Posted on 06/22/2013 9:02:59 AM PDT by ReformationFan
That is not a principle but an ethic. Ask yourself what the principles that ethic is based on.
I know what it is about.
The message of Jesus to love one another is indeed a principle to live by...We all have the choice to believe or reject his divinity....and we all have our own personal reasons why we do so....
But to claim that Christianity is anything other than Christ’s desire for us to love one another, is a lie and a misrepresentation used to lead people away from his message.
I love the Lord Jesus Christ, and I will love, serve, and follow Him to the best of my abilities and with the help of the Holy Spirit, all the days of my life.
But I think that American churches which proselytize a 'gospel' of 'cheap grace' and 'believe it-receive it' materialism are the greatest factor in repelling both earnest believers and seekers alike.
People who are spiritually poor, wounded, needy, desperate, and hungry are looking for the indestructible shelter of God's love and grace through the atoning sacrifice of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.
But instead of gently receiving, accepting, and coming alongside these people, and showing them the redemptive, restorative love of Christ, the American church gives them a Valium.
God tells us in in His Word that the Church is the living Body of Christ. The Church is the only Christ that the world can see. Yet we have taken that wondrous, vibrant, glorious gift, denied the price God paid to found it, and stripped it of its holiness in order to 'get with the times' and fill more seats. We have removed the simplicity of God's truth and redecorated it with gaudiness, populated its pulpits with hypocrites, and turned the Gospel into a TBN-style freak show. We have taken the Bride of Christ and turned her into a prostitute.
Who in their right minds would be attracted to a monstrosity like that?
Albion, your unbelief is a good example of the free will that God grants us. He allows us to choose between good and evil, between right and wrong, between belief and unbelief, and also between a lukewarm belief and robust belief.
Many of us have traversed the road you are on. How many times I have prayed the old prayer, “Help thou mine unbelief!”
You have asked some good questions which deserve an answer. I am working right now but I want to sit down and read your post carefully so I can respond. I’ll answer you tonight.
In his opinion, most preachers were just beggars coming around asking for money in exchange for a ticket to heaven. He thought that if heaven was real, then any of those who had died, would have found a way to tell us about it, as some had promised in his day. None did.
I wish I had found the book "My Descent into Death, A Second Chance at Life" by Howard Storm before my dad passed away.
Howard Storm was an atheist college professor who had a near death experience and lived to came back to tell about it.
The experience radically altered his perceptions of reality and death, since, unlike many who experience the light and/or long dead relatives and friends coming to welcome them when they die, he went to the other place.
There are many books written by those from all ages and all walks of life who have experienced near death and come back and their stories are remarkably similar, despite their different ages, backgrounds and education.
You owe it to yourself to explore this more fully. I wish my father had.
Perhaps that church could use a refresher course and some sales training.
I only offer observations about those who make claims of authority, yet whose actions show a curious reluctance to lead by example and usually drive those in need away.
That seems harmful and contrary to their mission, but what do I know? Not much.
Fortunately, it's not hard to find God if you are willing to look for Him. He will help the earnest, as well as the wretched, to develop the ears to hear and the eyes to see.
3. have a friend or relative that is gay. Have met 3 thus far that have said that to me.
You got that right. I've seen it in Pentecostalism where you are judged as to your spirituality but whether you speak in tongues, fall down (slain), how exuberant you are in worship, to put it kindly, etc.
There are the have's and the have not's. It is a very judgmental atmosphere and I can see why people reject it.
The problem is, they end up rejecting God, not what is wrong in the local church body.
OK I am ready to answer you now that I have had a chance to go over your post carefully. I’ll deal the first part of your post first.
You said: You said “I don’t believe I am evil by nature and need a moral code to keep me in check.”. So don’t believe you are “evil by nature”, but since you don’t define what evil is, you have no yardstick to measure by. Without a standard, a way of determining what is good and what is evil, how can anyone say whether they are evil or good ?
You add in that you “don’t need a moral code to keep me in check”, which is, in truth, advocating having no laws. After all, if people don’t need a moral code to keep them in check, that means everyone will do the right thing at all times. Well, perhaps not everyone, so perhaps you say a moral code is needed for some people, but not good, moral atheists like yourself. How can society know who needs to be subject to a moral code, and who will be moral without a code ? And, without a moral code, how would we know a moral action from an immoral one ?
OK. In the context of the bible evil would mean unfit for existence, since the punishment for sin is death. So according to the bible man in his fallen state is so wrong that he will die unless he changes his ways and not only die but be punished eternally. So I as an individual, am saddled from birth with this stain because of the actions of two people. I need to ask for forgiveness and atone for my sin or I will be burned in hell and be tormented for all of eternity. So by my nature I am unfit for existence. I would define evil as that which is wrong or harmful to man’s life. So according to the bible I am wrong by nature and my own nature is harmful to my life or evil.
