Intelligence and Christianity: Oil and Water?

"In many cultures there are myths of people being punished because of their search for knowledge."
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1 Peter 3:14

'But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed.'

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sorry for taking so long to reply

Sort of... I don't find the assertion of altruism incorrect since there is a valid reasoning to support it. But I find the lack of reason in lieu of an authoritative stance to be problematic.

Romans 3:27
Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? Of works? No, but by a law of faith.

Romans 3:28
For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.

Romans 9:32
Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works. They stumbled over the stumbling stone,

Galatians 2:16
nevertheless knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the Law but through faith in Christ Jesus, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, so that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the Law; since by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified.

Galatians 3:2
This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

Galatians 3:5
So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith?

What he is saying, in essence, is that it does not matter what you do (works) but what you believe (faith).

Obviously, they are not identical. However, all three have the same basis (Judaism) and contain more similarities than contradictions. In fact, many of the main religions share the same central tenets. Realizing this, my question then becomes; "Does the mouthpiece for the revelation matter when the central message and the ultimate source is the same?" Why should it matter if the translator of God's message was Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, or Buddha? Should we be killing each other because we were taught to love and be true to each other by different teachers; because the trappings around the message are different? This single issue is the greatest sorrow of human history. Mankind is quite insane.

Precisely... now ask yourself why this is possible. What about the Bible lends itself to such abuse?

I've about 4 books already queued up in my reading list but I'll add this one. Can you, in the meantime, present a synopsis of the argument?

Prayer and acceptance are very interesting topics but we might be spreading the discussion too broad... let's stick with what we have for now.

You got it. Exactly... the next question is then; what paradigms or systems negate or strive against this tendency for abuse.

That response was directed towards this comment from you, "There are things out there I don't understand, and there may be a God beyond what I can see or beyond what science can prove (and this is where I am at odds with the majority on this forum)."

Let's see if I can give you a synopsis that makes sense. There are certain critical unknowns and imponderables that defy any precise analysis... some of which, I believe, are like to remain so forever. For many years I also ascribed these things to God. However, at some point I began to analyze my need for the term God. What was it that I could assert about God aside from attributing these unknowns to the concept? I found nothing additional to assert... anything further was merely presumption. Thus I removed God from my beliefs. What remains is technically termed atheism; however, I find that that term really has no more meaning than stating that I'm not 20 years old or that I don't believe in the Easter Bunny. What I do believe is closer to pan/cosmo-theism but without the assertion of God.

~Raithere

 

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Well, thanks for resurrecting this thread...

Now I understand. The way I took it was "why God when the answers are so obvious?"...

Oh, and thanks for the quotes. I will try to get back to you sometime next weekend.

I haven't looked at the different messages between religions yet, so I won't attempt to argue that there are major differences between Christianity and the rest (possibly excluding Islam, which I'm not familiar with) as the consensus seems to be (and not just among Christians).

*** Bottom line, the more I post here the more I realize how little I know and that I shouldn't try to be the spokespiece for something I don't understand. I'm the one asking questions here, thanks for the ones you've raised (quite a few), but if you were looking for a debate that's not why I came (how it should have been). Despite all that, I'll still post back here if I find a satisfactory answer. ***

 

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Here's some help (all from http://www.religioustolerance.org):

Islam:

Judaism:

Don't worry about this being a debate it's just a discussion. I'm not out to prove you wrong but to bring various issues to light. If there are points where we agree to disagree, that is fine. If there is a point that's unclear I'm happy to work through it with you and if you wish to come back with question or points from your group I'm happy to address those too. You needn't worry about being a spokesman, you've already demonstrated that you are rational, reasonable, willing to discuss, teach, and learn. We've everything we need for a constructive discussion.

~Raithere

 

Okay, I haven't talked to anyone more knowledgeable yet, but hopefully these blurbs (taken from my children's NIV Bible with jumbo-sized font) will put a different spin on those Bible verses.

on Galatians: "Paul wrote this letter to the Christian churches in the Roman province of Glantia. These churches were being confused by false teachers called Judaizers, who were teaching the gentile Christians that they were not really saved unless they obeyed all the Jewish laws - such as circumcision, eating special foods, and celebrating Jewish feast days. This group also said that Paul did not have God's authority and, therefore, was not to be listened to.
Paul begins this letter by telling the Galatians what gospel it is that he preaches and that his authority is from God. We cannot be saved by our sins by obeying the law; we are saved only by believing in Jesus Christ, Paul adds. Christians are free to live by the law of love, not by the law of Moses. Faith, says Paul, must be shown in love and believers must live by the spirit."

on Romans (this one might not be as direct): "This letter was written by Paul to the church in Rome in A.D. 56 or 57 as he was finishing his third missionary journey. Paul had hoped to first go to Jerusalem and then on to Rome and Spain. He probably wrote this letter in preparation for his visit.
The theme of this letter is righteousness. Paul teaches in this letter that: 1) No human being is righteous; 2) Jesus Christ is perfectly righteous; 3) if we have faith in Jesus, we are freed from the power of sin, given a new life, and returned to a right relationship with God; 4) we should live Christian lives that are "holy and pleasing to God."

