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Picking and choosing the bits you like and ignore the rest? And you call yourself a scientist? Seriously?

Gandalf2 wrote:QUOTE (Gandalf2 @ Jun 21 2012, 12:56 PM) Picking and choosing the bits you like and ignore the rest? And you call yourself a scientist? Seriously?

but (you could argue) that that is what everyone, in every Christian faith does (at least to an extent), why is taking it a step further too much different?

Large tracts of the bible's proclamations are ignored, expecially Leviticus etc.

If you are discarding the old testament (despite the fact Jesus supposedly said, repeatedly, he wasn't abolishing the old law) you could argue praying in a group is discouraged, In the New testament, or Women must have theirhead covered when they pray and have no hair braids?

The vast majority of Christian sects/denominations do not follow every line of the bible, to be honest, and the interpretation becomes wildly different, between the sects, and as time passes.

I don't believe in a deity, am quite open about the fact. But I try to be a decent man as far as I can, and help others where I can, give to charity, avoid murdering anyone etc., basically follow the worldly stuff that Christianity preaches.


Would I still be damned?

You dodged the point I was trying to make. I'm not focusing on the "religious" here.

I'm talking about "scientists" holding a position that is unscientific, and doesn't hold up in the face of the evidence in front of us (the Bible). CS Lewis puts it best.
QUOTE I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.[/quote]

Gandalf2 wrote:QUOTE (Gandalf2 @ Jun 21 2012, 01:43 PM) You dodged the point I was trying to make. I'm not focusing on the "religious" here.

I didn't dodge it, as it's pretty irrelevant to me, personally, I was just framing the question to get a direct answer to my last line (from the Lewis quote I think your answer is basically Yes).


I do note I've grown up in a historically Christian culture, and I do note that between my parent's teachings, and British culture leaves me with worldly morals that tie up with Christian worldly teaching pretty much, but the basic fact remains I do not believe in a supernatural power, or that Jesus was divine.

My view is Jesus was a Jewish rabbi leader of an apocalyptic sect, who was crucified. The christian faith came about due to some impressive and prolific evangelising by a number of writers (not least of which was Paul who brought in the gentiles etc., on which much of Modern Christianity is based).

QUOTE I'm talking about "scientists" holding a position that is unscientific, and doesn't hold up in the face of the evidence in front of us (the Bible). CS Lewis puts it best.[/quote]

This isn't really an discussion about science any more really is it? It's about what is doctrine, and what people believe happens to unbelievers on death.

OK then.

So you answer that if a person is decent but doesn't believe in Jesus, he doesn't go to heaven, which is basically what CS Lewis is implying, and what the bible says.

This God, to me sounds capricious and pretty unfair if you ask me (think of all those in cultures untouched by Christianity and doomed to hell from birth for a start), but c'est la vie.

QUOTE A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or something worse.[/quote]
Wow, that sounds really dogmatic and black and white. Ok, so presumably Jesus claimed to be the son of a god, even _the_ god. Granted, that is pretty outrageous, and if we don't accept the supernatural then this person was deluded in this sense.

Still his social message of treating others as we want ourselves to be treated, and wanting to upset the social order so that those in power must be humbled, and those at the lowest levels (prostitutes, criminals) should be accepted as fellow human beings is not diminished at all. He also preached about brotherly love, and sharing our wealth with those less fortunate.

Those teachings and values have effected our thinking, and their value is completely independent on whether that teacher also believed himself to be a poached egg.

***

Gandalf, I have a question I've been wanting to ask you for some time. You are a smart, educated guy, and somebody who takes Christianity in full seriousness. As far as I know, you are not a creationist, and you accept that the world is millions (ok, over a billion) years old. Presumably that also means that you accept that humanity is roughly half a million years old, and fully modern style Homo Sapiens Sapiens have been around for at least 50,000 years. There was some talk earlier where some of us tried to float the argument that if the world is exactly as described in the christian faith, it's deeply unfair and such a creator is playing a massively cruel game.

Before Jesus, the all mighty creator presumably only made himself known to the Jewish tribes. A tiny fraction of humanity, and this only happened a few thousand years ago. The rest of humanity was included only after the Jesus affair, and even then only those who have personally encountered the gospel had any chance to be saved.

So... the question notjarvis and Raveen have asked is very important. If god really only cares about living a good life, then one could see how all those countless millions have not been doomed to eternal torment with no fault of their own. If a caveman/-woman was a decent person, they would have gotten the eternal reward, despite not being jewish, nor having ever heard of Jesus who was thousands of years in the future still. If faith and religion is a requirement, then it seems the whole universe is run by a cruel lunatic, if this bible / christianity thing is literally true.

In further response to Adept's statement:
QUOTE Ignore the belief bit. What about good action without belief. Say, thinking about jesus as a normal human role model, and living an exemplary life... But without faith.[/quote]

Similarly to Gandalf, I feel that this statement is paradox. If you embrace Jesus for all that he was, and claimed to be, you wouldn't be having good action without belief. In fact, this concept of our actions having any significant implications to our salvation is in direct contradiction to the teachings of Jesus. According to him, it is not our actions which make us holy, but saved by the grace of God, through faith in Jesus Christ himself who has died to save us from sin.

Secondly, to take Jesus as a normal human role model, among many things, we would have to:

Study and teach the scriptures
Heal lepers
Heal the blind
Heal the deaf
Cast out demons
Walk on water
Feed a crowd of thousands with five loaves of bread and two small fish, with 12 baskets of food left over after all of that
Raise the dead
Be crucified for claiming to be God (YHWH) - If he had claimed to be the Son of God, or even "a god" or, Son of "a god", there would have been no legal basis for him to be crucified. He was given opportunities to retract his claim, but he didn't and eventually got crucified for his claim.
Be resurrected after being buried
Get taken up to heaven

If you were to take the entire account of Jesus's life and remove everything supernatural, there probably is not much left. Hence the paradox of your statement.


