A Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ.
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A christian is person who is able to enjoy life as it comes.
A Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ.
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[quote name='KidsLoveSatan' timestamp='1306672869' post='4817071']
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A christian is person who is able to enjoy life as it comes.
A. God didn't create Adam and Steve, it was Adam and Eve. People think sexual attraction is genetic? LMAO, but if it was then you simply would not be able to like Baseball if you were genetically born to like Football. People learn to like things by thinking, yes thoughts count. Add emotional attachment and confusion to it and you get homosexuals.
B. They found Noah's Ark, The Ark of the Covenant, The parting place for the Red Sea, they found Mount Sinai where God gave the 10 Commandments, and they also found a lot of artifacts for ancient Jewish battles and communities. You need to do some research bro since your still a baby Christian.
If you think I'm closed minded, well then you're the one with your head jammed into your butt.
A. God didn't create Adam and Steve, it was Adam and Eve. People think sexual attraction is genetic? LMAO, but if it was then you simply would not be able to like Baseball if you were genetically born to like Football. People learn to like things by thinking, yes thoughts count. Add emotional attachment and confusion to it and you get homosexuals.
Can't really say much on the topic, not being Christian nor knowing the Bible and all that, but I think that when a religion promises paradise by requiring the mindless following of some rigid dogma, then something is fundamentally wrong.
If you lead your life according to some basic and fundamental ethical guidelines, like not voluntarily harming others and trying to make this place a better place for all (within your possibilities), then a loving god is gladly going to accept you regardless of your beliefs, whether or not you read some old book or visited temples or churches. It's just basic logical reasoning. If you believe that our world was created by that god, then he must be a quite rational and logical thinking fellow.
I also came to the conclusion that if God does have some elaborate set of rules he wants us to follow, he's done a pretty piss poor job of communicating them to us, given the number and diversity of religions in the world.
1 Corinthians 15:56
- Originally there was a lot of contradiction in the bible because it was written by humans
These contradictions were refractor-ed by a humans, specifically some committee of who's name I can't recall
Isn't that kind of backwards? If proof is antithetical to religious faith (kind of the point of it being faith) it shouldn't matter the quality of the intellect trying to prove it. If we could prove the existence of God it would kind of go against the point anyway.
Proof is antithetical to religious faith.
From my way of seeing this, you've got a few choices:
- Require proof. Some of the greatest thinkers through the millennia have put their intellects into this, and no definitive "proof" has so far emerged.
One thing to think about is why you are emotionally attached to the idea that the bible is true. If you were coming from a totally rational perspective, this would not be an issue.
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Why does being rational have anything to do with emotions being or not being an issue. Why are you emotionally attached to your wife or significant other? Do you find it irrational? If so, does it being irrational make it any more or less important to you?
Analogy time: A baby starts eating mother's milk, then gets weaned to mashed fruits and veggies, and slowly expands their diet to cover a full range of foods; you don't start by stuffing steak in a newborn's mouth. Next analogy: School children being with basic concepts and simple statements, gradually expanding in detail, depth, and nuance as the child's capacity to understand it increases; many times the concepts are incomplete or only partially true. You start a first grader on basic addition and subtraction, you hold off mathematical proofs of basic operations until number theory courses in college and have the capacity and background necessary to understand. And yet.... when science reveals that the food we give our babies is actually toxic and causes cancer, and new scientific theories completely destroy those currently being taught, what will people in the future think of our basic actions?
So too with how God would communicate to man. The recorded word says that God spoke with Moses, and Moses was shown the entire world from beginning to end. Do you suppose that Moses would understand the world as we see it today? Or that he would understand the world as it was seen in the 1400s? Or that he would understand the world as it was seen 2000 years ago? Or 4000 years ago? No, that isn't reasonable. Moses would have interpreted what he saw and experienced in terms he was familiar with. He would have recorded (or caused the scribes to record) his own interpretations of what he heard and saw. He could only process it in terms of what he already understood.
There are many things that we see and experience today that are completely outside the realm of understanding of people even a few decades before. How would you explain the Internet to those who have no concept of electronics just a century ago?
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No I do not expect Moses( a human ) to comprehend how to world starts and ends. But actually, I didn't know that god showed moses how the entire world began and ended, mainly because I do not read the bible that much. But this statement implies determinism. That it is already determined how everything will start and end, so why then do we have free will, assuming we do have it in the first place.
Next up, the concept of literacy. Many of the people in Bible stories were illiterate. Many prophets and kings relied on scribes to record their words. Many stories were not immediately recorded at all, traveling through many people before getting recorded. Some, like the story of Job, were written in poetic form. Does that mean that they cease to be divinely inspired? I don't believe so. Instead, you must take that at its value and accomidate for it within your beliefs.
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But that leaves the question just how much of it is real and attributed to god? Why should we believe this part versus others? It also leaves the possibility that all words in the scripture are wrong and falsely misinterpreted. If you defend that the bible is the scripture of god's disciples, then you cannot say that this part is from god and that isn't because it was or might have been misinterpreted. If you defend it, then you have to defend the whole thing.
You say they are fairy-tale like, and several are. I tell my own children stories of my own life and they enjoy them; I often start with "Once upon a time there was a little boy named Bryan, and one day he went out on an adventure..." These are stories of my life being recounted to my children, they are true to my memory, yet they are in fairy tale form. Would you say that immediately makes the story false? Would the life lessons I learned the hard way become less true simply because I use a format they enjoy? Does it harm the facts to reduce the story down to just those most relevant details expressed in a way they understand? I don't think so.
