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It has been added to, and subtracted from a long time before your seventy years?
What you believe is truth is a twisted version that consists of eternal damnation.
It has been corrupted into the "precepts and doctrines of men" in support of the control agenda of churches and has rejected the actual Gospel of Jesus - agape love, and reconciliation. I will trust that my state of mind of the agape love of God and each other will be closer to what God wants from us than the judgmental and vengeful state of mind promoted in Irkle's mainstream views.
It has been corrupted into the "precepts and doctrines of men" in support of the control agenda of churches and has rejected the actual Gospel of Jesus - agape love, and reconciliation. I will trust that my state of mind of the agape love of God and each other will be closer to what God wants from us than the judgmental and vengeful state of mind promoted in Irkle's mainstream views.
I would say that the Evangelical Churches have edited Christianity to fit Southern Culture and its folkways. These people have realized the sham the Southern Baptist Convention and its non-denominational Megachurch descendants have pulled off to be the dominant form of Christianity among American Conservatives. The reason for the SBC's existence was stunning, but its continued existence is even more baffling!
In my humble opinion, I believe the number one reason why so many young evangelicals are leaving the faith is marriage equality.
They might *say* that it is something along the lines of judgement, condemnation, etc. But I really think that the treatment of those who are part of the LGBT by some of the more extreme conservative members of the church, this is the real issue which forces them away.
They are correct in rejecting that extreme conservatism. But what they don't understand is that they never had a true and deep faith in Christ to begin with. So the only way they can reconcile the conflict in their mind is to reject faith altogether. This is exactly what I experienced. Because my faith (as a younger adult) was so weak, I would gravitate towards the extreme right at times, even though I had never held those conservative views before getting involved with the church. The Pharisees. When I realized that side was wrong (which it is) I moved to the hard left. But too quickly, skipping past the true and deep faith where Jesus lived, further left into the Saducees realm, where I began to deny the resurrection and the supernatural power of true faith.
This is not meant to imply a particular stand on marriage equality. I don't have the answer on this particular issue. But I do think that some Christians are too extreme in their condemnation, while ignoring many other social issues which should be more crucial.
What do you think? Can you not see that this is what is happening to so many young evangelicals?
No it's not marriage equality because we already have that. Everyone of age can get married, even disabled folks, no one is barred.
When I wanted to marry my husband, it didn't matter whether I was gay , straight, bi, whatever. My intimate private sexual preferences were no one's business but my husbands. No one asked us about anything private, we were allowed to marry and have been married 30 yrs now.
What they want is to re-define marriage into a definition other than what it is yet are packaging it as if they've attempted to get married yet are denied.
I would say that the Evangelical Churches have edited Christianity to fit Southern Culture and its folkways. These people have realized the sham the Southern Baptist Convention and its non-denominational Megachurch descendants have pulled off to be the dominant form of Christianity among American Conservatives. The reason for the SBC's existence was stunning, but its continued existence is even more baffling!
The SBC today hardly resembles the one of 50 years ago. Back then, the only “required†beliefs were Jesus as Lord and the bodily resurrection. They had a doctrinal belief of the “priesthood of the believer,†the right of every Christian to read and interpret Scripture for themselves. It still had a strong streak of racism. I was saved in a Mississippi Southern Baptist Church that had no black members. A visiting evangelist questioned the church about it from the pulpit and got a stony silence.
The priesthood of the believer harkens back to Martin Luther who wanted to see the Bible in every person’s hands, and who felt clergy had no unique hold on interpreting God’s Word. The new SBC has become the very thing Martin Luther fought against, and isn’t a bit different from what the Catholic Church was in Luther’s day—-dictatorial with regard to Solo Scriptoria.
I attended an SBC college where I fell three hours short of getting a double minor in Bible. Back then, in the early seventies, I had a conservative OT Professor and a more liberal NT Professor. I took a geology class where the Professor taught a millions of years old earth and had no problem reconciling the Bible with biological evolution. Modern day Southern Baptists are so indoctrinated with young earth and That each species was created independently of the other that they can’t even envisage a less strict SBC with regard to those issues.
Based on where my own theology has evolved, even the old SBC seems stiff and staid. To me the SBC has now dissolved into a political movement invoking God’s name. And I still know good people who lived in those times but stayed with the SBC despite it becoming more political, more man-centric, and more anti-gay. Not me. I saw the Titanic denomination was going down and ran for the lifeboats.
No it's not marriage equality because we already have that. Everyone of age can get married, even disabled folks, no one is barred.
When I wanted to marry my husband, it didn't matter whether I was gay , straight, bi, whatever. My intimate private sexual preferences were no one's business but my husbands. No one asked us about anything private, we were allowed to marry and have been married 30 yrs now.
