i'm a bad christian.
i haven't been to church in years. i'm not sure i've read more than one page of the bible. sometimes, i'm not even sure if i believe in god.
my mother says this makes me a bad person in general.
Anonymous
06:13:14 PM
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14 comments:
No, it doesn't make you a bad person...it just depends on what you truly believe. If you don't believe in God, then you don't believe in God. It doesn't make you any better or any worse than anyone else.
I am a Christian, actually, but who am I to say who's right and who's wrong? It all goes back to whatever you think is right.
Bah, I hate you people who call yourselves Christians but aren't hardcore fundamentalists. Grow some balls and go one way or the other.
well, i just fell asleep in church. slept through most of the service. oops!
atheist anyway.
Let me say, for one, that as a pretty hardcore Jew, I do not understand a great deal of Christian theology, dogma, etc. However, based on my limited knowledge, this is what I claim to be true. End Disclaimer.
In order to be a "good Christian" you must believe in God, and that Jesus will save you, yadayadayada. If you don't, however, that does not make you a bad person. It just means that you won't be saved and you will go to hell with the rest of us.
As far as actually reading the bible, I would recommend reading it whether or not you are a good Christian or whatever you are. It's probably the most influential book in history, and is as such worth a read.
And if your mother is calling you a bad person....way to be supportive of your children.
^^I'm not even sure how to respond to that other than with a slack jaw.
Any understanding of bible study in any religion would tell you how wrong you are.
Believe what you want.
Your mom may argue with you, but I doubt she'll actually make you believe something. And, it by no means makes you a bad person that you don't go to church. My defenition of a good person is someone who lives by their conscience (stolen from Les Mis). Just do what you know is right. In some ways, atheism actually encourages more of a sense of morality through promoting the value of human life (i.e. this is it, no heaven, no hell, no...whatever).
Anonymous 2, you're exactly right. I go to church 2-3 times a month and read the bible or some christian text most days. I believe in a loving god and Jesus Christ. I still am struggling with salvation by faith through Christ. Thus I am not a Christian and if I died tomorrow I would go to hell with everybody else.
I believe that if i ever do become a christian, those principles will become the ones that guide my life. Right now the most defining ideals of my life are American ideals. I believe in free speech, equality, religious plurality, and the rule of law.
I wonder if I will ever be able to reconcile these two systems?
Don't even start that. If this turns into a separation of church and state topic, I might just blow a fuse.
No, see, La_Corazon
you have a warped understanding of love. God hates sinners. He hates sinners because he is perfect, and you are imperfect. He wants you to be perfect so he can love you, because by loving you and making you perfect it proves how powerful he really is.
That being said, when God sends a person to hell he is loving them. He loves them because he is still acknowledging that he is the most important being in the universe. That is the way it has to be.
God is selfish and jealous because he's god, you see. He's the best. You're like a filthy rag to him.
The good news is, God loves himself. And he's willing to superimpose his image on you and make you like him, as long as you're willing to give your life up.
Without holding this principle to be true, Christianity is a bullshit philosophy. It falls apart very very quickly if you don't operate from a principle like that.
But I mean, believe what you want, personally I'm an atheist. I just hate people with stupid christianity. I can at least admire the more academic ones who know what they're talking about
(btw, Rashi, read some fundamentalist commentary and you'll see a hell of a lot of people who believe some crazier shit than this. so I wouldn't say "any religion." perhaps a minority of christians, but definitely the most extreme minorioty. This is what makes the most sense though.)
PS. SD, when I said "you" I wasn't really talking about you I was talking about every other pseudo christian too. Don't take it personally, friend?
Op, your mom needs to really reorganize her priorities. My personal view is that parents should raise their kids as religiously or as secularly as they please in the church of their choice, but when the kid gets to be 12 or so, the child's faith really isn't in the parent's hands anymore. They need to be left to make their own choice about their spirituality.
The parents only job is to give their child the infomation to choose whatever kind of -ist or -ian they want to be as an adult, and then let tham make that descision all on their own. No one can do it for them. Most of all, kids need the freedom and acceptance to say "No, I just don't want to go to church. No, I don't believe in God." and be respected for it. It's really a bummer you didn't have that growing up.
