianity has long eluded me. Magic tree, talking serpent, couple of gullible people the serpent is able to trick, which leads to us all having an evil spell on us called original sin, and we all suffer with that until god decides to provide us with a way to have it removed, subject to certain conditions of course... Sounds like a fairy tale to me.

I'm somewhat mystified as to your purpose here. This thread reads like you're the teacher in a Bible study course: offer a citation from scripture, ask a question about it that nobody answers, then answer it yourself.
 

Tecumsehsbones

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My prayer is, Lord deliver me from internet forum proselytizers......(Wannabe Preachers) who profess to know what happened or what someone said 2 to 4 thousand years ago
If I want to get preached to, I'll go to a church or synagogue !
And he who quotes himself has a fool for a source!
Better here than on a streetcorner you can't avoid.
 

Motar

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If that's so, and I don't believe it is, in fact I believe it's not, then he liberates us from a situation god deliberately and knowingly created and let us suffer in for millennia before deciding that a particularly brutal human sacrifice was the way to fix it. It's always seemed to me that an all powerful, all knowing deity should have been able to come up with a better plan than that. And really, on the evidence I'd have to conclude there's no plan at all, we're on our own here. The logic of Christianity has long eluded me. Magic tree, talking serpent, couple of gullible people the serpent is able to trick, which leads to us all having an evil spell on us called original sin, and we all suffer with that until god decides to provide us with a way to have it removed, subject to certain conditions of course... Sounds like a fairy tale to me.

I'm somewhat mystified as to your purpose here. This thread reads like you're the teacher in a Bible study course: offer a citation from scripture, ask a question about it that nobody answers, then answer it yourself.
It would bless me to hear your liberation philosophy, DS. How do you define freedom? How is it realized and maintained?
 

Dexter Sinister

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It would bless me to hear your liberation philosophy, DS. How do you define freedom? How is it realized and maintained?
These are deep and complex matters and it would require a lengthy essay to fully answer those questions, with citations from David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson, and a whole lot of other people who've thought and written more deeply about such things than I have. I don't propose to do that on an Internet message board, nobody would read it and I haven't the time or inclination anyway. But I can make some of the main points.

Freedom means the ability to act without undue constraint, I can go where I want, do what I want, say what I want, think what I want, without fear of being suppressed by an oppressive and controlling apparatus of the state or any other organization. There are some necessary limits on it of course, hence the key word "unduly" in the previous sentence. I can't utter death threats against politicians I dislike, for instance, or promote hatred of certain groups or individuals, or--a common example in first year philosophy courses--shout "FIRE!" in a crowded theatre, unless of course there actually IS a fire. Freedom, in other words, is a political matter, not a religious one, and it's realized and maintained by a general consensus in an organized society that this is the way we want things to be, what Rousseau first called The Social Contract.

Religion offers the very antithesis of that, enslavement to a rickety ideology in which you are constantly under surveillance by some divine dictator that you can't get away from even by dying. After your death, in fact, is when the really serious judgment of you, and its consequences, happens, and you can be condemned solely on the basis of your thoughts, not what you've said or done. No civilized polity will hang you for what you think, but religion claims it can and will, even, or perhaps especially, after you're gone. It can't really, there's no real substance to that, but it's managed to frighten a lot of people into believing it can.
 

Motar

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Thank you for sharing, DS. A biblical perspective of human philosophy is recorded in Colossians 2:8.
 

Motar

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Yes, the biblical perspective equates human philosophy with captivity (Colossians 2:8, NIV).
 

Motar

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“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:17, NIV).

Blessings, Friends. As always, you are appreciated!