If none of us has been here yet, we may be at the start of our journey.
The more I learned, I realized the less I knew.
I've finally tossed out all the pretenious and religious words and gone back to the only thing that really matters:
Posted on 01/23/2022 4:38:14 AM PST by Kaslin
Lemme guess....he’s about to “come out” as “gay”.
Just because you are from a fag state, you believe he must want to be a fag also?
Usually. Also people who converted without being convinced that they are sinners. I find those people usually end up creating God in their own image and then get upset because Scripture opposes their belief.
Church leaders who say “Hell isn’t real because the God I know wouldn’t do that” almost always leave the faith and claim they never knew Him. IOW they were lying.
Apostate.......
.....the Bible warns against folks like him
Period!
As soon as he said this person was a “Christian leader,” he fell off the cliff into the mud pit of nonsense.
Not a bad guess. From what I’ve seen, when people like this suddenly renounce their alleged faith (“alleged” because I’m not sure they ever really had it in the first place), it’s often because either a) they have a pet sin that they wish to indulge without feeling guilty, or b) they have tired of being at odds with today’s sick, twisted culture and want to be accepted by the world. Of course, it could also be a) AND b).
What is required is to read the bible as an ancient non-clerical Jew heard the bible and how they experienced the bible.
The bible was made theirs so they would commit to it, it adopt as their own story.
As their own story, the original poetry of the Aramaic was like music to the soul, asking the hearer to enter the story as their own, to enter into the story as one with, more than one hearing, more as one experiencing it, and in that vein to be inspired by it, to obtain the inspiration the Holy Spirit had imprinted in the words.
The bible is to be joined, to be experienced, and in the experience to partake in the original inspiration that has been given to it.
Getting caught up in text translations can get the vexed soul distracted from the inspiration.
The best translations in different languages have hopefully tapped the inspiration, more so than mere literal translation, and conveyed that inspiration in the right manner for that language.
So he was turned off by the interpretation de jour offered in the Protestant world. Not surprising. If that is all I had to work with I would become a non Christian too. Thousands of conflicting interpretations can’t all be correct.
I too, could question ‘my faith’, but I am in the category of those who were much like the ‘blind man who said’. I once was blind and now I see. For some of us, conversion was transcendental, life changing, like going from a worm to a butterfly. We CAN’T ever deny this. And that has made all the difference, it was not some gymnastic mental game in my brain, but something that made you shake, cry, and fall to your knees. And now I go around singing.
I love the authors self-description paraphrase of the book “ I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist”.
Sadly in today’s world, unproveable scientific theories have replaced the age old questions ‘by whom, how and why were we made’ ... that have sought to find creation without God.
The creation of life, the world, and the universe are perhaps the greatest testament to a Creator ...or God.
If none of us has been here yet, we may be at the start of our journey.
The more I learned, I realized the less I knew.
I've finally tossed out all the pretenious and religious words and gone back to the only thing that really matters:
Or, perhaps direct answers to direct questions give the best results...
John 6:25-40
25 When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
26 Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. 27 Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
28 Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”
29 Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
30 So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’[c]”
32 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
34 “Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
35 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36 But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. 37 All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”
I actually like looking at the different translations and dare I say it, the Hebrew and Greek as well. Chew the meat, spit out the bones.
Christians as a whole believe in the essentials of the faith. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. Jesus is the Messiah. The gate keeper of our faith. The sacraments - baptism, holy matrimony, communion, prayer, ordination.
The non essentials are where Christian churches primarily divide. Sprinkle rather than dunk, Is there a hell, are communion elements the real presence or merely a symbol. That sort of thing.
Walking away from your faith, I mean just walking away and denouncing the existence of God is pretty extreme. Even if one had no theological understanding at all, nature/creation testifies to God's creative hand. Just the inch of the tip of one's finger, your DNA, patterns in your eye testifies to a creator.
No person on earth has it theologically 100% correct. Even God's word acknowledges our failings.
It is an issue that all of our Sunday Schools teach a very simple understanding of the Bible. It creates a real vulnerability that atheists know how to exploit. It is not hard to demonstrate that simplistic view is wrong, and thus to sow the seeds of doubt on everything else the church has taught.
“It is an issue that all of our Sunday Schools teach a very simple understanding of the Bible. It creates a real vulnerability that atheists know how to exploit. It is not hard to demonstrate that simplistic view is wrong, and thus to sow the seeds of doubt on everything else the church has taught.”
******
I agree, but I’d say that at the end of the complex education you are left with a mystery, which is by design, and the faith of a child and a simple point of view is the way to go.
So true! If only Christ had founded a church in which His earliest disciples would pass on His teachings and the correct interpretations, a Church protected by the Holy Spirit against teaching error, a Church which would endure through the millenia....
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