What they want is to re-define marriage into a definition other than what it is yet are packaging it as if they've attempted to get married yet are denied.
I'm sure there were many people who used to say the same types of thing back in the day (before 1967 in the US) about interracial couples wanting to get married.
The SBC today hardly resembles the one of 50 years ago. Back then, the only “required†beliefs were Jesus as Lord and the bodily resurrection. They had a doctrinal belief of the “priesthood of the believer,†the right of every Christian to read and interpret Scripture for themselves. It still had a strong streak of racism. I was saved in a Mississippi Southern Baptist Church that had no black members. A visiting evangelist questioned the church about it from the pulpit and got a stony silence.
The priesthood of the believer harkens back to Martin Luther who wanted to see the Bible in every person’s hands, and who felt clergy had no unique hold on interpreting God’s Word. The new SBC has become the very thing Martin Luther fought against, and isn’t a bit different from what the Catholic Church was in Luther’s day—-dictatorial with regard to Solo Scriptoria.
I attended an SBC college where I fell three hours short of getting a double minor in Bible. Back then, in the early seventies, I had a conservative OT Professor and a more liberal NT Professor. I took a geology class where the Professor taught a millions of years old earth and had no problem reconciling the Bible with biological evolution. Modern day Southern Baptists are so indoctrinated with young earth and That each species was created independently of the other that they can’t even envisage a less strict SBC with regard to those issues.
Based on where my own theology has evolved, even the old SBC seems stiff and staid. To me the SBC has now dissolved into a political movement invoking God’s name. And I still know good people who lived in those times but stayed with the SBC despite it becoming more political, more man-centric, and more anti-gay. Not me. I saw the Titanic denomination was going down and ran for the lifeboats.
In truth, literalism is a dead end. Not only is it a kind of unholy hubris, thinking that you can essentially fully understand God's mind, but it also leads to all kinds of idiocies. The opening verses of Genesis are clearly figurative and poetic, but because literalists insist that it's a precise recounting of events, they box themselves in on evolution and new earth creationism despite the overwhelming evidence (Now this is where someone will dredge up some hack rogue scientist from some backwater) to the contrary.
This is why they have to defend the literal truth of every passage tooth and nail. If you point out one contradiction in scripture, the entire tapestry unravels. So they have to embark on these convoluted explanations to justify a literal interpretation. For example, the conflicting genealogies of Christ in Matthew and Luke. They don't agree, which either one is right and the other is wrong, or neither is right.
Yet literalists can't accept that perhaps Matthew or Luke might have gotten something wrong. It's a pretty forgivable error. There were no courthouses in which to look up Jesus' family tree. They had to rely on oral histories some thirty or forty years after Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. In any normal universe, we'd all shrug our shoulders and get on with the real point of those books, which was Christ's ministry on earth.
Instead, we have to go through these belabored explanations that somehow genealogies of the period couldn't be matrilineal, which still doesn't explain why we have two completely different family trees. Nor can the literalists explain that the Synoptic Gospels do not even agree on something as fundamental as Christ's last words. After all, "Into your hands I commend my spirit," "It is finished," and "My God why have you forsaken me?" are three utterly different sentiments with deep, deep theological meaning.
And the list of scriptural contradictions go on and on. Rather than simply state that the Bible was written by a lot of people describing their real and tangible encounters with the divine, we instead have to create this convoluted explanation of why every syllable is the direct utterance of The Almighty.
Yet all that is not faith. Instead, it's the requirement of proof. Faith is not empirical. It's not based on pointing to a verse in Hosea or Hebrews and saying, "Aha! There it is!" It's not developing some loopy eschatological theory on how we can slip into heaven by living up to some arcane rule book. It's the ability to simply understand that God is working in the world and try to live His will in our lives and our interactions with others.
I'm sure there were many people who used to say the same types of thing back in the day (before 1967 in the US) about interracial couples wanting to get married.
I'm sure there were many people who used to say the same types of thing back in the day (before 1967 in the US) about interracial couples wanting to get married.
That sounds like a new topic. Many things were different "back in the day"
However today, we have marriage equality. It's a great thing I've taken advantage of it myself
Yes, we DO. No thanks to people who think one can only marry someone of the opposite gender.
Our Creator instituted it. It's for life. Certainly not something we get to over-ride him on
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It has been corrupted into the "precepts and doctrines of men" in support of the control agenda of churches and has rejected the actual Gospel of Jesus - agape love, and reconciliation. I will trust that my state of mind of the agape love of God and each other will be closer to what God wants from us than the judgmental and vengeful state of mind promoted in Irkle's mainstream views.
