A question...

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Liebling:-))) said:
This is the reason why I created my thread last year.
http://www.alldeaf.com/showthread.php?t=14296&highlight=bible+religions



I'm neutral to any religions but God and Jesus.

You can't be "neutral" to other religions if you believe God and Jesus. Those other religions contradict your Christian beliefs, so you can't be neutral towards them.

If Adam and Eve had a personal relationship with God where they dealt with Him face-to-face, doesn't that mean they didn't need the rituals we associate with religion? I think that need came with the Fall.

Rituals are exactly the downfall of our relationship with God. We go into church and do a "routine" because it's comfortable to us, not because it's honoring God. We get to church, we sing for 5 minutes, we say a prayer, then we all say some kind of statement with the pastor, ("Hail Mary, Mother, Full of Grace..." as an example, there are a couple of different ones) or whatever, then we greet people in the church, then we sing some more, then we get to the message, then we have an offering, then we break bread and drink grape juice, and then we go home.

Rituals are just one way to affirm that you "belong" to this one church. But it's not done for God -- It's done for the people.

(thanks to the disunity that also came with the Fall, and I think the Babel episode gets at that), change in languages is the inevitable result.

What disunity? In the Babel episode, God himself admitted "nothing is impossible for them." It sounds like there ALREADY WAS disunity in the first place and different languages already in use around the world before attributing "God" as the one who came down and muddled their daily language.
 
Dennis said:
Rituals are exactly the downfall of our relationship with God. We go into church and do a "routine" because it's comfortable to us, not because it's honoring God. We get to church, we sing for 5 minutes, we say a prayer, then we all say some kind of statement with the pastor, ("Hail Mary, Mother, Full of Grace..." as an example, there are a couple of different ones) or whatever, then we greet people in the church, then we sing some more, then we get to the message, then we have an offering, then we break bread and drink grape juice, and then we go home.

Rituals are just one way to affirm that you "belong" to this one church. But it's not done for God -- It's done for the people.

You can definitely go too far with rituals and become self-absorbed in them...I agree that's a major danger and probably all of us from time to time fall into that trap. But, at other times it can be useful to have some ideas to start with on what to do.

What disunity? In the Babel episode, God himself admitted "nothing is impossible for them." It sounds like there ALREADY WAS disunity in the first place and different languages already in use around the world before attributing "God" as the one who came down and muddled their daily language.

At the start of it, yes, God says that. But after He confuses their language and intentions, the Babel episode shows the first time the disunity grew to national proportions.
 
Dennis said:
Sounds way more like someone's storytelling version of an event to get around a question of why people speak different languages today.
I guess what it boils down to is whether or not you believe the Word of God. If you ask me questions about God, I use His Word to reply. If you don't believe God's own book about His nature, His character, His people, His history, and His plan, then there isn't any more I can offer. I gave you the exact answer and you don't believe it. I can't force you to believe.


I really don't believe there was ever "one language" ever used by everyone on earth.
Well, since our world began with two people, a husband and a wife, it makes more sense for the two of them to speak the same language, and for them to pass on that language to their children. As the people spread out there might have been regionalism and dialects developed but they were still speaking the same basic language. For example, English is one language but there are varieties of that language in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, etc. During the early centuries of our world, the "everyone on earth" was a smaller, more homogenous population than now. Sharing one language was no big deal.


First off, you never find out how they were scattered.
IMO, they probably scattered away on their own. After the tower collapsed, the people were scared and confused. No two people could communicate with each other. Their common language was gone. Their common goal (to build the tower) was destroyed. Why hang around the ruins with a bunch of people shouting at each other in confusing languages?

It is obvious that the people did "scatter" abroad because the world population moved into new areas, and developed new cultures and languages.


Somehow, God confuses these absurdedly intelligent people (remember, Reba, you claim they were much smarter and long lived than modern peoples) and their language is so uncomprehensible that they have no choice but to stop building and go their separate ways. Now, the only way I think this could happen is if these people developed some kind of mental disease that prevented them from even remembering how they talked to each other.
When God confused their languages, each person used a different language. That means, each person spoke, read, wrote, and thought in a different language. It wasn't a "disease". There was no "cure". It was a sudden shock, that no two people could communicate with each other. Each person couldn't understand why the other people no longer spoke that person's language. There was a total disconnect of society's members. It no longer was a society. It was just a mob of individuals.

Yes, they were intelligent. That is what made it possible for them to move on, to develope new cultures, and create literacy in their new languages, without each other's help.

Their problem wasn't lack of intelligence; it was a surplus of pride.


These people talked to each other every day, they passed on oral histories and as far as I can tell there was no written language in place. Therefore, changing from one oral language to many would be silly unless there were already other languages in place.
If they voluntarily changed from one language to another, then yes, that might be "silly" for them to do. But the people didn't change their language voluntarily; God forced the change. After that, the people couldn't talk to each other every day, until the people within their family groups passed down their newly acquired languages to their children and later generations.


It makes MUCH more sense that these people were not unified and under one language in the first place.
Maybe that makes sense to you. To me, that is not logical.


Especially since ya'll keep thinking he was so obviously involved 6000 years ago and not so obviously involved today.
:confused: I never said that God is not "involved" today.
 
Reba said:
I guess what it boils down to is whether or not you believe the Word of God. If you ask me questions about God, I use His Word to reply. If you don't believe God's own book about His nature, His character, His people, His history, and His plan, then there isn't any more I can offer. I gave you the exact answer and you don't believe it. I can't force you to believe.

Reba,

I concur. :thumb: :gpost:
 
Reba said:
:confused: I never said that God is not "involved" today.

Agreed, God doesn't always have to be dramatic and get the best TV ratings to be involved in lots of little ways. :)
 
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