You seem committed to a very stark divide. The only god you will acknowledge as existing must be one who made sure to carve out some useful employment for himself among all the otherwise independently running tasks of nature. You want him available for inspection of his bit of the assembly line to make sure that …
It is his work and not done by anybody else,
that it isn’t replicable work that could easily be done by a less expensive robot (unaided nature)
that it is up-to-snuff.
On the Christian view God isn’t above stepping in to actually accomplish some of those three things from a creaturely point-of-view, hence the incarnation. But you seem more interested in other parts of the factory where you feel this deity/[employee!] should be found clocked-in, working, and taking the occasional breaks among all his other peers; and you seem distressed not to find him there. What doesn’t seem to be occurring to you is that he might be the CEO in charge, running the whole shebang, and not one of the 9-5ers who clocks in and can be seen oiling the cogs on the factory floor.
Neither do I. I reject all 5 points of TULIP Calvinism. I am an open theist – as far from being a Calvinist as possible. You are jumping to conclusions based on the presumption of another thing which I do not believe in … that our salvation depends on believing in God.
@jasonbourne4
Yes, I think that is quite accurate. We are being taken for a ride here on a merry-go-round.
Then by all means, walk away! There are plenty of other places to look for something which makes sense to you. I have no doubt whatsoever that you can stare at the same inkblot and see something quite different, but arguing that what you see is the correct thing is a complete waste of time.
There are reasons a-plenty for conflicted thinking. Even scientists experience this in the conflict between the the findings of quantum physics and the very premises for scientific inquiry itself.
But there is a question about the reasons for this conflict which are tied to whether productive discussion is possible. At this point the only productive purpose I am seeing as possible is the opportunity for him to vent his frustrations with a rather narrow-minded community. It is not a very nice role for the rest of us. And though I suppose it can be seen as being a servant of servants to go along with this, requiring other people to be a servant of servants to you isn’t something I can approve of. It seems more in line with the function of a forum to shake him out of this rather small world which he has been a part of to realize that Christianity is much much bigger than this.
I’ve already explained where I think the authority of Scripture comes from, and it isn’t from it’s literal correspondence with reality. If I believed the Greek or Norse gods were true God’s, I would look at their stories differently. My determination that Scripture is true has not come about because it passed a rigorous fact checking session. Using the Bible as an information encyclopedia is misusing the Bible. It’s not surprising that it disappoints you if you insist on making it something it was never intended to be.
Because I have a relationship with the God of the Bible. I KNOW God. What I read in the Bible about God can be cross-referenced with my personal experience relating to God. I don’t know what your background is or how you personally identify, but it seems you were at least raised in a Christian context. It also seems like you view faith as believing the right things really hard. So, when reality and the things you think Christians must believe really hard don’t line up, you are left with nothing. But faith is more than a mental exercise. Faith is spiritual. It involves a spiritual dimension and a spiritual component of humanity. Don’t you have any spiritual experiences to fall back on when you have doubts?
I just wanted to say that I’m sorry your wrestling with these questions has been such a painful and dark experience. But you aren’t alone in going through a painful paradigm shift and lots of people come out on the other side with a healthier more resilient faith. It doesn’t have to end in despair and nihilism. I’ll pray you find peace and a better place.
Okay, Mitchell, turn on your empathy for a minute or go discuss stuff on a more purely intellectual thread. If someone comes out and clearly communicates that they are struggling and frustrated they don’t need to be scolded for being in a distraught place. Emotions happen to some of us. It’s acceptable for people to come to this forum and try to work out their baggage, even if they can’t always do it in a detached and perfectly rational way.
Benjamin, like @Christy and many others, I encourage you not to give up your pursuit of soul rest in the person of Jesus Christ. Sit under his words in the gospels and see if he stands forth and commends himself to you as a real person who wins your trust. Just after Thomas had his doubts removed, Jesus says: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20.29). Jesus specializes in granting rest to the soul weary and burdened by doubt and sin.
It wasn’t a scolding, just a little nudge. I guess I could have put in more emojis. It’s not the first reminder issued to all the Spock-like scientists running around here, that’s for sure.
You aren’t alone in wishing for that certainty. Why doesn’t God just come down and announce himself to us face-to-face if he really exists and wants us to believe in him? Both believers and non-believers have opined after that all through the ages. Atheists have a ready and plausible answer for why no such appearances seem to happen in any universally accessible or documented sense. And some of us Christians tend to reply that we think that is what already happened around 2000 years ago, and then we nailed him to a cross. It came complete with face-to-face, and (eventually) documentation! But that doesn’t seem to be the type of God we all wish for. We want somebody a bit more under our control and to shore up our uncertainties under our own terms - and be at our beck and call according to our own agendas. But instead, a transcendent, personal creator God (if He exists as such) has the audacity to think that we should be answerable on His terms rather than vice versa. And we do chafe so under the cheeky presumption!
