I suspect that no one here really wants to insult anyone else. But Message Boards and Internet communications seem to have a way of stripping off context and the speaker’s mood, so that it’s easy to miss the speaker’s/writer’s intent.
Agnostic here. I just wanted to say that I understand what I think is the OP’s intent, and agree with it – Faith and belief – True Faith, not some poor wannabe imitation of it – can’t be manufactured. Either you have it, or you don’t. I’m surprised no one has brought up Pascal’s coda to fis famous Wager. He talked about how he was able to persuade himself, little by little every day that God existed, even though he didn’t intellectually believe. Me, I think he was fooling himself. Short of full-contact brainwashing, I don’t think you CAN change your core beliefs. I don’t think any religious person wishes that on unbelievers, even though they really WOULD believe, then.
So the original question – if you don’t believe, and all we’ve been taught in religion is true, are unbelievers damned? – seems a reasonable one to me. It doesn’t disprove religion, though. I don’t see it as a core failure. It DOES hurt, though, to hear people say that “if you don’t believe, then it’s your fault – you’re in denial”. No, it’s not. Lack of belief is lack of belief, not denial, and it’s not more honorable to replace it with a lie of belief that’s not there. Possible the answer (to a believer) is that “The Time Has Not Come”. Perhaps it is something else. To an unbeliever, it doesn’t really matter. But throwing insults – even unintended ones – isn’t the way for either side to proceed.
“Seems like a cop-out to me,” Isn’t usually considered an adequate refutation.
The fact is that regardless how those points seem, they do fill the “holes” you claim to have found in Christian Dogma. Not liking them isn’t really a rebuttal. I don’t like gravity, but it’s still there.
Still another possibility comes from the born-again camp. In order to acquire faith, you must first open your heart to Jesus and invite him in. If you do, supposedly he will answer.
The bottom line is that the Christian God isn’t a God of your personal convenience. He supposedly acts in mysterious ways that you may not like.
Well, I hope I’m not insulting. Let me say at the outset that this is not my intent.
Two things:
See my comments earlier in this thread on the distinction between faith and belief. I really, really think they are different things, and confusion concerning them is a nasty thing.
Beliefs can certainly be changed, even core beliefs. Brainwashing techniques have existed for many centuries, and the data from prisoners in the Korean conflict finally got around to filtering into the brains of Western scientists. But this does not mean it is a good thing to force your brain into believing something that you do not believe as a result of your reason and experience; for myself, as a Christian, I hope you would never even consider such a thing. May God forbid! Major religions have dicta against such tactics; Islam has a law which says, “let there be no compulsion in religion.” If there is a distinction between a cult and a religion, it is here. Religions use conditioning techniques enough as it is, just because in our society schools and institutions of learning don’t know enough to avoid it; but for Heaven’s sake, let us avoid it where we can.
Hi, Opal! (Obligatory, on the board.)
Some Fundie sects say this, but no mainstream denomination that I know of believes this. Roman Catholics have the concept of the “virtuous pagan” (where “pagan” simply represents anything non-Christian), and protestant denominations simply state that people who consistently seek the Truth and live a good life are fully capable of salvation. This is completely consistent with Jesus’s statement that all who are saved come to the Father through Him; He is a Reality, not a dogma. I don’t know what this does to your position; the fact that mainline Christianity doesn’t believe that you are damned, frankly, shouldn’t affect your life one way or the other (except that perhaps it might make you think a bit better of mainline Christianity). Still and all, I hope you don’t give up addressing the basic issues. Speaking purely for myself, agnosticism seems an awfully difficult place to leave things, but that may be just me.
Fist, I’m going to make a big mistake by assuming you do have some faith. You said you do believe in a God and also I think that if this wasn’t a big deal to you, you wouldn’t have started up this thread.
With that in mind…
I’ve learned from Church that all it takes is “faith the size of a mustard seed.” Mustard seeds are pretty small, but once planted, will grow into a very large and fruitfull tree. If I’m correct, you have the seed so over time it will grow. Now, if you nuture it, through learning about Christianity, it will grow. I’ve always felt it’s kind of like the: “you get what you put into it idea.” The more you try and learn and understand the faster you will grow and begin to believe.
