Are we prisoners of sin

Expressing finality with no implication of possible change this is the definition of absolute. First of all you need to read the bible at large before you draw any conclusions about its message, or about God’s dealings with the Israelites, what he did he did with a purpose in mind, he didn’t do it to spite us or for fun, all his dealings with the Jewish people and the ancient world culminated in the arrival of Jesus Christ. When God passed down his Laws he did so with the mind that some of them should last forever but not all, and the bible is clear on this please read your bible and determine which of these laws he meant to last forever. But concerning those that he meant to last he says about them in Mat 5:18 Truly I say to you, Till heaven and earth come to an end, not the smallest letter or part of a letter will in any way be taken from the law, till all things are done. The Ten Commandments is one such set of laws which God meant to last forever. And this are also absolute laws.Now about God ordering the deaths of certain nations at the hands of his children, Israel. Who is it that carries out the law when it is broken is it not the lawgiver, the court agrees on laws but also enforces those same laws, by passing sentence to the guilty party.About sin God says the wages of sin is death, so when God ordered for example the destruction of Jericho he was simply implementing the law that the citizens of this city had broken and that is sin, and this he did via Joshua. Courts don’t usually arrest criminals they have the police to arrest criminals for them and this is merely what God did when he gave this instruction to Joshua. When God sent down fire from the heavens to punish the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah he was implementing the law that states, the wages of sin is death.

Again, Cedre: which set of Ten Commandments? The ones that Moses broke into pieces, or the ones that Exodus 34:28 claims are "the ten commandments?" The ones, y'know, that were carried around in the Ark of the Covenant?

Now firstly I would like to say that everything posted here since the opening of this thread have not been empirically tested to to be true, so when people say that God exist or that he doesn't, there is no absolute prove for either claim. Or when they say that sin is a myth or that morality is relative all of this claims are just claims until proven to be true.God says by faith we are saved, faith implies that there has to be a certain element of believing without seeing, God says in 2Co 5:7 "But we live by faith, not by what we see." so ultimately the person who wishes to surrender his life to Christ has to do so not so much as a result of overwhelming empirical evidence, but partly as a result of that and partly as a result of his faith. This isn't irrational for indeed not everything has to go through the lap to be shown to be true. For example if your mother says I love you, you'll just have to believe her or not because you can't put her or her love into a test tube. Certain things we have to take by faith, because reasoning will only bring us this far.So yes it is a thing of faith, but Christianity is not without its supporting facts and proofs. In any case this is beside the aim of this thread. Returning I should say that sin has serious consequences. It is a fearful thing to land into the hands of an angry God, God is angered by sin. But the bible also says that he is slow to anger and quick to forgive, but his justice is a fact and it will in due course prevail.

Dear Coragyps, I'm not sure if God has a copier, maybe he does because he simply gave Moses a copy of the original ten commandments that Moses had broken. God didn't start up with an entirely different Ten Commandments.

Sticking with the topic, I think we can conclude that sin is a concept restricted to those who believe in religion. As a religious believer you will of course maintain that sin is a factual reality, but will be similarly unable to provide evidence to back it up as you are unable to back up your religious beliefs as reality. The flip side of the argument can and has provided current, factual examples of cultural differences and their effect on popular morality within those cultures.

I think this is called "Retroactive Continuity" which is often shorted to "retcon". It is quite common in serial fiction.

But she is real. I can see her, touch her.The love and approving of my parents is much more real and important than any supernatural being.(a supernatural being that has at no time given any evidence that it exists)I do not need a book to tell me how I should live by virtue of a fear of sin, rather I just needed my parents and community to show me this. If you plan on using the argument that my parents and community taught me based on the bible and sin let me dissuade you. My parents were lapsed catholics and religion was rarely discussed in extended families because were were a mixed catholic/congregationalist lot. Most of what I was taught in church was later proven to be the opposite of what is correct and good behaviour.Your whole fantasy about sin, has had little to no affect on my life. Surprisingly, I am known in my community for my volunteer work. Yes I volunteer in the community even though I a don't think I will get some sort of "reward" in an afterlife.

