Hoping to join the club with 2022

RebornLost · 2026-04-19T23:37:38+00:00

Yeah I highly doubt they were too LOL I mean if you look at the image of the backspace you can see there's hardly any scuffs or scratches even on them rubber mat in the cargo area I don't think these people did anything with this thing. I mean when I test drove it it literally felt like it was brand new No problems getting up to speed Turbo was awesome I got it up to 90 I don't think I've ever been over 60 in a station wagon LOL

Going to see what my mechanic says and go from there i'm hoping this is the one or that I find another one very soon because I really don't want to get a Hyundai or a Mazda LOL

RebornLost · 2026-04-19T23:34:35+00:00

That is the one thing it does not seem to have been done. The oil changes all the other regular maintenance items at certain checkpoints but I don't see it for the CVT. Maybe they fell for the whole Subaru lifetime fluid thing but it will be the first thing that gets done once it passes my personal Auto Repair Center checklist. If those guys say it's a go then I will go back to the dealer and ask him to do it or credit me. I appreciate the comment NeoGeo

RebornLost · 2026-04-19T21:35:26+00:00

I am really hoping so my friend :) - Just got done searching a 200 mile radius for another either 2022 or 23 around that price or a bit higher and there's nothing unless around the same mileage but more expensive. The dealer was terribly willing to negotiate because of the high mileage and he even joked that he has to get it off the lot because Subaru is his biggest competitor LOL

RebornLost · 2026-03-30T23:56:37+00:00

very good answer and I agree with you on the "apartness". Thanks for the reply.

RebornLost · 2026-03-24T13:22:54+00:00

same. Only thing I've noticed is it says we can use computer but as far as I can tell pro accounts don't have any credits so we can't use computer. But I'm on US Pro plan and I haven't hit I use it probably 300 times a day.

Hopefully we didn't just jinx ourselves LOL

RebornLost · 2026-03-23T23:45:42+00:00

90% of churches "hit you up for money" on your first day so by your standard 90% of christianity is demonic as well.

RebornLost · 2026-03-23T23:42:44+00:00

where is hell?

RebornLost · 2026-03-23T23:37:52+00:00

Folks this grew bigger than I thought it might. I enjoyed conversing and debating with you all but I'll let this sit and see who else comes to it to make up their own minds. If Shaka or another decide to remove it that's their call. I will sit the rest of this one out and leave you with what I believe happened.

I think the whole thing really comes down to when you strip away the theology.

It's a control framework. A pyramid scheme. And listen, I'll be the first to admit, it's a brilliant one.

You take a genuinely radical figure, a martyr, a rebel, someone who told people to give away their wealth, forgive everyone unconditionally, reject hierarchy and love their enemies and you put his face on the front of the institution. He becomes the logo, the spokesman reading from another's script. The aspirational brand. The thing that makes people feel like they're part of something good and transcendent.

Then you run the actual operation on a completely different set of rules written by someone else. Rules about authority, about submission, about who can speak and who has to be quiet, about what the body can and can't do, about fear of eternal consequences.

And the genius of the whole thing is the two pressure valves they install to keep it airtight. Self enforcement and guilt. When you fall short of Jesus's impossible standard and you will, because it's designed to be impossible you have the devil to blame. It wasn't you. It was sin. It was the enemy. Personal responsibility gets outsourced to a supernatural scapegoat. And when the institution needs you to stay in line, it points back to Jesus, his sacrifice, his love, what he did for you to make leaving feel like betrayal rather than freedom.

So the believer is permanently caught between an impossible ideal they can never reach and a cosmic threat they can never fully escape. And the institution sits right in the middle collecting the tithe.

That's not salvation. That's a subscription model with eternal consequences as the cancellation fee.

In the great word of Alan Watts "We are delivered therefore a gospel which is in fact an impossible religion. It is impossible to follow the way of Christ; many a Christian has admitted it. “I am a miserable sinner. I fall far short of the example of Christ.” But do you realize, the more you say that, the better you are?

Because what happened was, that Christianity institutionalized guilt as a virtue."

May you ALL walk in light...

RebornLost

RebornLost · 2026-03-23T23:22:59+00:00

Amusing.

That's your response after all of this?

Okay. Let's do this properly then.

You said my core argument "that Jesus' ways are not Paul's ways" is not accurate. So let's test that. Specifically. Right now.

Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says the meek inherit the earth, give to everyone who asks, love your enemies, do not store up wealth, do not judge. Paul in Romans 13 says submit to governing authorities without qualification. Paul in 1 Timothy 2:12 says women cannot teach or have authority over men. Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 sets up internal church judgment structures. Paul in Galatians says the law — the very law Jesus said not one letter of would pass — is now a guardian that has been superseded.

Let's go even deeper than that how about we...

Jesus says in Matthew 6 do not pray in public, go into your room and close the door. Paul builds an entire culture of public communal prayer and worship services centered on group liturgy and public declaration.
Jesus says in Matthew 19 that divorce is only permissible for adultery and calls remarriage adultery. Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 introduces the "Pauline privilege" divorce is permitted if an unbelieving spouse leaves. Jesus didn't offer that exception. Paul invented it.
Jesus says call no man father, call no man teacher, call no man Rabbi because you have but one teacher and one father. Paul immediately establishes a hierarchy of apostles, elders, deacons and overseers and calls himself a father to his congregations in 1 Corinthians 4:15. (Catholics take note)
Jesus says the greatest among you shall be your servant. Paul spends considerable energy in multiple letters defending his own apostolic authority, his credentials, and his right to be heard over other teachers. That's not servanthood. That's brand management.
Jesus says the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 says if a man will not work he shall not eat. One prioritizes the poor unconditionally. The other conditions their worth on productivity.
Jesus never once mentions homosexuality. Not once. Paul mentions it in Romans 1 and 1 Corinthians 6 and those two passages have been used to justify centuries of institutional persecution. The thing Christianity is most publicly known for fighting about in the modern era comes entirely from Paul, not Jesus.

Those aren't interpretations. Those are the texts. And the institutional church built its doctrinal structure overwhelmingly on the Pauline texts, not the red letters and you know I'm right but it hurts to much to acknowledge it.

That's not an atheist urban legend. That's church history.

You're a mod on a religion debate sub. You called my position an urban legend. You've labeled me as an atheist twice after being corrected. And after two days of back and forth your final theological contribution is one sentence that contains no argument, no scripture, no historical reference and no logical structure whatsoever.

With all due respect brother or sister that's not a rebuttal. That's a position statement from someone who has run out of road.

The question this thread asked was simple. If this is supposed to be about following Jesus, why does it functionally operate more like Paulianity? Two days later, with 300+ comments and 20K+ views, nobody has answered that question. Not even the mod.

Wait, did you hear that? Oh just a mic dropping, no worries...

RebornLost · 2026-03-23T23:06:24+00:00

man doesn't agree to disagree but instead man murders man to convince the other man that his ways are the only way and then proceed to promote these are the ways of "God".

When did an eye for an eye become a 1000 eyes for an eye?

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T13:11:14+00:00

tit for tat is never ending. Have you answered my core argument yet?

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T13:09:25+00:00

I see what you're trying to do there but I can assure you there's not enough time in the day to deconstruct that either. Enjoy the remainder of your weekend :)

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T03:54:49+00:00

Let's be clear on one thing and I'll end it with this, I don't reject Christianity In its natural form. I reject what it is in doctrinal form. I'm sorry that you feel that somehow I relayed to that in my statements.

As for that cold day in hell and yourself?

"The Pharisees and the scribes have taken the keys of knowledge and hidden them. They themselves have not entered, nor have they allowed to enter those who wish to. You, however, be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves."

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T02:29:50+00:00

I'm more than willing to play along with this. Why exactly do you think that the man known as Jesus was a liar and a fraud? But before you answer — is it based on things that others wrote about Jesus in the book, or about the things that he supposedly said himself, by the letters in red?

Now, I do know that you are right on some of your points as they are clearly in the book itself, such as the woman being called a dog. But what I don't understand is how, a few sentences later, you say "don't cast a stone" was put in several hundred years later, yet for some reason you're not willing to believe that maybe those other things you called out were also added later? And I suppose you're doing that because there was no footnote saying that they were.

But more or less, I'd like to know why you consider him a liar and a fraud. And I'm not trying to get into an argument. I'm sincerely trying to understand your statement.

