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[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]

Blah, blah, blah...  at the end of the day, you are following a fictional story. Its like dedicating yourself to Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. 🙃🫠☺️[/quote]

No. If we were following the rules to quidditch then I could see why that would be a waste of time. But these are rules of life that make us better people. If Jesus didn't teach them -- which most scholars agree he actually historically did -- then they are still good rules to live by.[/quote]

Like any book that is an amalgamation of different characters, time periods, and story events, some have good moral lessons or rules to go by.

Harry Potter and Percy Jackson also have moral lessons to live by. [/quote]

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