Loss of Faith--What's there to lose?

[Jagella]

Question for Debate: What would Christians lose if they lost their faith?

Needless to say, people do what they do for some kind of advantage they think it offers. If that effort is not applied, then a real or imagined advantage is feared to be lost. Christian faith is like that: believers see some advantage in maintaining Christian faith, and that's why they maintain their faith believing and acting in accord with their faith.

So what is there to lose by losing Christian faith? There are no doubt many answers to this question, but salvation might top the list. Christians see their salvation as an ultimate hope that offers them eternal life in paradise and assurance that they will never be damned. To lose faith is to lose salvation and to risk eternity in hell.

Other reasons to maintain Christian faith is to keep a familiar view of the world, to have a basis for morality, to have friends who believe as the Christian does, and to have a sense of purpose.

I can assure everybody, however, that loss of Christian faith is to lose what you don't really want. My losing my Christian faith is perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me. I felt a great sense of freedom in both thought and in deed when I lost my faith, and I still do. I now have hope that I can live this one true and real life the best way I can. I now have a view of the world that sensible and honest people have discovered through hard work and solid evidence. It truly is a tremendous gain to lose Christian faith!

[tam]

Peace again to you,

I think they should explain why they disagree... Jagella.

I am pretty sure that is what I did in post 35 and 33, and also here:

viewtopic.php?p=928697#928697 (which link contains a link to many other explanations)

and here:

viewtopic.php?p=928239#928239

and here:

viewtopic.php?p=928814#928814


and here:

viewtopic.php?p=731804#731804)

This is one "reality" Christians SHOULD lose .... Stuart

And yet when a Christian does 'lose' this... what do you (general you) do, other than mock them or try to convince them that they are wrong (and all without even addressing their explanations)?


How very interesting.




Peace again to you both.

[Jagella]

[Replying to post 41 by tam]

My explanation for the disagreement among Christians regarding their beliefs is the same explanation for any people disagreeing: there often is nothing of substance to decide the issue. You're going to have these controversies whenever people find the truth of any unproved claim to be very important to them both in favor and against the claim, and there is no real proof either way.

So the dogma of hell is like that. It is not falsifiable. All people can do is read the New Testament, come to their own conclusions, and maybe argue their case for the nature of hell. I will grant you that there is a lot of ambiguity in the Bible, so maybe the first Christians did a really terrible job of writing about hell and never clarified what they really meant about it.

So is that what you'd like to argue? That the New-Testament writers never clarified what they meant by all their talk of eternal fire and torment?

[Deleted]

"Replying to post 31 by rikuoamero"

mrhagerty wrote: We would be of all men most miserable, as Paul the Apostle wrote.

And yet...Paul was WRONG! I'm not miserable! Plenty of other people who have stopped believing Jesus was the Messiah are not miserable!

Your time isn't over yet, rikuoamero.

Paul wasn't wrong because he wasn't referring to being miserable right now. He was referring to what tam and I said about expectations lost that one was looking forward to. Oblivion is a miserable alternative to what Paul would be expecting.

You won't see that, of course, because life seems OK for you. (Just don't get bone cancer or leukemia. That might change your outlook in a hurry.)

But from a Jewish perspective, Paul would be facing a judgment based on works (the very thing you and Jagella boast about), which won't end well for anyone. Christ freed Paul from that worry. Being wrong about Christ would have been misery for him and anyone who believed as he did.

[Deleted]

"Replying to post 30 by rikuoamero"

mrhagerty wrote:
The ANSWER is that God knows this and provides a way to be restored to Him that utterly ignores an assessment of deeds done, good or bad. We will always fail this test.


So then 'good', according to the Christian view, is completely divorced from morality, from actions done.

It is, but not the way you expect. It's not your works that are now viewed divorced from morality. It's Christ's works that fulfill all morality and if you are "hidden" in Him, your works are not judged according to God's morality.

God sees Christ His Son and not you (with respect to impending judgment), and welcomes you into His fellowship and kingdom.

That's one part of what it means to be "saved."

This is where the meme of the person lying in bed, dying, then confessing Jesus is Lord, comes from. This person could have been a serial killer, but apparently, according to you, God would ignore this, and provide a way to 'be restored to him', to slap the label of 'good' on him.

YES. Are you getting a feel for why the unbeliever is going to regard this as foolishness if he tries to understand what's under the hood here with just his own understanding?

Hence the verse, "foolishness to those who are perishing, but the power of God to those who are saved."

Can you lay hands on the sick and heal them?

