On Faith and Salvation

[off^tangent]

ey Carlo Borromeo, Samokan and among others...

.just like to ask if where wud yu go during the Sinulog festivity or during the Christmas season..wud yu just join yur Christian buddies in the celebration or just stay in your room and pretend as if you are hybernating or sumthing?

Magsuroy-suroy ug motan-aw sa mga presentations, it's a visual feast! Religion-wise, it means nothing to me. Just because I don't religiously subscribe to it doesn't mean I am against the festival itself . It's so lame to stay at home and deprive yourself of the fun because of religious reasons, and it's feeling so self-righteous.
And I believe Christmas the same way I believe Santa Claus. It always brings out the child in me, brings back the good-old jolly feeling associated with it. Timeless Christmas songs always lift my spirits high! And Christmas season is a good sweetener to swallow with your pride and make amends to whom you have wronged, and forgive those who have done wrong to you.
So, it's futile exercise to totally avoid religious activities because it has rooted deeply into practically all aspects of our lives. Religion, you can run but you can never hide from it, unfortunately.

[Desert Father]

Have you ever met anyone who’s been to hell and back? Someone who took a stroll passed the pearly gates? I haven’t. And I bet, neither have you.

Really bad logic here, Carlo. Have you been to the Antarctic? But it's there, ain't it?

... and yet again antarctica and heaven cant be directly compared. Since antarctica has been proven by science that it exist but heaven is still a myth that science can never prove nor disprove.Â*

Just because science never proved doesnt mean it never existed. In the Stone Age, nobody thought that atoms can be fused and then separated. During the stone age, nuclear fission is not yet discovered.

Just because heaven is not explained by science doesnt mean that it never existed.

[fingolfin]

... and that is what you call faith. faith is believing something that is intangible.

[Carlo Borromeo]

Just because science never proved doesnt mean it never existed. In the Stone Age, nobody thought that atoms can be fused and then separated. During the stone age, nuclear fission is not yet discovered.

Just because heaven is not explained by science doesnt mean that it never existed.

Agreed. I suppose my analogy could have used some better phrasing, seeing as how it was terribly misinterpreted.

I don't doubt the existence of heaven.

What I was trying to say was, if I ever met a PERSON CLAIMING to have gone to heaven and back, I would not believe him.

Would you?

[Carlo Borromeo]

to the argument that all religions have the same images, symbols and similarities:

Ive been reading some CS Lewis, yeah the guy who made narnia, who is one the great Christian aplogist, and used to be an athiest, he argued that at first glance Jesus might seem like another corn-king, adonis, osiris, cinteotl, the god who dies and rises again, like the pattern of the corn. However, if Jesus was a corn king why would the analogy of seed falling to the ground be so seldom mentioned in the new testament (mr. lewis said it was only twice). And why would a "dying God" occur among the people, the Jews,to whom, almost alone, that the concept of the "dying God" was foriegn. His hypothesis why this is so because a God who dies and rises again, might at once look like the Corn-king, but He is like the Corn-king because the Corn-King is a portrait of Him. For the corn-king is derived (from human imagination) from the facts of nature and the facts of nature from her Creator, God , who is one with Christ. This is becuase Christians are not claiming simply that "God" was incarnate in Jesus. They claim that the one true God, whom the Jews worshipped as Jahweh, the Creator, si he who descended, he who is Jesus.

This is also applicable to all other Nature-Gods, He is Bacchus, Venus, Ceres all rolled into one. The image of the Nature-Gods are a portrait of the one true God.

Yup. You can ever read several of these things in NON-RELIGIOUS material, such as the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.

[tolstoi]

what i want to know is..since you guys really dissent our Roman Catholic practices, is there any chance that you go out on the street and celebrate the Sinulog with us?..or you'll just stay home and don't mind the celebration

Since you're being such a about it.

We do Sinulog this way - We start drinking on a Friday and don't stop until it's Monday.

But then again that's what we do ALL the time. Oh, and I've got Muslim friends and Christian friends and one dude who claims he's going Buddhist. We don't agree on religion, but we all agree that Red Horse is the best beer ever made by human hands.

hmm..so yu resort to nitpicking now?..what i believe is yu're the most

[tolstoi]

so we are all hypos

[Gwynhuever]

for those interested try to read God Without Religion by Sankara Saranam ...nindot sad ...offering a bridge between organized religion and spirituality for those questioning traditional dogma...

[MrBiddle]

for those interested try to read God Without Religion by Sankara Saranam ...nindot sad ...offering a bridge between organized religion and spirituality for those questioning traditional dogma...

thanks for the recommendation... there are Theists who would debate the unbelieving but aren't partial to organized religion either....

[Carlo Borromeo]

for those interested try to read God Without Religion by Sankara Saranam ...nindot sad ...offering a bridge between organized religion and spirituality for those questioning traditional dogma...

I think I will.

Try googling Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. Very insightful as well.