Posted by Ezekiel 25:17 on April 15, 2001 at 02:57:06:
Oh boy, I guess as a general rule, no matter how well organised the bulletin board, I have managed to mess it up once more :)
Thus for clarity and sanity’s sake, I’ve decided to try and amalgamate all the numerous posts and debates into one :) With even more precision and skill, I’ll even attempt to keep it to within 8000 characters!
:To come back to this point, I think that all Christians should be skeptical. Yes, as your knowledge of God grows, your faith will too. However, God does not call us to blindly believe in everything that we hear. Think of all of the atrocities of the Catholic church and consider that they, even though they were acting under what they called the "power of God", they still did things that were bad and evil.
Firstly, I concede your point that you can be Christian and sceptical . However, I am interested in just what to believe? The bible, the pope, your local priest? The Catholic Church has made some colossal mistakes in the past, and now Popes are apparently infallible?
: But most (and I must say most) Christian churches believe in the perfection of the Bible. That it is the perfect word of God. It is another piece of faith.
I’m not sure I understand your point here. The bible is perfect, even though there are numerous translations? Is your point that we should take the general meaning of the bible rather than any of the numerous quotations to heart?
: the Holy Spirit came down to inhabit all Christians. God does speak to us. Through this entity that we have within us.
Interesting point. Does the Holy Spirit inhabit us when we become Christians? Or does it exist inherently within each of us before we convert? Is proof of devout Christianity, the ability to communicate with the Holy Spirit?
:Adam did sin in Eden. He committed the sin making him not perfect. O.K. Can something not perfect create something that is perfect? The answer to that is no, of course. So, we are all burdened from birth, because of this.
If God is perfect, surely anything he created would also be perfect without the ability to become imperfect. However, even assuming the entire biblical creation story to be true (world created in 7 days), I find it difficult to believe that the whole of humanity was born from Adam and Eve. Especially since they only had 2 sons. How did the human race come into being?
:The Father, it is true, did not like what happened with His children after the fall. However, God gave humanity an out. He put a family on the ark so that humanity may survive, not just Noah. Also, it is well recorded that God is very passionate. Sometimes very benevolent and sometimes very angry. Just like we are.
Again I find it difficult to reconcile this story with reality. An ark filled with 2 animals and all the people in the world? Not to mention the difficulty with logistics and feeding all the varied wildlife, again I find it hard to believe that entire species can be spawned from one male and one female without resorting to incest.
This is yet another example of when God has decided to interfere with humanity. If God chose to do this in the past, why does he not continue his activities in modern day. Surely, there are more disbelievers and sinners now, then there were back in the past. If he chooses not to use any more floods, is this an indication he was wrong to do so originally? If God appeared and chastised humanity, perhaps he would have achieved better results than devastation via a flood.
:In the Pentateuch, the Law is set up so that there could be a sacrificial lamb to negate sins. These people had to find a lamb that was pure and undefiled, and sacrifice it in a particular way. Jesus was pure and undefiled. He was the sacrifice. The display on the Cross, although impressive, was to fulfill a promise made by the Father in the Old Testament.
Animal sacrifices? This is where the Christian faith grew in line with many pagan beliefs. Examples include: holy day being Sunday, which in pagan terms was when they worshipped the Sun. Jesus’s birth being celebrated on the 25th December, also coincidentally the birth of the Egyptian God Osiris. Much of this is related to the fact that when Christianity was alive in the Roman Empire, the emperor in an attempt to merge all religions into one to stop infighting, combined many pagan religions into Chrisitianity. Are you saying that to absolve sin in this day and age, all we have to do is sacrifice an innocent animal? An antiquated belief for antiquated times.
:Actually, in one of the Gospels, Jesus says,"Blessed is he who believe without seeing." Our blessing is rewarded by Him because we beleive without having to be a witness.
Gullible is he who believes without seeing. We receive further rewards if we believe without seeing? I thought the ultimate reward was heaven. If you saw and believed, you would end up in heaven. If you didn’t see and believed, you end up in a better heaven?
:Quite frankly, God's whole premise is that this world stinks. After the fall, the world became infested with sin. His call is that we should be better people in spite of the fact that we live in a fallen, sinful, imperfect world. We have a guide book (the Bible), an example to follow (Jesus) and a perfect God to have faith in.
Frankly, if that’s God’s attitude, I question his supposed perfection. As the Creator of this universe, he has direct responsibility in all aspects regarding life. Perhaps I would be a better person if God was a better God.
Throughout your post, we have direct testimony stating that God can be both benevolent and angry, prefers human and animal sacrifice and is willing to cause natural disasters when his creations break his commandements. An understanding, forgiving and loving God? Not.
What we have is a guide book full of contradictions (the Bible), an illusion to follow (Jesus) and a petulant God to have faith in.
:Before we go on, why can't the Bible be true, and these faulty humans be wrong?
Humans are often wrong. The point of the numerous websites is to point out the numerous inconsistencies in the bible both contextually and in direct contrast to other passages. I won’t pretend to know the Bible off by heart or even consider myself such a scholar that I can better the masses of material already present out there.
:Didn't burn myself by the way...Even though you didn't have doubts, you were still wrong.
Of course I had doubts, but I consider the point irrelevant in any case, as whether you had burned yourself or not means little to me, although if you had, I would sympathise. What I did, was accept your word that you had burned yourself, so frankly what you just did was admit you lied :)
:Certainly if there was a being greater than God (and we don't know that)that being would judge God. However, we are not God. He has the power to judge us as we have the power to judge a painting as being a good piece of art or not.
As humans, we rely on our judgement throughout our lives. We judge everything, every action and everybody. We often even prejudge situations and people. We may be right, and we may be wrong. However, this is our pre-rogative, and when you see your Gov’t doing a poor job, or someone doing something wrong, than it is our right to question why things are so. If God is out there, I believe he’s doing an extremely poor job and should know about it. If God has no accountability, we are stating that God is a dictator.
:Christianity's been around for a long, long time and so has Judaism. Each longer than 200 years.
:Population of the churches world-wide are only growing...
This last point is really irrelevant, it was just something I threw in. Having more or less believers is no proof in either case that there is or is not a God.
James 5:16