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No I guess I didn't say it clearly, when I say fairy-tale like, I do not mean how it was presented, I mean the content of whats being presented. Obviously, you telling your kids your life experience in a nicely wrapped version doesn't imply your story to be false, because your story are explainable. The story presented in the bible( from my little readings), are claims made such that its hard to believe and naturally/scientifically unexplainable.
Are you saying that all miracles must be outside of a particular probability? Are you saying that miracles must lay completely outside of science? I don't see how that works. Why would we need to be surrounded by mighty miracles that defy description?
I see a world where we are surrounded by miracles. Does it seem far-fetched that world is filled with miracles, divine inspiration, and at the same time is utterly mundane? How many stories are there where a mother feels prompted to check on her child only to discover them in a life-threatening situation? Was that divine inspiration or just some pattern of subconscious thought, or perhaps both? How many stories are there where people were protected from harm and they attribute it to God, where it can just as easily be attributed to a chaos butterfly effect? A thing can have a perfectly mundane scientific explanation and still be a miracle. Even our modern science itself I attribute to miracles and inspiration. Is a premature baby spending six months in a NICU and ultimately turning out just as healthy as a full-term child any less a miracle simply because doctors employed machines while the family spent time a few rooms away in the hospital's chapel? I spent two summers working in a hospital and saw enough for myself; go visit a hospital and ask some friendly doctors and nurses if they believe in everyday miracles.
Combining these I take it as refuting this group of claims. I believe there is plenty of evidence that supports stories in the bible, and that while the stories were told by people with a different understanding and interpretation of the world, they still contain inspired truth, and that miracles are all around us if we care to open our eyes to them.
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But the problem here is that your attributing miracles when some goods happen and saying when some good doesn't happen, its just bad luck. For example, two people are diagnosed with cancer. Both are christians, both families and supporters prayed heavily for them. In the end, one of them was cured, while the other died. Now your saying that the person that was cured, was a miracule, while the person that died just had bad luck. That doesn't constitutes as a miracle. You cannot simply say when something good happened, that it was a result of devine intervention and completely ignore the fact that the all other situation of similar kind that resulted in a bad was as bad luck. Thats just being ignorant.
The bible is not a single work. It is a compendium of a bunch of records that were kept in various languages, translated many times, consolidated, and more. Errors were made in copies. Errors were made in translations. There were many times that scholars collected multiple copies, compared the differences, and attempted to resolve errors between them, or gathered copies and attempted to translate them. Many records were left out because the scholars and clerics decided against it, perhaps through revelation and inspiration, or perhaps not. Many records were lost or destroyed, for reasons I'll let you ponder yourself. Perhaps records were added that should not have been, or omitted in error.
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You use the term scholars, as if they are better than 'regular' folks. Just because they are scholars, doesn't make their opinion correct. What you said in the above statement, makes the bible seem even more controversial. If what you said above is true, then that makes me even more furious. It seems like the "scholars" are just trying to turn profit and hide the evidence.
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Personally, I want to say thank you frob for all your help. You have helped me tremendously in this forum.
@RedPin:Go Kick rocks, others have already pointed out the flaw and ignorance of your post. You are not a Heretic, but rather stubborn.
@owl
A christian is person who is able to enjoy life as it comes....
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What you described there is not religion, but rather following some philosophy like
By Yann L:
If you lead your life according to some basic and fundamental ethical guidelines, like not voluntarily harming others and trying to make this place a better place for all (within your possibilities), then a loving god is gladly going to accept you regardless of your beliefs, whether or not you read some old book or visited temples or churches. It's just basic logical reasoning. If you believe that our world was created by that god, then he must be a quite rational and logical thinking fellow.
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In the end, it ultimately comes to my decision, and I hope I can come to a resting conclusion that eases my mind. Until, then I'm screwed in the head.
regards, D.Chhetri
[color="#1C2837"]So in desperate help, I ask you to prove me false. I ask you to rebuttal each and everyone of these statements. My mind is going crazy these last few nights. The more I think about it rationally, the less I believe.[/quote]
I agree with rip-off and some others on here. If you want to think rationally, then you're going to end up finding out that religion isn't for you. The Christian faith is like any other faith in the world. All your criticisms of Christianity are reasonable ones, and will inevitably lead you to the same conclusions myself and increasing numbers of people are finding. The most important one being: god is created by man, not the other way around. That's the only reasonable explanation for the myriads of religions throughout the world, the myriad of differing denominations within each of those religions, and the inconsistencies religious dogma always encounters with observable reality.
And there is nothing wrong with not believing in some deity, or a particular faith. In fact I applaud you for considering your faith logically (i assume you would currently describe yourself as religious as you said 'I am a confused Christian'). If you want to think rationally about such things, make sure you do so from an unbiased perspective, and don't just fall into the trap of trying to 'justify' what you already believe.
On the assumption that you still believe or feel compelled to believe in a god, one way or the other, then just remember that the nature of such a being means it is not something man can easily understand. What is recorded in the bible is the record of fallible men, even if it was recorded with the best of intentions. The pope will tell you that 'man can not understand God's ways' on one hand, and then claim to know how God wants you to live your life on the other. And why should you believe the Bible when the Qur'an says something different? Books are written by man. They are translated and edited by man over thousands of years. Councils and committees change the morals of a religion under the guise of divine inspiration; in order to more appropriately reflect the morality of the times and the surrounding culture; largely in order to attract members.
Most importantly, no religion or holy text or anyone else can tell you how to live a good life. You know how to behave well towards your fellow man, you don't need step by step instructions for it. All that's really left of any value beyond that is what waits for us beyond death. Personally, I'd suggest trying not to worry about that too much now, and concentrate on enjoying the one life you can be absolutely sure of
Good luck overcoming your dilemma.
