Apparently skeptical theism didn’t make a dent or was beyond your comprehension. Maybe you didn’t bother to look up annihilationism or conditional immortality either. Jesus has only failed in your limited understanding of who and what he is.
I was reminded of this today, about your experiences with ‘light’ (and with which I can in no way relate) which are devoid of content as far as you have communicated (true teaching is not devoid of content):
Yes, this, unless you ignore your sinfulness:
None of what I wrote is any attempt toward ‘theodicy’ or an explanation of suffering and/or evil that we experience in our present lives. Everything of what I wrote is in regard to the hope of what will be when all the present form of the world is passed away. I don’t remember if I ever read the site you link at some time in the past, but glancing at it now, I don’t see anything in there that is at odds with what I wrote - granted I didn’t read through it all just now. So if you have some particular thought from that site, that you think doesn’t mesh with what I wrote above, please share that particular thought. I make no pretensions (here anyway) that I understand the role of all suffering here and now or how to understand God’s hand in it or allowance of it.
Something else we have in common then.
Anyone who has bad anxiety has not read their Bible well and is maybe focusing too much on themselves? What we pay attention to is a continuous moral decision that we make, and if we are watching the stormy waters or not looking to or fixing our eyes on Jesus for our temporal and eternal security, we are paying attention to the wrong things.
Whenever I catch myself being anxious, especially when I am trying to go to sleep, singing this to myself this helps a lot:
(How’s your Portuguese? Em Jesus Amigo Temos (Clipe Oficial) - Lagoinha One - YouTube ; - )
@Mervin_Bitikofer thank you for letting me know you’re an universalist Christian
(HACKLES)
erectile hairs along the back of a dog or other animal that rise when it is angry or alarmed:
I think that’s what happen is as I shared. It hackled many, due my thinking was different then there’s.
For months @Dale has been explaining the light in me is false. Also I even went so far to use Christian language and then called light Holy Spirit and @Dale will ask, “how do you know that’s the Holy Spirit?”
My mistake was trying to prove, that God who lives in me, is my best friend. I shouldn’t of been trying to prove to anyone.
Examples @Dale telling me the light in me is false and how do I know if that’s the Holy Spirit? I think this been going on for months.
Here I was explaining about Inner ‘I’ we all carry that I learn from a Jew. I shared some art too
I think my mistake is, I tried to prove that God who lives in me is my best friend.
Now I learn you keep your beliefs a secret due to it’ll hackle many., well I think I understand, as I hackled many. My mistake is I wanted them to know that God who lives in me is really my best friend.
I think from now on I’m not going to try to prove anything. That’s what I learn from this
Sometimes I use uncommon words, and I should be careful about doing that with you. I want to help you recognize good common English usage, and not pick up too many bad habits from me while you do so.
Rather than use the word “hackles”, let me rephrase it this way: I am careful with my language so that I don’t offend people when I didn’t need to. There are some beliefs that may not be important enough to create unneeded offense. But there may be some situations (like when you are distressed and disturbed by these very beliefs) that I think it good and important to show that you need not be so distressed over some of these allegedly scriptural understandings. Many faithful people in history have understood scriptures well enough to see quite a different picture of God than what some Christians today may teach that causes distress for so many. Since you ask, I share.
then there’s sharing and not share
Then there’s actual not knowing 'till someone tells
I can’t 'till when I’m offending others
I have past scenes so worried what if I offended, that I’m the type of person who don’t want to hurt peoples feelings. Then I overly worry that I hurt peoples feelings and I run around saying I’m sorry. This happen off line. I run around saying, I’m sorry. As my mind would think of something later, and I overly worry did I offend, I would go on a chase to find the person and say I’m sorry
People would get upset that I’m saying I’m sorry. Then I say sorry for saying sorry, and that would upset them more. I would be confused. Plus some people claims no memory so not even understanding what I’m saying sorry about. I knew I had to change this and not say sorry often. But I also knew I needed to understand this more., understand people, how to communicate to people?
