Redemptive Hallucinations

[Ben Kenobi]

Eh? Why the laugh, Asher?

[Asher]

I suppose it's only funny from the outside, it's just normal to some people.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Tuberski
Are you Mormon, Verto?

ACK!

Verto is a Pole that means he's a good little Catholic boy.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Berzerker
It's a great book and one of the few based on much earlier Greek cosmogony (thru Virgil the Roman) which in turn undoubtedly derives from even earlier sources like the Egyptians, Babylonians, and, ultimately, the Sumerians. Read Dante as a celestial journey and you won't need "faith" to believe in God...

It's supposed to be about the Christian Hell, which it resembles slightly less than it resembles Disneyland. Insofar as it is supposed to have anything to do with Christianity, the book is a failure. I've seen the original Italian text and it is charming poetry, and it may have great significance in the same sense that the Oddysey does, but it's a very poor description of its theological subject.

[Bosh]

Very eloquent Elok, the best piece of Christian apologism I've come across on the internet in quite some time. However you've still got the problem of everyone who's not Christian being:

the folks whose behavior in life gradually turned them into something that wasn't really human at all. The proud, the vain, the selfish, the cruel, people more concerned with being better than those around them than with being in a good way at all.

which is a bit hard to stomach.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


Vesayen:

Good question, I think I can answer for Slowwy since Methodists are not too distant from Mennonites, both can be evangelical.

The way my church does this is to ask the congregation at the end of the service if there is anyone who has not accepted Christ, confessing that Christ is the son of God, and has died on the cross to redeem our sins.

If someone raises their hand, my pastor prays, and the confessor repeats each section of the prayer.

(It was me, first of all.)

What I'm really trying to ask is what does it take to accept Jesus and God? Do you have to believe that Jesus was the Son of God? Do you have to act like Jesus? Do you have to say, sure, maybe God had a kid a long time ago. What's it take?

[Lincoln]

I personally do not accept the "believe in God" thing the way it is often presented in modern churches. The first requirement is that we repent. The fact that there are so many "Christians" today that live worse lives than the people they are trying to convert shows that the present day gospel is not the same one that Jesus preached. Jesus said to the Jews who thought they were some chosen seed of Abraham: "If Abraham were your father you would do the works of Abraham." Claiming to be a Christian and a "believer" is not necessarily the same as actually being one.

"Repent and believe the gospel" is the message, not believe and get a free life insurance policy and ticket to live like the devil.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Boshko
Very eloquent Elok, the best piece of Christian apologism I've come across on the internet in quite some time. However you've still got the problem of everyone who's not Christian being:
which is a bit hard to stomach.

Thank you. Thing is, that's legalistic, and that's exactly my point. We don't know everything about the afterlife, but the Christians who know what they're talking about agree that God isn't going to check off on a list like a bouncer at a nightclub. There isn't one thing that WILL send you to heaven or hell, traditionally, except blasphemy against the holy spirit, which Christ says will not be forgiven in this age or the age to come. And blasphemers against the holy spirit are not just non-believers, but those who knowingly vilify the name of god, namely the kind of "evangelical atheists" who fit the symptoms I named like a glove. People who say there is no proof that God exists but mean that whether there is one or not (and they may very well suspect deep inside that there is), they will not believe in Him because they want to see the world exactly as they wish it to be, not as it really is. You can see this in the very phrase, "there is no scientific evidence that God exists," which is a pretty clear-cut tautology but still gets uttered on a regular basis. "A system of reasoning used to explain the workings of the world without resorting to the supernatural can find no proof of the supernatural." Now that's just genius. Any fool could see that, if God did exist, He would be anything but a controlled variable, and uniformitarianism would be nothing but a guess.
"Then why did he make the world so that it looks like it developed without Him," right? Why do computer programmers not write in a code that corresponds exactly to plain English? The same reason: the ability to be easily understood by those who make use of it was not a priority in the design. If knowing that God exists is supposed to make it easier for us to be better people, Christianity claims otherwise: Adam was God's best friend and had everything he wanted or could ever want and still screwed it up. Note also that, no matter how the universe was constructed, it would not be readily explicable because it would be the only thing we knew, and you can't fully understand anything when you have no basis for comparison. And yes, God can make anything, but a system without limitations isn't a system, it's a mess. Wanting a world that works like ours but is easily understood is a bit like wanting a world where people are also tuna-fish sandwiches and the Earth can orbit around the moon if it feels like it.
Considering that we are discussing an ostensibly omniscient being, the argument is especially ludicrous, because it puts us in the position of more or less totally ignorant people criticizing an expert on the subject, like a Mongolian horse-herder telling Rommel how to move his troops effectively, or a child yelling at Daddy for trying to kill Mommy with his pelvis after he walks in on them at night. We're trying to evaluate a situation that we are not capable of understanding here.
I always felt that you can never prove or disprove the divine, but I only recently realized why. Thank you, Mere Christianity, for the inspiration.
Okay, so I went off on a gigundo tangent. The point I was originally making is that it's not theoretical acknowledgement that matters, it's a lucid soul. Note that Christ didn't say He wouldn't forgive the blasphemers, only that they would not be forgiven. I think it's because you have to want forgiveness before you receive it. There's the catch.

