Evolution v. Creationism Debate

rgambs

RSR said:

rgambs said:

Most of the lore of heaven, hell, the "war in heaven", and angels comes from writers like Milton and Dante.

I think Dante's inferno is the most prevalent.

Paradise Lost is one of the greatest literary works ever. Dante is a translation so until I learn Italian I can't properly judge it.

PJfanwillneverleave1

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PJfanwillneverleave1

RSR said:

callen said:

RSR said:

callen said:

What or why? Not why??? Religion doesn't own the why either. Can watch monkeys and dogs and see morality. And know the why, to get along.

Would also counter religion doesn't make one a better person, in any respect. One should do good or be moral without the fear instilled. Religion offers an excuse for ones actions.

Yes you are being very careful to not sound judgmental and some may like this gentle approach but Christianity is not kind. It is not all loving and it is based on old fable book. All those that don't accept Jc burn in hell. Right? Or does one pick and choose what one wants to believe.

Christianity/bible makes no logical sense. Period. Get why it's popular but bad for society. We can do better.

Religion is not a hill I'll die on. Religion tries to make you a better person from the outside-in, and it fails. There are examples of people in all sorts of religions who transcended their own traditions and value systems to make the world better. But it wasn't their religion that got them there. They became who they are in spite of their religion, every time.

Burning in Hell has little to do with whether or not we accept some information or ascent to something intellectually. That's how it's been framed for a long time, and it's not the whole picture. The intellectual part of faith is often the last thing to catch up to our hearts. For example, We have an experience of bigness or something ethereal happens in our lives, and our heart immediately wells up. Our brains then start trying to categorize and make sense of it all. Sometimes we just can't, but it doesn't mean it isn't real.

Here's how I think the whole sin and hell thing works, in two examples:

Someone who can never control their anger will wind up being completely defined by that very anger. This is the essence of sin. How sin usually gets framed is "things we think are bad ... Like smoking, drinking, dancing (?)", but that's not right. It's better understood as things that hurt ourselves, or other people in some way. My dad smoked for 40 years. Now the effects are starting to show, and it's painful to watch. His past is now hurting him, and his kids who have to helplessly watch. I have uncles whose marriages and family lives are ruined because they chose the bottle over their kids one time too many.

But you don't have sin without forgiveness. Forgiveness is essentially the thing a person does when they decide to let go of the pain another person has caused them. In choosing to forgive, we acknowledge that there is a price to the pain caused to us, and we choose to absorb it instead of holding it against the other person.

And now hell ... Consider that a person who is always grumbling or complaining will at some point become defined by their own grumbling and negativity. Now imagine if that never stops. They go to the grave, wake up to find they are somehow still alive, and they just continue on as usual ... Forever. Eventually the humanity will be stripped right out of them and they'll be nothing more than the grumble. Some people can get damn close to that right now.

What I'm saying is, christian can talk about not wanting to go to hell after they die, but that misses the point. Christianity is really about the heaven and hell that's right here on earth right now. The Christian bible paints a vivid picture of both heaven and hell as not things limited to some spacey afterworld. They are present realities that extend out into time infinitely.

On your personal opinion of Sin - Could you please provide your opinion of why Christians believe humans are born in sin? To the person who says I was born in sin or a sinner I say fuck off (not you literally) but to the idiot thing called god that would cast that awful judgement upon a newborn, it's so sad it's sickening.

On your point of Hell - I really don't understand.
Spacey afterworld? - there is not an afterworld
Present realities that extend out into time infinitely - yes , they are called the laws of the universe.

Nothing you describe in your opinion of hell is interchangeable.

Last-12-Exit

Even when I went to church as a teenager, I had a problem with being born in sin. I actually heard a preacher say that if a new born dies before it is baptized, it would go to hell. How fucked up is that?

callen

Last-12-Exit said:

Even when I went to church as a teenager, I had a problem with being born in sin. I actually heard a preacher say that if a new born dies before it is baptized, it would go to hell. How fucked up is that?

Right!

And let's not forget god knows majority of worlds population won't be Christians so all those are also going to hell. So what like 15 % of his creations guaranteed to go to hell. Mean god, mean.

PJfanwillneverleave1

Last-12-Exit said:

Even when I went to church as a teenager, I had a problem with being born in sin. I actually heard a preacher say that if a new born dies before it is baptized, it would go to hell. How fucked up is that?

