Re: What do people believe when it comes to religion and or spirituality?
Sukil,
You're right. My point was that you won't go to hell for making the topic, you will go to hell because there is no way to heaven accept by redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ. Often times Christians forget that and attribute a given action to condemnation, and this is what I have a problem with. Telling someone they're going to hell for any given sin just makes them angry and certainly does not show Christ's love to them. It's a balancing act. We can't tell them they aren't going to hell, because that would be a lie, so instead we tell them how to get to heaven. All sinners go to hell, Christians are just sinners saved by God's mercy and grace through the pathway he created by the sacrifice of his only begotten son.
As for blasphemy of the holy spirit, again, if one is blaspheming, in the case you cited, attributing God's word to Satan, one obviously does not have a relationship with Christ and may never have one. There are some difficult passages in the bible to deal with, such as God saying in romans that he will harden those who he wants to harden, and show mercy to those who he would show mercy. He compares us to a potter and his clay. But I never said following God was in any way easy or even easy to understand all of the time.
Finally, as for Adam, he did die. He died to righteousness. You need to understand that the bible is packed full of metaphor. God says that we are born dead in our sins. So when he told Adam that he would die if he ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, what he meant is that we were not equipped to handle evil and so we would be dead to righteousness without his help. And that is exactly what happened. Does this mean that atheists can never be moral people? No, but that doesn't really matter. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, which is why we need to repent and turn to Jesus Christ for forgiveness of our sins.
Tw ard, I have to completely disagree with you for one simple reason. A year ago, I was exactly in your camp. If God did not prove himself to me, he obviously did not exist, and if he did exist, he was only worthy of my undying hatred for making me blind amongst other things. Essentially, we had the exact same position, save that I did not grow up with indoctrination as you did. Now, I have seen more than enough evidence to be willing to devote my life to Christ at any cost. It was not scientific evidence that brought me to God, though science has reinforced my faith over the last year. It was simply God showing me proof in his own way when I asked him for it, and working in my heart until I was finally ready to accept his leadership.
I also disagree that evolution covers all the bases of how we got here, especially since top scientists in the field, even atheists, have discovered that the world is just too finely balanced to have, "just happened." So now, they attempt to move the problem a step back by claiming that we were created by life on another planet, but that doesn't solve the problem either, since who created that life? The evolutionary theory, for that's exactly what it is, a theory, is full of all kinds of holes, like biodiversity, that is, redundant support systems in various environments, mathematically impossible odds, fake fossils in the fossil record and more. As finely balanced and tuned as the world is, it is impossible that the world we live in today was created by accidental, random chance, especially since true randomness has not been discovered anywhere in the known universe. Both theories, the big bang theory and the evolutionary theory, would have us believe that the universe just popped into existence because it needed to exist for some reason. This does not happen anywhere else in the world. If you go to a junkyard and stand around, you would not honestly expect to see a the junk suddenly assemble itself into a car. By that same token, why are these two theories the only viable place then where something just happened by supposed coincidence?
In short, I don't have enough faith to be an atheist.Give it another 20 years and Darwin's theory will likely be dead, since as of right now it is mostly the universities carrying it on and not scientists.
It isn't that I mind these debates. To the contrary, I enjoy putting my knowledge of scripture and evidences of God's existence to the test. Sometimes I do wonder what the point is though, since neither side goes in willing to be swayed, and both sides are expecting to leave the debate in, at best, a neutral position. For the Christian, the goal is of course to help those we're debating find Christ so that they will be saved from hell. When I was an atheist, my goal was either to get Christians to leave me alone, or to make them seem blind in their faith by offering what I thought at the time was obvious eviden ce against the existence of God. Of course, I do not mean to offend anyone, but sometimes, the things Jesus himself said are just naturally offensive to the ears of man. I certainly did not appreciate being told I was going to hell when I was an atheist and only following some invisible man in the sky would keep me from eternal torment. Now that my spiritual eyes have been opened, I know that there are all kinds of things wrong with that point of view, for example: God does not live in the sky, he dwells in heaven, which for all practical purposes can not be observed by humans unless he allows it. An alternate dimension, if you will. God is not invisible, he simply chooses to manifest where he wants to, and certainly not at the command of any human, lest we think that God serves man.
Thanks for reading, and I apologize if this seems a little random.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