[Lorizael]

To respond to your tangent, Elok, smarter atheists and agnostics don't make that claim. Instead they say, "There is nothing to suggest that a supernatural being exists or that a supernatural being needs to exist." And this is quite true.

One could argue that the universe needs some sort of creating force in order for it to have come into existence, but this is not necessarily correct. The origin of the universe naturally has to be a supernatural source, and anything supernatural would not have to follow the laws of the universe.

In other words, the logic of this universe stating that everything needs a cause would not immediately be applicable to the supernatural, because we do not know that the supernatural has the same laws of logic as our universe.

So the universe doesn't need a creating force. But, of course, there's no reason to think that it doesn't. There's no reason to think that the supernatural doesn't follow the same laws of logic. It's just that we can't really make assumptions about the supernatural, so I don't see how anyone could base their entire life off a belief that really has nothing going for it.

And, even if the universe does have some sort of supernatural origin, we don't know that this supernatural origin is a divine sentient entity, let alone the Christian God.

[Elok]

You have a point, bud. I posted this thread defensively, so to speak, because I was tired of the ignorant sneering. I'm not expecting anyone to convert because of what I say, only to stop fighting me on grounds that don't exist.
As for my personal belief, well, that's a matter of sheer opinion. True, I was raised Orthodox, but so were my brothers and they're heathen today. Hopefully nobody is going to suggest that I am just a fool or haven't given the matter enough thought. My belief is based on observations of humanity, not any God. I've seen the way we treat each other, it doesn't make sense to me, and neither does the statement, "nobody's perfect." I always wonder WHY it isn't perfect. Most of the wrongs we do have no positive results in the long term, but we do them anyway, and always with a tendency to overlook what is shown in retrospect to be obvious. Our explanations don't make sense, our truths aren't true, and the only thing conventional wisdom tells us about it is that we want to screw our mothers. About seven milennia of human civilization has led to the same bunch of nasty creeps as before. Even if perfection is impossible I don't see how it hurts to try. If religion is a human invention then the "religious atrocities" so frequently cited is just one common human tendency manifesting itself in another, so far as I am concerned.
Long story short, I am inclined to believe, based on the general orderliness and trends of human perversity, in the existence of a devil. The fact that we have survived the madness for so long-literally time out of memory-indicates to me that the devil is kept from winning by something. Now, there is no empirical evidence here, only hunches and guesswork. In my experience, however, hunches and guesswork are the essence of life. Most of the decisions I make are a leap and a wish with nowhere near enough information to base them on. It's all I know how to do, and perhaps more importantly, all I really can do. I go with Christianity specifically because it's what I was taught, I've never encountered a real or valid objection to it, and I can only do the best I can, to meet a tautology with a (semi-)tautology. That's about it.

[Sava]

Even if I assume Christianity is the true religion... I think faith is low on the totem pole in terms of getting into heaven. Leading a good life and being a good person are what I believe to be the important things. The whole notion that blind faith earns you an express ticket to heaven is disturbing.

[Elok]

Well, I'm gonna assume that you're responding to someone other than me, Sava, but I don't think it's faith or works. Faith is only necessary insofar as Christianity is the most accurate map to the destination you want; I think it was Buddha who said that his teachings were only the raft used to carry people to the shore. I agree with that, but would like to add that my religion isn't a raft, it's a yacht. Maybe you'll get there with your raft, but the idea of faith is that there's a better way to go.
Works, on the other hand, encounters the fact that your actions are not the essence of who you are. In talking of an omniscient God who can read your deepest thoughts like a book, it doesn't make sense to define it in terms of what you do within a given period of time. Doesn't fit with those Christian religions who believe in salvation for the sincerely repentant at their deathbed either. When all information is available to be seen, the best measurement of the heart would be the heart itself, the soul as it is made or lost by years of thought and habit. You cannot change what you have done, and who but God is to say that somebody "got off too easy"? Not your works, not your faith, not your contributions to Reverend Hal's Pomade fund, but you yourself, at the core, are to be judged. Well, sez me.