HelenM

Panta Pei

My church does teach that, once saved, always saved - that truly nothing can separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus.

So, that verse in Matthew doesn't mean that Christians can be separated and sent to hell.

According to them.

I have heard people who teach that Christians can lose their salvation, allege that this [false] doctrine that one can't, leads to Christians being very complacent about sin.

While I don't like the idea that people should be scared into behaving, by a fear that they will go to hell if they don't, I can't help thinking that, people being the way they are, it's probably true that people who think they cannot possibly go to hell, are going to be more complacent about their behavior than those who think their eternal destiny continues to be conditioned on how they behave.

So this 'once saved, always saved', practically speaking, might well result in Christians behaving worse...I mean, if you can get away with it, why not? Right?

love
Helen

Panta Pei

Thanks for reaffirming my post.

I had the ever so slight hope that I just had it all wrong.

I guess I can quit work now

HelenM

Hmmm...are you sure?

If lesser things had your wife making you sleep on the sofa, I wouldn't recommend it...

(I am referring to a post by Panta Pei a while back in saying this - I have no knowledge that others here don't have...)

love
Helen

Perchance

I once had a discussion with a Catholic friend- one of the few who bothered to find out what "agnostic" meant, and still wanted to talk about religion- in which she said that Genesis was a way of framing truths that the human mind couldn't yet touch or approach. She was saying- I think- that we can only think about certain things in symbolic form. I asked her why, and she said that she believed the human brain "was formed that way, since there are so many different creation myths in so many cultures."

Somewhat surprised to find out that she knew about these other myths and at least believed that people had once believed in them (even if she didn't believe them herself), I asked what I thought was the next logical question: are the "embedded truths" in Genesis the same as the "embedded truths" in other myths?

She denied that quite quickly. Apparently, the human mind can only think in symbolic fashion about certain things, but there are many wrong ways of thinking about these truths, and only one right way- and, of course, Genesis is the right way.

:sigh:

It's an interesting premise for treating myths as "serious," though.

-Perchance.

[ June 05, 2002: Message edited by: Perchance ]</p>

Dark Jedi

Not a directed at you, Helen.

My question: Every answer I recieve in response to why or how in Christianity start this way.
Why? Is there no logical way to explain it?

&lt;Please insert the default "And that is a matter of faith" to show your wittiness&gt;

Princess of Peace

I disagree that we should work within the believer's framework. In doing so, we neglect to inform the believer that there is another perfectly valid framework. For example, a Jew who decides not to convert to christianity would say that he doesn't accept Jesus as his savior because of reasons found in the OT. He wouldn't go to the NT to say that Jesus is bad. He would merely point out that in the OT, God abhors human sacrifice, God only accepts blood sacrifices that have been sprinkled upon his altar in his holy temple (and Jesus's blood was not thus sprinkled upon the altar and thus is invalid), and that blood sacrifices sprinkled upon the altar are only good for unintentional sins. Intentional sins are cleansed through repentance. To God. Not to or through Jesus. And now that the temple in Jerusalem has been destroyed, unintentional sins are cleansed through repentance as well. Why would anyone need Jesus?

By appealing only to their own framework and holding any others invalid, the Jews have no need whatsoever to say that the NT is merely myth or never happened. For all they care, it could have literally happened, and it would not change the fact that Jesus's sacrifice means nothing because God abhors human sacrifice and his blood was not sprinkled on the altar in the temple at Jerusalem. The NT's validity has nothing to do with its historicity.

In my framework, in the beginning, there was the big bang, followed by the formation of the stars and the planets, followed by evolution, followed by mankind making various ingenious myths with which to keep tribal groups together and to perpetuate a static culture as a successful survival adaptation. Those cultures which kept "thou shalt not kill" propagated more than those cultures that did not because the members ceased killing their neighbors so much. These days, we don't need a big sky daddy to tell us not to kill. When we find out who did it, we band together and lock the killer away so that they can not enjoy life. Don't kill because if you do, we're going to gang up upon you and you will lose your freedom. This, of course, also leads to absurdities, like: don't smoke marijuana or we will gang up on you and you will lose your freedom. However, this framework is better than the former "God says it, and that settles it" approach. After all, the mob is allowed to change its mind when new information becomes available. God, on the other hand, is not allowed to change his mind. And there is nothing worse than a stubborn stick-in-the-mud ruler who doesn't change with the times, shows favoritism to certain peoples over others, and doesn't take into account new scientific research in making policy.

HelenM

I might be wrong, but I think most believers who make it this far - as far as registering and posting on a thread here - have figured out that nonbelievers think that

Anyway, if you want to show someone's framework is faulty, don't you work within it to show up what's wrong with it?

Besides, I don't see why discussion of a narrative is only valid if the narrative is historically true. I don't even think the Jews of the past held to this because their discussions didn't focus on whether the story was true or not.

Surely we all use anecdotes and word-pictures at times and they have illustrative value.

I don't see what's wrong with trying to show Christians that you disagree with the lessons they think a narrative clearly teaches, even if they think the narrative is literally and historically true and you don't. It's one way to try to convince people that you can take the same narrative a number of different ways; of showing them that often there is not one answer but many to "what can we learn from this?" whether it's literally and historically true or not.

And that would be a good thing for some people to realize. (The ones who make assertions about everything and think everything is obvious - those ones are the ones I have in mind )

love
Helen

ax

I rekon that the bible does a crapy job at describing God, I believe the god of the bible exists, but the bible paints him in a poor light.
(note to helen-bipolar?! cool [ i'm not alone!!])

Queen of Swords

Why couldn't this god, if he exists, have made sure that the bible painted him in a better light?

Why would he want such bad PR?

ax

I guess he said to us
"go tell everyone about me. I leave it in your hands".
we said "yes" and then forgot what he said, and to cover up that they wrote things like,
"all the scriptures are god inspired, or spirit breathed" or whatever. I cannot deny his existance, I grew up in a penticostel church, and have seen many *mirracueles things.
* can't spell.