For all Christians out there, what are the hardest questions that you struggle with
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Anonymous
Faith provides a good fall-back response when logic doesn't work. |
Anonymous
Okay why does God create 10% of people whose "sin nature" is to be attracted to other people of the same sex, whereas the other 90% or so of us are attracted to people of the opposite sex but our "sin nature" is....what, I have no idea what it is. How is someone gay supposed to enjoy his sexuality if he can't express it in the way that he enjoys it? Would you be able to enjoy your sexuality if you were told it was a sin for you to love someone of the opposite sex, but that the only "right" way was with someone of your sex? Would you be able to force yourself to enjoy a bed with someone of your own sex? And if you think a gay man or a lesbian is supposed to force themselves to couple up with someone of the opposite sex, that is completely unfair not just to the gay man or lesbian, but to the partner you think they should be coupling with. I mean, for Zeus sake, would YOU like to be married to someone who deep down wasn't attracted to your gender and really didn't want to sleep with you but with your sibling of a different sex? So you are essentially saying that gay people are not allowed to express the sexuality that comes naturally to them. That, dear one, is called repression. And you are claiming that is what God wants. I claim that is BS. |
Anonymous
Everyone has a different sort of temptation that is hardest for them. It could be lying, cheating, stealing, murder even, homosexuality, and a few more. God didn’t make it extra hard for the 10% who are gay, EVERYONE has a main temptation they face. I wouldn’t force a gay person to get into a heterosexual relationship. All I know is that homosexuality is wrong. There is no universal answer for what ALL gay people should do in terms of a relationship. That’s up to them. If a told a murderer to stop murdering because it’s wrong, would you accuse me of trying to repress his natural behavior? People are driven to do bad things. If we don’t tell people what’s right and wrong, then the world will continue to be so messed up. Morality is supposed to get you to choose what’s right over your feelings. And to do that, you must force yourself to ignore temptation. That’s the bottom line. You can claim that everything God says is BS. But I would rather suffer for doing what’s right and ignoring my flesh than burn in hell. That’s much worse than anything you will suffer on Earth, Think about it. If Satan is real, then he would try to get everyone to hell. How? By saying “Yes you can murder, yes you can lie, and cheat, and steal, because there will be no consequences.” |
Anonymous
Things in Christianity deal with the supernatural: God, The Flood, Eden, The Ressurection, etc. That which is supernatural cannot be explained by natural laws or logic. That’s why it’s supernstural. Things in science are natural. The laws of physics and logic apply to them. But not to the supernatural Because God is supernatural, the natural laws of logic aren’t sufficient to explain things about Him. Logic and faith are two different categories depending on the subject you are talking about |
Anonymous
Jesus paid for all sins, past, present, and future. He didn’t END sin, he payed for it so that we could be redeemed. There’s a difference between paying for sins and ending its existence altogether. Does that help? Jesus’ death wasn’t about preventing everyone from sinning, he knew that they would so he made a way for them to pay off its price. |
Anonymous
| Obviously Jesus thought the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Mentioned several times in the NT. But it never came, never has come. So he was very wrong about that. Perhaps that's why he said "Father why hast thou forsaken me"? |
Anonymous
NP here, but been following this discussion. Just wanted to point out that the fundamental argument now has come down to “fire insurance.” Christian PP who is comparing gay people to serial killers really doesn’t care about anything but avoiding hell. The rest of it is just narcissistic pretzel logic. |
Anonymous
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2:54 here:
I recognize my comment was meaner than it should have been. As a recovering Christian, though, that’s what I struggle with. Growing up I was taught and believed that Christianity was inherently good and then only way to joy and peace and all that. However, as my experiences have not matched what I’ve been taught I lost both my personal faith and my faith in the entire “system.” Because what it comes down to, for most fundamentalist Christians, is believe or burn. Given Chris |
Anonymous
| Yes, fundamentalist/conservative Christians seem to have the most hate and act the least Christ like |
Anonymous
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Burning in hell forever. If God actually burns us alive in hell forever wouldn’t that make him the worst serial killer of them all. It’s disgusting how much evil that would take.
Whenever I hear about someone being killed my first thought is I hope they didn’t suffer. But if hell is real then it’s designed for us to suffer in the worst possible way forever. |
Anonymous
Also there's the question of why you would want to be in heaven forever if someone you loved dearly did not make it with you but was sent to hell or limbo. |
Anonymous
So you DO think God wants gays to repress their sexuality. And can you put into words WHY homosexuality is wrong and sinful, other than that's what God says? I mean, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why other sins are bad, beyond that God says they are. But what is inherentlly sinful about 2 men being in a lifelong loving relationship that includes them cherishing each other's bodies? And if you say it's sinful because they weren't made to procreate, you're then condemning all postmenopausal women all infertile people to singledom because they weren't make to procreate either. Also what's so sinful about not being able to procreate? Again, if you had a man who lost his genitals during a war, should he not be able to get married? |
Anonymous
When you go to heaven, you are not the same "you". Your relationships with other people aren't the same. That's what I was told. I have also recently learned that "hell" is not some burning firey pit, but a place that has the absence of the presence of God, like Limbo in Dante's Inferno. |
Anonymous
NP here. Sure -- my understanding is that the idea is that heaven is a place where you're closest to God (and therefore happiest), while hell is a place that is furthest from God. I guess my question, overall, is why some Christians tie themselves into logical knots trying to explain the obvious contradictions in the logic of their religion. Ex: Why would a forgiving, omnipotent God create anything but a peaceful, happy world? Why would such a God allow children to die? If the answer to those questions--as it often seems to be--is that God works in mysterious ways and we shouldn't question it, that doesn't seem particularly satisfying to many people (hence the decline in adherence to Christianity in much of the world). Of course, no religion is perfect, but there are traditions--like Buddhism and Hinduism, which granted many scholars don't consider "religions," per se, but more like life philosophies--that don't require so many instances of blind faith. They do involve belief in reincarnation, but other than that, there's not much that isn't supposed to be directly experienced by followers of Buddhism or Hinduism. There's no priest class that is supposedly inherently "better" than anyone else. There's even much less gender inequality--women can be Buddhist monks (they're called nuns) for example. The whole thing is about internal introspection and connection with something greater than the material world, with all its shortcomings. This is a long way of saying: if you're struggling so much with these questions, why not look into something different? |
Anonymous
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Reading this thread, a relatively narrow version of Christianity (American evangelical) is mostly what’s being represented. Probably because so many of the questions don’t apply to most mainline or progressive Christian theology and Biblical interpretation. Also because non-evangelicals tend to be less concerned with having a single correct answer.
And so much of evangelical Biblical interpretation involves twisting oneself into knot to justify really awful things (“Yes, God said to kill all of those women and children in the Old Testament and here’s why it was right and holy for him to do it”) because it’s built on a house of cards. I was often told, “if one verse isn’t true, then none of it’s true.” So you’re operating from a place of seeming certainty that’s masking existential fear that if you consider literary or historical context, or just a different understanding, your entire faith will crumble. The #exvangelical tag on Twitter is an interesting read and includes former evangelicals who are now part of other branches of Christianity or who are now atheist or agnostic. The Bible for Normal People podcast is a has a varied sampling of non-American fundamentalist biblical interpretation. They often have Jewish scholars on, which has really broadened my understanding of the Hebrew Bible and how differest schools of thought in Judaism have dealt with many of these questions for millennia. (Christians often forget that we share the majority of our scripture with a rigorous intellectual faith tradition from which we could learn a great deal.) (-former conservative evangelical, now Episcopalian) |