Testing The Christian Apologists

You are too authoritarian and stubborn. You often exemplify the essence of your fleshly nature and are currently not being a good advertisement for Christianity. Give a damn about that!

Im just going by the words of Paul. Much of Biblical Christian Theology emphasizes the need of a transformation. I know you never took much stock in the "Born Again" Theology, but I think I can find quite a bit of scriptural support for allowing God to change you. Behavior itself is indicative of a willful change. Not everyone starts out exactly overjoyed at the prospect of taking time out of one's week to volunteer to feed and clothe the homeless. That itself involves a change of attitude.And I agree with your interpretation of what Christianity is about...up to a point. Just because Jesus hung out with partiers in no way shows that He would have accepted them joyfully into His Father's kingdom as is. A different standard of behavior is expected of adopted children. One must follow Dads rules.

I agree with you, GDR. I see a basic split between liberal Christianity and Conservative Christianity. The liberals seem to think that a loving God would never seek to change anyone and would in fact accept all shapes, colors, and spirits(independent spirits) into His house whereas the conservatives are quite sure that God has an absolute standard, plan, method, model, and procedure for his grand plan.

To which jar responds; Which lends support to the idea that not everyone is saved or ends up in Heaven.
Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for claiming to know God and yet acting contrarily.He would not do the same to the common street people because they had no clue who God was. Thus they shouldn't be judged. Now a case can be made that by Jesus seeking to know them, it implies that God would, in fact, accept them. My point is that once you know God, you will willingly change. You don't enter heaven smoking cigarettes, doing recreational drugs, perusing Penthouse, and/or polishing your 57 chevy and other household idols. You enter humbly aware of who God is and grateful that He accepts you.Edited by Thugpreacha, : No reason given.

Well, He might let you liberals in just to test (and piss off) some of the conservatives, but I promise you He won't let Satan and the demons chill in there. He kicked them all out once, during the War in Heaven.

So what? You limit God and Jesus to characters in a book. You read the book without any allowance for God to become real to you---basically treating God as you treated Santa Claus. You then attack the majority of Christianity and Christian thought and belief, labeling them as charlatans, hucksters, and weavers of fantasy. The reason that you likely do this is that you were influenced by your largely secular-minded professors at your boarding school, for starters. Your entire club is a bunch of freethinkers who respect logic, reason, and "reality" as they see it anyway, and who taught you never to fall for the idea of belief and trust in the God outside of the book.

Even CS Lewis supports my argument concerning the need for a transformation. Whatever club you claim to belong to, your ideas are in fact fantasy. You will never get into Heaven simply by rolling up your sleeves and working at the local food bank. Sorry. I have been to a lot of churches. Of the many people I have met, none think like you do or even close. They all believe similar to what I have been taught. If I am guilty of making up a fantasy, the majority of Christianity is guilty as well, including most of the well-known names at the Chicago Statement. I would rather go with them than with the liberal secular humanists that claim to be Christians yet don't believe in anything but their own altruistic efforts.

It is not I who claim to be a better person. None of us are any better than anybody else. It seems to me that you have your own ideas of what God should be like and, like jar, shun the Christianity I was taught. It is you who don't understand the Bible.

We can start with Romans 12:2. One must be transformed by the renewing of their minds.Also mentioned in this article:
THE BIBLICAL UNDERSTANDING OF SPIRITUALITYand to be honest, I can't believe that people even question the need to change. What on earth are you thinking? That God will simply accept your little pompous ass into His house as is? Next thing we know, you will be lobbying for His job! And you know, I've been thinking about your liberal hissy fit about my abhorrent statement earlier concerning God selecting whom He so chooses. Would you dare think He would choose me? No? See, you too judge who is worthy and who isn't. The difference is, liberals base their judgment on secular humanist equality whereas conservatives are more authoritarian. I'm guessing God is somewhere in the middle of all that.

No, and there is a reason you won't find one. We share a common interpretation of what the bible means. You stick on what it says, yet have no clue of a Jesus that existed before the book was written. You were taught to critically examine what was and is said. We were initially taught by the Rhema Word...the obviousness of what God means. We don't simply follow apologists like sheeple. We would come to the same conclusions anyway, through studying it ourselves. The reason we don't trust those of you who insist that what is written is what is logically implied is because nobody studies it that way except secular scholars.

I just mentioned the scripture in Message 367. The natural man(or skeptic or atheist or agnostic) can't even wrap their mind around a living God.

