B.H. - A question for you

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote (Guest @ Dec. 21 2002,7:25)[/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]We all like BH,he's fine.It's just his belief system is inappropriate for a christian forum. The heart of an atheist is not the same as the heart of a Christian.Jesus is Lord to one and to the other he is nothing.BH is honest with his feelings and I care for him as a person but his belief system is not in fellowship with our community.

Just my opinion.

God bless,Charles :D[/quote]
"""""""""""I just don't believe that someone who doesn't believe the bible should be discussing it with believers.Why?entertainment...or a game..or what.""""""""""""""&
quot;"""'''

BH:  I like the intellectual exercise.


"""""""""""""""
We all like BH,he's fine.It's just his belief system is inappropriate for a christian forum. The heart of an atheist is not the same as the heart of a Christian.Jesus is Lord to one and to the other he is nothing.BH is honest with his feelings and I care for him as a person but his belief system is not in fellowship with our community.""""""""""""'

BH:  I must be blunt here.  A lot of you people here believe one must be baptized for the forgiveness of sin and to get in Christ to be a real Christian, yet many here have not/will not do that.  Should they be banned--their not in fellowship with you either?

[spurly]

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote (B. H. @ Dec. 21 2002,00:05)[/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--][/quote]
[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote [/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]BH said:  BH Said:  You problem goes way beyond what  erroneous ideas Christians may have had individually in the past.  Your problem is that YOUR TEXT is erroneous due to the fact it has been added to and taken away from throughout the past due to man (or devils :p)  the problem, spurly, if I may be so bold, is not your lack of understanding of the will of "god", but the lack of understanding that the very foundation of your faith is corrupt--the Bible. You are locked in a certain mindset regarding the Bible and cannot break free from it.  If you could do so, and I think with more study you will, the fallacies I see in religion will become more apparent and clear to you.[/quote]

BH, It looks like that is one of the finer points of our discussion.  Is what we have as the word of God really the word of God.  I would love to refute you about the Bible being corrupt, (I have studied this before and come to the opposite conclusion) but my apologetics are a little rusty.  When one is stuck in the culture of the church, not many opportunities come up to discuss topics like this with people on the other side.  So here's what I am going to do after the first of the year.  I am going to buy a couple of books, one from both sides of the debate.  (I don't want to be accused of only reading the Christian viewpoint).  And I am going to go back again and study the reliability of God's word.  It'll be a refresher course I will love taking.  What book would you suggest I get from the viewpoint that the Bible is hogwash?

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote [/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]Kevin said:  The argument I used above may be based on how the world is today.  However, the world may be that way, because that's the way that it was designed by God.  Which, again is a circular argument.  I keep hitting myself coming and going  :doh:

BH said: Maybe.  Prove it.
[/quote]

In time I hope to be able to do that.  Maybe not 100%, but at least beyond a reasonable doubt.

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote [/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]Kevin said: So I guess it comes down to faith, and which "theory" makes the most sense?  And that is something we have to determine based on our view of the evidence."""""


BH said:  But everyone examines the evidence and come to different conclusions.  Some see no God, some see Jehovah, some see Allah, some the "deist" god, ect.
[/quote]

Yes, that is true.  Many people come to many different conclusions.  Is that because people are all starting their study with different pre-concieved notions?  Is it because different people's study's are tilted in different directions?  Is it because some people are deluded into believing a lie? (You probably know 2 Cor 4:4 so I won't quote it here).  Or is it because a conclusion is impossible to arrive at?  

I think any real search for truth will eventually wind up at the throne of the God of the Bible.  

Kevin

[marc]

My only comment would be that I don't see the forum being dominated by discussions about atheism.  We have a couple of topics here and there, but for the most part (If I hadn't just read the Santa Claus thread I wouldn't have had to qualify that) BH doesn't inject the atheistic viewpoint into other discussions.  If he did, I would agree; that is the problem I have seen on other boards  (a discussion on baptism goes nowhere, for instance, because a poster keeps interrupting with "none of this matters, the Bible's not true").  But generally he doesn't disrupt other topics and keeps his (supposedly) atheistic viewpoints limited to a few threads on that topic.

[spurly]

B.H.

Thanks for sharing part of yourself and your journey with the rest of us on the message board.

My hope is that those in charge won't kick you off of this board just because you have a different theological bent (or no theological bent at all).  I hope they will allow you to stay for at least these three reasons.  First, you will challenge us to really examine why we believe what we believe.  And second, I don't think Jesus would ever say, "You don't believe like I do, then I won't let you talk to me."  And third, maybe, just maybe, if you hang out with people who are infected with the virus of God's grace, you will come back to faith in him.

