Why I will never give up Christianity
It always amazes me how many arguments against Christianity base themselves on things that are NOT Christianity. For example, almost every single argument Dan Larimer makes in Why I gave up Christianity for his sad falling away from the truth comes from objections to what others who have fallen away have done or said. Non Sequitur.
Pointing to the overwhelming majority of humans who have made the same mistake he is making – devising their own inconsistent beliefs to suit themselves and seeking to convince others to validate those beliefs – merely proves that he is just like everyone else: probably wrong.
True Christianity is simply the compiled eyewitness accounts of those who knew Jesus and two of their personal assistants. That’s it. The Council of Nicaea’s job was only to weed out all the other merely human-generated content that didn’t meet those perfectly reasonable criteria. We deduce that God supervised that process since those eyewitnesses have testified that Jesus assured them that God supervised the writing of the true inputs to that process. Jesus did and said enough incredible things to convince those eyewitnesses that they should believe what He told them. If He could do those things, He is certainly capable of making sure that an accurate account of them is preserved for you.
Therefore, I consign to oblivion all arguments pointing to the subsequent inventions, deviations, hypocrisy and personal preferences of other deceitful or earnest men like Dan Larimer. The inventions of popes, preachers or libertarian cryptoanarchists are not Biblical Christianity and their heaped up errors do not prove that Biblical Christianity is false.
That gets rid of most of Dan’s article as a set of irrelevant objections – a mere excuse to proceed with making his own mistakes along with everyone else.
What sets Christianity apart from all other belief systems is that it insists that humans are incapable of meeting God’s standards and therefore qualifying for eternal life on their own. They need God’s help. That’s how you sort out God’s One Way from all the other ways people want to invent for themselves. So we all get the simple choice to accept or reject God’s help. What a blindingly simple criterion for who gets into Heaven!
Clearly, if there is a God, there is no reason at all why he should agree to any of Dan’s preferences about how things ought to be. As Owner of the Universe, he would presumably feel entitled to make the rules and decide if, when, and how to reveal them to mankind.
Failing to meet the expectations of each and every fallible human is the most bogus excuse I can think of for rejecting such revelation.
So out there among the infinite sea of Personally Preferred Beliefs, one can expect to find exactly zero or one version that represents God’s Official Revealed Truth. (Hint: It's probably not the personal beliefs of Dan Larimer.) So our challenge is to sort through that haystack of self-invented (i.e. wrong) beliefs to see if one can find any single well-documented set that might plausibly be the Actual Revelation of God.
One serious candidate is the Bible (in its original languages). Our task is to decide whether to believe it or not. Pointing to other people’s inconsistent or hypocritical interpretations and extensions of it as reasons why it is wrong is intellectually dishonest.
Now I could point out that the Dead Sea scrolls found in the Qumran Caves in the 1940s and archeologically dated to be over 2000 years old match the Old Testament on your mother’s bookshelf almost exactly. I could point out that the 5600 New Testament manuscripts dating to within a couple hundred years of when they were written and gathered from cities all around the Mediterranean all say the same thing. I wonder, how did they all get corrupted in exactly the same way? The medieval monks must have had a secret GitHub repository to publish their ongoing personal preference changes is all I can say. So there is plenty of evidence that Scripture was handed down to us unchanged over millennia. If you insist that that’s not possible without Devine Intervention, good for you.
But that's all noise, I’ll cut to the chase.
Everyone who reads the Bible either believes it or doesn’t. This is God’s explicitly stated intent. Those who prefer to place themselves on God’s throne and make up their own rules inevitably find an excuse to reject it. Those who are searching for God and willing to accept the fact that He is in charge, often accept it.
It’s a filter. You get to filter yourself out by deciding you’d rather invent your own rules and philosophy. The reason it is sometimes ambiguous or cryptic is explicitly to allow each of us the freedom to weed ourselves out if we want to. Jesus was very clear about this in Matthew 13:11.
Then the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Why do You speak to the people in parables?” He replied, “The knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.…
Alas, that’s what has happened to Dan. (But don’t worry, I’m praying for him. He’s “not dead yet!”)