I don’t think I’ve really ever had an event in my life that would convert someone else, but rather it strengthened my faith. If it’s a modern day miracle you’re waiting for to convert you, I think you’re looking for the wrong thing. In our Easter sermon our pastor told us that Jesus is present in everything we do. When people go out and pick up a hammer and build a house for someone else, is Jesus there? Yep. He’s there in the money we send to flood, tornado, and earthquake victims. Jesus is playing an active role in your life. And even though you may think you don’t have any or very much faith, He is working with you.
Personally what I can’t believe is that there are people actually arguing that faith isn’t the core of any religion.
If you don’t believe in God, then the rest fails by corollary. Belief in the deity is hence central.
Stoid - I understand just what you’re saying, because I went through the same. I went to the churches, hoping for a ray of light. All I got was a feeling that whilst the words might be nice, it all just seemed a bit silly. I didn’t (and don’t) believe that God exists - without that how can I take any of the rest of it seriously?
And I gotta admit - dogmatic influences as a child aside, I have a tough time understanding what drives people to a belief that God exists. From a default position of no belief it is hard to reconstruct the steps that leads to such a position.
Neat thread, folks, and I think there’s been some wonderful discussion in it.
Stoid, I think RT said it all quite well – but evidently not clearly enough, because the argument went on about dogma as if he hadn’t spoken.
Quite simply, I have absolutely no interest in persuading you to believe in anything. And I mean that quite sincerely, though there is a bit of a word-play in it.
It’s two days after Easter as I post this. And the question at hand is, what difference does that make? The answer is, Something happened on that day that was understood by Jesus’s followers to be His rising from the dead. The proclamation (you may have noticed this in The Wizard of Id in the Sunday comics) is not “He has risen” but “He is risen” – and that’s not just semantics.
Some weeks ago, Stoid, you sent me a link (which time hasn’t permitted me to follow up on; sorry! I look forward to taking a look at it when I get a chance.) It’s remotely possible that the link you sent me was to a trap site that will auto-download a virus which will cannibalize my hard disk and erase all my files. I don’t think that; though. Why? Because I know you, from online and the one phone conversation we had. I trust you.
Whether or not the idea in and of itself is a particularly rational one, the claim of Christianity is that one can know the risen Christ. In a personal relationship. And that the appropriate response to Him, when you come to know Him, is to accept Him as Savior and Lord.
Personal relationship, built on trust. Your trust in His trustworthiness. Put another way, your faith in His faithfulness to you.
All the dogmata of all of Christianity, from fundamentalist Biblical literacy to the Orthodox view of icons as a window into Heaven to transubstantiation to the most minimalist/rationalist of UCC claims, is founded on this one idea:
That wandering rabbi that died on the cross didn’t stay dead. In some way, He came back to life, and did it in a way that promises new and richer life to anybody who comes to know and love Him.
There are tons of reasons not to accept this. But those of us who do know them and discount them. Why? Because we know Him, and we trust Him.
I don’t care what you believe in – but I care very much Whom you believe in – because I know Him and have been quite literally changed in spirit and mind by the encounter, and greatly enrichened and filled with joy from it. And I want to share that sense of joy with you.
Freyr, I’d be most interested in hearing more details on your “encounter with Christianity” and why it fell flat – by e-mail if you’d prefer.
Start with what you DO believe. Do you believe in anything at all that can’t be demonstrated or proven? Do you believe in anything that falls into the category of “metaphysical?”
Why?
Assuming you believe in anything at all, at some point you will run smack into “I dunno, I just believe it.”
Now you understand (I didn’t say accept) why Christians (or anyone else for that matter) believe in whatever it is they believe in.
If you choose to categorize faith in Christ as “ludicrous,” “hooey,” “ILlogical,” etc., well, I wasn’t put on this earth to change your mind.
On the other hand, I like to remind myself of what my father said to those who would quibble about various points of dogma in whatever religion they happened to practice.
