Religion, Faith, and Spirituality : Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Do you believe in god?

Who here considers themselves Christian?

I'm a nominal Christian because I was baptized Greek Orthodox. But I don't adhere to the religion.

We're you baptized Christian?

Do you consider yourself a faithful Christian now?

Are there any others who believe in god and follow other religions besides Christianity?

I GameBoy
You gotsta

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Yes, I believe in God.

I consider myself a Christian.

I got baptized after I became a Christian.

I would consider myself a somewhat faithful Christian.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Thank you. 👍

I guess the rest of the board are a bunch of heathens!!!

I GameBoy
You gotsta

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Proud heathen!

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I think heathen is different from pagan though. All pagans are heathens but not all heathens are pagans.

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

It was a flippant response to your flippant comment. Didn't think it needed any further explanation. But if you want to beat the horse, it's all heathery to christians and your OP seemed christian centric.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I was actually just silently laughing at the term "heathens". It's used by Christians much like "sinner" without any theistic meaning.

Loki, I'm merely trying to get the thread moving.

I'm also wondering where the word originated.

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

It originated from Germany. Basically like calling someone a country dweller.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Do you recall the uproar at the Pit over Smithy (JW-adjacent) calling people 'heathen'?

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

lol

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

8/10

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Good point.

But are you still a Calvinist?

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

However if you look at the relationship between that memory neuron and the brain, the brain may 'appear' infinite to the neuron, but the brain is finite. The brain just seems infinite because the neuron is so small.

But that sends me off on somewhat a tangent. If the whole assembly of thoughts and memories creates an individual personality, are the possibilities for that intangible personality finite or infinite? I mean aren't the possibilities infinite?

I'm also not so sure that a memory neuron could not be captured and isolated. Can a memory exist isolated and separate from the individual who remembers it?

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Lol. It took me several minutes to decipher what you said so you better respond later! 😝

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

You remembered that I was once a Calvinist!
The only self-professed Calvinist I recall from the IMDb was Gendo. Are you he?

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Have you left Christianity?

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I believe in God, but not a personal God in the sense of traditional theism.
What objective evidence do you have for the God in which you believe?

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Well, what do you mean by God?
Since you said, "I believe in God," I think that's a question for you to answer. I merely wanted to know what objective evidence you have for it.

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Also, ask Gameboy, why he worships that statue in his avatar image.

https://youtu.be/iPUwtyZglQI

https://youtu.be/QRTNm6GLJYI

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

We don't worship the statue. We worship what lies behind it.



I GameBoy
You gotsta

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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

The totality of what rationally is, the unifying concept.
That seems to be essentially a restatement, in different words, of what fundamentalists say when they're asked for evidence of God: creation; the universe itself.

There are naturalistic explanations for these besides the additional, unexplained, unevidenced factor of a 'God.'

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I got into philosophy.
Philosophy, eh?

Were you once The_Death_Of_Achilles?

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I believe in coffee grounds.





😺 Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. 🤨 Let's go, Brandon! 🤨 Try that in a small town.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I'm still conflicted in that belief because I'm sort of a person who'd rather see it before believing it, like I'm the hybrid of realist and visionary. Like the ghosts I talked to when I was a little boy.

Several of my relatives are Christians, but I'm not a Christian. However, I did sorta join Wicca/Pagan but I'm mostly Spiritual. Did you know Pagan was created before Christianity? Interesting trivia…..Even thought there are other older religions, older than Paganism, like Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Honestly, I'm kind of fascinated with Zoroastrianism. I wonder if they still practice this religion to this day.

No, but I know a cousin who got baptized as a baby. It was a beautiful service.

If I get pulled over, it better be a gay policeman riding on a unicorn.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I'm surprised baptism seems rare to you. Among most the families I know baptism is just a perfunctory rite of passage. The parents may not be very religious but it's just taken for granted that a baby must be baptized.

There are still Zoroastrians in Iran and India. But they are persecuted by the Muslims in Iran. In fact, they're called devil worshipers because they see fire as some type of holy sacrament. Zoroastrians believe there are two opposing gods, one good and one evil.

Paganism just refers to the gods worshiped before Christianity. For example the ancient Greeks worshiped Zeus and Apollo and various other gods. So that was Greek paganism. And the Germanic peoples (like @Loki 😝) worshiped Odin and Thor. That was Germanic paganism.

