The force

I didn't say I did not believe in the Bible. I've been a Christian for many years, even did two mission trips. It just seems a majority of the facts you were putting forward was quotes from the Bible.

My rationale for using quotes from the good book is to state that proving a God exists does nothing for faith, as it is faith that leads us, lest we all be doubting Thomas'.

Streen wrote: Oh Gisteron, why do you think so little of God?

Didn't say anything about God there. Frankly the biblical God character is a rather versatile (not to say inconsistent) fellow, depending on who writes it, so to have a single opinion about it is difficult. Most of the time it reflects all of the same flaws the people who wrote it did, which I appreciate as a sort of window into the thinking of the people of days long gone, but seeing as I am no historian this is not a primary area of interest for me.

Matthew 22:37-40(NIV)

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Yea, that's one of the places it says that these two are the "first and greatest" and that all the others depend on them to some extent or another. I know about this passage. What I haven't read is a passage that said that these are the only two that are still effective or that they replace all the prior ones or that to follow them is the one and only thing necessary and sufficient for salvation, and that is what I asked in post #274113 as well. Do you have any such quote?

Upon Christ's death on the cross, he fulfilled the original 10 commandments.

How?

He died for our sins, so we don't have to follow the old commandments, and simplified them into those two shown above (which you might agree, encapsulate the first 10).

But nowhere did he say that those ten (or indeed any of the 603 or 604 others) were null and void from thence onward. In fact, I distinctly remember him saying quite the opposite. He went out of his way to emphasize that even fulfillment of the Law (what ever that means) did not mean abolishment of it, if you look up Matthew 5:17-18, just to stay within the same book. Now, admittedly, the way Matthew 5:19 is commonly translated one might think that even those who break the Law still have a shot at getting into the Kingdom, but Jesus still notes that breaking the Law has consequences, far from it being wholly replaced by the two commandments in chapter 22.

The stoning you mentioned was no law created by God, but by man. Jesus even said, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Yes, Jesus made another frankly dumb rule about how we must not judge each other because none of us are perfect. I'm neither a lawyer nor a philosopher of right, so I cannot with any authority explain whence we derive legitimacy for our law and justice, but I do think we would all be objectively worse off in the kind of anarchy that would result if everybody who felt guilty about anything would refrain from the duty to judge others because of it. And as for the stoning disobedient children law, that's from Deuteronomy 21, a chapter right in the middle of the civil law portion of the laws that Moses brought back from Sinai, if the story is to be believed. Now I'm also no expert on the Bible, so I cannot on the face of it see which verses are supposed to be divine law and which are supposed to be man-made. Maybe the standard of "that's not what I think God would say" is a valid one, I don't know. But the fact remains that Jesus did nothing to abolish it and made sure to stress that it was not to be abolished either.

Love for God and others is not the romantic or human-relationship kind of Love you're thinking of. It's about caring for people, which I would think you agree as a Jedi is simple compassion for other human beings. (emphasis added)

So even the divine sort of loving is still loving of other people... So when Jesus says to love thy God with all thy heart, he really means the same as love thy neighbor as thyself, does he? But he calls them first and second, as if they were different, almos as if he doesn't understand what you do. Alternatively, maybe the first commandment is an impossible one to follow, just like I said. Which is it?

Loving God, I will admit, is not easy, but it's also not impossible.

So we're sticking with Jesus knowing less about what God wants than you. Fair enough...

He doesn't need our service, our actions. In fact he doesn't need anything. He's God. He's got it all. He wants it for us. To Love God is to Love oneself, because he loves us more than you can possibly imagine.

You don't get to represent God and neither do goat-herding savages. You don't get to decide what God wants or what it needs or doesn't want or need. If God has at least as much power as any human, it can make sure to tell us everything about how it feels towards us or what it wishes for us. Instead it apparently opts to send messengers like yourself, who first say that to love God means to be care for other people, then in the same breath continue on to say that it means to love ourselves instead, and at the end of it all pretend like they got any part of it from the one book that has the second most warped and broken idea about love surpassed only slightly by its islamic counterpart.

If people loved each other the way God loves us, the world would be a very different place.

I disagree. We do love ourselves exactly like God loves us: A matter of individual interpretation and for the most part not at all. I also believe that this natural state that results if beings like us are left to their own devices is a healthier one than any more controlled and homogenous one for that reason.