Smart men like Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and Stan Larimer studied the Scriptures and found them credible and consistent. Other equally smart men like Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking and Dan Larimer reached the opposite conclusion. So this is not an intelligence test. Get that arrogance out of your head. It’s a matter of the heart.
And that is what God is testing.
I think what you said basically amounts to: God is testing whether you have faith in Him.
But where do you get that idea from? The idea that God wants to filter out those who have faith and reward the true believers comes from religion. You seem to be first assuming that religious claim is true, and then reasoning from there. If that claim is not true, then the only support that I have heard of for faith being valuable disappears.
Religious people need to ask themselves what they care more about: finding the truth, or having faith. If their goal is to find the truth, then using faith to do that will produce terrible results. Faith has been shown time and time again to be a terrible mechanism of gaining knowledge about the universe. If that is your goal, you should instead use the best procedure humanity has found so far: the scientific method. If you did, you would find reason to not believe in most of the physical claims made in the Bible (or really any religious text). All that would be left are metaphysical claims (which are by definition unfalsifiable) and moral claims (normative statements telling you how you should behave). And I claim there is no reason why one should feel compelled to adopt these particular claims made in the religious texts as true (especially since the physical claims being false shows the texts as a whole are not infallible).
Now maybe you don't care about the truth and only care about having faith. Or maybe you are okay with using the scientific method to evaluate physical claims, but you choose to use faith when it comes to accepting metaphysical and moral claims. In either case, you should ask yourself, "Why?" Why do you value faith? What good does having faith add to your life? Could it be that valuing faith or using faith as a basis for how to live your life is in fact harming you?
Science limits itself to the observable and repeatable. It can tell me nothing about that which is not observable and repeatable. Thats a BIG limitation. But we routinely use eyewitness accounts to gain knowledge of that which is not observable or repeatable. To say we can know nothing that we can't repeat and observe ourselves is to say that a courtroom can never use eyewitness testimony to get to the truth of what happened beyond reasonable doubt.
So that's what I have done. Those eyewitnesses convinced me that Jesus is who he said he is. Therefore I take what they say he said seriously.
Jesus said, "You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me... If you believed Moses [scriptures], you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?"
So therefore I believe the rest of the scriptures, because I believe Jesus, because I believe the eyewitnesses who observed and reported what he said and did.
No way I'm going to miss out on what Jesus is offering just because science can't address His supernatural field of expertise.
But why you are missing all other religions? There are thousands of other doctrines that require faith to some supernatural being(s). What makes you think that everybody who has non-christian faith is totally wrong and only christians have the right kind of faith?
And you are also evading the fact that there are many different ways of interpreting what Jesus and/or God said. Which one of them is right? They are so different that not everyone can be right at the same time. How do you evaluate what is the right or at least most correct view of the faith?
Try to think about this from atheist point of view. There are millions of people who claim that they have witnessed the existence of and/or message from a supernatural being. How can we decide what is the truth if we can't use science?
"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." – Stephen F Roberts
Because every other religion teaches what man has to do to reach God. Christianity is the only case where God condescended to reach down to man.
Look, I'm an analytical person that one would expect to be as skeptical as you. I studied the Bible and found it convincing. I credit God himself for that stroke of good fortune.
The Bible tells us that man cannot save himself, he need's God's help - specifically what Jesus did for us. It explicitly states that no other religion can be right, because they all require their adherents to do something on their own to earn God's favor. And they contradict what Jesus Himself said: "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Show me another belief system that has better evidence. Where is your proof that what you see is all there is?
My OP allows for the fact that others can read the Bible and not be convinced. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
That's pretty much the whole point.
When you said you study the bible and found it convincing, do you mean parts of the OT and all the NT? The OT is muddled with lots of cookery, poetry, history, man made laws, same as we have. It is an encyclopaedia. Some may or may not be accurately true, eg, history is written by the winners. The NT on the other hand is the word of God.
In other words, the unfalsifiable.
