Yes, and although I respect the Buddhist faith, I will take what Jesus said over Buddah any day. If there was reincarnation, we would also have not motive to live good lives, because then we would figure “I’ll learn it in the next time”. There also would be no point in heaven or hell which is clearly affirmed in Scripture, because we’d assume God would have pity on us and let us assume another life to make up for all the sins we committed.
Hi Snoopy333: There are a couple of other verses that seem to suggest the same thing. I remember what they said and the context of each, but I’d have to look the verses up in order to quote them properly. If you’re interested I can do that.
It doesn;t prove anything. If we could reicarnate and become better and better, Jesus didn’;t have to take our sins on HIS shoulder, to be crucified. It would have been enough us to be born over and over again.
Hi Flower of God: That gets to the heart of the matter. While I am listed as agnostic, I use the term in relation to what most people on this website would understand as religion, and this is Abrahamic faiths. I do however, have a faith. That faith asserts that Christianity and my faith compliment one another. The reason I come to this site is because I don’t always see how they do, so these conversations help me. Part of my spiritual development is that I must accept Christianity as part of my faith. This is what I am trying to do. With that contextual background, here is how we see it. The Greek word hamartia (ἁμαρτία) is usually translated as sin in the New Testament. In Classical Greek, it means “to miss the mark” or “to miss the target”. The English word sin derives from Old English synn which has more of a connotation of guilt. The word remission means for some condition to lessen or recede rather than advance. In my faith I am told that to die for the remission of sin would mean to clear away ignorance. The remission of missing the mark (sin). What ignorance? The ignorance the ego, the mind and the intellect that convince us that we are separate and that we die. The idea, as we see it is that these bodies we are using die, but we cannot. This gets into some very complicated theology about the soul or jivatman as we call it. We “miss the mark” or commit sin when we fail to see our eternal and unchanging nature and identify instead with the temporary mutable world in which we live. Part of that sin or missing the mark is to see death as something that pertains to you rather than just the body. Rising again would show this to be an illusion and greatly help the wandering soul to understand it’s true nature and quicken it’s journey home. As we would see it, you never stopped belonging to God, so there is nothing to be saved from but the illusion of the ego. That illusin is the gateway sin to all other sin. For us, It is a matter of knowing. Again, I stress for us, to signify this is what we believe and make the distinction that I respect what you believe.
Hi Snoopy333: Yes, you’re correct. We see it as a continuum, with the Second Coming being when you awaken the Christ Kutastha or Christ Consciousness within yourself. Once that is done, you escape the cycle of births and deaths and enter a state of being that is like what Christians would call heaven. At that point, the fragment of the one great soul that is your individualized soul fits back in it’s home like a puzzle piece where it belongs. It then sees that there is only One. Then Jesus’ commandment to love God and love your neighbor as yourself makes a good deal of sense on a higher level than simply a code of conduct. It is both a code of conduct coupled with an insight into the nature of existence. It can’t be known on an intellectual level, which is why we work at burning away the layers of obfuscation and false selves like the ego, and the intellect. It’s a lot of hard work and certainly not for everyone, so there are others paths, which is why we respect those other paths.
You are very kind. But that might feed that ego I’m trying so hard to get rid of
Oops!While I agree with the statement that “Our perception of reality is not reality itself”, I do not believe that “Science is based on cold hard facts.”
I have never heard or read that the “…soul is God’s life within…” I would be interested in knowing your source(s). At any rate, it does not follow that the veracity of something is proportionate to its age.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, paragraphs 355 - 368 talks about the creation of man whose nature unites the spiritual and material worlds.
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Of all visible creatures only man is “able to know and love his creator”.219 He is “the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake”,220 and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life. It was for this end that he was created, and this is the fundamental reason for his dignity:Yeah, there are those who think thath Vedic study is how He spent the missing years between age 12 and 30.
This is so interesting to me – I had never heard this before. I was also told during a visit to a Mosque that the Koran discusses those missing years (Jesus is a major figure of importance in the Koran). Does anyone know if there is a spiritual reason the Bible neglects the “missing years”? Is the point to direct us, in our imagination, to wonder how Jesus spent those years? That would seem to make sense, but I’m wondering if there is a teaching that explains the gap.
The Gospels teach us about how Jesus became man, what He came to reveal, and His death/resurrection. It would be a distraction to tell us about the ordinary years of His life between 12 and 30. I find it interesting to think about, though, because so much of my life is ordinary. I think it means that ordinary family life and work is meaningful and holy.
I love that idea! An ordinary life can be holy, I think. I always felt there was some deeper spiritual reason for leaving us to guess as to his relative ordinariness in those years.
Hi Light 1111: I am not aware of any Christian teachings outside of possibly some Gnostic writings that cover some of those missing years. In India there is quite a bit if tradition about those years, and in these He is referred to as Issa. You can find quite a bit if you look up the life of Saint Issa. It’s a bit controversial for westerners so I won’t post any links.