@Former Member posted:God is a Spirit and so are you. Allow me to explain, please! I am irreligious and consider ALL religion as nonsense! However, I believe in Jesus' definition of God as given in the Gospel according to John, Chapter 4, Verse 24: God is a Spirit, or Intangible Living Energy, out of whom ALL the intangible living energies such as us and ALL life, and ALL the tangible latent energies such as our bodies and ALL matter, come! And we, intangible living energies, realizing that we are such, and that God is the Source of our being such, we must worship God, Intangible Living Energy, by being truthful, for out of God can only come TRUTH or REALITY, not untruth or unreality! Energy is neither created nor destroyed! Whatever is, was, and will always BE! There is NO death, just a separation of the spirit or intangible living energy from its tool, tangible latent energy, the body, matter!
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Death is separation. A physical death is the separation of the soul from the body. Spiritual death, which is of greater significance, is the separation of the soul from God. In Genesis 2:17, God tells Adam that in the day he eats of the forbidden fruit he will "surely die." Adam does fall, but his physical death does not occur immediately; God must have had another type of death in mind—spiritual death. This separation from God is exactly what we see in Genesis 3:8. When Adam and Eve heard the voice of the Lord, they "hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God." The fellowship had been broken. They were spiritually dead. A man without Christ is spiritually dead.To illustrate, think of Jesus’ raising of Lazarus in John 11. The physically dead Lazarus could do nothing for himself. He was unresponsive to all stimuli, oblivious to all life around him, beyond all help or hope except for the help of Christ who is "the Resurrection and the Life" (John 11:25). At Christ’s call, Lazarus was filled with life, and he responded accordingly. In the same way, we were spiritually dead, unable to save ourselves, powerless to perceive the life of God—until Jesus called us to Himself. He "quickened" us; "not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy" (Titus 3:5).
The book of Revelation speaks of a "second death," which is a final (and eternal) separation from God. Only those who have never experienced new life in Christ will partake of the second death (Revelation 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8).
-------------------------------------ALL is experience, whether personally acceptable or not, whether in this physical world of matter or in the world of energy or spirit!! The only change is the choice of matter, in this world of matter, for new experiences, according to the experiences desired! Jesus NEVER started ANY religion! He taught TRUTH not religion! 'Christianity' was Paul's creation to corrupt Jesus' teachings! Better corrupt than persecute, especially when you can't find them to persecute! Paul was a Pharisee, a materialist, just like the Zionist Jews of today! Jesus spoke against the Pharisees, calling then 'children of their father' the devil (an alien! Read Exodus 25, 30 and 31 and decide for yourself if this was God)! Paul was born before Jesus! Why didn't he persecute Jesus' followers when Jesus was alive? Because he feared Jesus' powers and the people who followed Jesus! People who hate ALL Jews are mistaken. There are thousands, maybe millions, of Jews who are against the Zionists, even in Israel! I believe that those Jews who were killed in the Holocaust were against the Zionists' plans so they left them to the criminal Nazis! The Nazis killed all they could find as they trusted NO Jew! I could tell you more but only if you're interested!
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Let us dive into to a little history lesson here. The church began 50 days after Jesus' resurrection (c. A.D. 30). Jesus had promised that He would build His church (Matthew 16:18), and with the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4), the church ekklesia (the "called-out assembly") officially began. Three thousand people responded to Peter's sermon that day and chose to follow Christ.The initial converts to Christianity were Jews or proselytes to Judaism, and the church was centered in Jerusalem. Because of this, Christianity was seen at first as a Jewish sect, akin to the Pharisees, the Sadducees, or the Essenes. However, what the apostles preached was radically different from what other Jewish groups were teaching. Jesus was the Jewish Messiah (the anointed King) who had come to fulfill the Law (Matthew 5:17) and institute a new covenant based on His death (Mark 14:24). This message, with its charge that they had killed their own Messiah, infuriated many Jewish leaders, and some, like Saul of Tarsus, took action to stamp out "the Way" (Acts 9:1-2).
It is quite proper to say that Christianity has its roots in Judaism. The Old Testament laid the groundwork for the New, and it is impossible to fully understand Christianity without a working knowledge of the Old Testament (see the books of Matthew and Hebrews). The Old Testament explains the necessity of a Messiah, contains the history of the Messiah's people, and predicts the Messiah's coming. The New Testament, then, is all about the coming of Messiah and His work to save us from sin. In His life, Jesus fulfilled over 300 specific prophecies, proving that He was the One the Old Testament had anticipated.
