Ask a Christian anything

[HAL9000]

That's not a very Christian attitude.

I disagree, I'd say that's a very Christian response, when confronted with tough questions.

 

[Analog]

Do you take the bible literally? I'll stick to the new testament. I consider myself a believer, but I my view is that the bible was written by human beings, and although it holds much wisdom and witness, some of it seems a bit sensational to say the least. Here is one that I have a hard time with:

Matthew 27 verse 51: (death of Jesus)

51At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. 52The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. 53They came out of the tombs, and after Jesus’ resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

Okay, so it says MANY people were raised from the dead? Don't you think that's pretty significant? Who where these people? Did they die a 2nd time? I think that this would be a huge deal, but glossed over and swept under the rug. When Jesus raised Lazarus, that was a big enough deal that he did that. But this takes the cake! Thoughts?

 

[zinfamous]

POINT me in the direction of a true christian and I would love to converse with him . But alas I have never knowingly met ONE. These Sunday worshippers are further away from God than many non believers

we need to get you and Malak together in one thread.

perhaps that would be too awesome, though.

:hmm:

 

[Nemesis 1]

He has tried and failed. He can't coup with recent scientific revelations about matter and the new particles the Sun is emitting . The matter thing is a little old news but the Sun thats something else.

 

[7window]

what is a good christian chat site?

 

[sonoma1993]

Does the world really end on May 21,2011 or in 2012?

 

[Nemesis 1]

what is a good christian chat site?

Anyone that doesn't talk about endtimes but instead talks of the message that the Word did deliever and try to live your life in that image that the Word did give. You find a site like that . Let me know about it please.


The poster above the Earth is forever.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

I bet so many of you are jealous that I have gotten a question answered.

 

[shiner]

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

 

[WaTaGuMp]

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

Yes.

 

[SphinxnihpS]

Given that,
1) Life begins at conception
2) Baptism is the method of being reborn in Christ
3) All things happen for a reason

What happens to babies who, for some reason, die of illness or accident before they can be baptized?

Note: quoting Church does not work for this, there must be a biblical answer, you may use New or Old Testament.

There is no answer to this question in the Bible and you knew it before asking. What is your point?

 

[SphinxnihpS]

I'll answer the questions I feel like answering.

Why do you want to believe in god?

 

[shiner]

Alex, Brad, Calvin, and Dennis are playing checkers. Each of the 4 boys played 2 games with every other player.

How many games of checkers were played altogether?

 

[Perknose]

Alex, Brad, Calvin, and Dennis are playing checkers. Each of the 4 boys played 2 games with every other player.

How many games of checkers were played altogether?

Answering this complicated mathematical question would require an entire Checkers speech, but Nix on that.

 

[dpodblood]

Are you ignoring my question OP, or are you still formulating your response?

 

[SphinxnihpS]

Are you ignoring my question OP, or are you still formulating your response?

I suspect he is ignoring your unfair question. Why do you assume he is a philosopher/theologian?

 

[MotF Bane]

Alex, Brad, Calvin, and Dennis are playing checkers. Each of the 4 boys played 2 games with every other player.

How many games of checkers were played altogether?

12.

 

[Bignate603]

I've got a question for you, why do you start a thread that's guaranteed to do nothing to actually help people to come to share your beliefs?

 

[Pray To Jesus]

I've got a question for you, why do you start a thread that's guaranteed to do nothing to actually help people to come to share your beliefs?

You never know who's reading.

 

[DangerAardvark]

Prayer works. Sometimes it just doesn't work the way you expect it to or at the speed that you want. It's all up to God and he has a purpose for all things.

You know what you call something that randomly works or doesn't work? That's called something that doesn't work.

 

[Perknose]

You never know who's reading.

Jesus knows. He forgives you. We don't.

 

[shiner]

Where did I stay while in Maine last fall?

 

[AreaCode707]

Going to respond to a few but may not check back for the follow up responses.

Why are we as humans expected to forgive each other and love each other unconditionally, but God need to sacrifice his son in order to have this ability? That is; why was Jesus death necessary in order for God to grant the common sinner passage to heaven?

PS: I am taking the offer in the OP as sincere.

We as humans are not expected to forgive and love each other unconditionally under our own power. It's stated that we are only able to even aspire to such heights when we put aside our own nature and invite the Holy Spirit to provide us with his nature. It's an ongoing activity, not a one time event, which is why we so often fail.

Galatians 2:20 (New International Version)

I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Given that,
1) Life begins at conception
2) Baptism is the method of being reborn in Christ
3) All things happen for a reason

What happens to babies who, for some reason, die of illness or accident before they can be baptized?