To notjarvis/adept:

Many of my friends who have been brought up in a Christian culture also tend to feel this way. Sometimes it is hard to experience the brute impact of God's grace when you have been immersed in an environment where the common moral approximates that of a Christian moral system. I am also not the best person to give a differing opinion because I would consider myself to be generally "good". Had I not known Jesus would I have been condemned to eternal punishment? If Jesus is the only way to salvation one can imply that without Jesus results in death. However, God is also at the same time a loving and righteous judge, who knows us perhaps even more than we know ourselves.

The best examples of salvation come from the testimonies of ex-hardcore criminals who have had their lives totally transformed. These people didn't even have to consider being condemned by God, when they were already condemned by the world and everyone around them. Some of them were even on death row. I have not personally met somebody who had been to the extent of being on death row, but here's an account from the net link - just one random page I managed to google.

Jesus has even loved the most condemned of the world and given them more than forgiveness, but a new and abundant life. Would this loving God also crush one of pure heart who has not known the Gospel? Much of the scripture seems to appear so, but yet if take the scripture as a whole, there is always a counterpoint somewhere that would result in a less than 100% certainty regardless of what stand you take on this matter.

Adept, this question you pose is arguably the most difficult to answer. I would dare to say that it is a mistake to even try to answer it, because that would imply a claim to certainty on the fate of a particular individual. This is something which is only in the hands of God. I feel that giving an absolute answer is bordering on sin or blasphemy itself.

However, the inability to answer the question is not very significant to my faith, because Jesus has not called us to attempt to fully understand the nature of God, but simply to follow his teachings. You have rightly outlined some of the attributes which are generally good moral values. Jesus said that if we love God, we would obey the commandments:

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

In essence it is only one commandment, because out of the complete Love of God, the rest of the commandments will flow accordingly. Our call is to HELP people in true need, by having a loving heart that stems from our love for God. Jesus also told us to preach the Gospel, which is translated as "good news". Saying that all unbelievers are damned to hell, and that conversion to one's faith is the only answer, seems to be like blackmail instead of good news. Jesus certainly didn't go around threatening judgement to those he ministered to, and certainly did not desire for us to smack everybody on the head with the doctrine of hell.

It is no wonder that many seem to think that God is a cruel lunatic, because as Christians many of us have not simply obeyed what Jesus has called us to do. Perhaps we could talk about judgement and salvation, and perhaps we could talk about other things of a more philosophical nature, but unless we have fulfilled the basic and most important call as Christians, as what Jesus has taught, it is best to leave those discussions till a future time.

grarrgrarr wrote:QUOTE (grarrgrarr @ Jun 21 2012, 06:02 PM) Adept, this question you pose is arguably the most difficult to answer. I would dare to say that it is a mistake to even try to answer it, because that would imply a claim to certainty on the fate of a particular individual. This is something which is only in the hands of God. I feel that giving an absolute answer is bordering on sin or blasphemy itself.

I find this to be a truly poisonous viewpoint. It is the adult (priesthood) saying to the child "this is not for you to know, you just need to obey". Unquestioning "child's faith" is celebrated in the bible.

It's a self reinforcing cycle that keeps peoples minds in the dark, scaring them with eternal torture if they start to question the sacred tenants. Do not want.

I have probably been misunderstood on certain aspects. I was merely saying that giving an absolute answer was incorrect only because we do not truly possess an absolute answer, and not that to know was a sin. To overextend partial knowledge into some sort of definite conclusion (especially on such a serious topic) was the error I was speaking against.

Perhaps you have met with some leaders of the church who has taken the stand as you have described in your previous post. However, I will show a verse which is commonly quoted by many:

7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 “For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 “Or what man is there among you who, when his son asks for a loaf, will give him a stone? 10 “Or if he asks for a fish, he will not give him a snake, will he? 11 “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!

This comes from Matthew 7 and is quoted from Jesus himself. Perhaps it is not God who wants to keep us in the dark, but the (gasp..) priesthood you are speaking about? This is an excerpt from the link I posted earlier:

QUOTE I have counseled with a number of men on four units of the prison system, but the doors are practically barred to me now because there were too many of them wanting to be baptized, and the denominational chaplains and the manager of the prison did not want those people baptized.[/quote]

Since baptizing new believers are one of the teachings of Jesus, would these "ministers of God" be deemed to be following Jesus by stopping willing people from being baptized?

It is not God who wants us to be kept in the dark, but men who are only able to keep their authority by playing on our fears and keeping us from the truth. This is strikingly similar to Jesus's stance towards the Pharisees, who were the "priesthood" of his time.

But all of that is true if, and only if the universe really is run by an omnipotent god of the Torah, Quran and the Bible.

The whole thing constitutes and extraordinary claim, and hence requires extraordinary proof. I appreciate you sharing your viewpoint with us grarrgrarr, but I do have to question the fundamentals of it. Having some subjective supernatural experiences has somehow convinced you that the christian world view is correct, lock, stock and barrel. Isn't it a much more reasonable assumption that your subconscious has helped you work out things you hadn't quite realised yet about your motivation at the university and your relationship with your family. Fortunate timing is just that, fortunate timing.

Our brains are great at spotting patterns and making intuitive leaps. Unfortunately it can be a drawback as well, as we easily draw very strange cause-effect conclusions as a result.

I would be inclinded to agree with you, Adept, namely on the whole "you don't need to know, just obey" deal since I live to question everything.

Going to think about it while I mow the lawn. Write more soon.