My father was a rock-ribbed agnostic. Although he never denied there was a God, he never accepted it, either. And whenever he found himself in a conversation about the finer points of theology, he would ask three questions.
“Do you believe in a God?”
“Do you believe in a God powerful enough to create the universe?”
“Then how can you not believe that God could not (create an immaculate conception, forgive sin, put life either on other planets, or not – whatever)? You may argue that an all-powerful God might CHOOSE not do something, but it seems to me that if you believe in a God, you pretty much have to believe that everything else is possible.”
So, while I don’t ask whether you believe, I can ask whether you believe it’s possible.
Wow, a whole lot of thoughtful and interesting answers! Thanks, everybody! It’s been very interesting, and I’ve been gratified to see little…actually * no * dogmatic and hysterical bible-thumping. But then, this is the Dope, that shouldn’t really surprise me.
There is really too much for me to address when i’m supposed to be putting in my hours (I own my own business and still have to account for my hours. How messed up is that? )
There’s a couple of quickies, though, that I can address because they are about what I believe, and do not require examination of new ideas from me. Which could take a very long time!
Actually, no, I didn’t say that, although I understand the conclusion-leaping. I do not believe in a “Creator”. That notion is, to me, completely nonsensical. It is beyond my poor imagination to see the circumstance under which I might come to believe in the existance of a being so powerful that it could have created the universe, the earth, and all the life upon it. That is simply off the table.
Which brings me to:
Not so. What I believe about the universe that can be classified as metaphysical or supernatural, I came to believe through evidence which I found astonishingly compelling.
Quick background:
I was raised a heathen, as I like to say. Utterly without religion, by a lapsed Catholic and a lapsed Baptist. My parents had abandoned their respective religions almost immediately upon achieving their majority, and never looked back. We celebrated Easter as purely a bunny-eggs-and-candy ritual, and Christmas was presents and food. The meaning of Christmas was explained to me as “something some people believe” and the story of Christ an allegory.
Therefore, coming into puberty and then adulthood, I was a spiritually blank slate. I did not have anything to rebel against, nothing to turn from. But as with most people, the questions of “Where did we come from? What happens after death? Is there anything other than what we see in front of us?” arose and I began poking around for answers.
It was the 70’s. I lived in Hollywood. Anyone alive back then can probably imagine some of things I found.
What made the most sense to me were some of the concepts found in Buddhism and other Eastern religions. I was studying these things when I had a personal experience which pretty much locked down some of these ideas as being absolutely true, because my logical mind looked at the evidence and told me that rejecting these ideas, in the face of the evidence of my life, would be ILlogical. Since then, smaller, less dramatic events have continued to confirm my beliefs.
But, even now, a quarter century later, I wonder. I’m a very rational, earthly person. Things must * make sense * in order for me to accept them. And while some sorts of unearthly things seem logical, they are still not provable by science and can be explained other ways, which causes me to still question. I think I shall never have absolute certainty about anything of this nature. Sometimes I am sad because I am tormented by fears that I am sure I would not have if I could have a pure and true faith in something like Christianity. But I cannot, so I must grapple with what my mind will accept.
I read a great quote once that I should have written down, but didn’t, so forgive my feeble paraphrase: " It is the height of arrogance to believe that the limits of your perception constitute the limits of what there is to be perceived." I try to live by that as much as possible.
And more later, when I have time.
And thank you all again, really, it’s very interesting. And enlightening!
stoid
PS: ** Polycarp ** Thanks for having ** faith ** in me. Ditto.
Oh, one more thing: a bit of clarification about this whole topic… it is ultimately about “salvation” - if in fact there is a Creator, I find it utterly perverse that he would put us in a position where we must “be saved”. I guess this falls under the items I referred to in the OP as being ludicrous. Beyond the business of faith and belief, is the whole foundation of Christian religion, which is the nature of God. The god that has been described to me just doesn’t seem very godlike. Perhaps that should be part of this discussion, too. What’s up with the vanity? The ego? The anger? Why would a God (who is, supposedly, perfectly enlightened, good, loving, etc) create this elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of “salvation” for us in the first place? What is the point of the Tree of Knowledge? Doesnt’ that strike any of you Christians as just the tiniest bit cruel?