Note: quoting Church does not work for this, there must be a biblical answer, you may use New or Old Testament.

I believe baptism is a sacrament (physical activity with a correlating result in the spiritual world) but that actions in the world are not the only way to achieve a spiritual result.

Romans 10:9 (New International Version)

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

No baptismal requirement there. Now, there is still a requirement an infant would be unable to fulfill, that of thought, belief and speech, but we did just take the sacrament of baptism off the table as an unalterable 100% of the time requirement.

Jeremiah 1:5 (New International Version)

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
before you were born I set you apart;
I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”



Psalm 139:13 (New International Version)

13 For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

From that I ascertain that God, who is outside time and knows all that was, is and could be, knows the outcome of a life even before it happens and (I believe) even if it cut short.

If being a Christian means you are a good person, than why are there so many sexual predators involved in religion? Wouldn't god be stopping that from happening?

Well, for one, being Christian doesn't mean you're a good person. In fact, it means you acknowledge that you ARE a bad person and need the saving grace of Christ. When Jesus came, he didn't hang around with the good people. He hung out with the outcasts, the people who were irrefutably sinners (tax collectors that skimmed money off the top), the people who were diseased (lepers and epileptics outcast by the community) and uneducated (blue collar working guys) and bigoted (anti-Roman zealots). He castigated those who held themselves up as "good" and called them out on their hypocrisy.

Matthew 9:10-13 (New International Version)

While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?”
On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

The church is still full of these people; those who are sick with sin. It's sad that the religious institution has set itself up as the place for "good people" when the reality and design is that it's anything but. People who are doing a passably decent job at being good people are the ones who, logically, are least likely to seek Christ because they are least likely to feel a need.

Matthew 23 (New International Version)

13 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to. [14] [b] 15 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when you have succeeded, you make them twice as much a child of hell as you are.
[...other stuff...]

27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

Sound familiar? Religious institutions were called out when Jesus was here, equally deserve to be called out now, and probably will be. Jesus didn't eschew the institutions though, he still attended and worked within the social construct that is religion. Look at all the mentions of him going to synagogue. He just called out the hypocritical behavior.

Now that the obligatory sarcastic-but-impossible question has been asked...

Epicurus summed it up nicely. "Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?" In other words, there are a few possibilities: God is unworthy of the title (impotent), God is an asshole (wicked), or God doesn't exist. So, either God isn't worth knowing or they don't exist. Either way the issue of gods is moot. So, why do you believe otherwise?

From a logical standpoint, abolishing evil would mean abolishing free will. Do you really have choice in anything if you are only offered one option? I look at this in a few different ways.

1. God's purpose in creating us and his desire for us is to love him. Love is not love when it is not freely given. In order for us to freely love him, he has to give us the choice not to. Since God's love is good and perfect, choosing otherwise introduces something not good and imperfect (evil) into the world by default.

2. I don't think we really want a world without evil. We value our independence, our free will and our choice over almost anything else, especially in the Western world. Look at the many many novels based on dystopian principle. We shiver to read or watch about a crime-free world where people have perfect unity and all basic needs met, when it's all been achieved by the removal of free will. The hero of such literature is always the one who rebels and exercises his free will, and the end of the novel is usually his triumph whereby the "perfect" society crumbles and people are restored to freedom of choice, or a sad ending where he dies and the world is doomed to a flawless but choiceless society. Bearing that in mind, how can we ask why God chooses not to be that dystopian dictator?

Why do pedophiles and murderers get to go to heaven, because they accepted Jesus, but people like Ghandi go straight to hell, do not pass go?

If salvation was based on a sliding scale of good works, where is the cutoff line? What makes one person good enough and another not good enough if the difference is a single lie in the course of a lifetime?

If you base your system of salvation on actions, and you assume that heaven is perfect, then anyone who is saved and enters heaven must be perfect or heaven would be contaminated by imperfection. Nobody is perfect, we probably all agree. So therefore we are all short of the goal line no matter who we are.

Christianity is a religion based not on works but on grace. We are all equally sinners, we all have grace equally offered to us. Very egalitarian.

Romans 3:23-24 (New International Version)

23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.

Now, I will say that I am not God and I do not know how people are judged. This passage indicates to me that there is more to judgment of non-believers than I can clearly comprehend.

Romans 2:14-16 (New International Version)

14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) 16 This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.

In all seriousness, what makes Christianity the true religion? God provided for Free-Will, so do those 1.3 billion Muslims just have it wrong? How about the 900 Million Hindus? Surely they think their own is the true religion.

