Matthew 13:10-15 I beiieve you fit here sir..

Careful Chewy, have you forgotten the Bible warns against judging people?

That is not a judgment,It is an educated guess.

Just a little mis-understanding, no hard feelings. chewy is still our brother in Christ, right chewy?

Chewy looks more like a sister........???

Ummm that's probably just his avatar.Do you think I'm really a talking (typing) flower?

Yes, that's right... you don't have to question something you believe to be true. Some people also believe the WWE is real wrestling and not choreographed violent dance routines then buy every pay-per-view they put out, but that doesn't make it real wrestling.

There are those of us who do question things because we refuse to take them at face value just because somebody (mainstream religions in this case) tells us it is true. The Bible makes it obvious, to those who can discern truth and untruth, that it's conflicted, opinionated by man, mistranslated, changed by men in power through the centuries, and has far too many things incorrect that are archaeologically-proven to be wrong.

If you truly have the power of the Holy Spirit over you, you are given discernment of what's right and wrong. You have discernment of what's good or evil. You have discernment of what is true or not true. The only reason you wouldn't is if you are intentionally wearing blinders to shield yourself from what man-made religion tells you is evil heresy. Man-made religion tells you to not question the Bible because they don't want you to learn that what they teach is not what you need to truly find God.

Man-made Christianity has a phrase used thousands of times per day in every church that goes something like this, "We cannot question the _________ (insert acts of, words of, desires of) of God because it isn't meant for us to understand these things until we are in heaven." The ultimate cop-out that translates into: "As a trained church leader in our denomination, I don't have a clue why this happened because it doesn't match what I was taught, so we'll make it an unsolvable mystery."

Fortunately, most things that God does or allows are easily explainable, and things that God did not do are explainable as well, if you pull your blinders off and see what's truly going on, what God wants from us, and who God is. I firmly believe that religions, made by man, and the biblical books, written by man, lead many seekers of truth astray. These leave many questioning what they were told, doubting the validity of what they got as answers, and sometimes even causing them to reject God all together. Many an Atheist has been birthed via a path of coming through organized Christianity and a realization that the Bible was whacked out. And that's unfortunate.

I assume you're talking at me about not knowing I am the Church. That's very presumptuous for you to say that I don't understand it. Because I don't fear being an individual (one of multi-millions in fact) who seeks truth and walks a self-disciplined path in this life that leads to God and eternal life, and because I have a clear understanding of what God is, what Jesus' core message really was, and more understanding of the spirit world than is ever found in mainstream Christianity - I know better than most what "the Church" is. "The Church" are those individuals who don't let an organized religious hoax intercede in the God-man individual relationship that each of us can seek and have.

I'm not going to say "I'm a Baptist" or "I'm a Methodist" as a badge of honor to prove I worship in line with the rest of the mainstream so my theology is approved by them. If someone asks, I tell them I'm a Gnostic Christian who searches and grows independently. God lets me have pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life as I go along and it's up to me to put them together and see the big picture. That works very well for me.

I mentioned it before in another debate thread, but I learned that President Thomas Jefferson, called a Christian by some and a heretic by others, determined for himself that the New Testament was a crock. He opened a Bible, cut out all the sayings attributed to Jesus, laid them on a table, and picked all the ones that fit with the true personality and teachings of love that Jesus was and most likely actually said. He then pasted those into a blank book and that became his Bible to live by. His "Christian" friends and acquaintances then called him a heretic and other choice names while shunning and turning away from him, but he stuck by his guns and didn't let them sway him away from his search for God's truths.