Anyway, I do have to get back to work. Hope you’ll all continue to examine and explain these things. I am very interested in hearing these issues addressed by such thoughtful Christians as we have here.
Stoid - sorry if my earlier post was incomplete. I started it just a few minutes before leaving work, and (in the way of a specific response) didn’t get further than the second paragraph of your OP.
I’m going to witness in the old-fashioned meaning of the word: I’m going to testify to that which I have experienced. (I’m not sure how ‘witness’ took on the meaning of ‘try to get someone signed up to your religion’, but such is life.)
Assuming that he who created the Universe can be known by us, and assuming that I’m one of those lucky people, it still doesn’t follow that I have a very clear picture of what God is like. Such an entity would have to be big, very big, compared to us. And any one of us would only see a small part of God. Knowing those limitations, I’m still going to press ahead.
In my experience, one thing God is not is arbitrary or capricious. With all due respect (and in his instance, it ain’t just a figure of speech) for Scylla, the notion that you get one crack at salvation and either (a) it hasn’t happened yet, or (b) it’s come and gone, and you missed it, is completely at odds with my experience of God. (Not that my experience is definitive, but like I said, that experience is what I’m testifying to.) Predestination? Ditto: that God’s gonna pick and choose in advance that some of us will have wine and roses for all eternity, and others will have perpetual torment - that’s a possibility that just doesn’t exist in the moral universe as I know it. Similarly another set of beliefs Manda JO cites:
The fact of Jesus’ crucifixion, if nothing else, practically shouts to anyone operating within the Christian framework that God makes our problems his own.
OTOH, I agree with Stoid’s fundamental point that there are serious limits on the extent to which we can choose our beliefs. For instance, I would be unable to bring myself to subscribe to the “What if you got hit by a car tonight” school of thought on salvation if my life depended on it: thirty years of this God business has already decided what I believe there. While I believe there are times when we are in some sort of balance, and can nudge ourselves one way or the other, I think they’re the exception with respect to belief.
Mostly, life changes us - or doesn’t. We can choose, to some extent, what sorts of experiences we’ll have, and we can always choose how open we will be to being changed by that which we encounter. But we can’t move ourselves from nonbelief to belief by choice - not with any sort of honesty.
And in my experience, God expects some sort of inner honesty, some attempt at fundamental integrity, from us. To pretend to believe when you don’t is wrong - and a culture that encourages that is an immoral culture.
Let God worry about your soul. I believe those who honestly seek the truth will find it - and so the Bible says. If you seek the truth, and are open to the truths you find in other people and your own experiences, my firm belief is that it’ll all work out: you will find God, or God will find you, or whatever, in a natural way. That’s my personal reading of Julian of Norwich, at least.
What Christianity is ‘selling’ depends on what Christians you’re talking to at any given time. What I’ve given you isn’t the orthodoxy of any particular denomination, but it’s the truth as best as I’ve experienced it.
[sub]
Yes, the post title was cadged from Stephen R. Donaldson.
Hi, Pariah! It’s been too long since I’ve seen you. Beautiful post, my friend.
Glad you showed up, Poly! I was gonna wave you over to this thread soon as I finished this post - which I expected to be several hours ago. The day kinda got away from me. Glad you found your way over anyway. [/sub]
Don’t get me wrong. I have gone from your current position to being a Christian. I truly sympathize with your dilemma (for lack of a better word).
Here is the thing of it. We (Christians) don’t believe that you haven’t been given enough to make the decision. We believe that God gives every one who has heard the word (In a REALLY brief nutshell: Jesus lived a perfect life, died a TRULY innocent death, because of this He was able to atone for our sins also, and asks only that you accept the gift, ie. you believe). We believe that you, having heard that (and by the grace of God), have enough to make the decision of accepting or rejecting it.
Don’t get pissed yet, keep reading.
