Hmmm, you still haven’t exlained Jesus’ warnings about hell and the fact that the rich man died and went there after his death. He was still concious after death and aware that he was tormented and thirsty.
In my opinion, oblivion is just wishful thinking for those who want to do as they please in this life without any eternal consequences. You have to make that a choice because you don’t like the other ones. You can’t engineer reality and truth to your likes and dislikes. Believe in oblivion if you want, I pretty much think you’ll find out you were mistaken.
You’re almost beginning to sound reasonable, and I certainly don’t want to derail your progress, so I’ll just say this:
Oblivion doesn’t mean nonexistence; it means death — the absence of God. There is no thirst you can imagine that is greater than an eternity without the Living Water.
But God does not judge us, and neither does Jesus (I’ve supplied those verses before); rather, we judge ourselves by His Word.
God is Love, His4ever. (I’ve supplied those verses as well.) He didn’t come to the world to judge it but to save it. He offers His love without limit. (I can give you those verses if you need them.) All who love are from God; none who don’t are. (Verses available on request.)
We are to Be Perfect, and do the same as He. (I can give you that one, too.)
Oh, I’m just dipping my toes in the water a bit. Gonna try not to say gobs and gobs since most everyone doesn’t agree with anything I say, except maybe Jersey or Joe. You get burned out after awhile and have to take little breaks.
His4Ever, I just wanted to hijack my own thread and say welcome back. I have missed you, you know, and I’m sorry if something I wrote prompted you to leave.
No, I just need little breaks once in awhile. Things get hot around here sometimes and I get burned out as I told Libertarian.
Guinastasia, my brain hurts also! I do not mean to sound prideful or have a na na na nyah attitude. I simply believe certain things are true with all my heart.
Well, I’m here to put in my two cents worth. I’m a baby born again Christian, in that I accepted Christ into my life about a year and a half ago. I’m embarrassed to say that I haven’t read the Bible in depth ever, something I plan to correct very soon. When I let Christ into my life, I felt a burden lift and a comforting presence fill my being. In that moment, I felt that Christ accepted me and had made me worthy of entering heaven when he decides. That being said, I am still a sinner. I still sin, whenever I think mean thoughts about others, judge others, and commit acts of sloth, tell lies, and disappoint Christ.
The difference between my previous existence and my present existence is I recognize my impiousness, feel guilty, and try to rectify my shortcomings. I ask for forgiveness and it is granted. I believe that people can claim they are Christians, can claim they are going to heaven, but these claims mean nothing without our Savior Jesus Christ, making it so. His is the final determination. All I can do is try to follow the commandments, recognize when I am sinning, ask for forgiveness and try to live a life that honors God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit.
Forgive me if I sound prideful and pompous; I am sincerely trying not to be. After reading several threads about what it means to be a good Christian, I wanted to get across my impressions. This is a flawed post, but it’s the best I can do at this time. For you other Christians, please let me know how you interpret my post; I would be honored to read your suggestions. Yours in Christ, Medstar.
medstar, wouldn’t it have been wiser to have actually read and studied the Bible before committing to a religion based on it? What if you become intellectually and emotionally tied to this religion, read the Bible, and find out that what you think the religion is about and what the Bible actually says the religion is about clash? Your only choices then are to either abandon your new religion, change your new religion to fit your understanding of the Bible(causing you to openly disagree with those who brought you into the religion in the first place), or deliberately ignore the parts of the Bible that do not fit you newfound religion.
Right! As do I-not because I just want an excuse to sin. I’m sorry, but I really resent it when people say that. What a way to belittle someone’s beliefs!
Let me add my “welcome back” to the others, His4Ever! I trust that you’ve clearly gotten the message that I count you a sister in Christ whose views differ enough from mine that I can and do disagree quite strongly and profoundly with them, but always (intentionally, and I hope obviously to your reading) in a spirit of love.
With regard to annihilation as the fate of the sinner, there’s a thread in the Pizza Parlor’s Kitchen started by THINKXP that would make good reading on the subject – people significantly closer to your viewpoint than me have contributed some useful discussion to it. vastrightwingconspiracy’s thread Eternal Torment or Final Destruction has some interesting and relevant stuff, too.
Czarcasm, you make a quite reasonable but invalid presumption that invalidates your point here. Christianity is not based on the Bible – it’s based on a relationship with Jesus Christ and through Him with the Triune God of which He is a Person. The Bible is a valuable asset in learning more about Him and His message, and what He accomplished in our behalf, but it is not the core of the Christian faith. I think even Joe, Jersey, and His, the most Bible-focused of our Christian regulars, would concede my point here, though they hold the Good Book in extremely high regard as the written expression of God’s Word to a humanity divided from Him by sin.
