fan_from_texas wrote:The Gospel of Thomas (which you won't find in the Bible because the church felt that its message was a detriment to their own fiscal cause) says in verse 77. " I am the light that is over them all. I am the All; the All has come forth from me, and the All has attained unto me. Split a piece of wood and I am there. Raise up the stone, an ye shall find me there." Basically, you don't need to go to church to be a good person. You also don't need to go to church to find God, because God is everywhere. Therefore I do not see how people giving their time, money, and lives to an organized religion is beneficial. Having a personal relationship with God (or Allah, Vishnu, Buddha, Chuck Norris, whomever) is far more beneficial both on a personal and societal level in my opinion.
How familiar are you with the gnostic gospels and why they were/were not included in the canon? There are a number of very good reasons why the GoT wasn't directly included in the canon, and the church's pecuniary interest wasn't among those, as far as historian's can tell. That's a little too much Dan Brown and not enough history.
Regardless, I'm not sure your exegesis on v77 is particularly accurate. If anything, v77 suggests something more pantheistic and gnostic, which is the traditional scholarly reading of the GoT. The idea of God being all and in all is more closely akin to various gnostic movements in the Middle East, e.g., the Sufis. But being pantheist and gnostic doesn't necessarily go against communal meeting and "organized" religion. We've seen most groups along those lines become more communal than ever. The idea of "individualized pantheism" is a bastardized American creation that basically says, "I want to believe in something convenient so I can be spiritual, but I don't want to have to do anything real about it." That is an admittedly convenient, pluralistic, and non-threatening way to approach religion, but that doesn't seem to square up with rigorous philosophical or theological thought.
In short, I'm not sure where you got your information from regarding the GoT, but from what you've typed here, it appears that you've built a personal belief system based on an erroneous (albeit conveniently western) interpretation of one of the Nag Hammadi docs. You can believe whatever you want and live your life however you want, but it's not reasonable to throw out your thoughts on this as though they're accurate. Hold 'em, but treat 'em like what they are--a way for Americans to feel good but not have to follow through.
Re aliens: the Bible doesn't say (or even suggest) that there are no aliens. The Bible states that there are non-human beings that exist. I assume there is other intelligent life out there, which is consistent with (and reinforced by) the Bible itself. I don't know why that would be embarrassing for religious people unless they took a hard line over a meaningless issue (which happens all the time. See, e.g., Falwell and the dinosaur bones). Picking apart the words of dumb Christians is pretty easy, and while it proves that there are some religious morons out there, these sort of ad hominem attacks don't say much at all about the validity of the religion itself.
Outstanding post FFT.
It's very easy for the anti-religious to make broad sweeping judgment on the "inherent evils" of religion and walk away feeling righteous in their naive and narrow-minded belief that elimination of organized religion will miraculously cure the world's ills.
What they ignore is that
all human beings are spiritual in the sense that we all eventually question our own existence; our reason for being and our purpose in life. And in that we all give at least some superficial, fleeting consideration to the notion that a Creator exists.
As a human institution "organized religion" is ripe with human error and folly. No one I know denies organized religion's participation in historical human suffering. Conversely it has also been a champion opposing human suffering.
For Christian believers, God has made us free-agents in a world where good and evil exist. It's this freedom to choose - faith really - that is the key to what He wants from us...worship of Him and kindness to each other.
It's the evil side of the human equation that creeps into organized religion and assists in human suffering. We are witnessing that at the moment, for example, in radical Islam.
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