If I believe in Jesus and his teachings, which I do, does that mean I follow a religion...

Let me ask a question to the Christians. If god is watching over us. Then who is watching thy lord?

You people have turned Jesus into some manifestation of pure love when in fact.... JESUS REPRESENTS THE MANIFESTATION OF PURE LOVE TOWARDS THE FATHER ALONE.

You New Age Jesus kooks are turning him into something he never was.

I don't agree with Jesus' love towards the violent Father. It's as simple as that.

Thanks, I will

Just like a true father will never stop loving and watching over his children, so it is with God. God's love is endless and infinite - and all who recognize the personal way that God communicates to us can feel that love.

I also watched this videa and it really blew my mind. It's a couple of hours long but well worth it

Sorry this

And how has the lord communicated with you?

Yes exactly.

I notice no one has come up with a refutation for my arguments because there are none to be made.

I expect someone will respond to this with a weak ad-hominem comment, but they largely ignore the concrete logic behind my statements.

Not having an almighty creature spouting orders at them from on high is scary, I understand. Such is the price of true freedom.

He often communicates with me through other people - even if those people do not recognize it. I also feel His guidance and protection with subtle signs throughout my day that reassure me and comfort me. Most importantly is the feeling I have within me, the voice giving me pause if I am about to do wrong, and the voice encouraging me to help those who need it. This is commonly referred to as the Holy Spirit, but others describe it as their conscience. Again words are just a grouping of letters, it is the feeling that is important.

No one can tell you how to communicate with God, that is for you to discover on your own. It is a very personal relationship - and it is something you will recognize when you feel it.

Last Edited by Rising Son on 11/22/2012 07:02 PM

I am not religious really, but I am spiritual.....

In his theology of justification by grace alone, Luther conveniently overlooked a plethora of biblical texts, including many from St. Paul, whom he claimed as his principle inspiration. In the parable of the sheep and goats from Matthew 25, it is clear that salvation is dependent, not primarily on faith, but on the quality of our love, especially toward those who are weakest and poorest.

The same Paul who spoke of justification through faith also said, “If I have faith enough to move the mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” And the same Paul who experienced the risen Jesus in an intensely personal moment of conversion also spoke eloquently and often of becoming a member of Jesus’ “mystical body,” which is the Church.

In short, the Bible drives a wedge neither between faith and love nor between individual salvation and ecclesial belonging. Further, the same Jesus who railed against the hypocritical legalism of the Pharisees also said, “I have come not to abolish the law but to fulfill it.” And the same Jesus who threatened to tear down the Temple in Jerusalem also promised “in three days to rebuild it.”

The point is this: Jesus certainly criticized — even bitterly so — the corruptions in the institutional religion of his time, but he by no means called for its wholesale dismantling. He was, in point of fact, a loyal, observant, law-abiding Jew. What he affected was a transfiguration of the best of that classical Israelite religion — Temple, law, priesthood, sacrifice, covenant, etc. — into the institutions, sacraments, practices and structures of his mystical body, the Church.

If the young rapper in the video is against the corruptions of institutional religion up and down the ages, then he’s got an ally in me. Finding them is like shooting fish in a barrel and criticizing them is as easy as being against rotten eggs.

But if he is advocating an individualist spirituality that ignores the thousands of ties that bind believers to one another through sacrament, practice and institutional belonging, and if he’s calling for a theology that divorces Jesus from his body, the Church, then he’s got an opponent in me.

Lots of New Age devotees today want spirituality without religion, and lots of evangelicals want Jesus without religion. Both end up with abstractions. But the one thing Jesus is not is an abstraction. Rather, he is a spiritual power who makes himself available precisely in the dense institutional particularity of his mystical body across space and time.

Jesus didn’t come to abolish religion, he came to fulfill it.
Video on this subject by Father Robert Barron
[link to www.ncregister.com]

It is yourself you are talking to. It's not hard to hear a different tone of voice in your head if you want. And add emotional chemical releases when you excite yourself. and all this means is you are a good person! I have to came to sit with god threw divine experience. and the trinity or my consciousness brought me before thy lord and he expressed himself threw silence to me and all of a sudden i knew their was no only path to him all comes back just as he exhaled he must inhale and all his creation comes back. Don't let other men's opinions shape your way of thinking. I have been pulled out of the blackness that you see when you close your eyes only to be surrounded in pure light a light you feel and see different from the light that comes off the sun. or your lights. surly that wasn't the work of the devil now was it?

You assume much, and you are projecting your own opinions of me as fact. I know who I am "talking" to, and it sure isn't myself. You can belittle and disparage my understanding of God all you want, but you don't know me, you don't know my life experiences, you don't how I comprehend and experience the feelings within me, and you couldn't possibly dictate to me what is legitimately God, and what is simply self-talk.

You stated not to let other's opinions shape my way of thinking - I learned this long ago, my friend. There are things that I have experienced through meditation and prayer that cannot be explained, so I don't try to. I do not discredit your experience with God, I would ask that you show me the same courtesy.