Again, I won't include my opinion on the matter until I do some more reading, thinking, and talking w/ more knowledgeable people. But it just seems obvious to me (and I don't mean that as an insult, of course) that Jesus taught that faith was of the essence; all actions (the good deeds, the changes in character...)arise from this love/faith relationship in Jesus (he says something like "I am the way" as opposed to "Follow the 'Golden Rule' and be as good as you know how" - this part disturbs me; I think it comes down to the concept of "Original Sin", that all people are evil, or something worse), which made pretty good sense to me when I heard it... furthermore,

is pretty hard to prove or demonstrate... unless Paul was crazy, because I don't think there's any room for moral relativity in Christianity. Anyways, I'll get back to you when I've got more to say.

 

Hmm.. what do I have against Christianity... nothing really. If you feel the need to worship God then be my guest. I don't, however, for a number of reasons.

First off, I've never 'experienced' God in any way. I'd always been skeptical of his existance, but I went to church and Sunday school trying to keep an open mind. Nothing ever happened. For years I went to church and every time I left that little building I didn't feel any different than when I first entered it. Sure, the gospels have nice messages sometimes; don't lie, be nice to people and so forth, but to me they were never anything more than fables meant to portray these messages.

So then I turned to science. I began to look at Christianity from a scientific view. Doing this only brought up more questions. How did Noah's flood happen? If God is a perfect being could he create an imperfect being? Why did God bother to create us at all? Why did God seem to use evolution to create us?

All the while I'm still going to church. Then I turned to boards like these, trying to find answers to my questions. I'm still looking. Oh, I've gotten all kinds of answers, but none that help me to become closer to God. And so, now, after several years of searching, I've come to conclude that God probably doesn't exist. I see no reason for him to exist, other than to calm our fears of death. We don't appear to have souls, all our emotions and thoughts can be explained by our brains, and the evolution of the universe has been explained rather well.

And if there is no reason for God to exist, and no evidence to show that he does, the only logical conclusion is that he doesn't exist.

So in the end, I think religion is just a way to quell fears of death and give us a moral code for which to live by.

 

Dear Xelios,

I am sorry that you haven't found what you are looking for.

This may help: think of yourself as soil in which something - truth - can grow. You seem to be earnest in your searching, so you'll agree with me this is a nice and neutral position to start from. No you aren't looking for God per se anymore (from a Christian perspective, God has chosen you and Jesus has found you - you need to nothing more than ask). What you are doing now is asking. If God doesn't answer, no problems ... you are still workable soil, nothing's changed.

Now remember: you can also choose who works your soil. What gets planted there, what doesn't. Jesus used the parable of the sower. Sometimes the soil is hard and unwielding, so nothing grows there for long. It's like sitting in science class at 3pm - you know Newton had discovered something, but you just aren't receptive to whatever it was. So you don't learn anything

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If you let people plant there Nietsche, Bonhoeffer, Kant, whoever, you will either water their words, or weed them out. You are what you cling to. What did science provide that God couldn't? Evidence, because that is what you were looking for, not God. God knows this.

The law is there so that people have something to go by even if they don't know the judge. It's a good starting point, but won't take you far on its own merit (it will actually only mean anything after you have discovered the spirit of it - but we'll leave that for later). The law is inherent to humanity. Murder is bad, love is good, to oversimplify. There is no inbetween, because you have to deal with either or both every day of your life. This is what the Bible metaphorically calls "light" and "darkness". Everybody are aware of these concepts. Just watch Star Wars or read any fairy tale. Children grow up with them. But like you said, up until this point there is no 'need' for God.

You can judge for yourself what is good or bad and even when you don't, someone else has or will. Wherever you go, someone has authority. The president, for instance. Even if a democracy made the laws, someone has to enforce them. We have police because not everyone can be trusted to be a policeman. If everybody had the spirit (agenda) of a policeman, where would crime be? But now we have people who judge for us, and under them our actions are judged. Still with me?

