Toto

It's not clear what your arguments are exactly. I thought you were a Christian, but if you don't believe that God cares about our beliefs or that belief in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, maybe you're not. It sounds like you are more of a Deist, or maybe a Unitarian?

A God who doesn't care if you believe in him is not the usual Christian god. If there's no consequence to belief, why aren't you an atheist?

Doubting Didymus

I have an objection to your argument.

You have made up this impression of god by yourself, trying to back it up with the nice bits of the bible. Many passages of the bible say 'nice' things about god like this, but there are also many passages that say that god is very concerned indeed that you believe in him without proof, that you will go to hell if you don't, that the nation of israel should crush all who go before them, and that above all, (very important) you should always slice off the top of your penis.

It is not possible to follow all of the bible, so how can anyone possibly decide which bits are right and which bits are wrong? Atheists have sensibly decided that the entire bible is myth, and are therefore justified in thinking that some bits are sensible and some bits are completely burk. How do you justify this if your belief is that the bible is the true word of god?

I'll tell you how many theists do it: they say that the bible was written by men, not god, and further: that only the nice bits (or whatever bits suit them) are really true about god after all. My question is: how is this any different to simply making it up?

If you do not think that this description applys to you, please tell us what mechanism you use to decide what is true about god. Specifically: tell us how your mechanism is different from making it up as you go.

The Theists main problem is finding an argument that is in favour of gods existence, but NOT in favour of made up omnibenevolent faery god.

Tercel

I thought I was too!

I don't see how you work this out. Is the entire Orthodox Catholic Church also not Christians?
Grr. For some reason I can't access the link I was going to give you. But never mind, It's <a href="http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=cache:kq-TiRP1XZEC:www.orthodoxpress.org/parish/river_of_fire.htm&hl=en&ie=UTF-8" target="_blank"> google to the rescue</a> with it's brilliant caching system.

Because there are numerous good reasons to believe in God.

Tercel

I plead guilty as charged to the doing critical thinking and thinking the bible was written by men bits.

The main mechanisms I use are reason and common sense.
I also take as a guide such principles as: to what extent is there agreement on this issues among writers; how important they each think the point
was; how much "in a position to know" were they; how sure can I be of the early Church's view on this subject; what other Christians throughout the centuries have believed to be the case etc

Doubting Didymus

You base it on what other christians believe? So how do you think THEY know? Do they use the same method? What is this 'position to know' you speak of? I hope I don't have to point out the problem with a socitey of people who ALL base what they believe on what everyone else in the same society believes.

Basically you have reduced the problem one more step: On what do you base the authority of the people you base your judgements on?

Tercel

No: At least, not soley. That was simply one of numerous considerations that might be relevant on any issue.
If other people are in general agreement then there's usually a reason for it, and it helps to examine what others have thought and their reasons for it.
Also others might have had spiritual experiences, guidence of the holy spirit, or I don't know what else, that guided their judgement.

Probably they used their brains, discussed it and thought it over, compared it to Biblical passages, compared it to experience, sought guidence from God etc.
It's said two heads are better than one: Well hundreds of heads are probably even better.

I could go out and write a detailed account about what happened in the year 24,000BC, but it probably wouldn't be very accurate 'cos I'm not in a good position to write an accurate book on the subject.
For each writer, we always have to evaluate what is being said against their position in the world, their bias, their influences and establish just how much of a position they were in to relate correctly that which they write.

You'd have a very unified and disagreement free society!

Toto

Hi Tercel - I read that article. It's quite interesting, but what do you know about Orthodoxy? I might have been baptized Orthodox if my father hadn't become an agnostic well before I was born. What little I do know is that the Orthdox do not believe in applying reason to theological problems, or in literal interpretations of the Bible (or traditionally in laypeople reading the Bible, for that matter. One priest explained that when people start reading the Bible for themselves, they all come up with different opinions, and then you have warfare.) For them, the essence of their Christianity is church tradition and ritual, with its chanting, incense, music and in particular, the artistic icons. The Greek Orthodox in particular think that they have an unbroken tradition from the time of the first apostles.