You should thank that preacher immensely for saying something so fucked up that it provided a reality path for your brain to come to

Last-12-Exit

PJfanwillneverleave1 said:

Last-12-Exit said:

Even when I went to church as a teenager, I had a problem with being born in sin. I actually heard a preacher say that if a new born dies before it is baptized, it would go to hell. How fucked up is that?

You should thank that preacher immensely for saying something so fucked up that it provided a reality path for your brain to come to

Lol. That was just one of 50 things that turned me off of religion.

HughFreakingDillon

PJfanwillneverleave1 said:

Last-12-Exit said:

Even when I went to church as a teenager, I had a problem with being born in sin. I actually heard a preacher say that if a new born dies before it is baptized, it would go to hell. How fucked up is that?

You should thank that preacher immensely for saying something so fucked up that it provided a reality path for your brain to come to

totally. that was one of several points that made me think "WTF???".

hedonist

Digging this thread on all fronts.

Just look at that crowd - all of them, every single one of us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7GhmTHGH40

Bennyorr4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ZF_R_j0OY

riotgrl

callen said:

Last-12-Exit said:

Even when I went to church as a teenager, I had a problem with being born in sin. I actually heard a preacher say that if a new born dies before it is baptized, it would go to hell. How fucked up is that?

Right!

And let's not forget god knows majority of worlds population won't be Christians so all those are also going to hell. So what like 15 % of his creations guaranteed to go to hell. Mean god, mean.

And I always questioned what happened to those people who lived before Christianity was founded? Did they all die and go to hell? And how can anyone believe that the Christian denomination that they follow, that was started in the mid-1800s, is the only true path to salvation? And that everyone else, even other Christians, are wrong and will die and go to hell? When I heard someone say that one of my family members would go to hell because she wasn't the 'right' kind of Christian then I was done. I've always struggled with the inconsistencies that I recognized in religion but that was it for me. Those are some astoundingly naive beliefs. Not really sure how anyone can believe this is literally true.

HughFreakingDillon

my brother and his wife told me that I will be going to infinite nothingness, and that they "feel sorry for me". I'm not close with my brother.
I think it's hilarious that they believe that christianity, which is only 2000 years old, is the truth. God was feeling pretty fucking lazy for a long fucking time if that's the case.

Last-12-Exit

paulonious said:

my brother and his wife told me that I will be going to infinite nothingness, and that they "feel sorry for me". I'm not close with my brother.
I think it's hilarious that they believe that christianity, which is only 2000 years old, is the truth. God was feeling pretty fucking lazy for a long fucking time if that's the case.

I get the "I pray for you everyday" and the "I hate to think I won't see you in heaven" weekly from my mom. She seriously thinks she failed as a mother because I "turned out the way I did."
We can't talk politics or religion. She always ends up in tears because she refuses to believe that I don't believe in anything.

RSR

This recent discussion sounds like you've all had a brush-in with Calvinism. One of the major critiques of Calvinism from within the rest of Christianity is that Calvinism systematically miscategorizes biblical texts, making God into a moral monster. It's also given some Calvinists the idea that they have permission to act in kind. I think many of us have experienced the fruit of that. By the way, Calvinism isn't a denomination - it's a theological leaning. Not all Calvinists are the same, and not all believe everything that John Calvin taught.

I have one Calvinist friend who told me, "Helping people for the sake of helping is just like giving them sandwiches on the way to hell". A statement like that makes no reasonable sense when you claim to worship a God who died for the sake of all people. Unfortunately, it makes perfect sense to a person who has made a series of assumptions that places having correct beliefs at the very top. Plus, because Calvinisms' way of speaking about God and faith is very precise and rigid, it tends to attract people who want to be right about everything.

It still makes my stomach churn to hear stories from people who have had relatives and friends tell them they are going to hell because they stopped going to church, or stopped believing in a god that they honestly felt wasn't worth trusting in the first place.

Some context: One of the enduring ideas from the enlightenment (and protestant reformation) which has permeated the majority of Christian circles is that the Bible is meant to be a sort of legal document. So "Section A, article 12, line 6" has the exact same weight as "Section 345, article 18, line 57." This is why you get Christians passionately debating people on their various stances. They feel like because it says 'X' on page 33, and 'Y' on page 1045 that they suddenly have a rock solid case. But that isn't what it means to believe the Bible. It's just what a lot of people have been told, and what a lot of people have accepted (or rejected) without much questioning.