When I said I didn’t need a moral code to keep me in check I was speaking to the nature of morality. Since I don’t believe I am unfit for existence from birth and need to be constrained from doing evil by the threat of punishment I view morality as a guide to help me choose the actions which will bring me the greatest happiness and success in life. What is a moral code and why do we need one. Morality is simply that which is right. Right for what, what is the standard by which we measure what is right? Well the standard depends on your purpose. Man is not like other creatures in that he has to choose his course of action in the face of many alternatives. So the primary choice, the one which precedes all others is does he want to live or to die. Since man has a fixed nature with fixed requirements for life that is the standard by which the good is decided on. So that which is harmful to man’s life is the evil and that which sustains man’s life as a human being in accordance with his nature is the good. The things which man practices to achieve the values he needs are virtues and the actions that harm his life are vices.
So a moral code of values is absolutely essential to every single man if he wishes to live and the standard to choose those values is his life and that which it requires according to his nature as man. Morality then is literally a matter of life and death. Laws are required in society because, unfortunately, some people choose death over life. The purpose of laws is to protect man’s rights and man’s life must be the standard of value used to determine what laws we put in place.
You said: Your next statement shows the naivete taught in our educational system: “I know that being moral is in my own rational interest”. Very often people do things that further their own ends at the expense of someone else. If you know for sure that you can get away with stealing a little here and there from the government or some big company, and no one will ever find out, (just think of the tens of millions of people cheating on disability or welfare programs), then your own purely rational interest is well-served if you help yourself to what’s not yours.
If someone drops $8,000 and you pick it up, and you know for a fact that they have no idea where they dropped it, and no one will ever know that you picked it up - if you just clam up and keep the money - you are ahead by $8,000. That’s acting in “your own rational interest”.
Where in this as yet unspecified and undefined “atheist’s moral code” does it say that taking money that’s not yours but just “falls into your lap” is wrong ?
By what standard do you gauge whether something is moral or immoral ?
OK, let’s look at this. The essence of your question is why shouldn’t I better my life by harming others whenever and where ever I can get away with it. Wouldn’t that be a neat trick to pull? The short answer is no.
To take your example of the dropped $8,000, what would be the essence of that action? It would be the attempt to gain or keep a value by fraud and force. The money is not mine by right. I didn’t earn it. It rightfully belongs to the other man unless he also stole it. Nothing can change that fact. Because reality exists independent of my thoughts and wishes, No matter how I might attempt to justify keeping the money, it will always be wrong. Would the money bring me any happiness? Not if my purpose is life. Say I took the money down and bought a new four wheeler. In your example you say that no one would ever find out but that is not true. I would know. Every time I used it I would know that I hadn’t earned it and it was not mine by right. If I bought food with it I would know with each bite that it was stolen. And there are much wider implications. How would I explain to my friends why I could suddenly afford four wheelers and lobster tails. Since reality is a consistent whole all facts are connected. I would be forced to lie about where the money came from, and then to concoct other lies to cover those lies until the truth would become my enemy and lying a virtue. If life and reality are my purpose then how can I achieve them by setting myself against reality? So the money could never be a value to me and nothing the money ever bought could be either. So the reason not to take the money is that it is not in my own rational interest. If I held that lying and cheating were a virtue and honesty a vice then what would my purpose be? What would I achieve by practicing those virtues and avoiding the vices of honesty and fairness? If I set myself against existence then what am I after? Do you think those people who cheat the welfare codes are happy or can ever be happy. No, they have forever cheated themselves from any chance at happiness or success. Ask yourself what their answer to that primary choice I talked about earlier is.
The principle involved is that honesty, the recognition of reality, is a virtue. The founders set this principle down in the declaration. They correctly recognized that man exists with certain inalienable rights. To violate any man’s rights is to violate every man’s including my own. So that is why fraud, rape, murder, stealing and all other forms of the initiation of force are wrong. It can never be in anyone’s rational interest to help themselves to what’s not theirs.
I have explored it fully. I would have to take this man’s words on faith since I can’t verify what he experienced. There have been many experiments to try and verify these out of body experiences and none have ever produced any actual evidence.
People just like us, who lived where we do now 200 years ago, would see our technology, which we now take for granted, as miraculous.
We could explain the science of the unseen around them, the vast electromagnetic spectrum for which we barely have the physical senses to comprehend even a sliver of, and all that has come from our new understanding of it, the silicon based electronics and software code, but they would know that we were lying to them.
We are generally doubting Thomases until we see it for ourselves. That is me.