In August, I had a student come up to me and make this statement, "I don't believe that God is who we think he is".  She has begun a journey looking for the real God.  I say that to say this, have you ever considered the option that God does exist, but he is not the God that you grew up hearing about in legalistic churches?  

I had to deal with this a lot after I graduated from Bible College.  Someone who graduated from another Bible College once told me that it took him ten years to unlearn what he learned in Bible College so that he could embrace God for who he really was.  The God my professors taught me about in Bible College was much more legalistic than the God I now serve on a daily basis.  I had to take time to unlearn the legalism of that God, and learn about a God whose main desire was to have a relationship with us.  A God who is motivated by love, mercy, grace, and justice and not a desire to keep all his creatures in line.

So maybe, just maybe, God does exist, but he's not at all what you thought he was.  I will probably still have to go through some unlearning.  As a matter of fact, that unlearning will probably not be complete until I see God in all his glory.  Only then will I truly understand who God really is.

Kevin

[marc]

btw, there are a few Cthlthu cults in this part of the country because of the existence of the actual entrances to the underground lairs not far away.   :alien:

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote (marc @ Dec. 17 2002,1:34)[/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]I guess what confuses me about all of this is that you seem to have bought into what is to me the least compelling aspect of Athiesm--the utter dependence on the wisdom of man.  As I've written before I'm much too aware of my own failings to hold myself up as a standard for anything.[/quote]
Look at it from my perspective:  Religion IS just the wisdom of man being paraded around as the wisdom of a deity.

I did want to mention that I have found a Foy Wallace book of sermons in my personal library.  I have heard of the name and I cringe to hear him cited in anything.  One thing I believe which I disagree with BH on is the heart of the preachers.  I did not know Mr Wallace but I know many CofC preachers (myself included) and this is not a fair representation.

"BH:  This was a joke against CoC preachers.  I think most of them are dishonest worthless men."


Notice that I said "most" not all.  Dallas Burdette is a CoC preacher and I think he is honest.  From what I can tell from your posts you are honest too.

If you want specific examples of CoC preachers being "sons of Belial" let me know and I will give you some.   :0

As for me I am not charismatic. :clap:

[spurly]

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote (B. H. @ Dec. 18 2002,2:44)[/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]Spurly said:  2- If there is a god, and that god chooses to reveal himself to us, he would do it ways we could understand.  He did that all through Scripture, and he always kept Scripture consistant so as not to confuse us."

BH:  God is supposedly omnipotent so he should have no trouble providing us with an incorrupted text, show us a absolute moral standard seperate and apart from himself so as to know we are not being deceived by men or devils in "the name of God."


"You said: [!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote [/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]Any inspired texts would have to be free from corruptions and not rely on "how-it-could-have-been-scenarios" to explain away contradictions.[/quote]

I don't know exactly what you mean by "how it could have been" scenarios.  However, if you look at the Scripture down through the ages, what we have now, is pretty consistent with the earliest texts that have been found.  I know there are thorny questions like, how did Mark 16:9-20 get in there?  What happened to the other letters Paul wrote to Corinth?  Etc.  But by and large, we have a copy that is very close to the original.  The mistakes that are in the text can easily be accounted for by copyist errors or errors in translation.  How do you think God could keep his word pure in a fallen world with other forces trying to corrupt it?  If you were God, what would you have done differently (not trying to be facetious)."

BH:  A "how-it-could-have-been-scenario" is a theory developed to explain away contradictions in the Bible.  For example, the "scribal error" defense is such a one.  You do not know that a contradiction was caused by scribal error, you just assume it to be so.  There are other examples I could cite but will pass that on for later.

Again you bring up the quality of the biblical manuscripts as proof of God. You just assume what we have now is very close to the original. A lot of things can happen to a book over time. Let me pm you the examples I mentioned above and we can come back to this later.

One thing I will say now is that an all powerful God, if he exists, could have kept his written word safe somehow someway.  The fact he has not makes the Bible no different from other holy books in that regard.[/quote]
You're right.  If an ominipotent God wanted to provide us with an incorrupted text, he could lead archeologists to uncover one tomorrow.

But even if he did that, we would have to scrutinize it to see if it truly is authentic.  That would involve everything that is currently done in the study of biblical manuscripts.  How would we know those studies were true?  We would have to at some point take a step of faith to believe?  Eventually, accepting God's words as God's words will always come down to that.

