It does seem rather redundant. After all, anyone whose not already a Christan is not likely to convert, unless they're on the fence about it. I know I'm sure not.
First-World Proselytizing
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OT: Everybody I know who does any sort of evangelization (including myself on occasion) is totally aware everyone knows about Christianity, they're just trying to explain it better and answer questions.
I was playing Munchkin with a church group once, a priest was playing as a cleric and won through the Divine Intervention card.Hagi said:
SonicWaffle said:
[img_inline caption="" src='http://i.imgur.com/jwSs3.jpg']
The simple part of the answer is because if he magically made those sins disappear unpaid for then he would not be just and then not be God. Omnipotence is just one attribute of God but he is also Holy and Just and so to make sin not matter is to deny those parts of himself. Sin demands payment and that payment is death. Christ takes our payment for sin so that we might have life and be reconciled to God. I know I am not doing it a great deal of justice in a couple of sentences but if you have any other questions or want to clear something up then let me know.SonicWaffle said:
Out of interest, how do you go about answering questions? I mean, I know and have debated a lot of Christians, because when I was an angsty teenager I was militantly atheist (I grew out of it); my best friend and his whole family are practicing, his father is some sort of minister, I've been to their church youth groups and discussion groups etc etc, and yet it always seems to come back to non-answers.StashAugustine said:
Generally, every discussion or debate or argument about the reasons behind their beliefs or the explanation for a Bible story comes back to "Look, God does what the hell he wants, alright? We're not supposed to be able to understand it". Maybe it's just me, but I don't see that as an answer.
Without meaning to offend, this sort of thing is precisely what I meant when I said people never seem to be able to explain it. All this explanation does is invite more questions.mrglass08 said:
Why does sin demand payment? Why does that payment have to be death? He's frigging God, he made the rules and he can change them any time he sees fit. Is there some kind of universal oversight panel who ratify his decisions and won't let him simply change things for the better? He can just say "Sin doesn't require payment anymore, now all you need to do is feel bad about what you did and you're clean again" or "Sin still requires payment, but that payment is no longer death. Payment is now an hour of line-dancing classes for my amusement".
How exactly does it work that if he made sins disappear, he wouldn't be just? Again, he's God, and he makes all the rules. "Just" is defined as whatever the hell he chooses to define it as, unless being "Just" is some core mechanic which he has built into the universe and must obey. In which case he isn't omnipotent because he is subservient to universal laws.
Why would not being just mean he wasn't God? If God is what he is, and he is the only one, then it follows that whatever he did he'd still be God. Just a slightly different version of God. I'm still SonicWaffle whether I'm wearing a red hat or a blue hat, changing those things doesn't affect who I actually am, just how I portray myself. He's God. He can change the rules any time.
Why does Christ have to take our payment? In fact, if Christ has taken our payment, then surely there's no longer any point in sin existing as a universal constant, is there? If the bill has already been settled, restaurants don't keep sending food to your table. But why Christ? Why not Barabbas, or Geoff, or Kim Jong Un? If we're all technically God's children, any one of us can be the sacrifical lamb, so why did God feel the need to pour part of himself into a mortal body, dick around for 30 years, and then get killed for some nebulous and barely coherent reason?
To me, this all seems like an after-the-fact justification. I can totally understand it, too. The Apostles have seen a man they consider holy and wondrous, a saviour, killed without managing to do any of the amazing things they were hoping for. So they start telling each other that there must have been a reason for him to die, because their hero wouldn't just die like some unimportant bloke. They come up with their whole story of sin and redemption, and over the years their followers add to it until we've got the jumbled, confusing explanation that people offer today, but it still doesn't make any sense.
I hope you understand I'm not knocking your faith or trying to convert you away from your beliefs, I'm just trying to explain why I have such trouble with these stories. They only make sense if you've already accepted a framework that says "God is great, God is good, God does everything for a reason" and then put that spin on a series of events to make it all seem planned.
Alot of Christian denominations view the telling others of the teachings of Jesus to be an integral part of their belief system, as it was commanded by Jesus himself that his followers follow his example in that regard[footnote]Actual quote "this good news must be preached in all the inhabited Earth," from somewhere in the back of Matthew but I can't be bothered to check exactly where. Chp 30 something I think.[/footnote]. The point is that where ever you find Christians you are going to find ones preaching about their beliefs. Possibly especially so nowadays as more people are atheists now or have lived more secular lives without any type of religious background which may lead some Christians to believe there is still worth in spreading the Christian teachings in the western world.
