this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Actual Christian here. This decision is not extreme, whatsoever, though I get that it appears extreme to non-believers and feminists. The thing to understand here is that Christians follow the Bible. And conversely, those who do not follow the Bible are not Christian. So let's take a look at a relevant Bible passage (1 Timothy 2:11-12):
Now that's the word of God. It's eternal, unchanging, and dictates how He wills us to live.
It's definitely out-of-step with modern secular culture, and that's a very good thing from the Christian perspective. We are God's peculiar people (Titus 2:11-15).
Any religion that deprives certain groups of power simply for existing as a certain thing is maybe worth a reexamination.
Do you think Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Mormons, Scientologists, etc should question their most sacred doctrines? I assume you think they're incorrect about what they believe, and questioning their faith would open them up to the truth, right?
If you then think that you shouldn't question your faith, isn't that a bit of a double standard? If you've got the truth, after all, it should have greater and clearer explanatory power than anything else, and, therefore, questioning it will only result in understandable, clear answers that strengthen your faith rather than weaken it.
I was raised an atheist and didn't find Christ until adulthood. So I am quite familiar with dismissing Christianity and any other religion for a variety of reasons.
Incidentally, I was also nihilistic and depressed for all those years, but I can only identify that in retrospect, because at the time, living in secular culture, the nihilism and depression just seemed like the normal way of being for people.
I'm a Christian because I know without a doubt in my heart that Christ is real, and He really is the way, the truth, and the life.
I grew up in a church that was consciously literalist and held the Bible as inerrant. I'm no longer religious, but looking back with the blinders of those doctrines on, I have to wonder if I might still be a believer if those ideas hadn't been drilled into me.
I'm all on board with the Jesus of the Gospels; he seems like a pretty cool dude who didn't have any time for people in power exploiting the downtrodden. But the Old Testament, on the other hand, is a mess, and it includes passages casting God as a bloodthirsty murderer making the Pharoah resist Moses just so that he could send more plagues against Egypt, prophets speaking for God in the language of the abusive boyfriend who tells his partner that it's her fault that he's hurting her (basically every one of the prophets, but take Ezekiel 16 as a representative example), God guiding Joshua through an ethnic cleansing of Canaan, and God commanding the genocide of the Amalekites and then punishing King Saul for being insufficiently thorough about it.
Let's not even mention that weird bit of erotic literature that's tucked into the middle for some reason (and don't try to sell me on the idea that "Your breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle" is a metaphor for anything other than really nice boobs)...
Then, on the other side of the coin, you have the letters of Paul where, when you look at it without bias, it's plainly clear that he's a religious conservative trying to pull the radical early church back into line with his own personal mores. Small wonder that hundreds of years later, when the church was The Church and falling into conservative patterns of orthodoxy, they picked the epistles they did to canonize as The Complete and Unerring Word of God...
What a well-written, intelligent, and respectful rebuttal. Thank you.
I really wish the message of Jesus, exactly as you described it, was better understood by all of the anti-Christians. It's a seriously good message, yet so many people want to hate on it without giving it a chance.
As for the Old Testament, I'm continually blown away by how much of it foreshadows Jesus, His ministry, and His apostles. The number of times this happens is far too great for me to count, though I'm sure some biblical scholars have attempted to do so. Having grown up in the church, and clearly having read the good book, you may well be more familiar than I am with all of the foreshadowing, as I'm a convert who was raised atheist and didn't find God until my 30s. I still have a lot of catching up to do, and I'm sure I always will. But suffice it to say, there's foreshadowing through and through.
Before Christ, we made God's work more difficult. Humanity wasn't wholly ready to follow Him. Abraham and his descendants were, at least they were enough to form a series of binding covenants. But until we were ready to receive Christ, God did what needed to be done to lead His first non-begotten son to the point when Christ could successfully arrive. And that, I believe, explains why the OT played out the way it did.