I just woke up and am preparing for my day. Believe it or not, our arguments here at EvC sometimes come to mind as I pray in the morning. I have no doubt that the God whom I pray to and commune with through prayer is the right God if any of them are. What's funny, however, is that when I get around to praying for EvC and remembering some of our arguments, He basically tells me to consider your positions. Which goes against my very nature. But I do listen. So keeping that in mind, let's start my daily rant. To begin with, how are jar and ringos ideas any different from secular humanism?ringo isn't even a believer...he claims that God and Jesus are limited as characters in the book. Even if this were true, it essentially reduces the argument to who most closely follows the book, which is irrelevant to me. I follow the Spirit. Critics can challenge which Spirit I am following, but they won't impress me by trying to teach me the book. I can read it for myself and decide for myself what it means to me. If I am in a club or cult of deluded people, so be it. I don't agree with this all-inclusive secular humanist roll up your sleeves non-supernatural Jesus anyway. If it so happens that the Jesus described by unbeliever ringo and eccentric critic jar is real, I suppose I lose.And let me make it clear that I agree with them when they say that Jesus' main message was to feed, clothe, comfort and encourage other humans...no matter who they are and no matter what they believe. I fully support that and do it when I can. What I won't accept is the idea that there is no such thing as the supernatural, that Jesus was merely a human example and that God (GOD) is unknowable and not as anyone in any belief adequately expresses.This whole idea that Christianity is dishonest by-and-large and morally bankrupt is not true in my experience. I know a lot more flesh and blood Christians in Denver than I do critics on EvC.
We likely feed and clothe more people than anyone suspects.Finally, I am learning to tolerate other beliefs, as God wants me to do, so I won't accuse jar off not being a Christian--only because he himself says that whoever claims to be a Christian is in his mind a Christian. So I will give him that same benefit of the doubt.ringo, on the other hand, is nothing more than argumentative. I really could care less what he argues because it is irrelevant to me whether his argument is logical since it is a universal argument coming from an unbeliever describing what he himself claims is but a character in a book. I give his character no more weight than I would give long John Silver, and I never listen to that pirate either. I know its hard work. Try being blind as I currently am in one eye. I may have to go on disability. I am wise enough to know that God won't m,magically heal me, though I pray He eventually does, of course. This experience has made me stronger as I am now more empathetic to blind people, as well as disabled people in general. I used to honestly consider them a bit of a bother, as they expected help from everyone but I too will be right there with them, so I learned something. The earliest authors did not know God to begin with. Only the prophets were touched by the Spirit. With a few exceptions.. The problem I have with your Theology is that you think nobody needs to change when the evidence shows that people who had encounters with Jesus id change or were changed. This whole idea that everyone is "saved" is your own worthless marketing.

You don't even believe that the character exists outside of the book. So who really cares if you can prove that the text says what it says, which you can, and your claim that it means what it says, which is a lie.
Why should the book you use be anything special to me? It is the character in the book that lives now and lived before the book was even written whom I listen to. Critics can call it a fantasy wish, but what you all are peddling is watered down Christian secular humanism.

The Apostle Paul was arguably one of the first apologists. His arguments seem pretty solid to me. And I dont need evidence. Your argument wont change a lot of Christian minds. What it will do is damage everybody else who reads it, for they will conclude as you do---that Mainstream Christianity is a con, a scam, and dishonest.Which is sad. You are inadvertently marketing Christianity to be nothing more than a secular humanist do-good club. You are pushing your beliefs onto the fence sitters. To throw God away. To throw Jesus away. To roll up their sleeves and help the community (which is good, by the way) but you are telling them that Christianity is basically a secular belief and is hard work.Granted that is true, but you have no place to tell people to throw away their belief, just because of you believe that Jesus or God won't help us in life. But you are no dummy. You know that we will get thje woprld that we *want*. You know that the bill will get paid. You know, though I doubt see the big picture--of what the future of America will be like.Listen to "Humanize Me 207: The future of society with Michael Dowd" on Spreaker.One of your predictions will likely come true. The CCoI will be one of the biggest threats to global stability. They simply wont stand for the world that you and the secular humanists envision.They already have guns. Pray they don't get ahold of nukes.

This does get frustrating! These guys will never change. jar has done more to discredit Christianity than he ever has done to promote it.And ringo has always demanded Chapter & Verse when it suits him. That scripture right there supports your claim, Faith. But ringo will likely explain it away if it doesn't support his argument.