---

Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts

Unless you can demonstrate the existance of your god, and that it has the properties you ascribe to it, no-one is obliged to pay your religious notions any attention. We can simply dismiss your god-based terrors as a sort of intellectual malaise.Faith is not legal tender in the marketplace of ideas.

You've never read Exodus 34? You're the one here that puts so much stock in the Bible, Cedre.

---

"The wretched world lies now under the tyranny of foolishness; things are believed by Christians of such absurdity as no one ever could aforetime induce the heathen to believe." - Agobard of Lyons, ca. 830 AD

Jesus was a real historical character and he was God, humanity did see God face to face, Jesus says in John 14:9 to his disciple Philip "Philip, I have been with you for a long time. Don't you know who I am? If you have seen me, you have seen the Father. How can you ask me to show you the Father?" So yes there is physical proof of the existence of God through the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. This is where I shall stop with the evidence I do not intend to wander far from the topic. But of course there is greater evidence out there almost from all the fields of science.Now sin, is like a web, you have to watch out it ensnares its victims, the more you become aggressive in this web of sin the soundly you become entangled. So therefore it is exceedingly harder if at some point later on you decide to come out of the sin to come out of it, because you are now thoroughly caught up by sin.Now a younger brother in Christ asked me this really interesting question once, not truly related to this thread but interesting nonetheless and thus worthy of my mention. He said Brother Carlos, do you think that animals are also bound by sin, and are they just as sinful as we are? I looked at this brother, contemplated briefly and smiled saying, Was it animals that ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or men? and waited for a response, assuredly his response was as I had expected a blunt No, so yes animals are not sinful, for they do not even possess a soul and conscience.Now when we observe animals in their natural habitats and notice all the predator prey relationships we could almost that animals are malicious in fact. God cursed the world also not just humanity, for the terrible thing we have done to him. Such a good God indeed.So animals act the way they currently do because of the curse the hangs over the entire face of the earth like a heavy drapery. Anyway to be sinful one first requires freewill, animals lack this too, they function on instinct. Morality is conscious choice or decision, animals can’t make this conscious choice they fall short in the faculty of decision making and foreseeing the effects of their decisions, so therefore they cannot choose to be bad or good, so animals are neutral.But the human O wretched man that I am as Paul defined himself, has this power, the power to choose the path of life or the path that leads to the pits of hell, since the day he ate of that tree mankind has been able to tell between good and evil and is bound by his knowledge.

The topic has wandered deep into a dark forest and it is not clear it will ever be found again.I'm going to close this while everyone figures out what is on topic then we'll have one more try before we close it permanently.

I don't think this is going to stay open for long but you can all try and see if a reasonably focused topic can be maintained.

By that standard, Homer's Odyssey provides "physical proof" of the existence of the Cyclops and Poseidon.Don't be an idiot. Utter nonsense.And of course, since you are unable to support the assertion that your deity exists, sin (defined as disobedience to your deity) cannot possibly exist either. This might have relevance if your concept of "sin" actually existed out here in the real world. Predator-prey relationships imply that animals are malicious?! You must certainly be insane. I jsut ate a chicken panini for lunch - does that mean that I held "malice" towards the chicken I ate? Did I commit a "sin?" If you beleive that punishing those who had nothing to do with the commission fo a crime is ethical, then you have no ability to reason.Let's follow your "god's" example - murders happen all the time in the world, so let's put Cedre in prison and punish him for them, for the "terrible thing {the actual murderer} has done {to the victim}." Then, to continue following your "god's" example, we'll put all of Cedre's children in prison for the same crime, and his grandchildren, and so on until the end of his line.Yes, such a "good" deity you worship. Why, then, do different cultures have identify "good"a nd "evil" differently? Why isn't there a consistent absolute, if all of mankind is supposed to be able to tell the difference thanks to the Magic Tree? Why did the Aztecs think it was "good" to make human sacrifices daily? Why do some societies even now view cannibalism as "good?" Why does roughly half of the US think that gay marriage is "good," and the other half think that it's "evil?"The reason is obvious - "good" and "evil" are subjective concepts. There is no objective morality.Sin, defined as disobedience to "god," does not exist. Your fairytales are simple nonsense.

quote:

---

Expressing finality with no implication of possible change this is the definition of absolute.