As a matter of fact, I did have that experience with a new born in the hospital with the family. We prayed and the next tests showed the condition threatening the child's life was completely gone.

Nor did it return. The child is now in his thirties living a normal life.
(And NO this was not a condition that could also have just gone away. So don't even go there.)

Can you do greater things than Christ?

Still working on this one. But I've seen Christians who have done things that were greater in scope than Jesus did.
(And no, the test is NOT walking on water.)

[StuartJ]

[Replying to post 41 by tam]

And yet when a Christian does 'lose' this... what do you (general you) do, other than mock them or try to convince them that they are wrong (and all without even addressing their explanations)?

I call this one the "I'm a victim" diversion.

However, I've yet to mock any Christian who lost all or part of their "faith" ...

Or try to convince them that they are wrong to lose it ...!?

From my view of the Christianities ...

If Genesis 1:1 can't be backed up with anything more than the rest of the propaganda and the Indwelling Holy Spirit ...

It's quite pointless reading through swathes of "explanations" that I've been reading for decades.

Nothing changes.

There is ONLY the propaganda ...

And the IHS inside the heads of believers putting them into a state of the mind that assents to the proposition that the bits of it that they like are real and are "God's Truth" ...

And NOTHING that resembles independently verifiable evidence for "In the beginning, Elohim/Theos/God/Jesus created the Heaven and the Earth" or so much as another verse thereafter having anything to do with ANYONE'S version of "God".

Hence my view that people should lose the lot ...

And then they would recognise that they hadn't lost anything ...

Because, like me, they would recognise that gods and angels and creations and floods and virgin-born god-men and "scriptures" are just human fantasy ...

And political propaganda ...

To convince the convinceable that THEIR Divine Leader should be ruling the "Kingdom".

[Deleted]

"Replying to post 30 by rikuoamero"

Is this a not so tacit admission, even unawares on your part, that there is little or no extra-biblical evidence for your Christ,

Oh I don't have to be tacit about it. There are paltry extra-biblical references to Christ. That was never supposed to be the way folks are to be convinced.
The Bible is as good as any extra-biblical source you can imagine.

It's only important to folks who must have anything but the Bible. But I guarantee you you would tar and feather those references if they proclaimed Jesus as Son of God and spoke about sin the same as the Bible.

So what you're really asking is, "How about some extra-biblical references that get rid of all the controversial things I hate about the Bible." Which would be another one of those sophomoric expectations.

[StuartJ]

[Replying to post 44 by mrhagerty]

As a matter of fact, I did have that experience with a new born in the hospital with the family. We prayed and the next tests showed the condition threatening the child's life was completely gone.

And how did you determine causation ...?

Looks like a case of the standard post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Magical thinking is a form of post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy, in which superstitions are formed based on seeing patterns in a series of coincidences. For example, "these are my lucky trousers. Sometimes good things happen to me when I wear them." https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Post_hoc, ... ropter_hoc

[Deleted]

"Replying to post 47 by StuartJ"

Looks like a case of the standard post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

You're a slave to your obligatory, Stuart.

[Realworldjack]

[Replying to post 27 by rikuoamero]



There is really no need in continuing this back, and forth, because we are getting way off track here. So then let us deal with the facts we have in hand, which is my original point.

It is a fact that there are numerous members of this site who freely, and readily admit to embracing Christianity, with all their heart, for years as an adult.

These very same folk now claim to not only reject the faith, but also that there would be no real good reasons to believe what they once freely admitted that they once were truly convinced of.

Some of these folks will say "they did not use the mind when coming to the faith", and there is at least one who claims to reject that idea, but rather claims they, "did not use the mind properly when coming to faith."

With all these things being fact, we now have an OP which seems to clearly demonstrate, that the thinking that lead one to faith, is in no way any different than the thinking that lead them to reject the faith.

I bring these facts forward, and you actually agree with me, because you cannot avoid these facts, and you give us the explanation that it may have been the intent of the author. However, you go on to admit that it was not wise, and you would not do the same.

The problem with your idea, is that it has not been verified, and cannot be verified, even if the author now claims you are correct, because we would all be left with simply having to take his word for it.

Moreover, the author has had every opportunity to give us an answer, but as of yet has failed to do so, and the silence speaks just as good as words in my ears.

[Jagella]

[Replying to post 49 by Realworldjack]

Even if we granted everything you say in this post, so what? All you would have accomplished is to demonstrate that people sometimes err. And if adopting a faith turns out to be an error, then dropping that faith constitutes error correction.