I think there is a fundamental different between starting with belief and making everything else fit the belief and starting with experience and understanding other things in the context of that experience. I’m starting with knowledge I gain from my experience with God. That is not the same thing as starting with “belief.” You could argue that any epistemology that starts with human experience is fundamentally unreliable, but I’d argue back that if that is the case you have to rule out a lot of things people claim to know as unknowable. I know what I ate for breakfast this morning. There is no amount of math or logic that can get you to that knowledge.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before. One part of the Bible that has consistently spoken to my non-rational side is found in Isaiah 42:3. “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” God’s grace covers our lack and I believe he can take that little smoldering candle of faith you do have and work with it. I hope you don’t give up.
Why should my reasons for how I choose to live MY LIFE be good enough for you??? I sincerely don’t care one way or another.
I like math and science. But I see no reason why others have to share my interest. I like existentialism. But I see no reason why others have to share my interest. I like the board game called go. But I see no reason why others have to share my interest. I like Christianity. But I see no reason why others have to share my interest. There are plenty of things that I also have very little interest in… such as reality tv shows, spectator sports, the Quran, the French language, cross-dressing, and the Bhagavad Gita, and no doubt many many more things.
These don’t interest me either. Not only hearing about them but even having them doesn’t appeal to me.
I respectfully disagree.
LOL It would be amusing to see you try that one.
Well since you put it that way I will start a new thread with this topic. But again… why in the world should they be good enough for you???
You claim to be an intellectual. Therefore it follows that if your reasons are good enough for you, they should be good enough for another intellectual. Unless of course, the other intellectual is more intelligent than you and sees the flaws you cannot…
The unstated premise here is that all intellectuals are equally interested in all intellectual subjects and will be motivated by the same appeals to intellect. My experience in the world says that is not so.
This still assumes that matters of intellect are homogenous across individuals which I strongly doubt.
I also believe they aren’t. I meant that it is possible for an intellect to be unable to follow another. For another to be ‘on another level’. Or ‘further along the path’.
Truth_Seeker! Your comments sound so much like my own from some years ago! I agree with everything you have said. (Well, unless I’ve missed something, which is quite possible.) Do not believe anything unless you have good evidence for it. Don’t ‘just believe.’ That is the way of fools. Pray for God to provide the evidence you need. When the time is right he will provide it. At least that is the way it happened for me. I will not tell you how he proved his reality to me; it would probably not persuade you. God knows what is needed for each of us to be convinced, so I will leave it to him.
I also demanded that the Bible be true, including scientific allusions. When I read the Bible from start to finish some years ago, I kept in the back of my mind a look-out for anything that was scientifically inaccurate. Except for referring to grasshoppers as four-legged, and except for Genesis 1-3, which I chalked up to poetry, I didn’t find anything. At first I was concerned when Jacob marked the trees and posts near his mating goats with speckles so that the offspring would be speckled. But rereading it I noticed that God didn’t tell him to do this. It was his own superstition at work. All in all I have not found anything in the Bible to be obviously or significantly false.
I argued a great deal with the elders of my church when I first became a believer. I could not see how they could claim the Bible to be true in every detail if we haven’t examined every sentence for its veracity. God persuaded me that I should accept their proposition, and I accepted it with some tiny reservations. Since then I have read the Bible a great deal and find it the most amazing book I have ever read. Not the most beautiful, not the most artful, not the most informative, although it is all these things. It is somehow alive, giving me what I need at unpredictable moments.
As for Genesis 1, I have reread it hundreds of times. I was going to read the whole Bible again, but I couldn’t get out of Genesis 1. I kept seeing how it fit with what I knew about cosmology and natural history. I loved science as a kid and that love has returned now in adulthood. I found “Let there be light” to be the perfect way to describe the initiation of the big bang. The appearance of land was immediately followed with an abundance of life, trees were divided into those with fruit and those without, vegetation appeared before animals, animals appeared in water before they appeared on land. There are a lot of other details and everyone of them has worked as far as I can see. The general drift in interpretation by current scholars is to say that what God made on the second day was a solid dome, set on pillars, etc., etc. and only meant to satisfy the ancient readers. General drifts in thinking are like snow drifts; it’s best to dig your way through them. The meaning of the word raqia emphasizes the fact of this “dome” having been beaten out – not a bad metaphor for the spreading out of the universe after the Big Bang, especially since we have discovered that some force is pushing it outwards, it’s not just coasting. And empty space isn’t so empty, apparently. It is filled with the Higgs field which is quite thick. Might that answer for a dome? Especially now that we know that space-time is curved? There is more to be learned about this; this interpretation of Gen 1 is a work in progress, but the more I learn, the more it works.
Don’t get discouraged. You are right in your very common sense demands of the Bible. Keep learning, and keep praying.
Marg
In the first creation account, the author has God saying that all green plants are available for food. However, He makes no explicit injunction against eating meat and, as a textual matter, we learn in Genesis 4:20 that Jabal was the father of those who … raise cattle ( מִקְנֶֽה), presumably for consumption and hides. In the Noahide covenants (to which you refer), God seems to be making explicit what had been a common practice, but with certain limitations.
It’s acceptable for people to come to this forum and try to work out their baggage, even if they can’t always do it in a detached and perfectly rational way.
It’s not the first reminder issued to all the Spock-like scientists running around here, that’s for sure. 