Clash of Christian Swords

[achilles12604]

Hello everyone. As you may have noticed, I have been testing the plausibility of dogma outside of the traditional "box" of Christianity. This is due mostly to being unable to marry certain ideas presented by the traditional church with my idea of God. He is to big and to loving to be placed into the confines that traditional Christianity has.

Therefore, I am attacking each question and topic with a totally open mind regarding Christianity. I am truly putting the traditional views of Christianity in the fire and refining them into much more solid and plausible beliefs. To do this requires that I also let some of the fat from these ideas burn away.

I have no fear in testing my faiths and if they are chafe, letting them burn. I believe that by letting go of "needing" certain things to be true, God will help guide me towards what really is solid and true.

Christianity is a faith written and interpreted by men. I believe that it is inspired by God. I believe that Jesus was sent by God to once again nudge the world back on track. But because of men, it has had things added and modified. I am going to let these things burn away and see what is truly gold.


I would encourage ALL of you to call me on things if you think I am wrong. Fisherking and Easyrider have already done so and I am thankful. I may not agree with you, but if you counter me on a point, I can only become stronger and smarter than if you decide to just let it go because you don't want to cross swords with a fellow Christian. Please, I encourage you to call me on something if you feel I am wrong and I will treat the new info the same as all my other ideas. I will test it in the fires and if it is gold, I will adjust my views accordingly.

I am grateful to the atheists here. There is no fire like atheist fire for testing the metal of ones beliefs. I ask that you further increase the fires from the other side so my views will be evenly forged and as close to accurate as possible.

Iron sharpens Iron, but not if they do not clash.

In his grip,

Achilles

[otseng]

I wish all had your kind of attitude.

Nobody has a total understanding of everything. And we all have some beliefs that could be in error. And the first step to correcting errors in our understanding is acknowledging that we could be wrong. And then we need our own personal beliefs challenged to find out if it can hold up to scrutiny.

I've been a member of a Baptist church for almost a year now. And there are some things with their beliefs that I do not agree with. And recently, the pastor and I had a good chat about it. But, what I appreciated was that he did not claim that the Baptists are infalliable, but that they could have some beliefs that are not totally quite correct.

We all need to constantly seek after truth. And it might be uncomfortable as we sharpen our swords against each other, but it'll prove fruitful in the long run.

[Goose]

Would it be appropriate to summarize it this way for Christians?

In essentials unity,
In non-essentials liberty,
In all things love.


Ditto on the OP for me.

[Fisherking]

"I may not agree with you, but if you counter me on a point, I can only become stronger and smarter than if you decide to just let it go because you don't want to cross swords with a fellow Christian."

I would expect the same from you all

God is infallable--we aren't

[joer]

Hello everyone. As you may have noticed, I have been testing the plausibility of dogma outside of the traditional "box" of Christianity. This is due mostly to being unable to marry certain ideas presented by the traditional church with my idea of God. He is to big and to loving to be placed into the confines that traditional Christianity has.

Therefore, I am attacking each question and topic with a totally open mind regarding Christianity. I am truly putting the traditional views of Christianity in the fire and refining them into much more solid and plausible beliefs. To do this requires that I also let some of the fat from these ideas burn away.

I have no fear in testing my faiths and if they are chafe, letting them burn. I believe that by letting go of "needing" certain things to be true, God will help guide me towards what really is solid and true.

Christianity is a faith written and interpreted by men. I believe that it is inspired by God. I believe that Jesus was sent by God to once again nudge the world back on track. But because of men, it has had things added and modified. I am going to let these things burn away and see what is truly gold.


I would encourage ALL of you to call me on things if you think I am wrong. Fisherking and Easyrider have already done so and I am thankful. I may not agree with you, but if you counter me on a point, I can only become stronger and smarter than if you decide to just let it go because you don't want to cross swords with a fellow Christian. Please, I encourage you to call me on something if you feel I am wrong and I will treat the new info the same as all my other ideas. I will test it in the fires and if it is gold, I will adjust my views accordingly.

I am grateful to the atheists here. There is no fire like atheist fire for testing the metal of ones beliefs. I ask that you further increase the fires from the other side so my views will be evenly forged and as close to accurate as possible.

Iron sharpens Iron, but not if they do not clash.

In his grip,

Achilles

achilles12604 I have long admired your position and outlook faith, religion and God.
What you say here reminds me of this:


CHRISTIANITY'S PROBLEM
Do not overlook the value of your spiritual heritage, the river of truth running down through the centuries, even to the barren times of a materialistic and secular age. In all your worthy efforts to rid yourselves of the superstitious creeds of past ages, make sure that you hold fast the eternal truth. But be patient! when the present superstition revolt is over, the truths of Jesus' gospel will persist gloriously to illuminate a new and better way.

But paganized and socialized Christianity stands in need of new contact with the uncompromised teachings of Jesus; it languishes for lack of a new vision of the Master's life on earth. A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism. Earth is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment.