So lately I’ve been seeing if I can understand why people had no awareness of what I was even appologiesing, so instead of quickly saying I’m sorry to people, I asked first, to find out.
That’s what I did when I asked @Terry_Sampson if he remember monster letter of YHWH and @Terry_Sampson wrote he doesn’t remember. So I thought ok then due to not remember then I don’t say I’m sorry. I felt a sense of growth. First investigate to find out then make a decision to say sorry or not say sorry. There I didn’t say sorry because there’s no memory.
Now I see that word monster again and I’m thinking wow others uses that word too
See how George MacDonald used the word Monster
I yet will read what George MacDonald wrote
So far all I’ve been doing is sharing my spiritual personal journey relationship with God and as I do a few here would tell me the God I go to is false
I’ve interacted with Jews online. I feel more accepted by Jews then I do by Christians. Because at least Jews don’t keep telling me the God I go to is false.
Here’s about inner ‘I’ I shared in this forum.
As @Dale would continue to tell me the God I go to is false
My mistake is my seeing if I can show @Dale that the God I go to is my best friend
It started the day when @Dale explain he survived kidney cancer
I wanted to show Kindness too. Plus at age 3 I almost died from neglect and from kidney infection and I’m a surviver from abuse and my kidneys are healthy. I only was thinking of showing kindness to @Dale but I used the wrong name in a Christian forum, I used the word Allah which means light
Instead of any focus on how both @Dale and I survived our kidney situation., @Dale lost a kidney, and did show more kindness to him as his concerns about his one kidney and covid and immune situation - I thought @Dale and I were sharing however this was an exodus thread,
so I thought I better some how include Exodus, and so I did by asking about horses, and it moved on towards back to Exodus., little did I know @Dale will be following me around with everything I write, and keep telling me the God I go to is false.
My mistake was, I tried to prove God is my best friend
I always thought the debate would had been, how come God didn’t make the abuse stop., as I hid in God, instead the debate is, the God I ran to for protection is this God true or false?
I have been told by @Dale that the God I go to is false sense June and it’s the end of November now. That’s 5 months. What 5 months I went through this
Lesson learn, I will never try again to prove to anyone the God I went to is my best friend
I will be making some changes in this forum. I will no longer prove that God I went to for protection is and still is my best friend.
I see more places using the word Monster
Doing that too much can create a lot of trouble for you too. If you ever stand up for anything in public, which sometimes we need to do, then you will always be offending somebody. Jesus caused penty of offense among the religious leaders of his day.
I could show you where MacDonald writes these things; but I’m not sure it will mean much to you. His style of writing is challenging even for us native English speakers. You might have trouble getting much out of it, but let me know if you want to try.
Well - Dale isn’t alone among Christians who do feel a calling to call out anything seen as a deviation from truth, even if such zeal is sometimes misplaced in terms of building relationship or listening. But truth has a place too, and if we are convinced we know the truth about some particular thing, then it is hard not to rise to its defense whenever we see it denied. Where I would start in a response to Dale is to note that all of us have a false version of God in our minds to some extent. If we didn’t, it would mean that we knew God perfectly well, so as not to be mistaken about anything regarding God. And that is exactly none of us - and least of all the ones who would most loudly deny this. Anybody who thinks they understand God completely has just revealed … that they don’t. This isn’t to say that all your ideas about God are right or that all Dale’s are wrong. I’m only saying, that if others want to follow you around all the time with some “you’re still wrong” mantra, you eventually may need to tune them out just for your own mental health. It could be that you actually are wrong, and maybe will just need to hear it from a closer or more trusted source, or at another time when your understanding may have grown in other directions. But I think it’s also true that all of us can learn something about God from you, just as we can from Dale or anybody else here, each in our own incomplete and usually faulty ways.
(Sorry to be talking about you in 3rd person here, Dale, I’m not meaning to be rude; I just want to give Riversea some different response to work with.)
I wrote a reply as a private message but I don’t care to make it public. If you’d like to receive it you’ll have decide how I can get it to you. Fine if you would rather not.