---

But that isn't the definition of absolute. From the link I provided the closest meaning to what you're thinking is: 4: having no restriction, exception, or qualification But the laws in the Bible do have restrictions and exceptions.Paul presents the idea that we are prisoners of sin. Not God or Jesus. Where does scripture actually declare this? This would be the OT not the NT.From what we’ve discussed so far we know that a wrong action can’t imprison anyone, but a person can be imprisoned for a wrong action. So Paul is speaking figuratively and not literally. Paul is making a case for his gospel. Paul is personifying his battle with wrong and right decisions. Remember, Paul is a man who has killed. He killed Christians, so he had violent inclinations. Paul using his own experience doesn’t make it universal or from God.Paul said the wages of sin is death, not God and just as Paul is not God; the scripture is not God. Scripture simply means writing, so we don’t know if Paul was inspired by the OT or another writing. Another problem is the way the Jews wrote at the time. They would take snippets from various places to make one idea. Today we wouldn’t consider that to actually support a position. Paul brings out the same concept that no one is righteous in Romans 3:10-18 Verses 10-12 is pulled from Psalm 14:1-3 (Psalm 53:1-3 Same words). The song is talking about fools, not everyone.verse 13 is pulled from Psalm 5:9 and Psalm 140:3.
The song is talking about wicked men.Verse 14 is pulled from Psalm 10:7.
The song talks about their enemies and men of violence.Verses 15-17 is pulled from Isaiah 59:7-8 and/or Proverbs 1:16.
Isaiah is talking about the wicked, not all humans.Verse 18 is pulled from Psalm 36:1.
This verse is also talking about the wicked.So the concept that no one can do good, no one is righteous is pulled out of context from centuries old songs which are written about the people's feelings in a specific time frame concerning the wicked not everyone. The songs are also not God speaking.Jesus did not present this concept. He came for the lost not the righteous. So he felt that some people were capable of good behavior.But then Paul wasn’t debating he was creating a need and then teaching a concept to satisfy that need. Paul was teaching that legalistic keeping of Torah does not save. IOW he is teaching against your meaning of absolute. Just as Jesus did.Edited by purpledawn, : Add signatureEdited by purpledawn, : Correct spellingEdited by purpledawn, : CorrectionEdited by purpledawn, : Fixed link

---

"Peshat is what I say and derash is what you say." --Nehama Leibowitz

The connection that Jesus had was with Adam who was the only other man to have ever lived who was, for a time, sinless.
Like Adam, Jesus was not conceived in sin, his father was God and not any man.He's not 'fully God' though as can be seen by his own words at John 3:16, Jesus said: For God loved the world so much that he gave his only-begotten Son. Just two verses later, Jesus again said that he was the only-begotten Son of God.Obviously he was not God himself but an angelic son of God. He came for a purpose as mentioned by Daniel 9:24 "...to terminate the transgression, and to finish off sin, and to make atonement for error..."The way he would do this is by living a perfectly sinless life and dieing a perfectly sinless death. He accomplished both. This point raises some good questions, some that I had grappled with for quite a while myself.
I must say though that Adam & Eve had every reason not to trust the serpent. For one, Adam lived for a long enough time to be able to name all the animals. He knew snakes could not talk ( but the snake never spoke to Adam, it only spoke to Eve) so when eve told him what had happened, he should have known immediately that something wasnt right.We have to remember too that Adam & Eve had a perfect conscience. It immediately told them that they had done the wrong thing because they hid themselves when God approached them...this means that they knew they had done the wrong thing.And finally, God did not cause Eve to have greater pain in childbirth as a way to spite her...he knew that imperfection would cause pain and problems during the very complicated process of childbirth. His intent was to keep, not 'man' but 'Adam' from the tree of Life. Adam had rebelled and so in line with Gods warning he had to die. We cannot live without God which is what Adam chose to do. He chose independence so why should the 'Source of Life' grant him eternal life?The promise to send a redeemer was made right there in the Garden of Eden and that promise was fullfilled in Jesus. He lived a perfect life, and sacrificed it for all of Adams offspring. Without Jesus sacrifice, we could only pay the price of our own sin which is death...but now Jesus has paid that price for us and we have the opportunity to eternal life.