So medstar’s position is precisely the correct one – commit to Jesus first, and then study about Him in the available references (conveniently collected in a one-volume edition). I’d encourage him (? --her?) to read a bit on how the Bible came to be, as well, and the stylistic peculiarities of it. The five-column material put together by CKDxtrHavn and Eutychus in the Staff Reports here is a good start towards that. As an example of what I mean, the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of Matthew are referred to as “the Sermon on the Mount” owing to its being set as Jesus having taught the people on a mountainside. However, it is quite probable that what we have reported in those chapters, although definitely teachings of Jesus, was probably not precisely what He taught at that particular time and place. (Matthew clues us in to this in his use of the imperfect rather than the aorist tense to describe Jesus’s teaching: “used to teach” rather than “taught” (there and then implied).) The reason here is that in Classical times, including the First Century, it was considered quite proper to manufacture speeches allegedly made by the subjects of accounts – the criteria being that they either did indeed say what was in those speeches or that the speeches represent the thought of those persons. Matthew was no more violating the canons of writing in his time and place than would a historical novelist making up a conversation between Washington and Lafayette as a chapter in a historically accurate novel about the American Revolution. But without that background knowledge, the obvious assumption to a modern person is that those three chapters are what Jesus taught at that particular time and place, since that is what Matthew seems to say happened. (In point of fact, Matthew apparently gathered much of Jesus’s teachings into five subject-oriented large groups and made them five “sermons” during the course of his narrative of His life; this is the first of them.)
But if you “commit” yourself to Jesus without first having read the Bible, all you’ve committed yourself to is someone else’s personal(and perhaps faulty) description of Jesus. If you are going to follow the tenets of a Teacher, do you really believe getting the info third, fourth, or even 100th hand is wise? I’m not sure religion should be run like a game of “Telephone”-the dangers of misinterpretation are very real. You may believe that when someone says they follow Jesus they believe as you do, but unless you both follow the same game book, the only thing you can really be sure of is that “Jesus” is a name you both can spell.
God Himself has visited us, taught us, and remains with us. The Bible teaches nothing. It is the Holy Spirit that teaches.
I had heard descriptions of Jesus my whole life. In fact, I had gotten most of my impressions from people like His4ever — Jesus the evil troll who loiters at the gate to Hell, snaring those who wander by and tossing them in.
Imagine my surprise when he knocked and I opened the door.
shoe1234, you’re welcome. I hope I get to read more from you. My Bible had a different translation of Matthew 5:48, so I got curious. It’s a vice of mine. :Shrug:
Medstar, I liked your post. I’m assuming you’ve got a good general knowledge of the Bible and the tenets of Christianity, mostly because I’m not sure if a person can make it to adulthood in Western society without an awareness of the basics of Christianity (we Christians can be a bit noisy at times;)). Learning more, and how much you learn is up to you. I did particularly like this:
That about sums it up for me. Sometimes there’s a delay before I recognize when I’m sinning and sometimes there are times when I don’t want to repent of a sin just yet (I’m thinking of a recent Pit thread where I wanted to continue hating one set of neighbors for a while). What matters is that I do acknowledge and repent my sins and try not to repeat them in future. (Although, God, are you sure I have to love guys who’d beat a retarded kid? I know, I know. I’m still not permitted to harm them.)
Lib, that sounds all well and good, but putting aside the implication that “God” visited you and gave you the real deal and everyone else in the world with a different message is merely deluded, what do you think your beliefs would be today if the Bible had never existed in the first place? How far would Christianity have gotten, and how would it look like today if what little we know about God and Christ were handed down via a massive game of “Telephone”?
Let us indeed put that aside since I have not said anything remotely like it. In fact, I don’t know why putting aside something that isn’t there is even necessary. Once we have established a foundation of intellectual honesty, we may begin constructive dialog.
Lib it seems to me as if you imply it whenever you say that you don’t get your ideas about religion and Christ from the Bible, but from some sort of direct divine message. I have heard from many others that they, too, follow Christ and not the Bible, but if their beliefs and your beliefs differ, what exactly does this say about either the divine message you recieved or the divine message [they recieved? Intellectual honesty should indeed be used-your ideas about Christ and his teachings have to have some sort of basis in the Bible. Now, if indeed a Bible-based Jesus is what we are talking about, then the next logical step is simple. Either you ascribe to all that the Bible says about Jesus and his teachings, or you have decided to follow the teachings that you can live with, blended with whatever personal philosophy you have developed over the years, and made a personal decision to not follow the rest.
Again I say, the teachings of Jesus has their basis in the written word of Bible, because otherwise, after a period of time you end up with a vague middle-eastern character called “Jebus” who goes around kicking the butts of people that believe differently.
Czarcasm, I appreciate your directness. I was raised Catholic, went to mass weekly and attended Sunday School throughout grade school. I have read portions of the Bible, but I never studied it in depth. Going to mass and Sunday school was forced upon me and I resented it, much preferring to sleep in. Guess what I did when I graduated from high school and went to college and gained employment? I stopped going to church and religious training. When I re-committed myself to Chris, it’s not like I stumbled into a strange cult I didn’t recognize. I just started paying attention to my spiritual hunger.
cjhoworth, you hit the nail on the head. Just because I’ve accepted Christ into my life, fireworks didn’t go off and banners didn’t appear in the sky, changing me into a wonderful person. I’d like to think that being a nice, thoughtful, caring person will be easy for me, but I know the truth. I still have to work at it, and make conscious, difficult decisions to do the right thing. I stumble at it, and always will. But at least I have Jesus Christ to support me and my brothers and sisters in Christ to guide me. I really liked your statement, “Sometimes there’s a delay before I recognize when I’m sinning and sometimes there are times when I don’t want to repent of a sin just yet (I’m thinking of a recent Pit thread where I wanted to continue hating one set of neighbors for a while). What matters is that I do acknowledge and repent my sins and try not to repeat them in future”.
Thanks, both of you, for forcing me to tighten up my earlier post.
