Are so-called "holy" scriptures necessarily true because they are holy, or are (were?) they holy because they are necessarily (observably) true? Which way does it go? What actually gives scriptures the attention and regard adherents treat them with?

Putting these questions aside, picking up after Adam hearkens unto the voice of his wife and eats the fruit, what happens?

-Both their eyes are opened and they realize they are naked
-Adam hides from god in fear for shame of his nakedness
-God...

I have just seen this on the BBC News.

Notre-Dame cathedral on fire in Paris
Our family gathered there to surprise my husband as part of his 50th Birthday celebrations in 1997.

This thread was started because of a conversation between @shmogie and myself on the identity of the 144,000, but others are free to join in the discussion.

Here is how JW's understand the 144,000 of Revelation.

Beginning with Revelation 14:1-5 we read...

"Then I saw, and look! the Lamb standing on Mount Zion, and with him 144,000 who have his name and the name of his Father written on their foreheads. 2 I heard a sound coming out of heaven like the sound of many waters and like the sound...

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It's said that hell was originally created as a place for Satan and his angels.
Matthew 25:41
41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
And from what a lot of Christians say, evidently Satan hasn't found his way there yet, as he's still leading us good humans astray.


1 Corinthians 7:5
5 Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote...

The true God no one can deny

Put yourself in a hypothetical frame of mine for just a moment
Imagine what humans would be like 2,000 years from today
Imagine we now travel the stars seeing what there is to see
Imagine we travel thru a galaxy and see a lifeless planet

A planet with air
A planet with water
A planet with mountains
A planet with valleys
A planet with no life to be found

You decide to put some life where none could be seen
A seed to grow into a future un seen
Imagine 1,000...

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So what do you think was going through Francis' mind at the time. "If I kiss his feet perhaps it will bring peace"? . . . . . . Really?

But I gotta tell you, I'd be kind of embarrassed if someone knelt down and kissed my shoes in public. Kind of an "Err Pope, c'mon. . . . . . Please get up.. . . . That's enough now." moment.

And because I'm not all that familiar with Catholic practices I have to ask, Is this a common method of accomplishing Papal goals?

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Divine intervention… or fake news? Either that or all of the adults and children are lying.

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19 March 2019

A group of 500 Nigerian Muslim-background Christians, who gathered together for safety were later attacked again by the Boko Haram Islamist militant group. Most escaped, apart from 76 men, women and children who were taken captive, according to a Barnabas Fund contact.

The 76 were taken to a Boko Haram...

John the Baptist, the son of a Jewish Priest said it was Jesus somehow

In the Passover week a family would pick a lamb the week before the passover supper and it would be with them somehow for a week. Jesus was with Jerusalem the week leading to the passover supper

How are your sins or the sins of the world health with in your view?

"Kings will shut their mouths because of Him" "He will sprinkle many nations' Isaiah 52

Does the large scale structure of our Universe fit into metric

ds^2=-A(r,t) dt^2+dx^2+dy^2+dz^2?

It satiesfies the Einstein Equations in the presence of Dark Matter. Perhaps, A(r,t)=h(r). The h(r) is not zero to count for cosmological red-shift and its acceleration with spatial distance. Look: we have never found the temporal acceleration, because the observation period with modern technologies is only 20 years. [We calculate the t-derivative of the scale a(t) of Universe NOT by comparing...

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War.... In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old...