Wicca is actually a new religion. But they went back in history and resurrected old pagan gods.

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Well, I don't know if I've been baptized or not, but I know some of my family members have. It's not like I dip my hands in the bowl of holy water and it sizzles, burning my hand.

I can see why they think it's the devil worshiper because of the fire element. To some people, fire is the gateway to Hell while to others, fire is the method of purification and some people in different religions get angry that they're being "copied" and deem them abomination or dangerous to their beliefs. Unless if I'm wrong and I'm overthinking this.

What they should have realized is that every religion have bad side but personally, "bad side" involve those who are misguided or they twist their beliefs. That includes Christians. For example, in the past, they (religious zealots) think God told them to burn the witches and they claimed they're purifying the land of their "evilness" but in reality, they wanted Christianity to be the only religion people turn to. That is until Science step in and conflict with religions as well. They didn't want to admit that science, especially in medical field, save lives. Christianity did almost die out at one point. If Christianity died out, this would would be very different.

They didn't want to believe the good side of Paganism because they were afraid they would lose their followers. And to be honest, I do think gods and goddesses exist. They just don't meddle with humans or they might have, disguised as humans, like what you saw in the movie with Henry Cavill called Immortals. They probably around in background, watching from distance. We'll never know! It's all speculations. Hell, one of them could be watching you right now, observing.

I agree with Wicca. It's not that old, even though they're part of Paganism. Some religions have their own variety of occult beliefs and magical practices, even though they can be similar to others.

If I get pulled over, it better be a gay policeman riding on a unicorn.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Do you believe in god?

No.

Who here considers themselves Christian?

I don't see much "Christian" behaviour from some of the so-called Christians here.

We're you baptized Christian?

I was and I was also confirmed as a teen

Do you consider yourself a faithful Christian now

Nope.

My heart bleeds for him, as a child. Someone took a kid and manufactured a monster. At the same time, as an adult, he's irredeemable.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Do you believe in god? No.

Who here considers themselves Christian? Not I, though I was raised that way, and spent perhaps three decades as a raving fundie looney. Leaving it was like recovering from a long debilitating illness. I transitioned from fundamentalist to liberal Christian, then to skeptic, to atheist, and finally to antitheist.

Were you baptized Christian? Twice. The first time was when I was sixteen and was baptized by a congregation of charismatic Baptists to which my aunt and uncle belonged. The second time was in 1993, by the Seventh-Day Adventists.

Do you consider yourself a faithful Christian now? No.

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Our paths are different with some similarity in between. I never went to church as a child. My parents were nominally religious and I was told I must believe in god. But there was no strict adherence to it.

By the time I was 8 years old I had decided there was no God and no Santa Claus. It just seemed implausible to me.

I was exposed to Mormonism as a teenager and had a conversion experience. I see a similarity in your conversion to Seventh Day Adventism. I can't claim to know much about them. But my understanding is that they are a sort of revivalist 19th century Protestant cult similar to Mormonism.

Of course I'm an atheist now. But I do have a deep respect for the LDS Church and how they tackled some of the major problems and enigmas posed by Christianity. To me they make sense of it more than any other Christian sect.

What attracted you to the Seventh Day Adventist?

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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

I never went to church as a child. My parents were nominally religious and I was told I must believe in god. But there was no strict adherence to it.
My parents were likewise. But there came a point, probably when I was seven or eight, that they decided (or someone told them) that they had a responsibility to expose me to church. So they went shopping for churches, keeping well within the confines of the evangelical Protestantism in which they had been raised.

We settled on one South Hills Baptist Church, and I began attending Sunday School there. The single thing to which I most objected about the whole church experience was wearing a button-down-the-front shirt, buttoned up to the top button in order to accommodate a tie, and the suit and dress shoes. Wearing these was like a form of torture - and to this day, I still won't; it's been nearly thirty years since I last wore a suit, save briefly in role I played in a short film. But I enjoyed Sunday school, with the salt maps we made of the Holy Land, with the towns of Jesus' ministry clearly marked. I had what must have been something of a subversive Sunday school teacher, at least among the Southern Baptists, since she took us on a field trip to a local synagogue, where we pitched questions to the rabbi, and were shown the Aron Kodesh, where the scrolls were kept. She also disclosed to us that Saturday was the Sabbath day, rather than Sunday.