I believe that God gave us minds, and he wants us to use them to figure out why the contradictions in the text exist.  There are answers out there.

By the way, again I ask if God created the world and he is the absolute moral standard, and the universe is an extension of himself, how could an absolute moral standard that was separate from his exist?    It couldn't, because he would be the absolute standard.

Kevin

"If an ominipotent God wanted to provide us with an incorrupted text, he could lead archeologists to uncover one tomorrow.

But even if he did that, we would have to scrutinize it to see if it truly is authentic.  That would involve everything that is currently done in the study of biblical manuscripts.  How would we know those studies were true?  We would have to at some point take a step of faith to believe?  Eventually, accepting God's words as God's words will always come down to that."

BH;  That is the point.  I don't think you will ever be able to prove a manuscript the "original".  You can take a step of faith, but make sure you are not being led by the hand of the devil.

"I believe that God gave us minds, and he wants us to use them to figure out why the contradictions in the text exist.  There are answers out there."

BH:  I have a reasonable answer why contradictions are in the Bible.  It was written by men who had different ideas on certain things.

"By the way, again I ask if God created the world and he is the absolute moral standard, and the universe is an extension of himself, how could an absolute moral standard that was separate from his exist?    It couldn't, because he would be the absolute standard."

BH: I think that an absolute standard can exist regardless of whether a god exists.  You are still in your quandry whether or not you have been deceived by Satan or just plain old con artists.

Two plus two equals four regardless of whether god exists or what he says on the matter.  If you disagree, show me how two plus two could logically come out anything other than four.

"Here's another question I have for you.  You mentioned a couple of times that we needed to be able to compare Scripture to an absolute moral standard that exists seperate and apart from God.  If this world was created by a God, doesn't it make sense that the absolute moral standard that exists in our world could not be seperated from the one who created it?  I know that sounds like a circular argument, but I think it is true.  What holes do you see in it?"


BH: One must exist, or else you can never know you have been deceived by Bible corruptions.


""If there were an absolute moral standard that existed apart from God and God was judged by that standard, wouldn't it make that absolute moral standard God as it places the standard above God himself.  You said that this absolute standard would not detract from God's omnipotence, but I don't see how that can be the case.""

BH:  God being wise, would realize the importance of having a standard seperate from himself so we can know whether we have been deceived by men or devils.  He would not oppose the standard apart from himself seeing how we are in the predicament we are in.  Even though whatever absolute standard exists exists seperate from his person, God ,being wise would realize the standard as best and would have adopted it on his own anyway.

[spurly]

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote [/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--][!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote [/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]Here are my thoughts.

If a god did exist, and the primary reason he created the universe was to have a relationship with people whom he loved, he would want those people to have a choice.  He would want them to be able to choose to love him or to choose not to love him.  (I know Calvinists don't believe in free will, but I don't want to go there right now.  That is another subject for another time.  Back to the topic at hand).

If God wanted us to choose to love him, then what you described above would really negate any choice.  Everybody would choose to have a relationship with him, and many people would choose to have that relationship for the wrong reasons.  Either they would choose to have a relationship out of fear of being destroyed, or cursed, in this life (with disease, depression, poverty, pain, etc.), or they would choose to follow him for the blessings that they could get out of it.  Like God was some big politician doling out goodies to his cronies.

But God wants us to choose to have a relationship with him for altogether different reasons.  He wants us to choose to have a relationship with him because we love him.  Plain and simple.

The requirement you are putting on god to prove that he exists would negate that for many people.

Kevin[/quote]
God could have created us where we would have no problems yet still have the ability to choose to love him sincerely or not.  This may seem logically impossible, but remember he supposedly created logic.  He could have created logic where it would entail the above. So, you get the best of both worlds:  we have no problems yet we still can sincerely choose to love God or not.

I do not mean to be disrespectful, but I think the argument you used above is just a rationalization of how the world is today.  You (generic you) cannot change how the world is so you invent the idea of "free will" to rationalize away the idea of God when faced with the problems we suffer from.  I am not saying you (spurly) willfully are trying to do that, but that your predeccessors in ministry have done so and passed the fallacy down to you.[/quote]
I will try to tread the waters without being pulled under by the currents.

I will readily admit that through the ages some things have been taught by Christians that did not come from God.  And those teachings had devastating effects.  I hope and pray that I do not do that, but because my mind can not get a full grasp on the infinite mind of God, I am sure I do it unknowingly at times.  I just hope the effects aren't devastating.