I don't see how any reasonable person can consider the writings in the New Testament to be a reliable enough source to be used as evidence in a trial, much less as supporting evidence for extraordinary divine claims. There isn't any hard evidence I know of to show that the people who actually claim to have seen these events themselves are the ones who wrote it down (and that their writings were preserved unchanged). More likely this "testimony" was gossip passed down verbally before eventually being written down (and then translated again and again), and any preschooler can tell you how a game of telephone can mangle the original message. And that is generously assuming that the original message was a genuine and authentic reporting by a sane observer and also that those writing it down didn't take creative liberties with their writing or outright decide to fabricate lies (which makes sense when you consider the great political power that be gained through religion).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To believe in the Jesus of the Bible is to believe it is possible for a being that appears to be a man to die, rise from the dead, and then literally ascend to heaven, or to walk on water, or to turn water into wine (and if you don't believe in any of the divine claims about Jesus, then what basis do you have to take any of the metaphysical claims supposedly said by him any more seriously than any political dissident out on the street today). These are extraordinary claims that appear to violate our known laws of physics. The evidence for such claims has to be incredibly compelling for any reasonable person to bother taking it seriously. I wouldn't accept video evidence of such events as something that makes it worth looking into (since it could be easily doctored with modern technology) much less the written down gossip of people.
I will never give up Christianity too
I sure wish Dan was a Christian I wish everyone is Dan is Brilliant. Maybe what he needs to hear is a scripture so clean so powerful so unmanipulative so pure and so true and trusting is "when you seek Me you will find Me when you search for me with all of your heart" It doesn't say you must do this or not do that go here not there it just requires you to seek with all your heart. all your heart. God is so able to reveal Himself when you seek for Him honestly with all of your heart He will meet with you. The guy who sounds and acts more like Jesus than anyone I ever heard is a Chinese guy names Francis Chan, author of crazy love. I hope enough people begin to listen to him to understand what real Christianity is,
If the truth were out there, then you could be content with finding it. You would not require any intelligence, it would hit you in the face. There is a miriad of truth of course, some relevant to your search, some not. But we don't actually know everything, so you cannot find all the facts. Fortunately, we have a brain that can link points together and arrive at a picture. Unfortunately we have desires that are not condusive to recognising the leaps of faith needed in linking the points. Too much reliance on fact will not lead to the truth. Consider the Big Bang, first put forward by the Very Rev. George Lemaitre, not Prof. Hubble BTW, he confirmed it. Now an examination of this, the first happening, will lead to the truth that there is a supernatural being. There is a sequence of logic that will take you from that point to Jesus but that is only half what is required. Why are we here is not included. The hand of man is too often mistaken for the work of God. Polarisation of ideas separate the less than perfect from the less than perfect.
Don't give up.
The heart forgives, accepts and is grateful for EVERYTHING. SIN means to "miss the mark," and has nothing to do with the vengefulness of hellishness. Belief is irrelevant - a matter of words and concepts. Only living the truth faithfully can reveal divinity.
The real nature of the divine is stated explicitly:
Thus, we all share in divine identity so long as "I AM" is true of each of us.
Neither here nor there means: the divine is WHAT IS, and THAT is WHAT YOU ARE: "Thou art that."
For me, statements like this^ reveal a lot: they indicate hidden insecurity about one's beliefs.
Indeed. "I've already made up my mind that no matter what happens, no matter how I feel or what new information comes my way, I will not give up Christianity", from my experience in the Church, that's how many people stay in their whole lives, by silencing any dissent and living in a bubble only doing what reinforces the belief system. It is a non-falsifiable conspiracy 101.