My previous comment not withstanding some of us need a more rationalist approach to this. Television Evangelists who preach emotion and Christians who envision God as some sort of Cosmic Muffin just don’t make it when it comes to answering the really tough questions.
Nothing make me crawl the walls faster then to ask a question and have some well meaning but completely useless nimrod say “You just have to have faith”. And, yes, I do ask God for forgivness (almost daily) for wanting to boil them in oil (or worse). <sigh>
For those us who needed that rationalist approach, I would like to suggest some reading. Specifically ‘The Case for Christianity’ by C.S.Lewis. If you can’t find it separately then it is also contained in his book ‘Mere Christianity’.
Here is a man who is like us. He started as a Atheist and came to be a Christian over a long period of time. If you’ve only read (or heard about) his children’s books, you’ve missed a lot. He was a professor at Oxford and had a remarkably disciplined mind. And a really readable writing style.
Also, it’s short. Maybe 30 pages. Its language is conversational and is an easy read. ‘The Case for Christianity’ was from a 1942 series of radio broadcasts in England and holds up well over time.
It’s remarkably refreshing to have someone clearly define and address the issues you have been pondering. If you get through that and want more, try ‘Miracles’ (also C.S. Lewis). It’s quite a wade because his ability to hold a thread of logic gets REALLY tiring. Stillgive the options, St. Augustine will make your eyes bleed, Lewis won’t. <grin>
(Also, his wife, Joy Davidman, wrote a commentary on the Ten Commandments, which is pretty nifty. Don’t remember the name. Probably out of print anyway.)
Alan Dershowitz wrote a book called ‘The Genesis of Justice’. Excellent read for those of us who read Genesis and then ask ‘What the hell was that all about?’. He doesn’t cover Genesis 1, not his interest. He provides an excellent overview of the growth of the concept of justice. Incidentally he also covers the really out-there stuff in Genesis. I mean, what the heck was with Abraham and Issac? God says, “Abraham, go build and alter and sacrifice your son to me”. What the heck was that all about?
Then, there is also the Bible. If you live in western civilization and consider yourself well educated you should read it whether you believe it or not. It is the root of a great deal of the civilization you live in.
All these books are in the Library. Don’t even have to spend money on them.
This is getting too long. Sorry about that. Tomorrow, if you’d like, I could go into that ever popular question: “Why faith? What a sloppy way to run a universe.”
I don’t know my friend. If you have questions in any other discipline you go and read up on the subject. Why is religion any different?
Via Con Dios
Damn skippy. We have heard it all. We do know the story, we have made a decision (and many of us are continuing to make it daily), and we do know that according to the Book if we don’t believe in him, God’s going to toast us like little sinful marshmallows.
So would you mind asking your fellow Christians to stop knocking on my door and leaving tracts at my bus stop?
“We Christians” don’t all believe the same things - so it’s probably a good idea not to claim to speak for Christians in general unless you know that pretty much all the major denominations agree on the point you’re speaking to.
In this instance, no such agreement exists; I’m surprised that wasn’t pretty obvious from my post, at least, that it doesn’t even exist among the Christians participating in this discussion. Those of us who acknowledge Christ as Lord, and who believe he accomplished something fundamental with respect to our salvation in his death and resurrection, have beliefs that diverge widely from there.
But we can get along pretty well, I think, as long as none of us claim to speak for Christianity as a whole, or to have cornered the market on Christian truth.
[sub]Having read a few hundred of Stoid’s posts here, I’m also be more hesitant to recommend Mere Christianity to her. But that’s another story.
What you mean ‘We’ white man? <grin> (I’m old fashioned, I prefer the old emoticon varients to them there newfangled icons (also, easier to code and I’m lazy))
You’ve heard, you’ve rejected. OK, now what?
BTW, God is NOT going to ‘toast us like little sinful marshmallows’. That is, IMHO, a serious misreading. My take on it is that God will put you somewhere where you can toast your own self. I see it this way. There are two basic places. They can be defined as ‘with God’ and ‘without God’. Now, given that (within this syllogism, anyway), God is the source of all goodness then you can see for yourself that the place ‘without God’ would be like.