The article that you found does a good job of twitting the Roman Catholics, but I would not assume that it represents all Orthodox thinking, or that you could take any document written by an Orthodox theologian and give it any meaning outside of the context of the the Orthodox faith. It was a speech given in English to a Greek Orthodox conference in America. How much of it was based on church thinking, and how much on his own idiosyncratic American thinking? I don't know.

Of course, you are free to believe anything you want. But if you're going to think so freely, it's not clear why you want to call yourself a Christian.

bd-from-kg

Tercel:

You say:

Well, the Gospel According to John contradicts you pretty thoroughly. For example:

So according to John, God cares very much what you believe.

What about Paul? Let’s have a look:

So Paul is as clear as can be: it is not through the law or by your works that you will be saved, but by faith – faith in Jesus Christ, in His blood.

[Side note: The authorship of some of these epistles is disputed or in doubt, but they are traditionally attributed to Paul, and no serious scholar doubts that they reflect his views pretty accurately. Besides, if some of them were written by other early Christians, this just confirms that the views they express were widely held from the earliest days of Christianity. And Romans was almost certainly written by Paul himself.]

Now Doubting Didymus wrote:

You replied:

OK, let’s apply these criteria to the question of whether God cares about what we believe.

As to what “reason and common sense” say, this is fine if it is used to interpret the Bible. But if you are going to use reason and common sense to reject the teachings of the Bible outright when you don’t like them, you are indeed making it up as you go.

To what extent is there agreement among the writers of the Bible that God cares about what we believe? Well, any number of passages indicate that He does and zero indicate that He doesn’t.

How important did they think the point was? Obviously very important indeed.

How much were they in a position to know? Well, if the Gospel writers were not in a position to know what Jesus taught, there is no reason whatever to believe in Christianity; we can throw the entire Bible into the trash heap. If Paul was not in a position to know, there is again no reason whatever to believe in Christianity, since it is Paul who formulated the central doctrines of Christianity theology. If Paul’s interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life and death is rejected, Christianity is left in a shambles. Besides, Paul was the beneficiary of a direct revelation from God. Who could possibly be in a better position to know than Paul?

How sure can we be of the early Church's view on this subject? Totally sure. It was not for nothing that the Gospel of John and so many of Paul’s epistles were declared canonical.

Have most other Christians throughout the centuries believed that God cares what one believes? Absolutely. Nearly all of them have.

It would be easy to show that these criteria also lead inescapably to the conclusion that our ultimate fate depends very much on whether we believe in Jesus Christ. Many of the passages quoted above (as well as many others) show this unequivocally; it has always been a central tenet of orthodox Christian doctrine; the NT writers and the early Church considered this doctrine very important indeed; and it has been believed, and continues to be believed, by nearly all Christians.

So if you were really going by your stated criteria, you would certainly believe that God cares very much about what we believe, and that our ultimate fate depends, at least in part, on whether we believe in Jesus Christ. Since you say that you don’t believe either of these things, one can only conclude that you are indeed “making it up”. You believe what you want to believe. If the Bible agrees with you, fine. If not, too bad for the Bible.

In fact, on other threads you have consistently shown a marked disinterest in what the Bible says, on what the early Church believed, on what Christians in general have believed historically, etc. It appears that your attitude toward the Bible is that it is an interesting book, worthy of consideration, but nothing more.

All of which leads to the question: in what sense are you a Christian? A Christian is generally defined as one who believes in the Gospel – i.e., the Good News – that Jesus has saved us from our sins. It appears that you do not believe this. So what do you believe that in your opinion qualifies you as a Christian?

Spud Munkey

My very same question to christians is often answered with the word faith. They even refer to their own religion as the christian FAITH. Correct me if I'm mistaken here, but isn't the very definition of faith to beleive in something despite a complete lack of evidence? This is why logical thinkers rarely beleive in a diety such as the christian god. Why should I believe something exists when the only thing I have implying it's existence is a book written by people who had no clue what existed even 1000 miles from them.

Pomp

Spud Munkey,

...isn't the very definition of faith to beleive in something despite a complete lack of evidence?

That's one definition, yes. One thing to watch closely when discussing matters of religious faith is that some people have a tendency to equivocate this sense of "faith" with other senses of the word, such as "trust" or "belief with evidence."