But this didn't last too long. My parents' experience there was quite different. One day the pastor and a couple of the deacons had them in for a friendly chat, and wanted their financial information disclosed on a form - cost of the house we lived in, how much they earned, etc., in order to be able to determine what their apparently mandatory tithe would be, extracted weekly from their bank accounts. Although my parents subsequently tried a couple of different churches on successive Sundays, the 'church experiment' was effectively at an end.

While my parents remained fairly non-observant, religiously, I gradually drifted more and more towards belief. This tended to coincide with my gradually increasing inner awareness that I was gay. Since the bible condemned homosexuality, at least the way it had been represented to me, I somehow must have thought that greater immersion in the religion could ameliorate the condition, of which I was in deep denial. So, by the time I was sixteen, I was well on my way to becoming a full-fledged fundie fanatic. My parents' divorce in 1979, and my grandmother's death in 1980 further destabilized me. I fell into end-times belief, popularized by authors like Hal Lindsey.

On a summer vacation with relatives on my dad's side of the family, I was baptized by one of his brothers, a Southern Baptist preacher in Oklahoma. The following week found me in Dallas, with another uncle, a charismatic Baptist. He and his family tried to give me the baptism of the Spirit, but I was unable to sufficiently 'suspend disbelief' to be able to regard the gibberish the charismatics were prompting me to utter as a legitimate manifestation of the Spirit. It didn't take. Neither did the standard teachings of the Southern Baptists, with which I had already taken issue, on the subject of "eternal security," aka 'once saved, always saved.' I had developed what to them seemed an unfortunate tendency to read scriptures and other sources for myself, and develop my own opinions of what they meant. I became what's called 'a seeker.'

Upon graduation from high school, I moved in with some friends who were Nazarene, a branch of the Holiness Movement, but without charismata. We went to a small liberal arts college. At the Church of the Nazarene, the music director's wife gave me my first 'Chick' comic, the infamous 'Alberto,' ostensibly the life story of a former Jesuit priest, one Alberto Romero Rivera. I soon acquired and devoured the entire 'Chick' Publications oeuvre, including its primary sources. Studying the primary sources for a lot of this material is what tended to lead me out of it. Then too, university courses on Old and New Testaments, and surveys of world religions had the effect of softening my fanaticism.
I do have a deep respect for the LDS Church and how they tackled some of the major problems and enigmas posed by Christianity. To me they make sense of it more than any other Christian sect.
I never had any actual contact with the Latter Day Saints, or with its adherents. It became, however, a subject of interest for me during the early 90s, when I delved into scholarly sources rather than the evangelical hit pieces done on Mormonism (like The Godmakers, etc). While I regard them as a fascinating study in the development of religion, more recent and hence far more accessible than the rest of Christianity, I've never been drawn to the sect.
What attracted you to the Seventh Day Adventist?
Their take on the end times scriptures; their exegesis on the 'prophetic books' of the bible is deeper and more cohesive than anything offered by other sects of Christianity. I read my way into the church. Of course, the end of my relationship with them was somewhat ordained from the beginning, due to my inability to accept the idea of an inspired "prophet" as founder of the sect. I would have had the same difficulty with the LDS, had I sojourned with them.

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Why do homosexuals like you, have longer discussions about Christianity than actual Christians?

https://youtu.be/iPUwtyZglQI

https://youtu.be/QRTNm6GLJYI

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Why do batshit crazy banshee whore like you come in here and cry about someone asking questions? Those are good questions. There's nothing wrong with curiosity and intellectual discussions in this thread that you can't understand.

If I get pulled over, it better be a gay policeman riding on a unicorn.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Why do homosexuals like you, have longer discussions about Christianity than actual Christians?
Because many of us had to fight our way through the hostility of homophobic interpretations of scripture, and of the believers who promoted it.

In terms of the length of the arguments, though, there's nothing any of us have had to say about it that matches the tediously discursive fulminations of Christians against us.

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Because many of us had to fight our way through the hostility of homophobic interpretations of scripture, and of the believers who promoted it.

🙄 Do I have to read that part in the bible again? Do you even know the very small portion of the bible actually mentions homosexuality in a bad way?

Also, The bible starts off with how Adam and Eve sin was the fall of humanity. Their sins were passed through generations onto the rest of us to this day. The bible says that all humans after Adam and Eve are their progeny, and that we are born sinners.

The actual fall of Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden had absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality. Now did it?

