[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by davem

The warnings about 'pearls before swine' spring to mind. Unfortunately, if you stand up & declare your faith someone is going to challenge you on it, even say nasty things about it.

Which is why I was doing my best to ignore this thread...

It's all very well for people to challenge my faith. That's fine, that's normal. To say nasty things is fine, is normal.

But for people who are positioning themselves as enlightened, fair-minded, as thinkers who are "simply trying to look at things objectively" to repeatedly and unabashedly beat down something that simply doesn't sit with their deep-seated anti-absolutist preferences without even considering that there MAY be something to it, doesn't smack at all of fair play.

However, I'm not trying to start any fights here so much as I am trying to get the point across that I'm distinctly uncomfortable with the attitudes here. Not the statements- I can handle challenges and assaults- but the general feeling that the people who are being intransigent in their opinions aren't the Christians, but the ones who really don't come across as Christian...

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

I respect faith but I resent faith being claimed as incontrovertable fact. You, as a well informed believer, could not surely think your that your cause would be better off if such ignorance as was displayed earlier in the thread went unchallenged?

Quite. However, at the same time, you have to remember that I consider the fact that "Jesus Christ was Crucified, Died, and was Buried, and that He Rose Again from the Dead" to be as equally truthful a fact as "Catholics are Christian". On the same note, I also think that "the Bible is God's Inspired Word" is as equally true a fact.

The Bible may have been fixed in the 4th century but human knowledge wasn't.

I'm not saying it was. I'm saying that the Bible, irregardless of when it was rubber-stamped by the Church, is God's Word. Human knowledge can go forward or backwards as far as it likes, but God's Word will remain God's Word, and an Ecumenical Council's authority is non-reversible on matters of faith. It wouldn't matter if Neanderthals had taken part in the Council, it would still be considered as binding, because a Council is the work of the Holy Spirit, not the work of mankind.

If it has to be taken "all or nothing", then many of us are going to have to say "nothing". However as I pointed out, many sincere Christians don't believe it is all or nothing and are able to reconcile their faith with modern learning and are motivated by their faith to great things. On the other hand, the fundamentalist attitude of "We're definitely right and the rest of you are not only wrong but going to roast in hell" is liable to put peoples' backs up.....

Then take it as nothing, if you must.

Believing that something is definitely right is not, of itself, going to get you into Heaven. Nor is believing something that is wrong going to send you to Hell. The Devil knows all the Right answers, he knows and believes God exists, and you ask him what the correct doctrine is on any matter, he'd be able to give as good or better an answer than any theologian.

But the Devil won't get into Heaven.

However, although Heaven and Hell is NOT an issue that is dependent on what you know or believe, that does not mean that a proper knowledge of what is and what isn't is to be considered completely trivial. To get into Heaven is to love God and to love man. If one loves God, then one will want to do everything the way God would want it, correct?

Now, with regards to the Abraham/Isaac/God situation...

It is very amusing to watch people ascribe modern thoughts and feelings to a very much not-modern event. Saucepan Man might very well be justified in telling a God who wants him to kill his children to shove it, but Sauce is a product of 1500+ years of Christianity being the dominant force shaping the morals of his culture. Abraham lived in day when the rational thought of the Greek philosophers had yet to start influencing us, and when child-sacrifice was NOT uncommon at all in the religions of the day. So although WE, products of Christianity that we are, would have some major issues with God asking us to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham, though undoubtedly sorrowed beyond words, would not have the same impulses.

Furthermore, it isn't exactly as if God was asking Abraham anything that He Himself would never go through. Not only was God's request reasonable from Abraham's cultural mindset, but God showed Abraham once and for all what absolute faith would be rewarded with: life, though we might have to go through death for it. Also, note the lamb... Abraham killed the lamb to spare Isaac. God killed His Son to spare us all.

Anyway, this is getting dangerously far off-Tolkien...