I was raised to believe that all you need to do is accept forgiveness from Christ and you're all set. I'm cool with that.
As far as God goes, I think it's best not to get his attention. According to the books, just about everyone who interacts with him gets burned in some way. There aren't many stories of people meeting God and living happily ever after.
I'll accept the grace, but that's about it. I'm not trying to get on God's radar.
I called God "him" for simplicity sake only.
Grace is offered through faith as far as I'm concerned. You don't seem to have faith in God. In other words, you don't want to trust God which is quite an oxymoron as I explained above. Because you have to first trust God in order to make any sort of judgement about Him. And God, by definition is the origin of everything that exists. So if you want to make judgements about such being or entity, you would have to first trust this entity or being because everything including your own being comes from this being or entity. Hope that makes sense! :]
Sorry, it didn't make much sense to me. Are you saying that you have to trust something before you can make a judgment about it? Can you make a judgment about Satan without trusting in him?
I believe that a very smart, loving, revolutionary man sacrificed himself for the betterment of humanity. I thankfully accept that sacrifice.
I believe that God could exist, but the stories written about him paint him to be a being that should be avoided, not called upon.
As far as I'm concerned, if something murders the entire population of a planet with water, I don't really want anything to do with it. I'll take that heaven-pass from Jesus, but I'm not about to try and get God's attention.
No. I never said anything even remotely close to that.
Satan by definition, is not the origin of everything that exists. You're committing a categorical fallacy here. You have to trust the origin of everything that exists in order to make a judgement about anything including the origin of everything that exists. In fact you already do. You can't trust your senses and cognitive faculties without first trusting the origin of everything that exists.
This is a pretty strange statement. I very much can, and do, trust my senses and cognitive faculties without first "trusting the origin of everything that exists", whatever that means. My eyes and ears work regardless of my belief in God's existence.
Why would anyone base their whole life around something without judging it first? Faith is one thing, but what you're talking about sounds like blindly jumping off cliffs, hoping there is water below you.
I think I'm more cut out for Judaism. I've heard they're big into arguing and debating the nature of God. That seems lacking in Christianity. The problem is that I'm not a fan of their God, Jesus is more my kind of guy.
How do you know your eyes work? How do you know you weren't created two seconds ago with a bunch of aliens who are feeding your eyes false images in a computer simulation? It's not a strange statement to say that you have to trust the origin of everything that exists before you can trust anything or anyone else or make any judgement. It's a fact...
That's just an emotional reaction. There's no logic behind it. As far as a child struck with cancer is concerned, he too wouldn't wanna have anything to do with doctors who wanna inflict him with more pain through chemo, etc. But that too would be an emotional reaction with no logic behind it.
That's called wanting to have your cake and eat it too. It won't work...
Says who? Christ already forgave me, who has the ability to take that away from me? Did I miss the part in the bible where Jesus made his forgiveness conditional?
Faith and logic are like oil and water. Logic is defined as "reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity." Faith is believing in something without proof (validation). Let's not make this about who's being more logical here. My beliefs are validated by the words in the bible and the physical evidence that I see in the real world.
I think every religious person should imagine their God in the form of a human. Then imagine that human doing the things that they are reported to have done. Forget all the mystic stuff and try to imagine your God in a show similar to Game of Thrones.
Imagine a character that kills everyone on a planet because he's angry. A character that allows his enemy to torture his most faithful servant and murder his daughters, just to prove how faithful he is. A character that kills every first born son in a thriving city. A character that jokes with a faithful servant by asking him to kill his child, then tells him he's been punk'd at the last minute ("Dude, you almost killed your kid! LOL!").
From what I've read, Jehovah doesn't seem like a good guy. The stories don't inspire love or devotion in me, just fear and disgust. Jesus is cool, but I don't talk to God because I'm afraid that he'll actually hear me.
A side note: I don't mean to hijack your post or trash what you believe in. This is just where I'm at, spiritually. I've got a lot of questions that I haven't found satisfactory answers to and maybe discussing things will bring clarity. If my comments are offensive or annoying to you, I won't persist.
Sorry to jump in on ya'lls conversation but I can't help but comment here.
@fronttowardenemy, You say Christ already forgave you, but by what authority do you think He is capable of doing that? I mean, if He's just some "revolutionary man" who sacrificed himself for "the betterment of society" then in what sense does that work? I mean, if He's just some guy, how is the betterment of society achieved by His sacrifice, and in what sense is His death even a sacrifice?
I think part of your problem is that you've been exposed to too many Christians with a very narrow view of inspiration; the kind of thinking that says, "if the Bible says it, I believe it." Well, the Bible says the Earth is Flat, so should we believe that?
There's actually many different opinions of what "inspired" means, and they don't all require you to believe that the Old Testament is giving literal history. Plus, the ancients had much different standards when writing history as well. Many of the stories in the Old Testament are written as polemic responses to the myths of the other religions in the ancient near east. So, for example the flood: there are flood narratives in almost every ancient culture and some predate the Exodus, Moses wrote Genesis so these stories predate the Genesis account. The Eridu Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh were popular myths at the time, and the Hebrew writers were countering the theological statements made in those myths by explaining that it was YHWH, not Marduk or any of the other "gods" of the time/area.
You also need to take into account the very idea of what a "god" was to the ancient world was a being that destroyed your enemies and protected your people, brought rain, punished evil, etc. When these ancient people wrote about their conquests, they often ascribed the violence to their gods. The ancient Hebrews would have been very much like their Sumerian, Canaanite, Babylonian, Egyptian counterparts. Thus, when the Israelites conquered some ancient people, they would ascribe the violence to YHWH, their God. The degree to which they ascribed violence to YHWH is really a reflection of how violent these ancient people were.
I know full well that some of what I said is controversial, even in Christian circles, but it doesn't put me outside the realm of orthodoxy. I'm just trying to make sense of the data we have.
The New Testament tells us that God's character is perfectly represented in Jesus. Hebrews 1:3 says
This means that Jesus perfectly represents God's character. It means that when God's Glory is shining, the "shinyness" is Jesus.
Jesus Himself tells us the He is the same as God:
What I'm suggesting here is that you look at the Old Testament through the lens of the cross. God showed His love for us by laying down His life for us. john 3:16. We know what love means by His example 1 john 3:16. Try to keep Jesus in mind when reading the Old Testament, because He is the revelation given to us: