Joined: 6/28/2007(UTC) Posts: 1,030 Location: Palmyra, VA
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Quote:He is the one that transforms our exclusion into inclusion, not with the righteous and conceited, but with the broken and meek. Everyone is welcome – Jew, Muslim, atheist, homosexual. Everyone. Huh? Who said Yahweh was interested in "inclusion?" Here are my latest ruminations from The Torah Code: Quote:To a follower of any big religion today, it may sound like blasphemy, but the truth is, God is not inclusive, broad-minded, or universalist in His outlook. On the contrary, He’s all about division, separation, and contrast. His path is exclusive, narrow-minded, uncompromising—in a word, holy. God’s way is set in sharp contrast with everything else. Yes, He has invited everyone to the party, but you’re only welcome if you enter His house through the front door. Strolling in through the big garage door will get you thrown out, and you can’t put on a disguise and use the servants’ entrance, either. Yahweh draws a clear line of division between those who have entered legitimately and those who try to sneak in some other way—or worse, merely get swept in by the tide.
So there is something fundamentally wrong, for instance, with a church that calls itself “Catholic,” a word the dictionary defines as “broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal; universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all.” There is likewise something flawed about a faith whose goal is to forcibly subjugate all of mankind under its banner: Islam’s scripture states, “Fight them till all opposition ends and the only religion is Islam.” (Qur’an 8:39) It’s founder said, “I have been ordered to fight the people till they say, ‘None has the right to be worshipped but Allah’” (The Hadith of al-Bukhari). Equally misguided is the Hindu Purana, which declares, “It should be the assiduous endeavour of wise men to attain unto God. He dwelleth eternally in all beings and all things dwell in him…. He is universal soul; all the interstices of the universe are filled up by him; he is one with all good qualities, and all created beings are endowed with a small portion of his individuality…” Even the Protestant Christian who espouses an “Onward Christian Soldiers” mentality has missed the point: Yahweh is opposed to forcing anyone into His kingdom. (It can’t be done, in point of fact.) Rather, He made us as creatures of free will: He invites us all to join Him, but He compels no one. Free will, then, separates those who choose Yahweh’s path from those who decline to do so. This separation is a condition known as “holiness”—being voluntarily set apart to Yahweh, set apart from the world that rejects Him.
I find it significant that this process of division and separation goes all the way back to the very beginning, to the creation account. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. Then God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament [or expanse] from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day. Then God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’; and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:3-10) However He actually did it, God describes the process of making our world habitable as one of division, of creating contrasts between one thing and another—light from darkness, water vapor from its liquid state, and the sea from the dry land. In the following verses, He would go on to extract plant life from inert matter, separate day from night, contrast light sources from those that merely reflect it, distinguish animal life from plants, then make animal kinds different from one another, and finally, divide man from animals by “breathing into his nostrils the breath of life”—which is, we’re told, tantamount to “making him in the image and likeness of God.”
Time after time, then, we see division, separation, contrasts established by the hand of God. Moreover, every time we see a major division achieved, God declares it “good.” In fact, when everything was finally split up to His satisfaction, He called it all “very good.” kp
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