EPTThere is plenty of Bible segments that are open to interpretation which causes many arguments and therefore I do not wish to debate such matters as they do little to help one another on the matters of faith. Faith in itself is not dependant on semantics in scripture but only truth and the love for truth will always lead one aright.
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This is the rest of the e-mail - just wishy washing crap in my opinion:
Since reading your reply I am further convinced that you are indeed in a season or better put as by Nancy Missler 'a night season'. It in interesting that Nancy has found the night season that so many Christians enter of such vital importance that she has developed an entire study program on the topic. I wonder if you can fully relate to her personal testimony and experience of loss and trial of faith. I honestly think the situation she went through is one of the worse. The book's chapters available online and if you are willing may give some final perspective.
http://www.kingshighway.org/faith_in_night_seasons/chapter_1.html
A piece of scripture that has helped me considerably over the last 5 years is this Hebrews chapter 4. I think verses 1-2 does not disqualify someone such as yourself where you have clearly understood the promises of God, however from what you have said appear to have run into a mountain that seams un-passable. Yet to everyone has been given a measure of faith including yourself which I am sure you can not deny. Ones existence in this world relies so heavily on faith principles. It's just what or better put who one places their faith (trust being a similar work) in. Either God or the things conceived in the mind of men.
One such change is from the physical birth to the spiritual birth which I am confident you have experienced. This experience when one is baptised in the Holy Spirit is as Jesus put it 'I in them and you in Me'. Therefore whether you are conscious of the fact that the Spirit of God has taken up residency in you is irrelevant that He will certainly continue to try for the better influence your life. Jesus' death on the cross purging the outcome of sin in which you believed at a point in time in your life has for all time affected it in the best of ways. Relying on nothing else than this fact means you have access to the strongest authority in the universe on your side.
Since reading your reply I am further convinced that you are indeed in a season or better put as by Nancy Missler 'a night season'. It in interesting that Nancy has found the night season that so many Christians enter of such vital importance that she has developed an entire study program on the topic. I wonder if you can fully relate to her personal testimony and experience of loss and trial of faith. I honestly think the situation she went through is one of the worse. The book's chapters available online and if you are willing may give some final perspective.
http://www.kingshighway.org/faith_in_night_seasons/chapter_1.html
A piece of scripture that has helped me considerably over the last 5 years is this Hebrews chapter 4. I think verses 1-2 does not disqualify someone such as yourself where you have clearly understood the promises of God, however from what you have said appear to have run into a mountain that seams un-passable. Yet to everyone has been given a measure of faith including yourself which I am sure you can not deny. Ones existence in this world relies so heavily on faith principles. It's just what or better put who one places their faith (trust being a similar work) in. Either God or the things conceived in the mind of men.
One such change is from the physical birth to the spiritual birth which I am confident you have experienced. This experience when one is baptised in the Holy Spirit is as Jesus put it 'I in them and you in Me'. Therefore whether you are conscious of the fact that the Spirit of God has taken up residency in you is irrelevant that He will certainly continue to try for the better influence your life. Jesus' death on the cross purging the outcome of sin in which you believed at a point in time in your life has for all time affected it in the best of ways. Relying on nothing else than this fact means you have access to the strongest authority in the universe on your side.
Do you Christians agree with this statement? If so then you should seek to find the truth. Would you prefer to be called a seeker of the truth or a Christian with total faith. Please don't take this as an attack on you which you seem to misinterpret my opinions to be. To quote Michael Laws: "Diplomacy is just another word for lying". I am all in favour of being blunt and I much prefer discussions where beliefs aren't sugar coated in order to appease someone you have a fundamental disagreement with.
Did you know that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all written anonymously and that it was only later that it was assumed that they were the writers? Archeologists estimate based on culture that they were written 30 years after Jesus' death and that they were written in a language that Jesus didn't speak. Does it ever make you wonder at least how accurate it is in relation to what Jesus actually said? The closest book I found to addressing this was The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. I used to lend that book to my skeptical friends in much the same way I lend The God Delusion to my Christian friends today.
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My favourite part from that book is the section on Pascal's Wager:
The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however long the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You'd better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.
There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is delicious mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your believing for you'. The de luxe model is advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City'.
But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What's so special about believing? Isn't it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as teh supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn't the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. 'Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,' was Russell's (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn't God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don't need to know in order to refute Pascal's Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?
Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better of wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed, doesn't the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet vitiate Pascal's whole logic? Pascal was probably joking when he promoted his wager, just as I am joking in my dismissal of it. But I have encountered people, for example, in the question session after a lecture, who have seriously advanced Pascal's Wager as an argument in favour of believing in God, so it was right to give it a brief airing here.
Is it possible, finally, to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc.
The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that, however long the odds against God's existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You'd better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.
There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don't. Pascal's Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he'd see through the deception. The ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do is delicious mocked by Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your believing for you'. The de luxe model is advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City'.
But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What's so special about believing? Isn't it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as teh supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn't the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. 'Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,' was Russell's (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn't God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don't need to know in order to refute Pascal's Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn't claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God's valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?
Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn't Pascal have been better of wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed, doesn't the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet vitiate Pascal's whole logic? Pascal was probably joking when he promoted his wager, just as I am joking in my dismissal of it. But I have encountered people, for example, in the question session after a lecture, who have seriously advanced Pascal's Wager as an argument in favour of believing in God, so it was right to give it a brief airing here.
Is it possible, finally, to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc.
But the thing is so many Christians that hold up the Bible as the Inspired Word of God today don't even know these kinds of things. If the Bible was your favorite band you'd probably Google them quite a bit. I used to love Savage Garden and read heaps of interviews about them to get an idea of what their background was etc. Yet lots of Christians put less effort into the Bible. In fact a lot of Christians have not even read the whole Bible - they generally conveniently ignore the OT but it's not hard to find teenage Christians who haven't read a single whole book of the NT yet have been caught up in the 'Jesus is my best friend' craze based only on what they have heard in Church and youth groups.
I didn't know many of these things about the Bible until I was starting to become disillusioned about Church. But it just makes me wonder today why I had to leave the Church to find out the truth about the Bible? I discovered more about Christian history at my university library than I did in all my years getting books out from the lending section of Church bookshelves.
Why aren't these kinds of things taught about the Bible in the sermons? It just seems so backwards that people claim that they have total faith in God and would die for His cause but most don't even really know the history of the Book that tells them all they know about the God they worship.
Often you hear of the concept that God created Satan as his top angel, with free will, and that through pride the morning star fell from grace – turning from good to evil. The idea is that without this option, the decision to cede loyalty to God has no value, ie. love must be a choice and not through force (like 'robots' is often the term you hear in Church).
So basically Satan and some of the angels falling to Hell came first. Adam and Eve and their fall came second, egged on by Satan in the form of a serpent in the Garden.
But how would you know this by simply reading the OT and NT alone? Of course you would have to look outside of the 'Inspired Word of God' to have an understanding of this sort of theology. You'd either have to presume it to an extreme level if you were restricting yourself to the 66 canonical books as they merely allude to it - or you would have to look to outside sources to verify such fantasticism. Texts such as Roman acrophyla and the Gnostic gospels.
So if you take the view that Christianity has stayed constant throughout time ever since the current Bible was compiled by the Council of Nicea, surely you can see that a lot of what gets preached in Church to answer some of the questions Christians have (such as why does evil exist), that these are looked at in context and not merely from the NIV. Therefore if you wanted a good understanding of where your faith comes from it's important to research deeper as well just to make sure you're not following something made up from speculation isn't it - rather than simply relying on faith.