I can see that God could have created a world the way you mentioned above, if he chose to.  But what you described is sort of like a parent saying, you can choose to love me, or walk away from me, you can choose to respect me or disrespect me, and whatever you choose there are no consequences for your action.  Any parent knows that to raise a child like that is not really raising them in love at all.

The argument I used above may be based on how the world is today.  However, the world may be that way, because that's the way that it was designed by God.  Which, again is a circular argument.  I keep hitting myself coming and going  :doh: .

I guess what it comes down to more than anything else is this.  I cannot prove beyond a shadow of doubt that God exists.  I can tell you about answered prayer, prophecies that came true, intelligent design in the universe and other arguments from creation, archeological evidence, etc.  But in the end there are refutations for most of that from rational people on the other side of the fence.  (Yes I believe that many atheists and agnostics are rational, even when they deny the existence of God.  Sometimes they are too rational for their own good :crackup: )

And on the other side, you can not prove that God does not exist.  

So I guess it comes down to faith, and which "theory" makes the most sense?  And that is something we have to determine based on our view of the evidence.

I am also trying to figure out why bringing up the whole free will/calvinism debate is like taking a manhole cover off of an abyss that I could fall into.  

The only thing I can come up with is trying to balance the sovereignty of God, with the free will of man.  Is that what you were referring to?

Kevin

"There is room for everyone here.  Christian conservatives, Christian moderates, Christian liberals, and ex-Christians turned atheists.  Everyone has a stake in the discussion."
Kevin

You may be right, but if so then the purpose and description of the forum should be changed to reflect that purpose. The purpose of GCM forum in that case is not to "edify" or build up the faith of one "escaping legalism to accept grace" as the name implies, but rather it is an apologetics forum that fosters arguments to prove or disprove the existence of God.  Weak Christians tend to fall by the wayside when the latter is the case even though the faith of "strong" Christians may be made stronger by such discussions.  Which is better...to defend the existence of God against atheism or to encourage those who already have faith?  It all depends on the purpose of the forum. And, no, I do not believe there is room for both on a regular basis.  A good way to measure the effectiveness of either approach is to look at the members who used to post, but no longer do.  Has the forum lost members who used to post regularly?  If so, there is a reason; something about the forum has ceased to maintain their interest.  Also, look at the growth of new members.  Are members joining and staying on a regular basis?  Is keeping discussions about atheism worth losing potential members who might otherwise find a place to strengthen their faith here?  Maybe, I don't know the answer to that.  Personally, I do not care one way or the other, but a forum should have a specific goal in mind. I agree with Charles.

[spurly]

[!--QuoteBegin--][/span][table border=\"0\" align=\"center\" width=\"95%\" cellpadding=\"3\" cellspacing=\"1\"][tr][td]Quote (Guest @ Dec. 21 2002,08:52)[/td][/tr][tr][td id=\"QUOTE\"][!--QuoteEBegin--]"There is room for everyone here.  Christian conservatives, Christian moderates, Christian liberals, and ex-Christians turned atheists.  Everyone has a stake in the discussion."
Kevin

You may be right, but if so then the purpose and description of the forum should be changed to reflect that purpose. The purpose of GCM forum in that case is not to "edify" or build up the faith of one "escaping legalism to accept grace" as the name implies, but rather it is an apologetics forum that fosters arguments to prove or disprove the existence of God.  Weak Christians tend to fall by the wayside when the latter is the case even though the faith of "strong" Christians may be made stronger by such discussions.  Which is better...to defend the existence of God against atheism or to encourage those who already have faith?  It all depends on the purpose of the forum. And, no, I do not believe there is room for both on a regular basis.  A good way to measure the effectiveness of either approach is to look at the members who used to post, but no longer do.  Has the forum lost members who used to post regularly?  If so, there is a reason; something about the forum has ceased to maintain their interest.  Also, look at the growth of new members.  Are members joining and staying on a regular basis?  Is keeping discussions about atheism worth losing potential members who might otherwise find a place to strengthen their faith here?  Maybe, I don't know the answer to that.  Personally, I do not care one way or the other, but a forum should have a specific goal in mind. I agree with Charles.[/quote]
One thing I find interesting is that by the post you made above, you seem to be someone who has been around this forum a long time.  Yet, you have chosen to remain anonymous in this post and just have "guest" show up next to your name.  

I was just curious as to why.

Kevin

Those are all good questions Kevin, but you need to go study somemore and see. ;)