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I was clearly taught as a child that if I obeyed god then bad things would NOT happen to me, and if I disobeyed him, they WOULD. Or as it's often aphorized: "god blesses the righteous and confounds the wicked".
And YET. Just let calamity befall a Christian and suddenly it all becomes about "god's Mysterious Ways" or accusations of hidden sin or exhortations to buck up and have faith anyway.
Yes. In the end, the Christian God is pretty random with who he protects and who he does not. So he’s not much different than a random universe with no God at all. Insurance companies know this mathematically: Christians don’t have a lower risk for accidents and illnesses, so they pay the same rates as non-Christians.
Listening to atheists is depressing. They have nothing to offer.
What do you want from them? The way this works is that you go out and show so much love that you set an example as a long suffering, patient, loving person. This is what I always forget.
Galatians
22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. 24And they that are Christ's have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts.
25If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit. 26Let us not be desirous of vain glory, provoking one another, envying one another.
What do you want from them? The way this works is that you go out and show so much love that you set an example as a long suffering, patient, loving person. This is what I always forget.
You have to tell them the truth. That is what love is.
You have to tell them the truth. That is what love is.
Except you only know what YOU THINK is the truth. Stop being so arrogant about it. According to Jesus, YOU are wrong just as our ancestors were. You fly a false flag when you claim to possess Jesus' truth. You possess our ancestors' scriptural truth which is NOT what Jesus revealed about God.
Yes. In the end, the Christian God is pretty random with who he protects and who he does not. So he’s not much different than a random universe with no God at all. Insurance companies know this mathematically: Christians don’t have a lower risk for accidents and illnesses, so they pay the same rates as non-Christians.
The way I usually put it is that an indifferent god, an absent god, and a non-existent god all behave precisely the same. There is no way to tell them apart.
Apart from paying lower insurance rates, one would think there would be a lower percentage of Christians in prison relative to their share of the population, that divorce rates would be significantly lower, that they would be healthier, that their houses of worship would be safer (especially for children!!) and on and on. Yet despite the ready availability of such statistics, we never see any statistically significant difference.
To be fair, just as there are Christians who emphasize god's judgment and other who emphasize his love, there are Christians who place an emphasis on life-as-endurance-test vs those who place an emphasis on some imagined "victorious Christian life".
But in my personal experience, it was nearly always a bait-and-switch: god's lovingkindness, protection, enlightenment, comfort and liberation from [insert your insecurity or pain points here] were on display when proselytizing, and then god's testing of your faith and "peace that passes all understanding" were on display when you inevitably had no increased quality of life post-conversion. On the one hand as a sinner you are doomed to both earthly and eternal punishment and reaping the "wages of sin" and on the other hand this somehow is never reflected in your quality-of-life and you just pretend that it is and don't complain about it. On the one hand you need to be saved from your sin and made "a new creation"; on the other you must wrestle with your sin-nature, just as before.
Believing in a God who woul torment a man forever because he never heard of Jesus, never heard of a bible, just some isolated man from a village so God needs to torment him for eternity and its our fault cause we didnt go into the jungle to warn him that God is going to pronounce eternal suffering. Its really hard to preach a merciful God to an Atheist using the eternal torment pitch because there is no reason or logic behind the idea. If we serve a God that petty, that he should even desire to torture good people for eternity, who could believe an argument from any Christian when their foundation begins with you believe, or God is going to put you in hell for eternity.
How long is half eternity, cant we just do half? O Dang the bad luck, half eternity is eternity too. What could I possibly do in my life to justify 50 years of torment, much less eternity.
Christians look for the unrighteous bound for hell but the unrighteous is in your right hand as a spirit inside of you like Moses and the Egyptian, like the two goats of Yom Kippur, like the thief on the cross, like Cain, Abel, Ishmael, Esau and Ephraim.
When the wicked are exposed, they are exposed in every man just like Jesus separating the goat from the sheep, this concept is absolutely redundant from cover to cover.
Your waters will divided just as it was in the crossing over, the flesh dies, the soul is taken.
I doubt you could find a worse sinner as me, and I am one of the worst, but even in my sins, I dont see anyone else more righteous or more unrighteous, you could line all the swine up together, put makeup on them and dress them up, but they still gonna be swine and none are better than the other.
I am always fascinated by those who, while affirming that they don't believe in religion, are the most vocal and strident in their challenges.
Why does someone care about another's beliefs?
Irrefutable and undeniable? Hogwash and horsefeathers!
absolutely correct, 100%
I don't believe in organized religion, nothing has to be explained to me, I choose to believe what I believe without influence from any religion or anyone else's belief system.
its a matter of choice and what one prefers to believe.....
Well, then you have to listen when we tell you the truth.
Your beliefs have nothing to offer anyone.
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