I am not offended at all, I welcome dialogue about my faith ad will attempt to answer as best as I can. Be aware that the issues you are raising are not simple issues and have been studied extensively for a long time with whole libraries devoted to their understanding and a few sentences will be very unlikely to do the topic justice, but I will try. Please not that I come from a conservative evangelical background and a lot of the topics you raised have a great deal of debate about them.SonicWaffle said:
I will try to break this down into a few topics but they overlap a little so bear with me.
God is the creator and sovereign of creation. He made it from nothing and he sustains it by his will to do so. Nothing is higher than God, no rules, laws or concepts define who he is or what he does. We can however see several attributes that he both displays and defines. For instance, he is love, he is justice, he is mercy, he is holy. What is a little more difficult for us to see is how these attributes fit together all of the time. Thousands of pages of been put into that topic so it gets a little difficult to come down with a firm answer of how.
Now sin is a few things all at once. It is a rebellion against the sovereignty of God, it is a rejection of him as the giver and sustainer of life and it is a corruption of his creation. Sin and God can not coexist because they are diametrically opposed to each other. God can not allow sin to be unpaid for because it is an outright rejection of him and his authority. Whatever is sinful is in essence saying that they would be better of without God and so God is willing to grant that, and since God is both the giver and sustainer of life to reject God means that you earn death.
Man has been corrupted by sin and has rejected God and therefore earns separation from God and death. God in his mercy offers a way that man can pay for their sin and be reconciled to God. He gave himself take our death that we earned and instead give us life. Christ was, and is, God in the flesh, he was not just a man possessed by God but God as a man who lived a perfect life and could be our atonement. It was not a nebulous reason, he knew what he was here to do, be our death so that we could live.
That was admittedly a rather poor couple of paragraphs but I am off to work. I will check back tonight to see if I can explain anything any better.
The reason we all know about Coca-Cola is because of all that advertising.Daystar Clarion said:
Conservative evangelical in the American sense? I ask because here in England, the word conservative has a very different meaning to what it does in the US. For us it indicates being traditionalist and right-wing, whereas the American conservative movement seems to be dominated by extremist far-right theocrats who would consider British conservatives to be pinko commie liberalsmrglass08 said:
Though it doesn't relate to our overall topic, this is something else I've never understood and that my religious friends have never been able to explain. Why is God, simply by virtue of being creator, the sovereign? My parents created me, but they do not have absolute authority nor do I feel the need to worship them. I love them, and am grateful for them because they turned me into a (fairly) normal and functional human being, but I certainly won't be building any temples in their honour. If I invent a useful object which goes on the be used by every household in the world, I may get royalties and be recognised as the creator but it would be foolish of me to think I was "ruler" and could dictate what people did with the item.mrglass08 said:
The whole thing smacks of tyranny, like the kings of old whose "right to rule" came from the fact they had the biggest army - God is the biggest and the baddest, he was here first so he has the right to rule over our lives. From a modernised human perspective, it's a deeply troubling thought.
OK, so accepting your logic for a moment, we define those attributes in relation to God. Are you saying that we have trapped God in a prison of our expectations? Because earlier you said that if God made sin disappear he "would not be just and then he would not be God". If our definition derives from him, and we say that if he altered those definitions he'd no longer be what we think of as God, that implies that he's stuck.mrglass08 said:
Of course, he is God and by some schools of thought omnipotent. So technically he can go outside of the rules he's set down for himself, and remain God. In fact, logically speaking, if we derive our definitions of such attributes from him then he gets to decide what our definition is - if he decided tomorrow that love actually involved wearing coconut shells on your feet, that would re-define what love is, no? If he defines, and he has ultimate control, then he can re-define at any moment and still remain God.
Rebellion requires active resistance. An atheist, for instance, is not rebelling against God's sovereignty; he simply does not believe in God, and can no more rebel against the sovereignty of what he considers an imaginary being than he could rebel against Lord Voldemort. He may hold religion and its trappings in extreme distaste, but religion is not God, merely a framework people have built as an attempt to understand him. To rebel against God's sovereignty, logically, one must first A) accept that God exists and B) actively seek to resist him.mrglass08 said:
As to "rejection of him as the giver and sustainer of life", this again requires a belief. Now despite what televangelists may say, belief is not a choice. Whenever I've been asked why I chose not to believe in God, I respond by asking why my questioner chooses to believe. The answer is always the same - "I do not choose to believe. I just know it's true". This is precisely the point; I have never made a conscious choice not to believe in God, I just don't, and without some kind of proof I never will. By no stretch of the imagination could that be called "rejection", could it? I'm not plugging my ears, singing a little song and just pretending I can't hear God talking to me. To reject God and his plans, one must first believe in God and his plans, otherwise the only thing being rejected are the theological views of other humans.