As for twin roe deer, I have no doubt God appreciates the form of a woman. Otherwise He'd not have made her look as He did, and He'd not have predicated our entire civilization upon marital intimacy.
As for the scripture that we now consider canonical, do you really think God had no hand in the Church's selection? I find it implausible that He'd take the effort to inspire various works of scripture, but then leave their canonicalization unguided.
No, it's not.
I's the words of many men claiming they know what God says. The divinity of Christ was even decided by the church during the 4th century during council sessions like that of Nicea.
Yes it is.
This is the primary lens which so many who prosthelize are happy to ignore. The words in the Bible are words written by humans over centuries. It is an iterative document which is still being tweaked by people, and to claim that any part of it is the untarnished word of God is to ignore the fact that humans are terribly fallible.
The Bible was written with a Human agenda, and the faith which organized religion fetishizes is more correctly described as faith in the humans who represent their words as of divine origin. It is a faith that the human representation of a divine will is correct, and that those who claim to speak with divine authority have no incentive to misrepresent reality in exchange for positions of power, status, and wealth.
The sheer number of abuses made in the name of divinity, all ascribing to speak with the will of the single divine truth, make it incredibly obvious to anyone not indoctrinated that if 99.9% of religions are bunk by virtue of their own definition (this religion is true and others are not), the chance that 100% are is pretty high, and the chance that any truth which may have been heard is not twisted is so small as to not be worth considering.
Actual ex-Christian here.
The concept that you seem to be failing to grasp -- and I can't blame you because it escaped me as a Christian as well -- is that these are rules that you are welcome to follow. Your religion tells you what you can and can't do. You can make that choice. The problem comes when you try to apply that to anyone else who doesn't accept it. Your religion's rules don't apply to me, because I'm not part of your religion.
I'm willing to coexist with Christians. But that coexistence has to go both ways.
I was raised an atheist and didn't find Christ until adulthood, so I do grasp that it's all voluntary. I also recognize that you can't force anyone to be Christian against their will.
So on those points we agree. Where we differ is that I firmly believe my God is your God, and neither of us could ever change that, no matter how much we may want to. Christ came to save all people, with a focus on those who need it most. So yes, Christianity does apply to you, even though you don't want it to.
I fully understand your "get off my back" perspective, honestly. Telling someone else how to think or what to do is a remarkably terrible way to make friends. I'm not here to be a jerk. Promise. I know you're going to do what you're going to do, irrespective of me. I only want to take every chance I can get to give testimony of my own experiences with God, and to follow the Great Commission for anyone who actually cares to let a seed get planted.
So does that mean we can coexist? I certainly hope so, but I recognize you may think I'm overbearing.
That sounds like a you problem. If your god expects me to believe that it's real, then it's going to need to move itself to prove it. Your testimony isn't sufficient. I've already been there, done that and bought the t-shirt.
You're entitled to think that's the case. What you think in the privacy of your own head is your business. The moment you think you have the authority (as too many Christians do) to make me follow it is when we have a problem.
And this is why we can't be friends. We've heard the story. We've heard the testimony. We remain unmoved. At this point, the only way to describe this behavior is harassment.
The world has heard the message. Let it go and leave us alone.
Christians in Europe have been highly successful at coexisting with non-Christians without harassing them. You might look into their example.
If you were raised Christian, you should know how much God loves human faith. He would never do anything to deprive us of the challenge of faith, because He knows how healthy it is for us to live on faith. Everything He directs us to do is for our own good. Revealing himself would deny us that opportunity. There will be a second coming, but by then it'll be too late.
You know where to find us when you're ready. Wishing you all the best.
The reason I'm no longer a Christian is because I committed the unforgivable sin: I put these claims to the test. There was no answer. No fire from on high to consume the altar. No dove descending from the heavens. No whisper on the wind. Just confirmation bias.
Try to survive on faith and you'll starve quickly. Trying to convince me that your beliefs are true is just going to annoy us both. Mission accomplished.
