“Your sufferings, accepted and borne with unshakable faith, when joined to those of Christ take on extraordinary value for the life of the Church and the good of humanity.”
Pope John Paul II, Message for the First Annual World Day of the Sick, 1993.
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In his 1984 Apostolic Letter “Salvifici Doloris” (On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering), Pope John Paul II expounds the dignity and the salvic power of suffering. The letter begins with quoting the Apostle Paul: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24).
The Apostle Paul was able to rejoice in suffering, because of his discovery that to suffer is to partake in the salvic suffering of Christ for the benefit of the church. Suffering has meaning and dignity because of its redemptive power and spiritual significance in the context of the sacrifice and passion of Christ.
If I remember correctly, at present the majority of atheists are atheists because a government told them or their ancestors that they had to be atheists.
That well could be. India has recently surpassed China as the most populous country, I think I heard the other week, but that is irrelevant when the ex-Soviet bloc countries are a such a big chunk of them (those ‘coerced into atheism’, that is).
And as I pointed out before, there are atheists who want to come to faith. I knew some in my university days, and the barrier that held them back was twofold: YECism and judgmental Christians.
Your uninformed prejudice is showing. Biological evolution is reality. Some people have a penchant for truth and don’t want to be hypocrites. Truth comes from reality. 2 + 2 = what, @Buzzard?
Hint: if you have to deny reality and evolution is true, and if becoming a Christian means you have to deny the reality of evolution but know it’s true, then to become a Christian means to become a hypocrite. No thanks, they say, and justifiably! And you’re calling others naïve. Right.
No Scripture is based on the precept that God is in complete control of both the world as a whole and anything that interacts with His people be it nature or people. That is the Jewish perspective. God can even control the toss of a coin, or the biblical equivalent of drawing lots. But it is only about Israel in that respect. When Paul goes to Greece he does not claim that God has hidden the truth of Christ from them, only that they had not heard, and that is not the same thing.
You would not just blindly accept that mental disability is demon possession, would you? The writers of the bible have no idea about bacteria, viruses or other influences. You would not just blindly accept the biblical explanation for how Jacob bred speckled sheep, would you?
The Biblical viewpoint of God and how much he controls is a specific Jewish one that we,do not have to accept or encourage. That is not what Scripture is for. It is no more for claiming a controlling God than it is for claiming a 7-day creation.
I am sure you could quote many scriptures that would claim God did this or caused that. But that does not mean that we have to accept the biblical explanation.
Did Jusas choose to betray Jesus or did god force him to? Scripture says that He did.
Look around you and decide how much of your life is controlled. And how much you can change, or have changed. Scripture would claim that your whole life has not only been guided by God, but directly controlled.
God is not controlling Putin or forcing him to invade the Ukraine. But Scripture would claim that He is. The same goes for the Nazis, Sadam Husain, the Ayotolla, or Binladden. How was God glorified by the destruction of the two towers? God did not send a Tsunami to Japan, or deliberately stop rain from falling on Ethiopia. To think so is to denigrate God. By definition God is Good, Good cannot initiate evil.
Are you saying those atheists didn’t known that a Christian doesn’t have to be to YEC? If so, their ignorance demonstrates that they weren’t interested enough to find out what Christianity is - instead, they probably listened to some lying atheist university lecturer who taught them that all Christians are YEC. (Everyone knows that secular universities are hotbeds of atheism and anti-Christianity.)
Atheist translation of “judgemental Christians” = Christians who believe abortion, fornication and homosexulaity are sinful and opposed to the will of God.
Wrong again. It means Christians who want to use the power of government to coerce people into conforming to those Christians’ view(s) of things. Those political actions just show Christian hypocrisy.
How many atheists have you talked with about these matters?
So, atheists can use political power to create abominable laws like legal abortion and same-sex marriage, but Christians who oppose such laws in the political arena are “judgemental”?
What’s wrong with Christians using political power in formulate laws based on Christian morality?
It’s also a bad witness because it portrays a God Whose desire is to coerce people.
And it wastes time that should be being used to help others.
In short, it is a denial of the Gospel.
It also comes from a deep misconception about the Christian situation in the world, one that regards us as living in Israel and having a duty to achieve righteous laws, when in reality we live in Babylon where our duty is to love our neighbors and show that God loves mercy.
Jesus gave us one ‘weapon’ to use – the Gospel. When we take up politics as a weapon it shows several things; one is that we’ve forgotten our mission, another is that we don’t really trust God.
Jesus never said, “Go therefore and fight to change laws to force people to be righteous” – and acting like that shows others that Christians don’t even know what their Savior instructed.
Quite a few. Apart from atheists I’ve known personally, I think I’ve paticipated in every online, English-speaking, atheist forum on the 'net.
There’s not as many sites as there were, say, ten years ago, and of those that exist now, they are very intolerant of any participating theists They’re not coy about expressing their hatred of theists and theism, and they don’t need much of an excuse to ban a theist from their site.