The Christian Fear Factor:
- Thread starter Praxius
- Start date
I would go along with that, even a child that is wanted might not go through those very same things depending on the parenting skills of the parents, even the neighborhood can cause those things once a child starts to move about in that surrounding.
All I pointed out is that conception is the point where God sees a new child being alive. Some human societies don't see that until the 1st week of breathing has come and gone, that is when the child receives a name.
(Some of this belongs to what another post brought up)
Are you one who believes that all the nasty things in life is just what God ordered? If it was then all those things should have been in the Garden before any fall. They weren't, all those things became part of life after the fall, God wasn't as close as He was before. Nor can any of those things be removed before the time comes to do so. That's just the way it is, so there are going to be tears, lots of them even. Do you want to blame God for allowing tears to even be there at all?
I'm not sure where this quote comes from but anyway...
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The term 'born again' has no meaning for today, there are two births, one for the body (which is what we are going through now) belief or non-belief is not a factor and the 2nd birth which is when you are standing before God and He offers you eternal life and you accept. That is the 2nd birth.
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Quoting I would also like to site a book I finished recently called, "Why People Believe What They Believe," by Andrew Newburg, MD. Newburg posits that there are four interdependent mental modules for belief: cognition, emotion, social consensus, and perception.
It would appear to me that -MOST- Christians believe for emotional or social consensus reasons. Social consensus will cut a wide swath of Christians who are indoctrinated as children. The other "born-again" variety invariably "accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior" due to "spiritual" or "mystical" experiences.
I agree. I DISagree that "most" (your term) atheists disbelieve because of emotion or social concensus.""It would appear to me that -MOST- Christians believe for emotional or social consensus reasons. Social consensus will cut a wide swath of Christians who are indoctrinated as children. The other "born-again" variety invariably "accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior" due to "spiritual" or "mystical" experiences.
The term 'born again' has no meaning for today, there are two births, one for the body (which is what we are going through now) belief or non-belief is not a factor and the 2nd birth which is when you are standing before God and He offers you eternal life and you accept. That is the 2nd birth.
He was removing people from His garden and putting up barriers to stop any attempt at returning. Back then (before the exile) they could look right at Him, today that is impossible. That is what 'distance' has been put there, but that has always had a finite amount of time attached to it. The bad things in life are not put there by God, He just doesn't do anything to keep us safe from those things.
Sounds about right along the lines of what I was told. Kids are absorbant little buggers when it comes to information, and usually how you say something is just as important as what you are saying. If God is supposed to be a great, wonderful, caring and wants people to love him, then why the hell does he permit sunday school teachers and priests to scare the living B-Jesus out of kids such as telling them that if they don't do as they are told, they will suffer for all of their entire afterlife with having millions of ancupuncture needles shoved into their eyeballs with a twist, having their nipples sliced off and fried in a pan for you to eat so they can grow back and do it all over again.... and so on?
To me, the entire structure of teaching the religion was not on the basis of learning to love, care and treat others as you would be treated.... it was mainly focused on what will happen to you if you do certain things against the teachings of those things.
I mean, geez, I went to a sunday school-like summer activity fun day thing or whatever that my friends used to goto that was run by baptists. Now I thought Roman Catholics were good at making you feel like you do nothing but sin every minute of your life.... these guys certainly held their own. They handed out little booklets of information in regards to how they understood the teachings and man! let me tell you.... that was some fuct up sh*t right there.
Example? Sure..... they had a picture on the cover of this knight with a sheild and sword fighting a dragon that was shooting fire at him..... typical kind of adventure story all kids like at that age right?
Wrong...... it went on about how it was a sin to read books or play games that promote "Fantasy" because it was being creative outside of what God already made or some line of crap like that. It went further on beyond just your own actions in your everyday life in regards to yourself or others around you.... .they were basically telling you that many of your own thoughts or forms of entertainment were sins as well.
Then we went to play floor hockey..... odd. :-?
Either way..... no matter how I look at the entire faith, and no matter which schism is telling it, it's always had fear thrown either directly into your face or in the background in regards to what you do every day.
Basically right around the last few days before I finally said screw it to the whole thing, I started to kinda realize that no matter what I did, how I did it, who I listened to, who I followed, etc..... no matter what, I ended up sinning in one fashion or another and chances are, I'm gonna goto hell for one stupid reason or another.
So I was fighting a losing battle..... so what was the point at all?
I could either sit in a bare room, with no bright colours, no pictures, no tv, no contact from the outside, hell, I could even try and stop taking dumps and just sit there and breath until I die...... and I still would be sinning in one way or another.
The problem I see which was what brought up the topic to me in the first place, was the fear factor in the religion and how it is used so much to continually cloud and confuse the overall message and to continually control how people think.......
it's either their way, or the highway to hell..... and that is why I feel many others tend to deny or ignore other forms of arguments, because they fear if they do, it will destroy everything that they have worked for for so long in their lives..... it would destroy everything in which they believed.
So what? What then? If that truly happened and all of this fear was for nothing and you won't goto hell..... then what are you really doing it all for?
Even if there is a Heaven and a Hell..... do you think God is really that anal about what video games you play, what gender your partner is, if you decide to have a baby or not.... sex before marriage?
I mean seriously, these Sunday school teachers already seemed to know exactly what God's view on video games and the internet was...... even though nothing about these were in the Bible.... .they just knew what God would think about them....... How the hell does that work?
The more years that go by, there seems to be more and more input from one person or another about something being sinful and evil, and just adds more and more on top of the pile of things you're not supposed to do..... until you technically can no longer function in life if you actually tried to live by them all.
Hell, even Ned Flanders can't do that.
You still believe everything you were told back ten, it still hasn't occurred to you to even question if what you were told was correct (about the Bible), back then or even these days. Somebody said it so it must be true, how much swamp land do you two own BTW?
In that case, if a woman decides to get an abortion, isn’t that also planned by God? Then why do prolifers try to abrogate God’s will? Or if somebody is a homosexual, isn't that also planned by God? then why the hatred towards homosexuals, isn't that hatred towards God's plan?
