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no worries raf...

Not at all, unless you consider sorcery a good thing. But some call it a record, to your point.

Folks are certainly entitled to those beliefs, but as Christopher Hitchens once said, "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." The new heavens and new earth are an assertion. Accusing people of being blind to them is a convenient way of sidestepping the fact that there is no evidence in favor of the assertion. Perhaps we are blind to the new heavens and the new earth for the same reason we are blind to pixie dust and the Loch Ness Monster: They are figments of the imagination of human beings. There is an end to our world here in the physical. But that doesn't make the spiritual more important unless the spiritual can be established to exist. I remember writing in another thread (and in a comPLETEly different context) that if you step back far enough in time, you can dismiss and minimize just about any atrocity, especially those committed in the name of a god. So God tells you to kill a baby, and you do it, figuring the baby gets eternal life in heaven/paradise, so from the eternal perspective, how much harm did you REALLY do? Yeah, that's a problem there. And it's not academic. Don't make me look up the verses where God commands Israel to kill heathen babies, or the honest-to-evilness exposition by the contemptuous William Lane Craig who argued with a straight face that the real victims of that episode were the Hebrew soldiers who had to carry it out. [Yes, he really said that. No, it's not out of context. Yes, he was serious]. Anyway, it's a LITTLE unfair to cman to make this point in response to what he posted, as I am SURE his meaning was much more benign. Nonetheless, I am compelled to respond with my reasons for rejecting the words of that post. [I re-read this post and I seem a little harder on cman than I intended. I hope I can convey that while I disagree with what was written, I do so respectfully, and my heart is to explain why. Things got a little hairy between us a couple of weeks ago and I am not intending to resume any hostility that I previously exhibited].

Yeah, see. That kinda leaves us between a rock and a hard place. We were either following the teachings of a man with devil spirits or he was wrong about what he taught. That means he could have been wrong about...well ... anything.