EACH HAS HIS ROLE.

Some deem that parents' love galore
and wish that God could love as much.
They don't distinguish between roles:
parents care for flesh, God for souls.

Some of us come from a position where we may wish our earthly parents could be as loving as God. Sometimes the best spiritual role models are other people's parents whose faith was more overtly apparent.

Thank you very much, Solomon, for your very kind comment.

Perhaps you'll tell me how the Greek word from which the English term "Bible" is derived -- τὰ βιβλία (ta biblia) --supports your claim that what the title given to the collection of writings sacred to Christian and Jews indicates what "the Bible" is.

I'd also like to know where we find it said  in such books as Genesis, Ruth, Amos,  :Leviticus, Isaiah, Ezekiel,  Ecclesiastes,  Song of Solomon, Numbers,  First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings,  Chronicles,  Job, and Philemon, among others,   that the divinely decreed destiny of human beings is to leave earth as a discarnate being let alone where in those books, we are given instructions on how to do so.

What I want and what I've done  is irrelevant.  The issue is whether what I've said about your claim regarding what  the word Bible indicates about what that collection of writings actually is has validity.  
 
Furthermore, my "opinion" in this regard is based on facts (which you've run away from addressing).  Yours isn't.    Nor, it seems, is it one you have any evidence for holding on to --  which means not only that you are not entitled  to it, but that it is not something that anyone should accept as valid.  
 
https://theconversation.com/no-youre-not-entitled-to-your-opinion-9978  
 
Believe what you want to believe,  but stop claiming you know what you are talking about and that the Bible supports your unfounded and wholly subjective beliefs.

"parents care for flesh, God for souls.  '

Leaving aside the fact that good parents care for the souls of their children and do so by seeing that they become good people with good minds and values, why, if god cares not for "flesh" why did he embody us and promise that our bodies -- which is the instrument through which we come to know him and without which we cannot know his blessings  -- would not be subject to death .  And if he only cares for disincarnate souls , how do you explain what the stalwart  men  spoken of here say?

2 Maccabees 7:1-14

On another occasion a Jewish mother and her seven sons were arrested. The king was having them beaten to force them to eat pork. 2 Then one of the young men said,

What do you hope to gain by doing this? We would rather die than abandon the traditions of our ancestors.

3 This made the king so furious that he gave orders for huge pans and kettles to be heated red hot, 4 and it was done immediately. Then he told his men to cut off the tongue of the one who had spoken and to scalp him and chop off his hands and feet, while his mother and six brothers looked on. 5 After the young man had been reduced to a helpless mass of breathing flesh, the king gave orders for him to be carried over and thrown into one of the pans. As a cloud of smoke streamed up from the pan, the brothers and their mother encouraged one another to die bravely, saying, 6  

The Lord God is looking on and understands our suffering. Moses made this clear when he wrote a song condemning those who had abandoned the Lord. He said,
The Lord will have mercy on those who serve him.

7 After the first brother had died in this way, the soldiers started amusing themselves with the second one by tearing the hair and skin from his head. Then they asked him,
    Now will you eat this pork, or do you want us to chop off your hands and feet one by one?

8 He replied in his native language,
    I will never eat it! So the soldiers tortured him, just as they had the first one, 9 but with his dying breath he cried out to the king,
    You butcher! You may kill us, but the King of the universe will raise us from the dead and give us eternal life, because we have obeyed his laws.

10 The soldiers began entertaining themselves with the third brother. When he was ordered to stick out his tongue, he quickly did so. Then he bravely held out his hands 11 and courageously said,

God gave these to me. But his laws mean more to me than my hands, and I know God will give them back to me again. 12 The king and those with him were amazed at his courage and at his willingness to suffer.

13 After he had died, the soldiers tortured the fourth one in the same cruel way, 14 but his final words were,

I am glad to die at your hands, because we have the assurance that God will raise us from death. But there will be no resurrection to life for you, Antiochus!

More nonsense here:

"The loaves of God nourish the soul  
the Lord cares for to stay alive. "

So there are souls God does not care about?  That's what your syntax makes you  end up saying.

And aren't souls immortal?  If so,  why would they need anything to "stay alive"

"The flesh is minded by the flesh  
and our souls by Who gives breath.

Relative clauses need to have a subject.  "Who gives breath" does not .