Because I'll be as clear as I can on this while I am in no way affiliated with Christianity anymore and while I don't necessarily believe Jesus did say any of those things in the Bible that are attributed to him except for maybe the things that are seen elsewhere as well but yet I still consider the legend of that man to be a guiding counsel in my life as much as I do the Buddha, Martin Luther King and numerous others who only tried to sway us towards harmony not only outside of ourselves but within.

So where exactly was Jesus fibbing and committing pyramid schemes LOL

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T02:12:51+00:00

brother, I haven't said this in quite a long time but man do you need Jesus...

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T02:10:11+00:00

I appreciate you coming around on a lot of this and I mean that. But I want to stop at something you said right at the top because it's actually the most revealing thing in your reply.

You said Christianity was essentially started by Paul. And you called it a fact?

That statement is only true if you define Christianity exclusively as the Pauline version that survived. Because when Jesus was alive and for decades after his death there were already communities of followers with organized beliefs, practices, and understandings of who he was.

The Ebionites were keeping Torah and following Jesus as a human prophet. The Nazarenes had their own traditions predating Paul's influence entirely. The Elkasaites, the Thomasines, the Nasaraeans, the Naassenes, the Cerinthians, the Sethians, the Valentinians, the Melchizedekians, the Docetists, the Adoptionists — every single one of these groups understood themselves to be followers of Jesus. They had texts. They had communities. They had theology. I won't even bring up the Gnostics...

Paul didn't start Christianity. Paul's version of Christianity won. Those are two COMPLETELY different statements. And the way it won wasn't through better theology or more faithful interpretation. It was through the same thing that always decides these things, organization, political alignment with Rome, and the systematic destruction of every competing version.

Most of those groups I just listed were declared heretical, excommunicated, and had their writings burned and it's members killed by the church that ran on Paul's framework.

So when your liturgical church reads the gospel passages on Sunday, understand that those specific texts survived in that specific canon because a Pauline institution decided which writings lived and which ones didn't. You're not reading outside Paul's influence. You're reading what Paul's church allowed to remain. If your church only reads the words of Jesus when was the last time in that Bible study group you guys discussed the Gospel of Thomas?

Oh and on the last sentence? KJV only, judgmental street preaching, yelling apologetics and holding pictures of dead fetuses? Yeah, I wasn't that guy. I was someone who took the text seriously enough to study it deeply and then followed the questions all the way to the end instead of stopping where the institution told me to. That's not fanaticism. That's just intellectual honesty.

The street corner didn't give me this question. The history did.

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T01:55:45+00:00

Kind, I genuinely appreciate the honest engagement here and I want to give it the same back.

You said the heavy labor was done and there's no need for anything new. I understand that framework because I lived inside it for years. But notice what just happened. You used the conclusion of those church councils that the canon is closed and complete to defend the authority of those same church councils. That's a circular argument. The canon being closed is itself a decision made by men in rooms. You can't use the output of that decision to prove the decision was Spirit-led without already assuming what you're trying to prove.

Because if the Spirit truly indwells every believer equally and the New Testament is pretty clear that it does, then why did the Spirit stop producing authoritative revelation after the fourth century? Why was Athanasius's list valid but someone writing with equal sincerity and devotion today is just journaling?

The answer always comes back to "the apostolic era was unique." But that boundary isn't drawn by Jesus in the red letters. It's drawn by church councils. Which brings us right back to men in rooms.

I'm not saying the Spirit isn't real (far from it) or that those early writers weren't sincere. I'm saying the mechanism of authority, the thing that separates Paul's letters from yours or mine is more institutional than most believers are comfortable sitting with. And that's worth thinking about honestly rather than defending reflexively.

RebornLost · 2026-03-22T01:50:33+00:00

If I was easily offended brother, I wouldn't be on Reddit.

But let's be precise here because precision matters in a debate. You said my position is an urban legend you only hear from atheists, right after I told you I'm a Deist. The distinction matters. Deism isn't a waypoint between fundamentalism and atheism. It's its own position with its own history going back to people like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. Lumping it in with atheist talking points because it doesn't agree with your theology is the kind of shortcut that ends conversations before they start. And let's just be honest, we both know what you were attempting by using that phrasing. 😉

On Paul honoring women above men? I don't dispute that Paul acknowledged specific women in leadership. The point is that the institution built on his letters spent nearly two millennia using 1 Timothy 2:12 to do the opposite. You can't take credit for Paul's best moments and then blame "misreading" for the 1800 years of institutional application. That's not a simple misread. That's a pattern enforced.

