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river
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Questions and Answers

Post #1

Post by river »

For those of us who spent any time studying the Bible as a Christian and sitting under various ministries have you ever wondered how on earth could I have believed something so ludicrous? How could I have been so gullible?

I can't speak for everyone but an explanation for why I embraced Christianity so doggedly is not so hard to come by.

I was a student of the Bible for 25 years. I now know why they would always tell me how important Sunday school is because in Sunday school they give you so many memory verses you can go your whole life thinking you know what is in the Bible when really you don't.

sometimes I would see things in the Bible that gave me pause (to put it mildly) but like so many other questions I would quickly squelch any questions that tried to rise in my mind. I squelched the questions because on some deep level I knew I was not emotionally ready to handle the possible answers. Answers that might behoove me to take bold actions I wasn't prepared to take. So I just doubled my dose of the blue pills and kept believing.

In fact, I was right in the middle of defending the Bible against a list of Bible contradictions posted at another website when I was absolutely checkmated. I was zeroing in on the easy ones when someone brought up an issue I had buried and there was nothing I could honestly do but confess my uncertainty.

This opened the door for me to see the absurdity of thinking I had all the answers when I was scared to ask the questions. I then prayed to "the Lord" saying You said you would never leave me nor forsake me, that no one can pluck me out of Your hands. If this is true then I have nothing to fear exploring these questions whatever their answers may turn out to be. What You told me is either true or it's not.

As you may well know the more I explored those questions the more I realized the insufficiency of what I had been told were the answers.

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Cathar1950
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Post #2

Post by Cathar1950 »

And sometimes they didn't even know or understand the questions but we all have to mature. You might believe when you are 5 but when you are 30 or 50 you should believe differently. I ave seen many defend what and how they believed when they were 5 as adults.

cnorman18

Post #3

Post by cnorman18 »

My own perspective is quite different. From the very beginning, my religion was the center of my life; I was very devoted to God, though I was never quite so sure about this Jesus guy...

I learned to walk and talk the party line, and I understood how to intellectually and logically defend the faith, retreating into "It's a Mystery" when necessary, and arguing as honestly as I could otherwise. But there were always aspects of the Christian faith that troubled me, even in spite of my learning and my devotion.

I was in my late 40s when I began to study Judaism, in books written by Jews (which is not as fatuous a point as it sounds). I felt a sense of recognition immediately, and I came to understand that all the parts of my religion that were dear to me and seemed intuitively RIGHT to me -- were the Jewish parts. Rational argument and reasoning being the final authority; the personal and unverifiable, and ultimately trivial, nature of "doctrine" and "theology"; the primary importance of ethics, justice, and compassion, which are all aspects of the same thing; the unknown nature of God and the Afterlife, to the point of not being finally certain that either exists at all; and the importance of human community, human heritage, and human wisdom. And much more, of course. These all seemed to be undertones, hinted at in the way Christians I knew lived and treated people, more than in any formal doctrine or teaching. It was long before I knew that all these ideas were basically Jewish perspectives.

On the other hand: All the parts of my religion that I found unlikely, or troubling, or illogical, or even embarrassing, were the Christian parts: The devotion to a PERSON as opposed to God; the primacy of "doctrine" and "belief," and those being the determinant of one's Eternal Fate; the primary importance of the NEXT life, as opposed to THIS one in the first place; the weird obsession with sin, what's sinful, temptation to sin, fighting sin, thinking about sin all the time... And the hugely counterintuitive idea that good people could go to Hell for not believing the right things and bad people could go to Heaven if they signed on the right dotted line.

I read more than 80 books on Judaism before I finally began the conversion process. I've read maybe 200 since, and I still haven't heard a false note. Judaism, as I understand it, hangs together, makes sense, and hooks up nicely with my own observations about human nature and morality. I'm a Jew, have been for ten years now, and I've never looked back.