So, I offer one more from my path, a book by a neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander who survived the unsurvivable and also came back fully intact, miraculous all by itself, to tell about it.
His book, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife, is written from his point of view as a brain surgeon who, like many of his colleagues, clearly agreed with you prior to his own experience.
He and they also would have told you that there is no way anyone in his condition would survive it, and even if they did, there's no way they'd have much of a brain left, let alone fully recover a neurologist's education, training and experience.
As such, perhaps he is uniquely qualified to address your comment to me, should you be curious.
Personally, if I can't check it out myself, then I want to hear from those who have.
I've had many of his undergrad classes, so I understand the language and much of the basic brain areas/functions, and had some first hand experiences, so his experience and point of view was helpful.
Interestingly, he wrote his own experience down first, before exploring the vast library of other people's experiences, so as not to taint writing/documenting his understanding/explanation immediately afterward, while it was still fresh in his mind, with another person's terminology or experiences.
Howard Storm's book from his experience as an atheist was my first. Dr. Eben Alexander's book from a hard core, practical science/medical point of view was the third book.
The second book was from a child's point of view: Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back by Todd Burpo.
Todd Burpo is a reverend in a small town, so his point of view is Christian, but mostly of a father trying to help his dying son and then understand his son's remarkable experience.
For me, that's essentially three points of view, a hostile non-believer's, a practical scientist/Surgeon's and a more or less guile-less child's, all describing the same experience.
There are others, but I wanted to show that I have been doing some due diligence, as well as share some of what I have found.
Another book I've not had a chance to get back to is Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace.
At this point in my reading, he's written about his study of the events of the Bible from his point of view and training and experience as a homicide investigator.
He is showing me things I hadn't noticed before and I like having information, the more the better.
Though I've not read any of Lewis, I was especially taken by J. Warner Wallace's starting perspective when he began his investigation:
Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance.
The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.
--C.S. Lewis
I had not heard that before, but couldn't argue with it. Nor could I say that I have fully explored something that could be of infinite importance, but I like a challenge.
I hope that I am not proselytizing or being aggressive with this post or this information.
I absolutely cannot stand religious aggression against me, especially by the newly born again who I tolerate and the fake preachers which I do not, so I hope I haven't morphed into either one of those with this post.
I appreciate your comments and don’t take them as proselytizing. I too read a great many of those books about near death experiences. In the end I concluded that no matter how many of them I read I would still have to take the author’s word on faith. There are experiments being run right now to try to produce real evidence of these experiences and so far they have failed. I don’t know what is going on and neither does anyone else. To be honest I would like them to be true but that doesn’t make them true. When someone produces some real evidence and can verify these experiences I will believe. The same thing goes for alien abductions, past life experiences and M theory. No amount of eye witness accounts by themselves is sufficient evidence of anything. If all we had were eye witness accounts of the holocaust but there were no physical evidence such as bodies, ovens, prison camps, photos and movies then it would not be rational to believe in the holocaust.
Yes, many people do take much on faith but not me. Those Indians might well take my ipod or cell phone as magic but they would be wrong. Their’s would be an error of knowledge. They would be capable of learning the background knowledge to understand these technologies. I cannot fathom what technologies will exist 100 years from now. It will not be magic though but technology of which I would also have to learn the background knowledge of. Because we don’t know the reason for something, we are not justified to believe that it must be supernatural. Many of the things men used to attribute to supernatural forces have now been shown to be natural phenomenon.
I can argue with that C.S. Lewis quote. If Christianity is false it is of immense importance because ideas matter a great deal. All of history has been determined by ideas. Ideas are the most powerful force in the universe. The wrong ideas lead to destruction and the right ones bring about happiness and prosperity or at least the best chance of obtaining them. America was founded on some great and true ideas. Unfortunately some very evil ideas were also present right from the start of this country and those ideas are bringing this country down before our eyes. Ask yourself what those ideas are and where they are being taught and promoted. There is one fundamental idea that is false and is at the root of all of the major religions and also at the foundations of Progressivism, Natzism, Socialism, Communism and fascism and if we could just get rid of it once and for all it would bring about the greatest prosperity the world has ever known.
I suspect we will have to agree to disagree for the remainder of our consciousnesses when we find out for certain.
Regardless of whether or not science is eventually able to support or disprove their theories regarding existence or the experience of Purgatory/Hades and of Jesus, as those NDEs document, I have read and experienced enough to support both faith and fear.
And, along the way, I have curiously found that "peace that comes from understanding" others have spoken of, but I had never experienced.
I think I had to live enough life first, the good, bad and the ugly, before whatever had blocked my understanding was lifted. For all of that, I am grateful. I asked and I did receive.
i canned religion for hot rods and drag racing 68 years ago and never looked back!
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