Trust me, I do know where to find you. Until I go looking for you, leave us alone.
As someone who was raised in a Calvinistic Baptist sect I second this in the strongest possible terms. If satan himself turned up at my old church the faithful would fall down and worship at his feet because they couldn't tell the difference between him and their god.
No wonder a bunch of you lot have trouble understanding consent.
Hey i think it would be best if you could keep any proselytising to a Christian Curious specific community. A lot of us have deconstructed but still bear the scars of religious trauma so it can lead to hostile conversations that aren't productive for either of us. Giving some objective "this is the verse used to justify this action." and explaining that action without devolving into "My god is your god" is fine.
Hasn't the Bible been translated from Greek and Hebrew multiple times?
also even Christians can't agree on what it means--do you know how many fucking schisms Christianity has? (and don't ask about the one which created the Southern Baptists...)
We're still trying to learn our lesson from the Tower of Babel. It's a work in progress. All of the disagreements, though, are over relatively minor details. If you read statements of faith from various churches, you see they're basically all the same in the essentials.
Don;t forget the books the the church in the 1600's decided shouldn't be in the bible.
Yes, and some of them are pretty wacky translations. But the underlying word of God is unchanging.
And didn't the Catholic Church shuffle around what books were included in the Bible over the years? Like didn't they take a bunch of books out?
I suppose I'm a former actual Christian, raised in the church, homeschooled K-12, not SBC but not unfamiliar with it. Point is, I know enough to know that modern Christianity is the accumulation of a series of compromises, concessions, and reinterpretations of the eternal Word of God over the centuries.
Interpreted literally, that passage also outlaws woman from teaching even Sunday School, much less my mom from Home Schooling me. Certainly I should have been in authority over her by the time I was, what, 13?
So basically, I appreciate and respect the perspective, but I'm not entirely buying it as a rational explanation for this.
This literally could go for anything in the Bible. As the person said, the Bible is the word of God, Christians follow the Bible without questioning the word of God. It is, inherently, not based on rational, it is based on Authority.
I think even from a christian perspective the right thing to do wouldnt be to just accept a collection of scriptures as absolute truths (or to be precise the exact interpretation of those scriptures by the leaders of the group they happened to get into).
If you dont examine your beliefs with regard to historic evidence, and critical thinking you would have no way of knowing if there was some work by people (or if you believe in that even satan) when the current biblical canon was set up or when jewish tradition formed the old testament, etc.
Church leaders obviously dont talk about this that much, but being a follower of jesus and a good christian doesnt require one tho view the whole bible and one specific reading of it as a unified work of truth.
I dont know your exact stance on this topic, but in my experience there are too many people that dont examine the way current day teachings of their community got formed throughout history and just treat it like if god revealed it himself to them here and now.
If you happen to be interested here is a video by a yewish guy (though he views the bible from a historical viewpoint not in an orthodox way) exploring what we currently know about the bible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqSkXmFun14
Hope i didnt sound disrespectful, i just like when discourse makes us revise our deeper beliefs.
Is that your version of "kill 'em all and let God sort it out"? No, I don't "prohibit" anything. My point was just that this is a Christian organization following the Bible, which is to be expected of them.
Except for all those various translations and interpretations that say different things.
Interpretations are certainly ever-changing. The underlying word of God is different from translations.
People are well aware of the 'why' behind these types of decisions. There's a reason Christianity is considered abhorrently sexist by a huge number of people.
I assume you think slavery should be reinstated as well, since the new testament tells slaves to obey their earthly masters?
Paul was a legit Rabbi. Old habits die hard.
It's argued that Paul didn't write Timothy 1. But beyond that, Paul was a false prophet, who took the good work of Jesus and twisted it into his own religion. I often ask Christians who they follow: Jesus or Paul?
https://youtu.be/YUwxG36L7Ms
Well at least I'll be in good company in Hell.