Similar question to the one right above, and I already threw a verse at it but I want to add a non-Biblical analogy I've always liked, even though it's a pretty loose interpretation of anything actually Biblical.

CS Lewis wrote The Last Battle as the final installment of the Narnia series. In it, there is a character who lives his life with complete faith to his false god and to his conscience, much as outlined in the Romans passage I pasted. After that character dies, he meets the true god character in the book and realizes that, despite all his best efforts, he make an honest mistake in his understanding. To quote the summary from Wiki:

Aslan tells Emeth that 'all the service thou hast done to Tash, I accept as service done to me' and further explains 'no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him'. He explains that Emeth's pious devotion was really to Aslan, rather than to Tash.

Not a legit basis for belief but it somewhat matches the passage above and I like it as an analogy for something I find fairly plausible theologically.

Christ said "none come to the father but by me".
Does this mean that people living in the jungle who never heard of Jesus are eternally damned? Or young babies who died before they ever had a chance to understand what Jesus was, are damned?

See two previous answers above.

God is love. (1 John 4:8)
God is a jealous God. (Exodus 20:5)
Love is not jealous. (1 Cor 13:4)

Which of these statements is false?

This isn't a theological conflict, it's a problem of language.

World English Dictionary
jealous (ˈdʒɛləs) — adj (often postpositive and foll by of ) (often postpositive and foll by of ) 1. suspicious or fearful of being displaced by a rival: a jealous lover 2. resentful (of) or vindictive (towards), esp through envy: a child jealous of his brother 3. possessive and watchful in the maintenance or protection (of): jealous of one's reputation 4. characterized by or resulting from jealousy 5. obsolete , biblical or demanding exclusive loyalty: a jealous God 6. an obsolete word for zealous [C13: from Old French gelos, from Medieval Latin zēlōsus, from Late Latin zēlus emulation, jealousy, from Greek zēlos zeal ]

God is love.
God is a jealous (possessive and watchful in the maintenance or protection) God.
Love is not jealous (resentful (of) or vindictive (towards), esp through envy)

You generally are very protective of someone you love.

How do you know that Christ was divine?

Probably the very best question in this entire thread. For me personally, I think rising from the dead is demonstratively a divine act. The witnesses to this act changed their entire lives, and not at all for the better, as a result of having seen this occur. They were jailed, tortured and almost all of them were ultimately killed for refusing to recant the testimony about what they saw. While I absolutely believe that secondhand witnesses would do that through crazy-level faith, I do not believe that firsthand witnesses, knowing it to be a lie, would sacrifice so much.

That's my personal reason for the belief of Christ as divine. I'm sure other people have other reasons.

When Christians preach and say things like "you're going to hell unless you believe in Jesus," do they honestly believe they are performing a public service? To non-religious people it seems pushy and mean, but I get the impression that Christians think they're being super kind by saying those sorts of things.

Also, what if I just can't accept that Jesus was anything more than a mortal man? I can say the words "I believe in Jesus and I wish to be saved" or whatever, but I would never be able to actually believe them because Christianity doesn't make sense to me and I am incapable of believing in it in its current form.

First point, yeah, most of them do think they're helping you. They do it in the same way they'd say, "don't jump off this 30 story building because you'll die!!" However, I think most pushy Christians err in getting up in your face because (A) God gave us free will and it's up to every individual to make their own choice; it's not up to Christians to try to take away the free will of others; (B) it's a totally unsuccessful tactic; and (C) even if someone was going to jump off a building and kill themselves most people would not resort to smashing them over the head and breaking their skull to prevent it, which is sorta what you do when you yell about hell and try to use scare tactics to push salvation.

Second point, belief is only good if it's genuine. I teach high school youth group and I strongly encourage my kids, if you have doubts follow up on them. Research and learn about world religions, including atheist and agnostic views of the world. If you hold your beliefs solely because you are ignorant of the alternatives, how strong are they really? Go, learn, and then choose. I have nothing to fear from you learning all you can about all worldviews because if I believe that I really have truth, and you promise me you won't stop til you find truth, then I have confidence you'll find the same truth I have.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm gonna go get a shower and then go to dinner. Will be at the Bonterra Trattoria in Calgary, Alberta if anyone wants to join me. Work trip.

 

[DangerAardvark]

Jesus knows. He forgives you. We don't.

I forgive. You just have to put money in my collection plate and/or step into my confessional.

 

[blurredvision]

Here's a question. I was always taught that you can only get saved when god "speaks" to you. If god never speaks to me and saves me, then why am I punished and sent to hell? He's the one who never spoke to me and showed me the light, so that's a bit unfair IMO.