No need. Merv said it better.
Where I would start in a response to Dale is to note that all of us have a false version of God in our minds to some extent. If we didn’t, it would mean that we knew God perfectly well, so as not to be mistaken about anything regarding God. And that is exactly none of us - and least of all the ones who would most loudly deny this. Anybody who thinks they understand God completely has just revealed … that they don’t . This isn’t to say that all your ideas about God are right or that all Dale’s are wrong. I’m only saying, that if others want to follow you around all the time with some “you’re still wrong” mantra, you eventually may need to tune them out just for your own mental health.
God is findable. Some don’t want to find him and are content with their own flawed deductions, imaginations and fantasies. We have objective evidence of both.
Which reminds me – I should add Phil Yancey’s account to the thread linked above. He was given objective and communicable facts, they just weren’t empirical,1 external events impersonally observable by others, nor were they solely subjective and merely feelings or impressions.
1Empirical here is a synonym for observable at the time – it does not carry the scientific connotation of reproducibility. It does however allow for the forensic recognition of one of God’s M.O.s in his interventions into the lives of his children. His intervention into Phil Yancey’s life is another M.O. and no less meaningful.
Huh. I wonder if that might apply to any here.
Jesus is God. If Jesus is not your best friend, you have some work to do and some education to acquire. The New Testament is your best source for that prayerful education – do not look to anyone who is trying to start their own universal world religion by amalgamating counterfeits.
And a song in my heart.
Yeah lets do this, because Macdonald is my type of person if he uses the word monster. Because I used the word monster too. I want to learn how Macdonald used the word monster.
Please share please
Lets do this ok
I can’t help but feel I may be adding nothing but more confusion for you here. But I will try, and will certainly reference a couple Macdonald texts for you to read directly. But first, you should know that what I attributed to Macdonald, I still put into my own words. The ideas were his - and most of the words were mine - but with a few phrases I borrowed from him. The passage I was most drawing from did not actually use the word “monster”. But Macdonald does use that word elsewhere, and he follows the customary usage of it as speaking of something that is (or seems) large, powerful, scary, and evil. It is almost always used as a metaphor. Let me know if you want to know more about metaphors.
Since you are curious about that very word: ‘monster’, I did find a paragraph of Macdonalds making use of that very term: I bolded it in the text below.
The moral philosopher who regards duties only as facts of his system; nay, even the man who rewards them as truths, essential realities ofhis humanity, but goes no farther, is essentially a liar, a man of untruth. He is a man indeed, but not a true man. He is a man inpossibility, but not a real man yet. The recognition of these things is the imperative obligation to fulfil them. Not fulfilling these relations, the man is undoing the right of his own existence,destroying [his very reason for being], making of himself a monster, a live reason why he should not live, for nothing on those terms could ever have begun to be. His presence is a claim upon his creator for destruction.
However, if you are actually curious more about the content of what I had written in a post above, I include more of Macdonald’s writing below from his sermon titled “Justice” which was where I actually got those ideas from. Even though he didn’t use the word “monster” below, I hope you will see where that very idea comes from; I bolded a sentence near the end to help you zero in on that bit.
If it be asked how, if it be false, the doctrine of substitution can have been permitted to remain so long an article of faith to so many, I answer, On the same principle on which God took up and made use of the sacrifices men had, in their lack of faith, invented as a way of pleasing him. Some children will tell lies to please the parents that hate lying. They will even confess to having done a wrong they have not done, thinking their parents would like them to say they had done it, because they teach them to confess. God accepted men’s sacrifices until he could get them to see–and with how many has he yet not succeeded, in the church and out of it!–that he does not care for such things.