It's no different in God's kingdom. We live in the world, we have a democratic right to choose and to make our own laws, but they are subject to God's will. Israel needed laws to guide their actions, so God gave them the ten commandments. In God's eyes, everybody are sinners, but through Jesus' eyes, everybody is saved. Therefore we can only be justified through Jesus. Jesus did all the work, there is nothing we can do more to save ourselves. So we don't do good works for our own sake anymore, but in Jesus' name. We can do nothing more than what Jesus has already done for us.

Jesus said that the laws aren't enough. Nobody can ever follow them sufficiently. There will always be temptation to disobey them.
Romans 3:19Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.

Does doing a crime make a country's law less valid? If the laws are corrupt, does that mean the people are corrupt? Only if they made the laws themselves. The ten commandments serve no man. It wasn't in anybody's interest to create them. The laws of Hammurabi already existed. Plato and Socrates had already envisioned ethics. Why more laws? The ten commandment tailored to ensure that love prevailed - they were the letter of the law, but love was the spirit of it.

Even the ten commandments can be used as a substitute for love, or for God. What happens then? People interpret it to justify their actions. The law is dead. Only the spirit of it gives it life. When Jesus died, the Holy Spirit was sent to earth to give us life. "He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant--not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life."

You can find everyhting you seek somewhere else. Except one thing. God said that we have been judged by our own laws. People murder, steal and destroy and at the same time ask why God lets it happen. How hypocritical can you be? God "let people happen", and Jesus saved our immortal souls. People choose to look at their bodies as the law, that which they can see. Jesus said our bodies were already dead. The life we lead now is one of spirit, and the implication is that we need to apply the spirit of the law, not stare ourselves blind against the law anymore. The visible world is decaying...

We can't bring God down to our level in order to understand Him, and we can't lift ourselves up to His level by our good works. It is by grace alone that we were saved. Our faith and hope is in Jesus, not ourselves. Anything we try do to on our own merit only discredits the grace we have received, even though it can't reduce it. If you rely completely on yourself, you are left to the law, and if you reject the law, you also reject the lawgiver. If you reject a country's laws, you're an outlaw. You cannot be loved if you reject love. The law of the world is selfishness and power. The norm is lawlessness and hate. All of this I reject, and will reject even under penalty of death. That is what i call living. I am at God's mercy, and am glad He is invisible, because I don't want to be judged by the visible. Anything visible has flaws - either in its appearance or in its application. An invisible God has no flaws, cannot grow old or die.

"... faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him?" Faith without deeds is useless, and deeds without faith have no meaning. It is empty because it has no love outside yourself, and no hope beyond yourself. That's when you reject the message of the Bible and instead try to be "good" on your own. Good for what, for what reason other than selfishness? Nothing wrong with selfishness - if you want to die alone. Nothing wrong with empty love - if you can live with it.

"James 2:26As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead." Faith is the spirit, deeds are the body. Both are necessary, but only one gains immortality.

 

Jenyar - thanks for the post... that's all till later.

 

"It's no different in God's kingdom. We live in the world, we have a democratic right to choose and to make our own laws, but they are subject to God's will. "

Who are God's laws subject to? No one? Why can't we simply make it one step simpler and say that humanities laws are not subject to any other being as well?

If the only way to be saved is through grace and Jesus, then why does he insist on making it so difficult to accept him? Everyone should be able to clearly choose, do I follow Jesus or not? Not do I believe in Jesus, that's not the issue. The issue is, do I follow him and his word. How can you follow something if, to you, it doesn't exist?

I have no wish to be a 'helper of Satan' (IMO he doesn't exist though), I live my life much like the 10 commandments say I should. However that doesn't change the fact that I'm still going to hell. And why am I going to hell? Simply because I don't believe God exists, because the way I think is in conflict with the way I have to think to believe in God. Not because I murder, or rape or whatnot, but because believing in God requires blind faith, something that I simply cannot give. So in the end, my good deeds and my attempt to live a good life are for nothing. Simply put, God punishes me and others like me simply for not being as gullible as most people on Earth.

I don't mean that as an insult, btw.

Now if God would provide irrefutable proof of his existance, and proof that everything the Bible says is true, that would be a different story. Being saved would no longer depend on how easily you are convinced of something, but actually on how you want to live your life, like it was meant to be. Why God didn't do this in the first place is beyond me, but as it stands he is not giving us a fair chance at all.

 

God's nature and mercy makes belief in Him possible, not his visibility. Otherwise our salvation would depend on US - i.e. on our accepting or rejecting what we SEE. We could never redeem ourselves, because justice demands fairness, and in all fairness - neither you nor I would live the way belief in God demands. God knows this, and terefor graceously allows us to believe in Him in the only merciful way - with Jesus as living evidence, so that we can be saved by mercy alone. That is why God sent Jesus in the first place - so we don't have to judged, but can live in him, and he in us.

