Jesus is my GOD because after reading the bible when I was 27 I noticed how reality parallels what happens in the bible. Every day now I am convinced by how he works in my life. I am so thankful he is merciful because I defiantly deserve flames.
Romans 1:20 New Life Version (NLV) 20 Men cannot say they do not know about God. From the beginning of the world, men could see what God is like through the things He has made. This shows His power that lasts forever. It shows that He is God.
Nice to have a civilised thread, hope it stays that way too. I probably wouldn't have been open about my faith without this I guess.
Well to start I'm a striving pentecostal Christian, still striving to live a good life, fulfil God's plan for my life and areas where I fall short I ask God for forgiveness, in the days we live in, being a consistent Christian is really hard I think.
I'm not one of those who try and force down the throat, bible bash or condemn others to hell or whatever, I just say what I need to and hopefully if God is willing, He will do the rest.
I've seen a lot of people say this. What is your religion? Because in traditional Christian traditions (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox) Jesus is the son of God, not God himself.
Yeah, I think I remember that. I'm not very good at apologetic discussions, so I try to stay out of them and do my own reading to decide. I feel like whenever people get into religious debates they are all trying to sell me something, and that was the same kind of vibe that made me turn away from Catholicism when I was younger.
Now I pretty much just stick to the Bible and try to read as many interpretations as possible to get my own ideas. I'm sure I'm opening myself up to some flawed reasoning somewhere down the line, but it's been a gradual process. At the moment I feel like the book is more important than anything else
I think that's exactly what God expects of us. Blindly following a religious leader of any denomination is the lazy alternative to actually reading the good book yourself and seeking God's guidance on what is important.
For some reason I thought you guys were, bluntly put, all about punishment. I don't know how much you condone any punishment on any level, but it sounds like it isn't what I thought it was. For me, punishment is a last resort. It is a lazy replacement for much better teaching methods or fixing the problem, but enough of that.
Yes, there are a lot of christians that choose to focus on the fire and brimstone. I find it hard, like many people, to reconcile the notions of a loving forgiving God, and a God who is dangling us like a spider over a fire, just looking for a reason to drop us in, so the "freedom view" of hell that I posted previously seems to make more sense.
Well, I know that some hate other religions, the idea of god, and maybe even religious people, but I'm not convinced they actually hate him as they do a person. I think they'd be more likely to have a million questions for him.
Some people I've met online do. They mostly hate him because of the argument from evil. They're angry that he allows evil in the world, and they believe him to be a monster for it. But what they don't see, or refuse to see, is that the existence of free will requires a possibility to choose evil. As the answer to the "can God make a stone so big..." question I posted earlier goes, he can't simultaneously give free will and withhold free will. Still, they're very angry with God about it.
I have two follow up questions:
I might just be splitting hairs with this first one, but would you pursue moral choices without the approval or disapproval of god or is his approval just bonus points or something?
Well, we do believe there will be a reward in heaven for those who do right in this life. But assuming for the moment that there were no God and no Bible, or if I just didn't believe in it, I don't think I would pursue moral choices if I thought I could get away with it. I doubt I'd do something like murder, only because I would fear what human authorities would do to me, but something like cheating people out of money? I'd be there. Not to say that I always make the right choices anyway, but I know I'd be a lot worse if I didn't have my faith.
If you believe in an afterlife, how can you convince me you really care what goes on in the present life? Why strain yourself to prevent tragedy in this life when all good souls heaven anyway?
George MacDonald wrote about this in The Princess and the Goblin. I won't try to retell that part of the story, because honestly I don't remember precisely how it went, but the main idea was that this life is a preparation for the next. What we do now and how we condition our souls will be how we continue for eternity. A person who always makes bad choices and is nasty to everyone can only attain a certain degree of badness in the course of 70 or so years, but give him an eternity and he'll become a real monster. (This is another possible justification for the doctrine of eternal punishment. That by the time you leave this life, the course you've set yourself on will continue through eternity, and like a train following tracks, there's no way you can possibly go but to hell). Contrariwise, a person who's walking on a good path will continue to get better and better as eternity passes. I don't know if that's right, but it's a possibility.
I've seen a lot of people say this. What is your religion? Because in traditional Christian traditions (Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox) Jesus is the son of God, not God himself.
That's not actually true. He and the Father are both God, as is the Holy Spirit. It's okay, I can see how you would be confused. The doctrine of the trinity is a pretty complicated, and at first counterintuitive, bit of theology, and it's hard to explain how one person can be three people, but let's try.
Lewis put it much better than I can paraphrase it, so I'll just copy paste it here:
You know that in space you can move in three ways - to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two; you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body: say, a cube - a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.
Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways - in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings - just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal - something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.