‘But,’ again it may well be asked, ‘whence then has sprung the
undeniable potency of that teaching?’I answer, From its having in it a notion of God and his Christ, poor indeed and faint, but, by the very poverty and untruth in its presentation, fitted to the weakness and unbelief of men, seeing it was by men invented to meet and ease the demand made upon their own weakness and unbelief. Thus the leaven spreads. The truth is there. It is Christ the glory of God. But the ideas that poor slavish souls breed concerning this glory the moment the darkness begins to disperse, is quite another thing. Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; they must dilute it before they can take it; they must dilute it before they dare give it. They must make it less true before they can believe it enough to get any good of it. Unable to believe in the love of the Lord Jesus Christ, they invented a mediator in his mother, and so were able to approach a little where else they had stood away; unable to believe in the forgivingness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to be forgiven that should not demand of him so much; which might make it right for him to forgive; which should save them from having to believe downright in the tenderness of his father-heart, for that they found impossible. They thought him bound to punish for the sake of punishing, as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness; that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they invented for its justification a horrible injustice, involving all that was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. They invented a satisfaction for sin which was an insult to God. He sought no satisfaction, but an obedient return to the Father. What satisfaction was needed he made himself in what he did to cause them to turn from evil and go back to him. The thing was too simple for complicated unbelief and the arguing spirit. Gladly would I help their followers to loathe such thoughts of God; but for that, they themselves must grow better men and women. While they are capable of being satisfied with them, there would be no advantage in their becoming intellectually convinced that such thoughts were wrong. I would not speak a word to persuade them of it. Success would be worthless. They would but remain what they were–children capable of thinking meanly of their father. When the heart recoils, discovering how horrible it would be to have such an unreality for God, it will begin to search about and see whether it must indeed accept such statements concerning God; it will search after a real God by whom to hold fast, a real God to deliver them from the terrible idol.
If you find this confusing or disturbing, then I can do my best to try to help explain Macdonald’s thoughts here, but I’m also thinking it might not have been a good idea to dump all this on you and may think better of it yet. If it upsets or disturbs you, then I’d advise just to let it go for now.
@riversea I am saddened that Christians do such a poor job of being a witness for the truth. I am guilty of this myself, and am neither confirming nor denying that @Dale came across this way. I honestly haven’t followed the course of the conversation over the past few months. But yes, tune them (or us) out if we are ugly monsters. Follow what you believe and don’t worry about those who disagree with you. I am a very strong believer in the freedom you have in following your conscience.
But there is one thing I cannot help but explain, in coming to be near a holy God, I am fairly confident you will have an Isaiah 6 kind of experience, “Woe is me!” And that’s where Jesus comes in rather uniquely.
But then maybe you are not a sinner, so definitely feel free to disregard anything that me and Dale have to say.
I was wondering what all the talk was added to this thread… surprised people had so much to say about Satan and chaos… and I see now that the discussion has followed a winding road into other interesting topics and ideas.
This concern for offending others is something I have been thinking about recently. And I realized that my lifelong family mantra not to care for what others think isn’t precisely where I stand. There is a sense in which I don’t care and a sense in which I do. And I think the parting of these comes down to an acceptance of the fact that I cannot control the opinions of other people. But this does not mean I have no empathy and no care for what I would think if I were in their place. I certainly do not accept the nonsensical judgements of others according to whatever strange standards they choose to employ. But I have always strongly identified with other people and taken my morality from a sense that whatever you do to others is in some sense doing the same to yourself. For example, if you measure other by some trivial quality, then in effect you reduce yourself down to that same quality and spurn all the other aspects of yourself that you have ignored in them.
Accordingly, I identify with people in other religions, and thus I naturally embrace a pluralistic version of Christianity. To be sure I think the Christian teachings are correct and very much disagree with teachings of other religions such as reincarnation. On the other hand, I also strongly oppose the notion that God is somehow defined or confined by Christianity. I find somewhat laughable the idea that the notions that some finite beings have about an infinite God can be described as the correct version and thus others are simply mistaken in their own perception of God. But this does not alter my own decisions about God. This difficult contrast is resolved by my admission I make not pretense to objectivity in my view about religious matters and my conviction that reality is not exclusively objective, but there are also irreducibly subjective aspects to reality as well.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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