Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
This is exactly what it is.
Years of pondering moved him back into the realms of a believer. He may have felt that the universe and everything in it, could have not come together by chance - so there is something out there. And if that something is God then why look for it ONLY in the church?
Any my question was, what if he can't find it in the church as it was in the first place? Will he go back to Atheism? Just a question.
I do not see anywhere where he claimed to be an atheist, at any point. Perhaps I'm mistaken.
I am not planning to get all holy roller or anything. I just want to be part of a group in my community that has shared values that I can identify with and a place where I can get a little help and give a little help when its needed.
Funny...but I didn't want to get all "holy roller" and be a "born again Christian" at one point, either. Now I'm a pastor, and have been a believer for 23 years.
Blessings as you go forward, I pray God will reveal himself to you.
With all that said, what I am wondering is if anyone has been through this at some level or another and ended up back in church even though you don't fundamentally believe the same way you did before? If so, how did the experience play out? Was it easy, hard, or just awkward at first? Did you stick with it?
I am not planning to get all holy roller or anything. I just want to be part of a group in my community that has shared values that I can identify with and a place where I can get a little help and give a little help when its needed.
Yes. I went back because it makes my husband happy. I didn't go for a long time because I couldn't stand the church he was going to, but he found a much more progressive denomination and covers the pulpit once a month. So far so good; I may not share their spiritual beliefs, but I don't feel uncomfortable being there. No one has burst into flames from eating my coffee cake
Yes. I went back because it makes my husband happy. I didn't go for a long time because I couldn't stand the church he was going to, but he found a much more progressive denomination and covers the pulpit once a month. So far so good; I may not share their spiritual beliefs, but I don't feel uncomfortable being there. No one has burst into flames from eating my coffee cake
Am I reading that right? You say your husband preaches once a month?
Yes. He's been an ordained minister for 10 years, and was a youth pastor for 14 years.
Interesting. I thought you were saying that as a layman he was preaching once a month. I'd love for the men in my church to grow to the point where they could cover the pulpit once in awhile -- it would be good for them, and the church.
I'm sure you probably mentioned he is ordained before, I must not have seen it or it didn't register.
I did play the part of atheist at one time, but it seemed just as illogical as devout belief for me. Not because atheist are illogical (some are, some aren't like any other group), but it felt pretty futile, even if it is because I was raised in Christianity. That doesn't mean I feel it is a futile position for everyone, but an observation of my own experience.
I had to come to a new way of trying to see the Bible to try and make sense of things. Again, my opinion, but the Bible isn't the word of God. I see it as the words of men in ancient times that conveys their experience of God. And considering that most people weren't literate in earlier times and very few people had a copy of the Bible until the printing press was invented, I would have to believe in a god that didn't find it important for his word to be available to a lot of people for the majority of human history. How would others understand or find God without his word? Well, the often referred to verse of Romans 1:20 of course.
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
So until the Bible was canonized, most people would have had to decide what they thought of the world and God simply by understanding it from what has been made. And as a result, people would have had a more authentic experience of God that isn't clouded by list of things you must believe lest you spend eternity swimming laps in a lake of fire.
Old testament brutality was another thing that troubled me in the past when I was in church. I did, however, gain a lot of understanding about the brutality of the old testament. Its easy to sit in the armchair quarterback position of a 21st century intellectual, pondering over the stupidity of those uneducated idiots. But life has always been hard and often brutal. The 21st century has shielded us from a lot of the harsh realities of people living in hard times where a person being lazy could be a danger to the very survival of a group. Many years, food was not abundant and no one knew if a bad year would be followed by another bad year or not. A lazy member of a small group village or tribe who did not keep up their labor would be a threat to the well being of everyone else when all available labor combined is barely enough to avoid starvation. Killing someone for such an offense may sound awful, but when the poor behavior of one person could cause suffering and even death for others, it sounds less severe. We live in a marshmallow world where everyone's feelings matter more than their actions often. That is why I think the old testament looks awful. Killing off entire cities including women and children? Yep, pretty much how it went frequently when there was war. Nobody flew anywhere to talk about it first. Armies gathered and fought brutally in a kill or be killed scenario. If your group had been attacked a couple of times and managed to survive, you would quickly learn to be brutal as well if you wanted to live back in the day.
Violence is not evil. Violence is order. Law and order can only be maintained through threat of violence, no matter how much I actually started buying into the idea that non-violence is right and violence is wrong. Of course non-violence is an option, but with no threat of violence, laws would be null and void as soon as someone asked "or else what?" Biblical times were a very violent part of human history for religious and non-religious people alike. I don't agree with everything in the Bible, or think the violence used was definitely right. I'm saying it just makes more sense to me that violence was part of the life of those who wrote the Bible and that is was a very different story than today.
I went to a few UU churches on my way to leaving church altogether and it really wasn't my cup of tea. I don't like to define myself as liberal or conservative because my views are frequently neither. That being said, I the UU churches I went to felt too liberal for my taste just like some Baptist churches are too conservative for my taste. I will probably consider Methodist and Lutheran churches first and see if I'm comfortable going again.
Interesting. I thought you were saying that as a layman he was preaching once a month. I'd love for the men in my church to grow to the point where they could cover the pulpit once in awhile -- it would be good for them, and the church.
I'm sure you probably mentioned he is ordained before, I must not have seen it or it didn't register.
The Plymouth Brethren is one of the original fundamentalist denominations and they don't even have clergy as such ... their elders take turn "covering the pulpit" as you put it. And then many of the Quakers do away with a formal sermon as a fixture of their ritual entirely, favoring unstructured ad hoc "sharing" of members as they are moved to do so. At the other end of the spectrum, UU congregations often have members lead services and you are right, practice makes perfect; in my experience they are quite good. And when their minister leaves or quits, they are perfectly capable of keeping things going with just the members, they don't even have to bring in an interim or guest pastor while they are going through the (leisurely) process of selecting a new "settled minister".
I did play the part of atheist at one time, but it seemed just as illogical as devout belief for me. Not because atheist are illogical (some are, some aren't like any other group), but it felt pretty futile, even if it is because I was raised in Christianity. That doesn't mean I feel it is a futile position for everyone, but an observation of my own experience.
I had to come to a new way of trying to see the Bible to try and make sense of things. Again, my opinion, but the Bible isn't the word of God. I see it as the words of men in ancient times that conveys their experience of God. And considering that most people weren't literate in earlier times and very few people had a copy of the Bible until the printing press was invented, I would have to believe in a god that didn't find it important for his word to be available to a lot of people for the majority of human history.
All good thinking in my view. Considering that for most of human history, most humans had no meaningful access to personal study and perusal of the scriptures, god cannot be that concerned about the things many conservative Christians seem to think he is concerned about. A more general and loosely held faith in a non-authoritarian god is less unreasonable to my way of thinking, than the standard-issue fundamentalism.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