I don't say that all my questions have been answered; I don't even claim to know what all the right questions ARE. But one answer that was important to me was this one, and it rings true to me: "There are some things you basically can't know; you can guess, but you can't verify or prove anything about them -- but you know what? They aren't all that important anyway. What you BELIEVE doesn't matter as much as what you DO and what you ARE."

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wonderer
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Post #4

Post by wonderer »

It shocks me now to think that I went 20 years before coming up with the question which was the start of the end of my belief in the God of the Bible, ie. if God is loving, why did he create humans in the first place, knowing the majority would end up in hell? There's no answer to that question, therefore the Bible is not the word of God because it doesn't make sense that God could be loving and God could be cruel enough to have set up such a system when he didn't have to.

I don't know how I could have accepted such a God. I should have been able to work that out at the start, without ever having studied the Bible. It's almost like, as the Bible says, Satan blinds people so that they can't see the truth (ie. truth of the gospel) somehow I was blinded to not see the truth that the Bible is not true. But who would have blinded me I don't know. Maybe a different Satan in a parallel universe? Its certainly a strange thing to have felt that I'd been blind all the years prior to becoming a Christian, and then 20 years later to feel I'd been blind for the 20 years of being one. It's enough to make me question my good judgement.

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Cathar1950
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Post #5

Post by Cathar1950 »

One idea I did like just because it made sense in some sort of way, limited in scope of course, that God didn't do anything except through creation and that God was memory and the ultimate benefactor but also the ultimate victim as God would experience and remember all pain and sorrows as well as joys and satisfactions. Surly Christians can't figure they are the ultimate benefactor as everything is for God's good pleasure.
The point is that God loves as a sympathetic memory feeling and understanding or relationships to everything while only able to act through creation and the responses. God has all the power in that there is no power outside of God or anything that could experience beyond God. God is the self surpassing. While there is nothing that could surpass God as God is included in everything.
We can't blame God for not acting as we are the actions of God as is everything else.
Kind of a pan-en-theism where experience and events are the grounds for understanding and knowledge.

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flitzerbiest
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Re: Questions and Answers

Post #6

Post by flitzerbiest »

river wrote:For those of us who spent any time studying the Bible as a Christian and sitting under various ministries have you ever wondered how on earth could I have believed something so ludicrous? How could I have been so gullible?
Not really. To be sure, I find my former beliefs to be ridiculous, but the intensity of indoctrination that I received from the cradle through the university was such that my beliefs were fairly understandable. As long as I was a) inundated enough with the message, and b) busy enough with my studies, work etc., there was little opportunity to examine my beliefs critically. Once I did (ironically as I was reading extensively about church history, doctrine and documents in order to become a more effective evangelist/apologist), they collapsed "like a flan in a cupboard".

Add to this the fact that I am an extrovert, that extroverts basically do most of their thinking out loud and that there was a strong social disincentive to openly question church dogma, and I come to the conclusion that I really had very little opportunity to process my faith until I was independent and well beyond my formal years of education.
river wrote:I now know why they would always tell me how important Sunday school is because in Sunday school they give you so many memory verses you can go your whole life thinking you know what is in the Bible when really you don't.
I agree with the effect (false sense of knowledge), but not the motive. I think most Sunday school teachers are just trying to protect you from the temptations of life.
river wrote:Sometimes I would see things in the Bible that gave me pause (to put it mildly) but like so many other questions I would quickly squelch any questions that tried to rise in my mind.
I tended to rethink discrete areas of my faith when certain doctrines became suspect. As such, I had changed several of my beliefs (e.g. the concept of Hell) long before the rest of the house of cards came crashing down.
river wrote:I then prayed to "the Lord" saying You said you would never leave me nor forsake me, that no one can pluck me out of Your hands.
LOL...my final prayer was "Crap or get off the pot," but this had more to do with frustration over lack of divine interest and/or assistance in personal transformation than it did with questions of doctrine.

river
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Post #7

Post by river »

Thanks to everyone for sharing. Our experiences are varied and yet similar.

It all boils down to some form of disillusionment. But how can we be disillusioned unless what we had was an illusion to begin with?

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