Last-12-Exit

RSR said:

This recent discussion sounds like you've all had a brush-in with Calvinism. One of the major critiques of Calvinism from within the rest of Christianity is that Calvinism systematically miscategorizes biblical texts, making God into a moral monster. It's also given some Calvinists the idea that they have permission to act in kind. I think many of us have experienced the fruit of that. By the way, Calvinism isn't a denomination - it's a theological leaning. Not all Calvinists are the same, and not all believe everything that John Calvin taught.

I have one Calvinist friend who told me, "Helping people for the sake of helping is just like giving them sandwiches on the way to hell". A statement like that makes no reasonable sense when you claim to worship a God who died for the sake of all people. Unfortunately, it makes perfect sense to a person who has made a series of assumptions that places having correct beliefs at the very top. Plus, because Calvinisms' way of speaking about God and faith is very precise and rigid, it tends to attract people who want to be right about everything.

It still makes my stomach churn to hear stories from people who have had relatives and friends tell them they are going to hell because they stopped going to church, or stopped believing in a god that they honestly felt wasn't worth trusting in the first place.

Some context: One of the enduring ideas from the enlightenment (and protestant reformation) which has permeated the majority of Christian circles is that the Bible is meant to be a sort of legal document. So "Section A, article 12, line 6" has the exact same weight as "Section 345, article 18, line 57." This is why you get Christians passionately debating people on their various stances. They feel like because it says 'X' on page 33, and 'Y' on page 1045 that they suddenly have a rock solid case. But that isn't what it means to believe the Bible. It's just what a lot of people have been told, and what a lot of people have accepted (or rejected) without much questioning.

Huh?

PJfanwillneverleave1

RSR said:

This recent discussion sounds like you've all had a brush-in with Calvinism. One of the major critiques of Calvinism from within the rest of Christianity is that Calvinism systematically miscategorizes biblical texts, making God into a moral monster.

but god is a moral monster
"“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

I wish I could take credit for writing that but it belongs to someone else.

calvinism, smalvinism, same shit different pile

brianlux

I grew up in a protestant home, tried the Jesus thing in the seventies and eventually decided I'm good with learning a little from all faiths but that ultimately what is beyond that which we know is pretty much Mystery. I like the concept of the mystery of the intangible. That said, I have respect for those who practice their faith, what ever it may be, when that faith is based on a desire to do good things, be loving, generous, kind, etc. RSR, you seem like that type.

I don't think we need to dump on people we don't agree with. Just saying.

Last-12-Exit

brianlux said:

I grew up in a protestant home, tried the Jesus thing in the seventies and eventually decided I'm good with learning a little from all faiths but that ultimately what is beyond that which we know is pretty much Mystery. I like the concept of the mystery of the intangible. That said, I have respect for those who practice their faith, what ever it may be, when that faith is based on a desire to do good things, be loving, generous, kind, etc. RSR, you seem like that type.

I don't think we need to dump on people we don't agree with. Just saying.

In regards to your last sentence, I'm fine with people believing what they want. What I'm sick of is the people in my life insisting that I need god to be alive and to die.

Bentleyspop

It always amazes me that so many people believe in and trust in a benevolent being who in their world is so wonderful and loving. Yet is responsible for so many terrible things. Such as AIDS, Ebola, The Holocaust, Dick Cheney, and so much more.

:-O

brianlux

Last-12-Exit said:

brianlux said:

I grew up in a protestant home, tried the Jesus thing in the seventies and eventually decided I'm good with learning a little from all faiths but that ultimately what is beyond that which we know is pretty much Mystery. I like the concept of the mystery of the intangible. That said, I have respect for those who practice their faith, what ever it may be, when that faith is based on a desire to do good things, be loving, generous, kind, etc. RSR, you seem like that type.

I don't think we need to dump on people we don't agree with. Just saying.

In regards to your last sentence, I'm fine with people believing what they want. What I'm sick of is the people in my life insisting that I need god to be alive and to die.

Well, that's where I draw the line as well. If you were to hang around me place you'd notice we don't get a lot of proselytizers at our door these days. [-(