If you actually attended enough church services, or watched enough of mainstream Christian church worship services on tv, you would plainly see that the sermons are never about homosexuality.🙄

If you can find some examples of a bishop, pastor or The Pope publically brain washing other Christians using biblical scripture as a means of condeming homosexuality, please share them with us.

https://youtu.be/iPUwtyZglQI

https://youtu.be/QRTNm6GLJYI

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Stop trying to troll God.

I GameBoy
You gotsta

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

The bible starts off with how Adam and Eve sin was the fall of humanity. Their sins were passed through generations onto the rest of us to this day. The bible says that all humans after Adam and Eve are their progeny, and that we are born sinners.
None of this is stated in the bible; it is an entirely interpretive and harmonistic take on the meaning of the bible as a whole. The "bible" does not actually exist as a whole; it is a collection of separate works by individuals of different cultures and different views. Nor does it "start off" with Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve; the order in which books are placed in the bible is not the same as the order in which they were composed.
If you actually attended enough church services, or watched enough of mainstream Christian church worship services on tv, you would plainly see that the sermons are never about homosexuality.🙄
Your experience is clearly limited. How old are you?
If you can find some examples of a bishop, pastor or The Pope publically brain washing other Christians using biblical scripture as a means of condeming homosexuality, please share them with us.
You're denying that Christians use the bible to condemn homosexuality? Seriously?

While the actual meaning of the texts in "the very small portion of the bible" is debatable, how Christians have used them across the past 1,500 years or so is not.

Mark me: Nowhere have I said that the bible condemns homosexuality, but that Christians have interpreted them that way. There is an enormous difference.

The Church has condemned same-sex relations between men since the 4th century.
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/just-novels.asp
The Catechism of the Catholic Church added a section on homosexuality in 1994 which characterizes it as "intrinsically disordered," which it bases on several biblical texts. (Again, note that I am not saying that this is what they mean, but that the Catholic Church says that is what they mean.)
https://www.catholichawaii.org/media/224236/homosexuality_-_from_catechism_of_the_catholic_church.pdf

A typical evangelical summation of teaching against homosexuality:
https://www.christianbiblereference.org/faq_homosexuality.htm
Evangelicals in particular have distinguished themselves in propagandizing against LGBTs, and lobbying against their rights. Recently, they have allied themselves with the Trump Administration in an effort to stack the Supreme Court with judicial conservatives in the hopes of, among other things, reversing gay marriage.

Largely unsuccessful in prosecuting their culture war against LGBTs here in the States, evangelical homophobes have been exporting it to susceptible African nations. What has been mostly rhetoric here (calls to "kill the gays" coming from evangelical pastors like Kevin Swanson, Donnie Romero, Steven Anderson, and Roger Jiminez) is carried out in countries like Uganda, Kenya, and Nigeria. In fact, believers there have actually recapitulated practices of medieval Christianity, hunting down, beating, imprisoning or killing gays, subjecting suspected lesbians to what's termed "corrective rape," and burning accused witches alive. Some of the accused are children.
https://www.thenation.com/article/its-not-just-uganda-behind-christian-rights-onslaught-africa/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-centralafrica-witchcraft/witch-burning-rebels-stoke-central-african-republic-violence-idUSKBN0TF03920151126

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/crisis-in-south-africa-the-shocking-practice-of-corrective-rape-aimed-at-curing-lesbians-9033224.html

Are these sufficient, Margo, to underscore what Christians have done?

§« The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. »§

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Do you believe in god? Yes! But I’ve had lapsed moments

Who here considers themselves Christian? Me

I'm a nominal Christian because I was baptized Greek Orthodox. But I don't adhere to the religion. Same, but ROC

We're you baptized Christian? No

Do you consider yourself a faithful Christian now? Yes

Are there any others who believe in god and follow other religions besides Christianity? Perhaps 😛

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Rouge, you said you were baptized Russian Orthodox, right? Then you say you weren't baptized Christian.

That makes no sense unless you're one of those Protestants who don't believe Catholics and Orthodox are Christian?

I GameBoy
You gotsta

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

No, I mean parents never physically baptized me… they were both atheists (kinda). The early 90s were a weird time.

Re: Christians and Christianity and theism in general.

Okay, sorry, I misread that. They even say Putin is a Russian Orthodox believer now. Not Vlad, the real Putin.

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