Posted on 03/04/2025 8:42:14 AM PST by SeekAndFind
You’d have to read his testimony to understand he’s been a work in progress his whole life long. When I read his statement of what he’s come to believe and realize where he started out.... I stand in awe of God’s Spirit, and of how relentlessly He pursues us.
Did he convert to Christianity - or did he accept Christ as his Savior?
It’s the most important thing a person can do. Our time here is short.
Saul of Tarsus was an unlikely convert.
The believers in those days didn’t believe it or trust him for a while.
Blessed are merciful for they shall receive mercy. If God can forgive so can we who claim to be His followers.
Thanks. Reading it:
Even in the last few years leading up to my conversion, the arguments made in debates by theists like William Lane Craig still struck me as glib; he seemed to sidestep obvious problems that the non-philosopher atheists were usually not philosophically acute enough to pick up on. The approach that Craig and others took struck me as earnest, but ultimately intellectually dishonest.4 But the atheists were—to my disappointment, because I really wanted allies—actually worse. To me, they came across as clownish, often merely mocking, and apparently incapable of addressing anything but the most simplistic versions of the arguments. They insisted strongly that anyone who merely failed to believe in the existence of any god was properly called an “atheist.” Under such a definition, I was an atheist. Yet I was not like them: I was always willing to consider seriously the possibility that God exists.
The atheists typically, by contrast, said that they simply lacked a belief that God exists, but their mocking attitude screamed that God did not exist. In my experience, the people who call themselves “atheists,” regardless of how they define this term, rarely take the possibility of God’s existence seriously.
Debated some on Quora,com, and that is indeed the norm. God is typically not tolerated even as a hypothesis, but they need an object for their anger, and engage in irrational, ignorant charges. So I have/do I though.
I tell them they have a lot of faith.
Yes, worth reading. One excerpt:
Critics of the religious right often seem to forget that Christianity as a moral culture, beyond its religious and political tenets, instructed people to work hard, to hope for a better life, to treat others kindly and donate to charity, to practice the graces of humility and self-respect, to rein in our passions and practice moderation, to take responsibility for ourselves and our dependents, and much more. It wasn’t all good, but much of it was. It taught the very idea of obligation, which has grown much weaker for many of us. It was an organizing, all-encompassing, core part of the Western civic culture. But really no more.
ping
In truth,Jesus finds you and calls you. You don't "find" Him.
(Saying this, as a Methodist Preacher's Kid who "found" Jesus by seeing at age 34, finishing my Ph. D. work in a branch of physical chemistry, marital family life ruined, and came to the realization that there was no other place to go or to believe in except regarding one's existence from God's point of view. That was 54 yeas ago, spiritual rebirth 'birthday" on May 24, as of 1971. Abundant life thereafter, 88 y.o. now, a recruiter and discipler of babes-in-Christ.)
Matthew 20:1-16. Something Jesus said. But you are probably a better Judge of your fellow man, right?
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