See, I'm anonymous....I don't have to apologize for anything.
Anonymous2, we are now going to start a theology debate. Right here. Right now.
There are three things generally accepted about God.
1) He is omniscient
2) He is omnipotent
3) He is good
Now, this leads to some very interesting conflicts, as obviously at most two of them can be true. After all, if all three of them were true, there would be no suffering in this world, and we would all live a much happier existence. No matter how you look at it, God must be in some way, shape, or form fallable. If He is omnipotent and good, one must assume that He is simply not capable of realizing the suffering that happens (this is largely the "Clockmaker" theory, and actually presents a paradox, as omnipotency would imply omniscience, unless of course, He chooses to not be omniscient). I'm sure you can figure out the rest on your own, though with your total lack of understanding of God, I have my doubts.
What my real point is that you wrote: "He hates sinners because he is perfect, and you are imperfect." This is, by the stated above, simply not a valid statement. If God is only two out of the three above, then He is clearly not perfect. In addition, the fact that God would declare Man "imperfect" goes completely against the Judeo-Christian idea of the creation of man, which states that man was made in the image of God. But again, it seems that you are spending too much time bullshitting and not enough reading the actual text.
Now, Jews don't believe in Hell. It simply doesn't exist. We believe in a place called Gehinnom. Perhaps the best way to describe it is like the Mesopotamian concept of the afterlife - basically a barren, purgatory type wasteland. If you're deemed "good" of course, you go to Heaven, but that's a different issue. If you are truly evil, say for instance Hitler, your soul is simply blinked out of existence. Now how exactly is that God "loving them?"
You know what just occurred to me? You basically plagiarized Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, though admitedly you are slightly less wacko than Jonathon Edwards.
I am not supporting fundamentalism. Anyone who reads the bible verbatim will not only gain nothing from it, but will essentially find himself bogged down in so much minutia, they will literally go crazy.
I've taken a multitude of classes regarding Christianity, although taught by a rabbi. I at least grasp the psychology of the religion as a whole.
That's all the theology I can think of at the moment. Your move.
Your definition of good is skewed Rashi, we'll leave it at that.
What's good for God is that we suffer for our sins. That means he is just. Justice is good, right? Yes. It is.
Also, man and woman (together, and only together) were created in the image of God. if you bother to read past genesis chapter 1 in the bible, you'll find that they screwed that up. The image was distorted during the fall and the subsequent curse that god laid on man. In some way we still reflect him, but not in our actions.
Any "idea plagiarism" was not intentional. I've never read a sermon by Johnathan Edwards before, but apparently he has some good ideas. I have heard him referred to as one of the greatest american theologans.
I'll stop there, obviously your flawed premise that god can't be all three of those things screws up the rest of your argument, and maybe you can see that now, or maybe not.
Also, I don't consider this a debate. I'm gonna check it as long as it's on the main page and post on it when I feel like, whenever you or somebody else says something that piques my interest. You can take my refusal to respond to whatever bait you choose to throw out as "you win and vanquish evil" or whatever you want anyway, since that's the only purpose I can see of your slightly too dramatic "your move" and "right here. right now." lines. It's fine with me :D
Ah. And this is where perhaps the prime difference between Judaism and Christianity occurs.
We are not made to "suffer for our sins." Day in and day out we address our sins and ask both God and our fellow human beings for forgiveness. Once we have done that, assuming that we didn't murder someone or something (which I think we can both agree is wrong), we are absolved and good to go. Where you drew this conclusion that for us to suffer is good for God baffles me. God does not want to see us suffer. However, He respects that we make our own choices and as such, we really end up punishing ourselves.
Show me a verse that says that the image of man was "distorted" and I will show you one that says it wasn't.
And of course, my premise was flawed. That's the point! God cannot possibly be all three things, for if He was, there could be no suffering in this world. Thus, we must accept that maybe God is NOT perfect, and as such, is in no real position to judge humanity.
That said, I am sorry that I have been so argumentative lately. It's been a long time since there's been a really juicy topic on Tangst, and I've been itching to see one again. If you know me in person, you know that I don't believe half the things I say, I just like to make up points and defend them. I am by no means a fundamentalist - on the contrary, I despise them. And that's all I have to say about that for the moment.
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