I disagree with your conception of a Christian walking round with blinkers on. Consider the Big Bang, so named because of stalwart of the atheists of the time, Sir Fred Hoyle, Astronomer Royal refused to accept that the universe had a beginning. This horrendus idea was put forward by Rev. George Lemaitre so it had to be wrong, but Hubble confirmed it four years later. Still Hoyle would not accept it as he realised that if the universe had a beginning, then it had to have a cause. Nothing of our universe existed before the big bang, not even time, so you could not have a physical cause, a natural cause, for the big bang. There are many still fighting against this obvious fact, but they cannot come up with an idea that is workable. So there is a God, which one, well that is more difficult and needs a lot of consideration. In the end it comes down to faith, but faith based on something rather than nothing.
https://steemit.com/bible/@bible/holy-bible-pdf-download
The heart and the head come to different, even opposing, understandings and conclusions about many things. This is illustrated in Tantric Buddhism by the Peaceful (Heart) Deities and the Wrathful (Head) Deities.
"Everyone who reads the Bible either believes it or doesn’t." I don't experience that to be so. I am quite capable of both believing and not believing something simultaneously. I both believe the consensus reality that I participate in, and at the same time disbelieve it. I know that in a fundamental way, it is a projection of my inner state. I know that, among other things, a mere change in my mood, for instance going from bitterness to gratitude, drastically alters my perception of consensus "reality".
And I can have totally different opinions on a greasy hamburger with a full stomach than when I haven't eaten all day.
Glad to have found you Stan. Great article! I'm a newbie and just finding my way around. I made my very first comment on another blog writing against Christianity a couple of days ago and you Upvoted it! I so appreciated that! Thank you!
Great article!
The more I read about you and your son, the more I am impressed.
Beginning to pray with you for Dan's salvation, and joining you in the bitshares community. To God be the glory.
thanks for your cool post...will resteem it....i have a christian channel on steemit.....i have been posting christian music so far....i want it to grow so that i can write posts myself....if you like some of the music i have on my blog please upvote it....God bless you man...All the best
ops...cannot resteem your post.....getting used to steemit rules lol...but upvoted at least...will follow you too
I like this post because it is Stan's response to Dan. As for me, I would surely be happier if I could give up Christianity but I have found this for me to be impossible. It seems reality and myth have a symbiotic relationship!
When you realize that this life is just a proving ground for the eternal one to follow, it makes it a lot easier to put up with the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". That confidence of what Jesus has in store for us is an enormous source of permanent happiness. I would be super-unhappy if I didn't have that great hope to help me make sense of this current crazy world.
Consider this: All men of belief believe that what they accept as true, is true, and that what others accept as true is flawed in some way. Clearly, humans have and do demonstrate themselves capable of believing in some of the most ridiculous ideas. Some religious ideas, on the other hand, are of absolute merit and are universally accepted. In my humble opinion, Christianity has spread the way that it has for one reason in particular: Christianity, once upon a time offered European pagan warlords and tribes a militaristic and psychological advantage in their fight for power. Pagan European Kings and leaders saw the strategic advantage (some say so in their records) of the "new faith" and embraced it for that reason. Their followers, on the other hand, accepted Christianity because that's what followers do, they follow. Christianity has proliferated because of the oft-spoken of socializing/organizing affect that it has on populations. Christianity has demonstrated itself to be a double-edged sword. Wicked men are "Christians" and not so wicked men are also Christians. For indigenous people, Christian people are from the darkness and to Christians all non-Christians need to be saved, for their own good. Christian history has proven to be bloody, brutal, and racist. By the time those soul saving conversions and 100 years have passed, you get crackhead/alcoholic, disenfranchised, under-educated, out-of-shape, gang-banging people of all races and ethnicities (and a million other failures). I hate to say it but Christians, then and now, really don't understand the bible (no matter what they say to the contrary). A Hebrew system, comprehended and practiced by nomadic, tribal, ancient people, that can't be fully understood by modern man, or reconciled with the world as we see it today. Put another way: If you practice what the bible says, if you do what the bible says do, you will be branded a terrorist. I see no possible way that a human being can obey the biblical Judeo-Christian God and obey a national government, without conflict that will leave one or the other violently angry. The Biblical God requires "Fidelity" as a condition for acceptance. You can't be a man of God on Sunday morning and a good American the rest of the time and expect God-almighty to accept your life. Read the book, again, very carefully. Then, read it some more. 1up-vote.