Kyle wrote:Food restrictions were specifically lifted in Acts. I can just vaguely remember something about fabrics in the law from the Old Testament.
The food restrictions and the sex restrictions were often lumped together in the Old Testament. There's only one reason why the food restrictions were lifted in Actsand the sexual ones were not; Acts was written for Gentiles who would have balked (if not laughed) at such food restrictions and ignored them and probably spurned Christianity in the process. Not wanted to lose converts, the New Testmanent writers like Paul and Luke did something that is considered a dirty word today... they
compromised. They didn't lift the taboos against certain sexual acts because they wouldn't have been as uniformly ignored, so they kept those in. Divine inspiration had nothing to do with it.
Christian History is loaded with such compromises... among these the timing of Christmas and Easter (which were both originally
pagan holidays) to celebrate the winter solstice and the coming of spring respectively.
sarobah wrote:The concept of heaven does not make sense to me… at least not the traditional concept of heaven as a place of perfection and eternal happiness.
If, on the contrary, heaven is a place where the inhabitants feel and experience and evolve, then (1) it is not yet and can never be a state of perfection, and (2) the inhabitants must have free will and therefore the potential to do bad things. If the heavenly residents do not have the power to do wrong, then they don’t have free will. For most humans that is hardly a reward for good behaviour on earth. It is a punishment!
I have other problems with heaven, but those are the key issues.
Pretty much what I believe. Heaven
isn't a state of perfection. Such a state is impossible for a group of diverse people with different wants and needs and desires. One person's idea of heaven might seem like Hell to me, and vice versa. Instead, I believe that, assuming there is an afterlife at all, each gets one custom-made to his own desires. In which case, mine for instance would include TUGs with like-minded individuals!!! Heaven
isn't perfection; it's simply (I hope) a whole lot better than our current reality.
Again, this is just what I hope and believe. I'm probably wrong; but my beliefs suit me and hurt no one so what's the harm? It makes just as much sense as (if not more sense than) anyone else's conception of the Afterlife.
What I really fear is the actual case is not the biblical concept of Heaven or Hell, however. What i fear is that, if the modern physicists' concept of an infinite number of parallel universes is correct (with an infinite number of duplicates for every person that has ever existed, ever will exist, and even ever could exist but never did in our own reality), it also implies an
infinite number of
reincarnations for each and every living thing (including humans) that has ever lived!!! If so, that means each of us could already have lived our lives in an infinite variety of ways in different universes and will continue to do so for eternity!
Gahhh!!! If
that's the case, it's a darned good thing memory never carries over so that each time always seems like the first and only time!
Dare to be different... and make a difference.
To boldly go where no one in their right mind has gone before...