Reply to WAKE UP

Forum Index » Religion

Reply to "WAKE UP"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am an atheist but without my judgement being clouded by god can see that OP is a naive idiot.

Christians are not required to allow themselves to be massacred by Islamic terrorists without fighting back.
[/quote]

NOT ON CHRISTMAS DAY. We fight back by showing them why Christianity is the best religion in the world. We exemplify the word of God. I said for anyone who knows Christ -- not you in other words.[/quote]

Atheists often know Christ - many even believed in him once.[/quote]

How can you be an atheist and know Christ? Sincere question.[/quote]

Easily, as a pp said, many atheists were once Christians.  So we know all about Christ.  We were taught it, like any other Christian.

Plus, you don't even need to be a Christian to know Christ.  He's famous.  He has a religion named after him.  People learn about him in school.[/quote]

Actually, I’m not sure this is true.   There is a major difference between hearing about Jesus in a church where your parents dragged you there and truly understanding the Gospel of Jesus Christ in both your mind and heart in a way that changes you.

I know first-hand.

I grew up in a Catholic Church — 18 years, mass every week, all the other “Catholic” stuff.  None of it made any impression on me.  I heard the readings from the Bible but didn’t understand what any of it meant.  My only take away was “do good, be good” and that type of religion became a major burden after awhile.   I very much thought that the premise of Christianity was — basically be a good person - go to church etc — and maybe one day when you die, your cosmic positives outweigh your cosmic negatives and you make it to heaven.   Or at least purgatory.   After awhile, in my early 20s, I gave up on it all, became an atheist, and lived a life for the world — focused on career, work, money, travel, having fun, and getting laid, not always in that order.

In my early 40s, after a personal crisis, I  very unexpectedly started to give religion a second look.  I found the sermons of Tim Keller and they completely changed my life.   The Jesus that Tim Keller talks about is NOT the same Jesus I heard about growing up.   The fundamental message is different.   Christianity is not trying to follow a bunch of strict rules so you can go to heaven.  Rather, it is about our innate inability to follow the rules — and the need for a savior who followed the rules for us and us receiving a gift of righteousness from him purely on the basis of our faith in him.  That’s a radically different motivation structure.  I stopped doing a lot of crappy things in my life not because I was white knuckling it, but because I actively wanted to reflect back the love of Christ after seeing and believing what he had done for me and realizing how beautiful it was.

Also, there are many Christian hypocrites don’t get me wrong, but God truly blessed me by putting into my life a bunch of serious Christians who are living out their faith and are truly different from the other people I see in my life, mainly at work, but also in my Catholic family too.  Those years of Catholic masses never rubbed off very much on my parents who constantly fought and my some of my grandparents who harbored a lot of racial animosity.    My church is beautiful and diverse and seeing a group of people like this come together in the body of Christ every week truly is wonderful.

Maybe I am an outlier, but I feel like most Christians who leave the faith never truly understand the Gospel, nor are they around other Christians really living out their faith.  I certainly didn’t and wasn’t.  But the real Gospel and a true faith community changed my life.   [/quote]

Unfortunately you are an outlier because you are trying to live the faith.  Most Christians in America are not.  It's a lot of lip service.  They LIVE their life in a way that is antithetical to the teachings of Christ while crowing loud and long about what faithful Christians they are and how much the looooooooove Jesus.  Honestly they make me sick to my stomach. They use Jesus' name to justify hatred and cruelty. It's outright evil. They do not understand the first thing about grace or forgiveness.  They are all talk.  And they are part of why so many people turn away from Christianity in this country.  Let's face it, we, people, are the Church.  If the flock behaves like a bunch of nasty hypocrites, what decent person isn't going to say this is BS and go elsewhere for community?

I am genuinely glad for you that you have found a community where people try to follow the teachings of Jesus.  But yes, you are an exception.

And I would add, I found a lot of meaning in going to the Catholic Church as a child and teen.  The service and the readings were not hollow to me, I felt them deeply, maybe because of my mother, who is a very kind, accepting, and spiritual person who lives Christ's teachings.  But as I got older and looked around me, reconciling what has been done by clergy and what some supposed Catholics do has been hard to deal with for me.  The dissonance between the teachings and the behavior of people is, frankly, infuriating.[/quote]

I was the long poster.  I understand the sentiment about corrupt church leaders.  It’s hurtful and wrong and leaves many people disillusioned with church.

But ….

Christianity comes down to one issue — did Jesus rise from the dead?  If the answer is yes, then he is the son of god and everything he says mattered.    If the answer is no, then nothing he said matters at all.  Everything turns on that question.

If you believe the answer is yes — then corrupt church leaders don’t really matter too much.   They have nothing to do with whether Jesus was the son of God.

Also, when you truly grasp the concept of sin, you can recognize that everyone is a sinner.   Some people use religion as a way to cover up their sinful lives.   Or they do religious “things” as a way to try to show the rest of the world how “holy” they are.  But when you do that, you are being your own savior as opposed to looking to Jesus as your savior.

Framing it this way has helped me get past the hurt that comes from flawed church leaders.   [/quote]

Not only did Jesus not rise from the dead, he wasnt ever a real person, just like Harry Potter or Iron Man. [/quote]

Don't be ridiculous. Of course Jesus was a real person. No one disputes that.[/quote]

Don't be ignorant. Of course Jesus is made up. A lot of people dispute it. (There's even a whole discussion about it in this same subforum)[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics