Thermal
August Member
A lot of us were born being force fed it, being told it was the only One True Beverage. Then we discovered tequila and realized we had been living a lie.
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Why Are the Majority of Those in Hell the Poor and Oppressed Masses?
- Thread starter Emre_1974tr
- Start date
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
I know you weren't asking me, but in my case there was no one single BIG issue - there were a bunch of them. But I suppose you could say that the biggest one was this.
My church insisted that only they had the right answer, and every other denomination, church, and religion was wrong. My epiphany, such as it was, was that every denomination, church and religion insisted the exact same thing.
What was more likely - that my church was right and 10,000 other churches were wrong? Or that 10,001 churches were wrong?
Oh full on apologetics - not seen that here for many a year. How sweet.
I was born into a primitive Methodist family, I was the last child to be baptised in the Methodist chapel before it burnt down* I went to a Methodist school, we did prayers every morning and sang hymns every Friday assembly, religion was intertwined in our lessons and I went to Sunday school every week, it didn’t stick.
*It’s a family story, I know the timing of the chapel burning down and it does fit in with the timeline.
When I was not yet 5, I was sent to Sunday school under the command of my 8 year old brother.
It was a cold morning and all the children (how many? perhaps six?) were bundled up in coats
and caps. The small, bleak room in the church was unheated, so we sat in our wooden chairs
still bundled. The girl in charge of us -- she may have been 12; a big kid to me -- ordered us, "Take off them
caps, you kids." I took off mine and then put it back on. Dammit, it was cold in there! And too, I think I
didn't like being told what to do. My brother, dreading embarassment, pulled it off. I clapped it back on.
He pulled it off a second time, roughly and taking some hair with it. It's a good thing boys
don't cry, because that's how I came to Jesus.
You didnt ask me either, did you?
It was a cold morning and all the children (how many? perhaps six?) were bundled up in coats
and caps. The small, bleak room in the church was unheated, so we sat in our wooden chairs
still bundled. The girl in charge of us -- she may have been 12; a big kid to me -- ordered us, "Take off them
caps, you kids." I took off mine and then put it back on. Dammit, it was cold in there! And too, I think I
didn't like being told what to do. My brother, dreading embarassment, pulled it off. I clapped it back on.
He pulled it off a second time, roughly and taking some hair with it. It's a good thing boys
don't cry, because that's how I came to Jesus.
You didnt ask me either, did you?
junkshop
Otto's Favourite
Add another 'yes' to the pile.
Church every sunday (and sunday school, wherein I won many certificates and prizes for being able to reguritate the verses that that flavour of christianity [baptist - the UK version, not the more...emphatic US version] chose to accept), sent to a CoE* primary school, and a CoE junior school. Compulsory christian assembly was still a thing at secondary school.
I have tried the Kool-aid, and found it to be weak sauce. Unconvicing, and (if I am honest) rather silly.
*a very dilute and wafty version of the cult, I am aware.
Thermal
August Member
Well, we can show Manson's followers accepting him as a God too, but that doesn't pack any punch either. A natural born believer is a natural born believer. Muslims who were raised Muslim tend to be Muslim believers. If they get exposed to enough Christianity, many will convert. If you plopped those same brothers down in Japan, I'd betcha they come out Zen Buddhist in a matter of minutes.
Now skeptics are a different story. We are not primed to believe in a God or gods, so we don't jump at the chance to convert to one religion or the other.
So back to the question I asked earlier: what do you think the most persuasive argument is for accepting Christ? Or Muhammad? Or Zeus for that matter?
junkshop
Otto's Favourite
I have no respect for any 'god' that can't get a day of the week named after them.
Thermal
August Member
"I said Thor's day, not Thursday, you illiterate twit!"
Steve
Penultimate Amazing
Just stumbled across this on another site:
"Believing the bible makes you a christian, Understanding the bible makes you an atheist."
Seems relevant to the current discussion.
"Believing the bible makes you a christian, Understanding the bible makes you an atheist."
Seems relevant to the current discussion.
Thermal
August Member
Someone hasn't had the opportunity to hear the Good News? You can tithe by auto-debit now if you're interested?
Rusty Tyler
Graduate Poster
Here is something that happened to me on another forum.
I was on another forum years ago where a man was having a rant which ended in an absolute fit by writing this:
"... consult with your Holy Spirit and get back to me!"
Yikes! It was a real scorcher of a post. Had to wear oven mitts to read it. - LOL
I was still reeling when I heard very clearly, "Answer him."
Say what? "Er... what should I say?"
No reply, as usual. - LOL
I hit REPLY and took a deep breath and just started typing.
Words were going into the post with little thinking effort from me.
I reviewed what I had written and fixed the obvious spelling errors.
Marveling at what I had written, but a bit uncomfortable. I hit SEND.
I had asked him to flip open a Bible and point randomly to a verse that would speak to him.
Under normal circumstances I don't recommend doing that. But... whatever. ???
The next day I heard back from the guy. He was a completely different person.
Something had changed. He told me that he had in fact randomly opened the Bible and pointed to a verse.
The verse is pasted below.
When he read "before the silver cord is severed" he was overcome with God's presence.
The post I had delivered spoke to the pain he was experiencing. Which I had no knowledge of.
He shared that he had lost a child and his wife in childbirth. He was angry and bitter.
The "silver cord" had reminded him of the umbilical cord "severed" at birth.
He pressed me to tell him the color of his wife's hair.
I said that would be an abuse of the gift, but for some reason I was seeing red hair in my mind's eye.
BINGO. Red hair.
Ecclesiastes 12:6 NIV
Remember him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
Rusty Tyler
Graduate Poster
Thanks.
I have actually been deconstructing (evaluating) for the last couple of years.
Seemed to me that other who were deconstructing over-reacted. Which led them to atheism.
This was the BIG turning point for me.
We had a family situation. My sister-in-law informed my mother-in-law
that she couldn't believe in a God that would put people in hell.
Mom was pretty upset. She was afraid of losing a child to unbelief.
The church had taught her that those who succumb to unbelief will be lost for all eternity.
Mom was devastated. Understandably.
The family had been raised evangelical, as had I. Which left me with nothing to offer but the standard apologetics about hell.
This left me with a hollow feeling inside. My "biblical" defense did nothing to help the situation. Mom was still sobbing.
There was really nothing we could say to my sister-in-law to help the situation. I thought she was at least half right.
The hell doctrine bothered me too. Although the church was backing away from the hellfire and brimstone message...
It was still there. Now softened to "Eternal separation from God." (whatever that means)
I did some research to see if I could bolster my hell belief enough to hang onto it. Again, the empty rhetoric prevailed.
What was hell and why did God create it the way the church described it? Such pointless and sadistic horror.
What kind of a...? (sigh)
Then a forum friend whose biblical knowledge I trusted said that he didn't believe in a forever burning hell. Say what?
I responded by saying, "Tell me more." He directed me to a forum topic where Universalism was being discussed.
So, I did some research in that direction. My eyes were opened to something I had never seen before when I read this verse.
I had seen the verse before but never noticed the words, "not only for ours". Say what? That's where it began.
1 John 2:2 NIV
He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.
Rusty Tyler
Graduate Poster
There's something to that.
We were misinformed about the origins and nature of the Bible and about hell. (eternal conscious torment)
This was very helpful.
Majority Text vs. Critical Text vs. Textus Receptus - Textual Criticism 101 - Berean Patriot
There are three major competing Greek sources to use for translating the New Testament: the Critical Text, the Majority Text, and the Textus Receptus. The science of assembling these manuscripts is called “Textual Criticism”, and you can consider this a complete Textual Criticism 101 article...
www.bereanpatriot.com
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
In many cases it can. You noted that eyewitness testimony is admissible in a court. However, just because a witness in court claims to have seen and heard something doesn't ipso facto prove that it actually happened. The testimony is appropriately questioned in an adversarial system that follows rules for fairly testing the claim. Then ultimately a trier of fact decides whether that claim is credible.
That mimics what happens informally when someone claims to have seen and heard something. The credibility of the witness, the circumstances surrounding the claim, and the prima facie nature of the claim all go into the calculus of determining whether a useful standard of proof is met.
"My mother appeared to me in a dream and told me something important," is a fundamentally different kind of claim than, "My mother appeared to me in my living room and told me something important." If the claim is that each appearance is a literal attempt to communicate, our knowledge of the nature of dreams in general informs our relative evaluation of the prima facie plausibility of each claim. Skeptics are fond of saying that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. That's debatable, but in this case the claim per se is the proffered proof. The question is not whether the claimant can prove his claim in either case with additional evidence, but whether we should take the eyewitness claims themselves as proof of the matter of the mother's appearance and message.
Someone steeped in Christian belief may not even bat an eye to hear that some figure appeared in a dream and delivered an important message. Within that belief tradition, that's a common axiom. Outside the belief tradition, and especially in science, it's an extraordinary, unproven method. Dreaming as a communication conduit on par with an in-person conversation has no scientific support and considerable scientific counter indication. The claim is improbable if not impossible on its face and therefore offers no evidentiary value.
Your particular line of questioning touches upon mental illness, specifically schizophrenia, in which the sufferer may claim sensory data that we can know objectively did not occur. We know that an unhealthy, off-nominal brain can have imaginative mental states that create recollection of sensory experiences that did not occur (hallucination). We know that a healthy, perfectly functioning brain can have imaginative states that create a recollection of sensory experiences that did not occur (dreaming). In one case there is metacognition to supply a lucidity control. Dreamers tend to know they were dreaming. Hallucinators can be trained to recognize when they are hallucinating but do not start out with this skill.
Experiment has shown that even a nominally healthy, nominally lucid, nominally engaged brain does not always form an accurate sensory recollection of events that are simultaneously captured via objective means. This means there is no limiting factor on the error in seeing and hearing. Nor is there any control in the brain to determine that this has happened—no lucidity feedback. Because even under the best possible circumstances we cannot trust eyewitness testimony, claims to have seen and heard something are not by themselves adequate proof that it happened that way.
While the Christian belief tradition provides a ready hypothesis to explain NDEs, the observation per se is not proof of the hypothesis. Hypothesis testing in religion is not especially rigorous, nor desires to be—faith, etc. Similarly, the secular tradition also provides a ready hypothesis by noting that the circumstances of the NDE very closely aligns with other imaginative, semi-lucid mental states. Because science applies a far more rigorous method of hypothesis testing, it doesn't claim to explain all outstanding details. That is a difference in standard of proof, not in the strength of the hypothesis. The advantage science has is in the structural avoidance of circularity. In attempting to explain NDEs, science relies upon principles previously proven by other methods.
The notion that an NDE provides evidence in the form of something seen and heard does great equivocal violence to the concepts of seeing and hearing. The circumstances under which non-veridical NDEs occur thoroughly precludes seeing and hearing in the way those terms normally apply to evaluating eyewitness testimony. It conflates the concepts of seeing and imagining. Hence it's improper to expect them to be considered equivalent eyewitness evidence of the existence of the thing seen or imagined.
Rusty Tyler
Graduate Poster
What if the important information from mother in the dream led to a significant action which wouldn't have happened without the dream?
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
How would you know it wouldn't have happened without the dream? How would you know that the dreamt-of information was actually a communication from your mother and not just self-reflection personified in your imagination?
So far no useful information has been shown to have been communicated via a dream. That doesn't preclude the function of dreams in the brain's own planning process.
I can't believe I have to explain the fundamental difference in evidentiary value between actually talking to someone and imagining you talked to someone. Seeing something in a dream has zero evidentiary value in proving that it exists as an external reality.
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Rusty Tyler
Graduate Poster
Shouldn't we give some credit to the one who had the dream?
Are they not capable of discerning whether it was their mother or not?
If talk to you on the telephone, am I present with you? (no)
Is it actually me talking? (yes) Dreams can do that. IMHO
Acts 2:17-18 NIV
“‘In the last days, God says,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your young men will see visions,
your old men will dream dreams.
18 Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days,
and they will prophesy.
arthwollipot
Limerick Purist Pronouns: He/Him
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Credit for what?
Do you understand the difference between someone being physically in communication with you and imagining someone while you're semi-conscious?
That's still physical communication. I'm not imagining it. There's a testable external reality involved. We know what telephones are and how they work.
Your opinion is irrelevant. There's no evidence dreams work as you want to believe they can, and considerable evidence that they cannot. Why did you ignore my questions asking how you would test the veracity of your opinion?
I don't care what the Bible claims. I care about what you can prove with objective, testable evidence.
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