The teachings of Jesus, even though greatly modified, survived the mystery cults of their birthtime, the ignorance and superstition of the dark ages, and are even now slowly triumphing over the materialism, mechanism, and secularism of the twentieth century. And such times of great testing and threatened defeat are always times of great revelation.

Religion does need new leaders, spiritual men and women who will dare to depend solely on Jesus and his incomparable teachings. If Christianity persists in neglecting its spiritual mission while it continues to busy itself with social and material problems, the spiritual renaissance must await the coming of these new teachers of Jesus' religion who will be exclusively devoted to the spiritual regeneration of men. And then will these spirit-born souls quickly supply the leadership and inspiration requisite for the social, moral, economic, and political reorganization of the world.

The modern age will refuse to accept a religion which is inconsistent with facts and out of harmony with its highest conceptions of truth, beauty, and goodness. The hour is striking for a rediscovery of the true and original foundations of present-day distorted and compromised Christianity—the real life and teachings of Jesus.
Primitive man lived a life of superstitious bondage to religious fear. Modern, civilized men dread the thought of falling under the dominance of strong religious convictions. Thinking man has always feared to be held by a religion. When a strong and moving religion threatens to dominate him, he invariably tries to rationalize, traditionalize, and institutionalize it, thereby hoping to gain control of it. By such procedure, even a revealed religion becomes man-made and man-dominated. Modern men and women of intelligence evade the religion of Jesus because of their fears of what it will do to them—and with them. And all such fears are well founded. The religion of Jesus does, indeed, dominate and transform its believers, demanding that men dedicate their lives to seeking for a knowledge of the will of the Father in heaven and requiring that the energies of living be consecrated to the unselfish service of the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind.

Selfish men and women simply will not pay such a price for even the greatest spiritual treasure ever offered mortal man. Only when man has become sufficiently disillusioned by the sorrowful disappointments attendant upon the foolish and deceptive pursuits of selfishness, and subsequent to the discovery of the barrenness of formalized religion, will he be disposed to turn wholeheartedly to the gospel of the kingdom, the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.

The world needs more firsthand religion. Even Christianity—the best of the religions of the twentieth century—is not only a religion about Jesus, but it is so largely one which men experience secondhand. They take their religion wholly as handed down by their accepted religious teachers. What an awakening the world would experience if it could only see Jesus as he really lived on earth and know, firsthand, his life-giving teachings! Descriptive words of things beautiful cannot thrill like the sight thereof, neither can creedal words inspire men's souls like the experience of knowing the presence of God. But expectant faith will ever keep the hope-door of man's soul open for the entrance of the eternal spiritual realities of the divine values of the worlds beyond.

Christianity has dared to lower its ideals before the challenge of human greed, war-madness, and the lust for power; but the religion of Jesus stands as the unsullied and transcendent spiritual summons, calling to the best there is in man to rise above all these legacies of animal evolution and, by grace, attain the moral heights of true human destiny.

Christianity is threatened by slow death from formalism, overorganization, intellectualism, and other nonspiritual trends. The modern Christian church is not such a brotherhood and sisterhood of dynamic believers as Jesus commissioned continuously to effect the spiritual transformation of successive generations of mankind.

So-called Christianity has become a social and cultural movement as well as a religious belief and practice. The stream of modern Christianity drains many an ancient pagan swamp and many a barbarian morass; many olden cultural watersheds drain into this present-day cultural stream as well as the high Galilean tablelands which are supposed to be its exclusive source.

THE FUTURE

Christianity has indeed done a great service for this world, but what is now most needed is Jesus. The world needs to see Jesus living again on earth in the experience of spirit-born mortals who effectively reveal the Master to all men. It is futile to talk about a revival of primitive Christianity; you must go forward from where you find yourselves. Modern culture must become spiritually baptized with a new revelation of Jesus' life and illuminated with a new understanding of his gospel of eternal salvation. And when Jesus becomes thus lifted up, he will draw all men to himself. Jesus' disciples should be more than conquerors, even overflowing sources of inspiration and enhanced living to all men. Religion is only an exalted humanism until it is made divine by the discovery of the reality of the presence of God in personal experience.

The beauty and sublimity, the humanity and divinity, the simplicity and uniqueness, of Jesus' life on earth present such a striking and appealing picture of man-saving and God-revealing that the theologians and philosophers of all time should be effectively restrained from daring to form creeds or create theological systems of spiritual bondage out of such a transcendental bestowal of God in the form of man. In Jesus the universe produced a mortal man in whom the spirit of love triumphed over the material handicaps of time and overcame the fact of physical origin.

Ever bear in mind—God and men need each other. They are mutually necessary to the full and final attainment of eternal personality experience in the divine destiny of universe finality.

" The kingdom of God is within you " was probably the greatest pronouncement Jesus ever made, next to the declaration that his Father is a living and loving spirit.

Thanks for seeing and searching for the truth Achilles.