If we learn nothing else from church history, we should at least recognize the importance of letting "the word of Christ dwell in us richly" (Colossians 3:16). Each of us is responsible to know what the Scripture says and to live by it. When the church forgets what the Bible teaches and ignores what Jesus taught, chaos reigns.
There are many churches today, but only one gospel. It is "the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints" (Jude 3). May we be careful to preserve that faith and pass it on without alteration, and the Lord will continue to fulfill His promise to build His church.
------------------------------------The only real possessions each of us has are our memories, our labour and our power to choose! Our memories are dependant on what we input into our brains from our five senses; we labour, whether physically or mentally to support our physical bodies; our power to choose we always have, whether in this physical world of matter or in the world of spirit or energy! We visit the world of spirit when we dream, temporarily, or for a longer while when we leave our bodies in the state we call 'death'! The body doesn't 'die', does it? It just decomposes and is used by other life forms! The spirits of our loved ones are still with us but do not interfere with our experiences unless to warn symbolically when we are in danger of doing something which could end our experiences here in this world of matter!
Heaven is the world of spirit where we no longer have to support a body! There is NO Hell!
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Say what! Again, what book are you reading? Clearly couldn't be the Bible.The Bible speaks of the reality of hell in the same terms as the reality of heaven (Revelation 20:14–15; 21:1–2). In fact, Jesus spent more time warning people about the dangers of hell than He did in comforting them with the hope of heaven. The concept of a real, conscious, forever-and-ever existence in hell is just as biblical as a real, conscious, forever-and-ever existence in heaven. Trying to separate them is simply not possible from a biblical standpoint.
Rejection of the existence of hell can also be blamed on inaccurate assumptions about what hell is. Hell is frequently imagined as a burning wasteland, a dungeon full of cauldrons and pitchforks, or an underground city filled with ghosts and goblins. Popular depictions of hell often involve a flaming torture chamber or a spiritual jail where evil things reside and where good things travel to battle evil. This version of hell does not exist. There is a real place called hell, but it is not the Dante’s Inferno image most people think of. Certain details about hell are given in the Bible, but those details do not match the popular myths.
The Bible actually gives very few particulars about hell. We know that it was originally intended for demonic spiritual beings, not people (Matthew 25:41). The experience of being in hell is compared to burning (Mark 9:43; 9:48; Matthew 18:9; Luke 16:24). At the same time, hell is compared to darkness (Matthew 22:13) and associated with intense grief (Matthew 8:12) and horror (Mark 9:44).
In short, the Bible tells us only what being in hell is "like"; it does not explicitly say what hell is or how exactly it functions. What the Bible does make clear is that hell is real, eternal, and to be avoided at all costs (Matthew 5:29–30).
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Is God a masochist or sadist! God is Spirit or Intangible Living Energy out of whom come ALL the intangible living energies such as us and ALL life, and ALL the tangible latent energies, such as our bodies and ALL matter!Ananias, never heard of before or after, was a part of Paul's plot! "Paul, receive thy sight!" which he had never lost!
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Explain, please enlighten me.
------------------------------------Now, because of Paul, Jesus' God, a Spirit, has become conflated with the 'god', an alien, of the Jewish high priests and the goyim (cattle), the Gentiles, mistakenly worship a false 'god'! Jesus called him the devil and those who worship him his children! No wonder there has been so many wars with the Jewish financiers, like Rothschild, profitting from both warring sides!
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When a skeptic finds a "disagreeable" doctrine in the Bible, he/she is likely to say, "That passage has been corrupted," or, "Paul wrote that, and we know he was a liar." Where the Gospels teach a "Pauline" doctrine, such as Jesus' atonement for sin in John 1:29, the skeptic dismisses it as "inserted by devotees of Paul." In reality, the skeptic's only basis for such a selective approach to Scripture is a personal bias against the idea of Jesus' atonement.
Paul's apostleship is attested to by the miracles he performed (Romans 15:19), the training he received (Galatians 1:15-20), and the testimony of the other apostles. Peter, far from being Paul's enemy, wrote this about him: "Our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction" (2 Peter 3:15-16).
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See my comments above, I still need to know what book you hold truth too. Is it the same bible (NIV/KJV/NLT etc..) I read or something else?