What do you believe is the purpose of Christianity? (prayers, truth, opinion)
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Also, the "you shall be perfect even as your heavenly Father is" is prophetic. Once those Jews are filled with God's spirit and He writes His laws on their hearts and they walk righteously and in love, then they will be perfect even as their Heavenly Father is.
That's a strained interpretation at best. Right before it Jesus is supposed to have said "And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?" and right after it he states, "take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven."
So for this to be prophecy he would have to inexplicably switch from teaching to fortune-telling mode and back again. No, it's an instruction / admonition, like the others. In context, you understand ;-)
But don't feel bad, you aren't the only one who finds this verse inconvenient. I have heard the word "perfect" decried as idiomatic Elizabethan English and the original Greek really must mean "complete" or "well rounded". Despite that the far more modern NASV and NIV translate it "perfect", just like the KJV.
Nobody knows whether God, Jesus Christ or Heaven exist, or if they're completely imaginary.
Why oh why do you care so much that you post deliberately offensive or provocative online posting with the apparent aim of upsetting someone or eliciting an angry response from them?
Why not just live and let live? What motivates you to seek out religious message boards to do this? Help me understand the mindset.
This is something I was told when I was a fundamentalist, too, but when I started to actually study other belief systems as to what they actually believe, rather than listen solely to what critics and opponents of those religions claim they believe, I was quickly disabused of that notion.
Usually the claim you are making is associated with (or really used as an illustration for) the claim that Christianity is "not a religion" which is defined as "man trying to please god". By contrast, supposedly, Christianity is supposed to be about god taking the initiative to save man, which man could not do for himself.
The actual truth is that "man trying to please god" is a contrived definition for religion, the actual definition of which is "A belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially one or more personal gods" or "a particular system of faith and worship". Or metaphorically, "a pursuit or interest to which one ascribes supreme importance". Since I suspect you believe in and worship a superhuman controlling power (the Christian god), subscribe to a particular system of faith and worship (Fundamentalist Christianity) and consider your participation in that belief system to be of supreme importance, then for any commonly understood and used definition of "religion", you are part of one.
So setting aside the contrived definition, we can see that most religions have a deity and that deity "reaches out to" man, communicating with him via seers or holy books, issuing instructions, threats, and so on, just as your god is said to do. No other religion has precisely the same concept of grace and forgiveness, but that's a circular argument: if Christianity had precisely the same dogma as another religion, it would BE that other religion, or that other religion would BE Christianity.
Even Christians who are not particularly Calvinist and believe they are saved by grace and "not of yourselves", and "once saved always saved", believe also in sin and punishment for sin and things such as "the unpardonable sin". So I see the offer of grace, mercy and forgiveness as largely an affectation than a reality. You have to accept the grace and mercy "or else", and then you're expected to "be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect" anyway as evidence of the free gift, so it's a distinction without a difference when you actually get down to it.
That may be the definition, but in practical terms, all other religions are man trying to please the gods.
That may be the definition, but in practical terms, all other religions are man trying to please the gods.
You don't seem like much of a student of "all other religions".
For example, Buddhism is about letting go of attachments to particular outcomes. It doesn't even have a deity TO please. Buddhism could make the claim that it is different from all other religions in regard to its core teaching, just as Christianity is claiming to be unique in its way. At the end, all you are saying is, "my religion has some distinctives." But also you are making incorrect blanket statements about "all other" religions.
Your assertion might be more accurate if you limit it to "all monotheistic religions". Once you get out of that realm you are on pretty thin ice. Many forms of polytheism and all forms of pantheism, panentheism and deism for instance don't have a personal god and so there is no god for man to approach in the first place. There is no intentional agency for man to interact with in those systems and even if there were, there is no belief that sin must be expunged and so no reason for the deity to "reach out to man" either in the sense that you mean it.
Liberal Christianity and every other religion disagrees.
Who is right?
Is there some experiment we could run to determine who is right?
Perhaps we could look at statistics and see if conservative Christians have lower accident and illness rates than the overall population?
Tell me. How do we know that you are telling the truth?
What has that have to do with salvation ?
Get with it.
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