More importantly, what does God give breath TO if not the flesh -- which indicates (as Genesis 2:7  proclaims) a person needs a body to be a living being and that without a body, there is no living being, let alone a person who can enjoy God's belssings.

"Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being."  

Nice spiritual read for a Sunday ...

Very dear Cara,
Thank you very much for your very kind comment. I like your ideas.

Thank you very much,Lil, for liking the poem. It's good that you like my poem for a Sunday.

1- Thank you, Baldwin, for the great story from,"Maccabees 7: 1-14".
2- God cares for the body, but bodies need earthly matters and money. He mainly wants the salvation of the soul.
3-"The loaves of God nourish the soul
  [ Which] the Lord cares for [it] to stay alive. "Where and It" are omitted. How can you explain it in your way?
4-Souls are immortal, but sin kills them, and this is hell.
5- "The flesh is minded......... ." Here the clause you are asking about is not a RELATIVE CLAUSE, and moreover, you say the clause needs a subject. What is WHO? Isn't a subject? But it is a subject not of a relative clause. Guess what kind of clause it is.

It's a beautiful poem  

What do you mean by "beautiful" and what criteria did you use in  determining that this submission from J-Z fits your definition?   I'm sincere in wanting to know your answers to these two questions.

I cannot understand this thing called soul.
It is, I’m told, essentially,
a ghost in a machine
But if it is, does it have hands
that crank,
or feet that pedal turn
the wheels and cogs
that constitute the mechanism that it haunts?

If souls are,  as is generally assumed,
something immaterial, dimensionless,
comprised of nothing that a body has,
do they possess
capacity to grasp, to feel,
to sense the steel
(or fleshy parts) believers say
that they manipulate?

If yes, how so,
since only solids, things from atoms carved,
are able to connect
with solid things?

To me this soul "thing" is
a contradiction.  It's
a hoary old Platonic fiction, not
to be accepted or believed.

And if you were to open me
to find this “soul” which, so it’s claimed,
resides “inside” my bodily abode
and lives within
the circumscription of my flesh,

(and yet how can a thing
with no extension, says Descartes,
take up or fill some space
or have a face, a trace, locatable?)

what could I then expect to find
if it is truly  "thing" and “there”?.
What is it I’d be looking for?

I am not sure, nor are,
I wager, firm believers too.

It is, I think, the “soul”,  a metaphor,
for something else.

And so I also think I'll show,
most metaphorically of course,
this "thing" called "soul"
that I'm supposed to “have”
(or is it the reverse?)
the exit door.

The Bible says  
God’s care is not for ghosts
that for a time
inhabit men, and then
ascend into a ghostly realm
of bliss above,
yes, even if it notes
(tell Job!)
there are such things
and such things do.

It’s persons whom he loves
and cherishes..

The claim that we’re
essentially unbodied things
designed to be eventually
untethered to the world
God made our only home,
is Plato through and through

and is  

when set against
the Bible’s point of view  
in which it’s said
God made our bodies good

and deemed them as the seat
of how we know his truth,  

and which, upon time's end,
will be what God  
redeems and sanctifies,

heretical, untrue.

And only those who read
the scriptures through a Gnostic lens
profess it, with a fundamental ignorance  
of what the scriptures say,
otherwise.

Aren't your two poems here tell not show, Baldwin?

What makes you  think that the pieces of mine that you refer to are all tell?  Please be specific.

Why do accuse others of what you do yourself. Prove to me that these two poems are show and not tell.

Not until you prove to me that your piece above is not all tell.

"The flesh is minded by the flesh  
and our souls by Who gives breath."

Is "Who gives breath" a title for God?

 

Yes, it is a title of God because breath means life.
Do we say A TITLE FOR or OF God, Baldwin?

Acts 17:25 indicates that life and breath are not the same. thing.  And the Biblical terms for breath (ruach  pneuma) do not mean life

May I ask you where in scripture you find  "who gives breath"  being used as a circumlocution for God?

I find it curious that it is claimed
the “ loaves  of God”
(whatever they may be)
are nourishment
unto a soul, let alone
the sole one (marked definite
and singular by “the”)
that God is said
(and awkwardly) to wish
good health
when scripture says
that any bread distributed because
of grace divine
was something focused and  designed
to feed not souls
(who could not chew it anyway)
but multitudes
of hungry men.