Give 'em a break. Let’s say you found a cure for Aids or somesuch. Let’s also say the scientific community and drug companies don’t believe you and won’t listen. I suspect you’d be banging on doors trying to get people to listen also. They’ve found their ‘cure for Aids’ (and everything else) so to speak.
I have to disagree completely about the ‘choice’ of believing/having faith in something. Faith does not just happen, no one is born with it; the African tribesperson is no more born with faith in his/her tribal rituals than the Christian is with faith in God or the Daoist with his/her path to Enlightenment.
People can only have faith in something if they are exposed to it and decide on the basis of that information whether or not to accept it. The decision may not always be a conscious one: perhaps the African tribesperson believes in the power of the ritual because everyone (s)he has been exposed to also believes. However, faith is not innate.
It seems to me that the more likely explanation is that you percieve no compelling reason to adopt faith in Christianity, or that you percieve compelling reasons not to adopt faith in Christianity. For example, if you believe Christianity doesn’t make sense, that might be a compelling reason not to adopt faith in it. Does this sound like an accurate assessment?
Simple idea. If you don’t have faith in God, you’re not going to be saved. That is, God’s gonna kick you in the ass. Well, I don’t have faith in God, I don’t think God exists. Is God going to kick my ass or not? Don’t waffle, give me the straight story. I’m telling you right here, right now, I’ve read the Bible, I understand the Bible, I was Baptised, but I reject it all. I reject following Jesus, I think his moral ideas are unworkable.
Is God going to kick my ass because of that or not? I’m not a virtuous pagan, I was baptised but it didn’t work. I’ve heard the message of Jesus, understood it, thought about it deeply, and rejected it. Seems to me that there is not reasonable reading of the Bible that doesn’t end up with God kicking my ass.
So what should I do? I’m not in denial. I’m not waiting for a message. I heard the message and I turned away from it. I’m not a lost sheep, I know exactly where I am and I’m glad I’m here. There is no such thing as God. But, suppose I’m wrong. What then? I’m going to put MYSELF in hell? I don’t think so, I’m not into masochism. If being cut off from God is hell, then I’m already in hell. And you know what? It’s not so bad. In fact, it’s pretty good!
I can’t have any faith in God, because doing so makes no sense. I believe all you people who believe in God are deluded. So what happens now?
By “we” I mean the people to whom you were referring in your earlier statement:
. . .unless you were speaking specifically of Stoid, that is.
Or perhaps I misunderstood you. Seems to me that you acknowledge that some or all non-Christians in the US already have enough info about Christianity to accept or reject it.
So, if we have enough info, why harp on it? (don’t get up, I’ll answer for you ;))
Because few Christians truly believe that anyone can turn down the Christian faith. If someone is of another religion or no religion or leaves the Christian faith, they simply don’t understand. So, it’s the Christian’s “duty” to “explain” it yet again. As if belief will arise through repetition, perhaps.
And perhaps it will. After all, everyone has heard that smoking kills, yet there remain numerous efforts encouraging people to quit.
But there’s a difference. We have evidence, real and tangible, that smoking kills. We have no such evidence for the tenets of the Bible. Smokers are physically and psychically addicted. Many people’s opinions to the contrary, non-Christians are not addicted to sin. Many smokers want to quit. Again, while it’s hard for many Christians to believe, non-Christians, by and large, do not desperately want to become Christians.
Yes, I know it’s important to Christians that I be “saved.” That’s how they’re taught. :shrug:
Now I say, “thank you very much for your concern for my soul. I assure you, it’s in good hands. I understand your beliefs; I do not share them. Bye.”
But, unfortunately, that’s not enough for some people.
In you opinion, sure–and I very much appreciate it. In my opinion, the entire concept of hell is silly. (For that matter, I fail to understand how anyone can be separated from the Infinite, but we can let that one go.) Nevertheless, there are plenty of people out there who do not share your views on damnation, as I’m sure you’re aware.
)