You don't have to see Jesus to believe in him. Every time God's people turned to a visible reprentation of God, they were missing the point, that is why God forbids idolatry. Any image of God cannot be God, because God is alive. Jesus is alive for those who believe in his resurrection and live their belief. That is the stumbling block you are struggling with. You only know death as a reality, and you are living that reality - you stare into the walls of that reality. You can't accept that death isn't final. Now, you would reason that you would believe that death wasn't final if you could see beyond death. Well? You can! Since you don't know when you're going to die, just living from one moment to the next is seeing beyond death, being able to see the past is seeing beyond death.

We can only be perfect through faith, not obedience to something, whether seen or invisible. Faith is not blind, it is based on a hope tought by an account of the past (which is what the Bible is), always accompanied by love.

It's ironic - and not by chance, since it is part of God's nature - that we should have to believe a certain past in order to believe a certain future and live in a certain present. Since God created the universe, with time along with it, it is natural that His plan should stretch from the beginning to the end (God is after all the "A & ?").

God is not human, that His judgement should be subjected to a man or anything, since God set the laws we live by - natural and judicial, He can be the only true judge on whether those laws are obeyed or not. People don't even obey their own laws all the time.

You say you don't murder, rape, etc. Jesus said that if you call someone an idiot it is no better than murder (Matt.5:21). God isn't interested in the leter of the law, but in the spirit of it, as I have explained. But I suggest you read Romans for a complete picture.

One last thing: God is not punishing you for not believing. His love includes you, since He created you. Your life isn't over yet is it? Death is the only penalty, one with which you are living anyway, whether you believe in God or not.

 

"You can't accept that death isn't final. "

That or you cannot accept that it is final.

"God is not punishing you for not believing. His love includes you, since He created you. Your life isn't over yet is it? Death is the only penalty, one with which you are living anyway, whether you believe in God or not."

Assuming, of course, he exists. Up until now he hasn't been doing a very good job of reaching me. Who knows, maybe some day I'll find God does exist, but I doubt it. I'm pretty convinced that God lives only in one place, the minds of human beings. The ultimate imaginary friend, if you will.

 

And who determined that these were false teachers? Paul. Sounds self-serving to me.

But that goes against what Jesus said:

Matthew 5:18-19 "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished."

Matthew 7:23 "And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS."

Luke 16:17 "But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the Law to fail."

Luke 24:44 Now He said to them, "These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things which are written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled."

John 7:19 "Did not Moses give you the Law, and yet none of you carries out the Law? Why do you seek to kill Me?"

Jesus, it seems to me, was out to clarify what we would today call the "spirit of the law" rather than simply carrying out "the letter of the law".

I do think that Paul is in concurrence with Jesus in stressing faith, however, Jesus also stressed that the law was to be followed. Paul wanders from this when he indicates that having faith one does not need follow the law.

~Raithere

 

Raithere (and anyone it may concern),
I don't know how you're going to take this (especially since this is a hasty reply and I've only slept two hours in the past 30), but I hope my good intentions thus far will make the following seem less suspect: it is my belief that I cannot continue this "discussion" any further because I don't know jack shit about Christianity, about myself, about the ways of the world... anything, really... I thought when I came here that I was actually an unbiased person with a sincere interest in Christianity, but I'm beginning to understand that I have my share of prejudice against Christianity. Suffice it to say, I don't understand the Christian concept of "sin" yet - and I thought going to Sunday School made me an expert - so I don't think a discussion on the "different approaches" Paul and Jesus took will get anywhere or do me any good just yet...

And as for the scripture quotations: perhaps I'm not thinking this through, but could it be that Jesus is there to fulfill every last stroke of the spirit of the law? After all, he was the one who gave us the go-ahead to eat pork and pretty much anything, whereas in the OT God pretty much said "Thou shall not" to all that. Wait a minute - you mention something similar at the bottom... okay, I'll end up milking the guy for an answer on the following:

I dunno - I'm sure Paul thought the "holy spirit" was with him(thought and prayed about it of course) when he said it, but this is sort of an agreement amongst scholars of the Bible, I'm assuming... whether or not this still applies after your second point is beyond me really. Think I'll go take a nap - Raithere, once I get a good Q &A session with that guy I hope we can put an end to this Paul/Jesus mess

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Happy turkey day

 

I wonder how other people perceive about Human Honesty.