Yet the concept of sin exists. If the two cannot coexist, then either one of them must be false or our understanding of the matter is flawed, no?mrglass08 said:
However, we're told that he is merciful and forgiving. It seems that, should someone reject his authority (which, remember, derives from nothing more than simply being "better" than us, and being able to hold a threat over our heads - much like the old parental maxim that "I gave you life, and I can take it away!") then all he has to do is forgive them. Hell, if he's all loving and all merciful then by definition he is obliged to forgive our transgressions, whether we want him to or not. Anything else would violate the definitions of love and mercy we have derived from him.mrglass08 said:
Except that, as I said, by the definitions of love, mercy and justice we have derived from his attributes, when we rejected him and earned death he would forgive us anyway, right?mrglass08 said:
Consider again what I mentioned above, about this fallacy that faith in God is a matter of choice. You may find some vitriolic souls who claim to hate God, rather than religion. These people are not athetists, they are theists, much as they may hate hearing it. A non-believer can no more hate God than he can hate any other fictional character. However, those who do not belief generally do so because they see no reason to believe, no convincing proof for God's existence. Isn't the burden on God to provide that proof? If he created humans, then he knows full well how our brains work, and he knows that many of us will require evidence before we believe wild claims which run contrary to our experiences of the way in which the world works. Ergo by not revealing himself to us definitively, he is not offering us choice, he is forcing us into a state where we (according to the definition above) "reject" him. For this, we earn death? Lack of belief in God, if he really does exist, is not us rejecting him; it is him rejecting us. Or would he rather we lie, pretend to believe in him until we even have ourselves fooled, even though he can see our hearts and knows that the only way for us to truly believe would be for him to give us a real, obvious, unmistakable sign of his existence?
This doesn't really follow, though. It only makes sense if you assume God to be malicious and spiteful. Imagine this same sentence, but with the addition of the loving and forgiving being we like to assume God to be;mrglass08 said:
"Man has been corrupted by sin and has rejected God, and therefore earns forgiveness and everlasting life"
Remember, he's God. He can do whatever he wants to do. If he is the very source of justice, mercy etc then he has no excuse for punishing people who have never truly made the choice to turn away from him.
I cannot even argue against this part, because there's no logical standpoint to base my counter-arguments on. Could you try and explain this a little more clearly, please? Why would God do all of that instead of doing something so much simpler? Why would he create a race of beings which inevitably turn towards sin as a part of their nature? No man is without sin, after all. It's a rigged game, from what I've been told. Why all the jumping through hoops, the complex "explanations" for the transference of sin and the potential for forgiveness and all those other things when he's frigging God and didn't have to bother with such insanely convulted or impractical plans?mrglass08 said:
You did fine. I think you're just working with concepts that nobody has ever been able to adequately explain to a non-believer, because they have too many of what would in another body of work be called "plot holes" ;-)mrglass08 said:
The idea of advertising is not to increase awarness of the product but create mental need for it. It is the "I could use a cup of coffee right now" effect.Daystar Clarion said:
It is to get you desire the product, not know it.
They have to advertise more to counter the incredible improvement of access to information on modern communication nets
Just look at the arab country revolutions
Just look at the arab country revolutions
If god both knows the future and created you, then he created you in a specific way, knowing that you'd sin.
Omnipotence is incompatable with omnisense.
Here's a better quote to explain the incompatability:
?Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind??
Omnipotence is incompatable with omnisense.
Here's a better quote to explain the incompatability:
?Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind??
I would say that you're ideas of proselyting sects is incredibly wrong. I can't speak for all sects but I'm Mormon, one of the more gung-ho Christian faiths when it comes to missionary work. You'd be hard pressed to find a Missionary that doesn't believe that they can at least convert one person sometime in their life. I myself know many converts to the church due to missionary work. Some of them are from different religious backgrounds and some of them have no religious background. Some were die-hard atheists who eventually decided they'd give religion a try and have stuck with it ever since.The Plunk said:
As for the eternal torture part I doubt most Christian religions believe that. It is rarely if ever a requirement to be a missionary in a Christian religion. If I remember correctly the Seventh Day Adventists require it... I might be thinking of Jehova's Witnesses however, but most don't. When I was talking with my bishop the other day he pretty much came out and said that a Mission isn't required for eternal salvation, so if I really don't want to he doesn't think I should have to go.
As for the OP. It's not so much that people don't know what Christianity is, it's that most people don't fully understand it. It's not so much, "HEY HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS THING!" it's , "Hey do you know details of this thing."