The Marketing Of Christianity

Prayer and fasting bring God closer to us and make his will clearer -- that has been my experience -- so if He's calling for a particular work for the poor for instance, we'll get the message more clearly what He wants us to do.

Prayer and fasting clears the channels between you and God, as it were, diminishes the fleshly noise of everyday life and increases spiritual awareness. It's often done for the purpose of understanding what God wants of you in a particular situation, or to find out if God wants you to do a particular work. You may get strong impressions of what God wants you to do from spending a few days at it. It can be used for any spiritual purpose. It could involve a ministry to the poor, or any other kind of work for God. It may also sensitize you to your own faults at the same time.Phat has been saying most of this already though. I don't know what the problem is with getting his point. Edited by Faith, : correct grammar

Seems to me this discussion shows that the people who fall away from Christianity are ones who grew up in the church. They learned all the doctrine and as ringo says just went with the flow. So they had a merely superficial commitment even though they outwardly lived as part of the community.abe: What this means is that they were not born again. Christianity is a transformation, not just a belief system. Even those who grew up in the church have to become converted to be Christians. "Conversion" isn't just a matter of superficial belief either, it's to be understood as an actual change, a real conversion from one condition to another. /abeI was sent to church as a child, but I can't say it really stuck although I felt a pang of loss when I gave it up as a teenager, under the influence of "enlightened" sophisticated friends, and lived without it for the next thirty years. When I came back to it in my mid forties, completely through a blitz of reading up on religions, it was brand new to me. I found out then that I'd never understood what the gospel is all about, I had to learn it all from scratch. I remembered the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm and a few hymns and the Christmas Carols but that was about it. (And recognizing clearly for the first time what the carols are actually celebrating reduced me to tears of joy and thanks, and they often still do that to me). I had to give up quite a few things I had believed as an atheist and some of it was a hard struggle, but when I gave myself to Christ in my forties it was a done deal, I could not ever lose it, it was sealed by knowing that the Bible is really God's communication to us, and by many personal experiences of His providence in my life, answered prayer, even some supernatural events. I've lost a lot of my original passion and want to get it back if I can, but the basics I know will never leave me, God Himself, Jesus Christ, will never leave me, in reality or in my own mind.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Hm. I believe the evidence led me to my Christian beliefs. There is always more to learn, always, for all eternity for that matter, but the basics were answered for me when I became a Christian. There's no further evidence that could change that. What, I learned that Christ is God who became a man to pay for my sins -- how could that change with further evidence? There is no possibility this belief could be wrong, I know how I got to it and now I'm there. All else is to be subsumed under it because there is no way to doubt it. There are plenty of other things I believe as part of the basics, such as the reality of the miracles reported in the Bible, which are themselves evidence for the whole Plan of Redemption spelled out in god's word. YOU may be able to doubt any of it, but the evidence is quite sufficient for me, and it took me from one way of being into a completely new way of being and I can never go back.Some people may think they can believe without evidence but I can only assume they just aren't good at recognizing the evidence because nobody can believe ANYTHING without evidence. And of course I don't find any conflict with true science. True science is a wonderful gift of God. Some science is built on false interpretations, however.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

And there are those who also wrongly believe the evidence led them ot the Old Earth and Evolution. So what? My point is only that I make use of evidence and don't think it's possible to believe anything without evidence. And no, the nature of the conclusions to be drawn from the kind of evidence available means there can be no other conclusions drawn.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

oh fer pete's sake. Judging from your posts on this subject, I doubt very much that you could ever be able to grasp the creationist's situation. You don't even understand that they aren't lying at all when they refuse to accept your arguments. I can't speak for every creationist; after all there are some who capitulate to your point of view so clearly they aren't in the same position I consider myself to be, but I'm sure you really don't know how to judge what we are trying to do. And neither does Rrhain. Some of that in my case has to do with the fact that I'm not familiar with the particular arguments you are talking about. Sea salt, moon dust etc. As Rrhain said, we've had this conversation many times already. And except for his pejorative spin on it he pretty much covered the issues.By the "extraneous claims of YEC" I guess you mean particular arguments that don't derive directly from the Bible but give support to elements of the Biblical record, often the Young Earth timing. Any of these arguments could be wrong because they are humanly derived, so if the evidence really is good against them they should be dropped. However, even in these cases the rebuttals may not seem convincing to us so we want to wait until we have a better grasp of the whole subject before we drop it, because of our certainty that the Bible is God's truth.In my case I have a couple of whole theories about how things worked from a YEC point of view in both biology and geology and since both subjects are fairly complex I'm not going to capitulate to any plausible-sounding rebuttal until I feel I've really mastered it. (I think Morton capitulated without any real reason to). All the snarky mean and usually totally uncomprehending rebuttals to my arguments only serve to keep me on my track too. I change parts of the argument that I decide are going in the wrong direction, but not the overall argument, as opponents make certain aspects of the situation clearer to me.People who compromise the Bible to fit evolution into it are weak-minded people in my opinion who are selling out God's truth. Far better to take Kurt Wise's position that there seems to be a lot of evidence on the evolution side although he nevertheless believes God's word against it and hopes eventually to find a defense that works.Many of the "extraneous" arguments have merit in any case. But there are rock-bottom points that cannot be surrendered because we know without a doubt that God has established them: Any accommodation to evolution that requires that death have entered the world before the Fall is wrong, and all the rationalizations dreamed up for it selling out Truth. Any accommodation that denies the worldwide Flood is wrong. Evolution from Species to Species is wrong in the first place since the Bible defines all living things as separately created after their own Kind, all at the same time at the Creation and not evolving from one another. These are nonnegotiables. There may be others escaping me at the moment.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Funny I thought the subject was why YECs do as we do, not your opinion of YECism.

The only thing I'm in fear of around here is the constant threat of being bored or harassed to death by know-it-alls who have the arrogance to define people's views without understanding one thing about them.

As I understand it there is lots of research being done by creationists. The British Creationist Society has been doing research in the Grand Canyon, and Steve Austin years ago did research in the Grand Canyon, which to my mind proved the mass sudden death of the nautiloids which doesn't fit the standard interpretation but does fit the Flood. I haven't kept up beyond that.