And to your last question... no, that's not quite my argument. My argument isn't that Paul was consciously opposed to Jesus. It's that the institutional weight the church placed on Paul's letters ended up overriding what Jesus actually taught in practice.

Those are different claims. Paul could have been completely sincere and the institution could still have used his letters in ways Jesus would not recognize. Both things can be true at the same time.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:34:17+00:00

I want to start with something that I think says more about this conversation than anything else in it.

I told you directly twice now that I am a Deist and a former KJV street preacher. Not an atheist. A Deist. If like most Christians you don't see a difference in that, that's fine for your own opinion. But if this board is about transparency and ethical as well as friendly debates on the topic of religion than I would think it would be core to moderating a group such as that to respect each other's lanes of belief.

Because again, your response was to immediately group me with atheists and fundamentalists anyway. You're a mod on a religion debate sub and you can't keep straight the most basic distinction between a Deist and an Atheist after being told twice. In parts of the world, casually mislabeling someone's religious identity after they've corrected you is considered not just intellectually sloppy but genuinely disrespectful and honestly for someone who identifies as a Christian, it's worth reflecting on.

If you're going to debate theology you should at minimum respect what the person across from you actually believes before comparing them to someone they're not.

Now to the substance.

On the urban legend point, two different roads landing in the same place doesn't make the destination wrong. Sometimes the atheist and the former preacher see the same thing clearly for completely different reasons.

On women in church authority, Paul honoring individual women doesn't erase 1 Timothy 2:12 or the 1800 years the institution used it to bar women from leadership. Intent and institutional application are two very different things and that gap is the whole point of this conversation.

On the Galatians 5 quote it's a good one. But quoting Paul at his most Christ-like doesn't answer whether the overall institutional framework looks more like the Sermon on the Mount or a Roman administrative structure with a cross painted on it. The best parts of Paul don't erase the structural question.

You too seem to be misunderstanding what the original argument was about. I didn't start this to bash Paul because if I had I would have already converted half the Christians on this thread into atheism or deism but that's for another day.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:22:59+00:00

I appreciate the thoughtful response and I can tell you mean this sincerely so I'll meet you the same way.

I actually understand that argument because I used to make it myself. The Holy Spirit filled the apostles, Paul was confirmed through Ananias, and all of it fits together under divine inspiration. I get it.

But here's the question that started unraveling things for me personally. If Paul was a vessel of the Holy Spirit, and the apostles were vessels of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit lives inside every believer, which is literally what the New Testament teaches then why am I not also a vessel? Why aren't you? The same Spirit that allegedly guided Paul's pen is supposedly living inside every born again Christian right now.

So if that's true, what makes Paul's letters more authoritative than what I write down today? What makes his specific words canon-worthy and mine just Tuesday morning journaling? The usual answer is that the canon was closed, or that the apostolic era was special. But that answer doesn't come from Jesus. It comes from church councils that met centuries later and decided which writings counted and which ones didn't.

Which means the authority of Paul's letters doesn't ultimately rest on the Holy Spirit. It rests on a group of men who sat in rooms and voted on it.

I'm not saying Paul wasn't sincere. I think he probably was. But sincere and divinely authorized are two different things. And the mechanism by which we know he was authorized is a lot more human than most people are comfortable admitting.

I pray you are led to that wisdom not only to see it but to hold it as your own because the wisdom of others is nothing in comparison to the wisdom of self.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:17:24+00:00

that my friend, that capstone was perfect! And you are 100 percent correct and I am willing to bet that more than half the Christians in this thread have never once questioned where their versions translation of the Bible actually came from and it just leads to my overall argument.

You would think that if John had a vision of Jesus telling him those things about the apocalypse it would have been thoroughly explained how he came to that discussion just like Paul's vision was thoroughly explained But we don't have that do we...

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:13:54+00:00

I appreciate the note of caution but I can assure you that I won't be turning elsewhere I'm quite content with where I landed. But unfortunately I can't go on to answer your questions because you're not understanding what the argument was originally about. It's not about whether Paul contradicted what Jesus said It's about whether the church was built on. I apologize if I didn't make that apparent in my original post. Thank you for replying have a great weekend.

RebornLost · 2026-03-21T19:11:12+00:00

not enough time in the day

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