7 comments
Finding the TRUTH
by monicaMy issue is simple....the churches, nay - the country, is overflowing with with people who stand on ceremony. Who pray to a "create-your-own-Jesus". Who wear their gold crosses and use the bible as a God, not a tool to understand God. Who are not willing to live for God, live in quest of knowing the heart of Jesus, but rather find it more self gratifying to argue and fight to defend their own interpretation of him. History has clearly pointed out to anyone paying attention, that the rigid zealots controlling people through "religion" , have been the ones who have pitted their interpretations against science, and then claimed it to be the other way around. The Bible was INSPIRED by GOD, not written by him. The fighting over biblical interpretation is pure ego. The modern day church is mostly anti-intellect, egotistical, paranoid, prideful and bigoted. Science has one simple task, to understanding the nature of things. By understanding the nature of things, we understand the glory that is God. If science proves our our interpretation of something was WRONG, so be it! God is NOT subject to our interpretation of HIM. Galileo was not a heretic, he was a scientist. The real heresy is the arrogance of the church when she is so wrong.
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In the past 2000 years, the Church has gotten some things wrong. Some things we have done in ignorance, and in some things we have willfully sinned. Today we have a hard time believing people thought the sun revolved around the Earth. And we have a hard time when we look through the Bible even seeing why that would be a big deal if it wasn't.
Another thing we get wrong is thinking all churches are for us. Different people like to worship in different ways. Some people like a new experience every week. Some people found God in last week's ceremony, and they expect they'll find him again this week if they do the same thing again. And they just may. Just as God made each of us difference, he made different local congregations for different people. Now, some churches may be stuck in a rut because that's the easy thing to do, but some intend to meet with God in just the same way every day. Eliminating uncertainty in the worship process helps some people concentrate on the spiritual aspects of that process.
If a local church isn't for you, join a different one. I hope you can find the perfect church for you. And then I hope that you connect with it perfectly. That is, that you may perfectly:
1. renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of the world, and repent of their sin;
2. accept the freedom and power God gives them to resist evil, injustice, and oppression;
3. confess Jesus Christ as Savior, put their whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as their Lord;
4. remain faithful members of Christ’s holy church and serve as Christ’s representatives in the world;
5. be loyal to Christ through The United Methodist Church and do all in their power to strengthen its ministries;
6. faithfully participate in its ministries by their prayers, their presence, their gifts, their service, and their witness;
7. receive and profess the Christian faith as contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
Sounds hard, doesn't it? Try leading a bunch of people that every day fail to live up to their commitment? Isn't it reasonable that we, as a church, would fail from time to time?
That said, 1. We American Christians are lazy, comfortable, and materialistic, and 2. Science and a literal interpretation of Genesis 1 doesn't seem to be logically reconcilable.
For #1, Got any ideas on how to fix that? Maybe anytime we can, we need to do what we can to help others understand that there are others out there that are lost and that are suffering and that need our help and just because we've pushed them out of our mind doesn't mean it isn't true.
For #2, How can they be combined? First consider this. Noah's great-great-great maternal grandmother isn't mentioned in the Bible and yet she existed. Maybe there were some details God didn't disclose to us 6000 years ago because we weren't ready for it. Maybe, as God was creating the Earth in six days, he embedded in it the sediment layers of the Grand Canyon, the bones of dinosaurs and our evolutionary ancestors who never lived, and the rocks with various levels of Carbon 14 and other radioactive particles. Genesis would have been laughed at 6000 years ago if he had told Moses all that. So he didn't put it in at that time. And now that we recognize it is missing, Genesis gets laughed at because it isn't sufficiently detailed. Can we believe that even though some details about Creation aren't in the Bible, it still could have been done that way? That's the only way I've been able to reconcile Scriptures and Science. Does it mean this is right? No, maybe Genesis 1 is a made up story meant only to convey a point about God's power. Or maybe science is totally wrong and we'll find the missing piece tomorrow and it'll turn out that all these fossils are just elaborate hoaxes like crop circles. But I doubt it.
This is a good place to mention that a key tenant of Methodism, and I believe the Christianity and the Bible, is the reconciliation of the Bible with reason, experience, and tradition. If we try, we will come to different conclusions and that may cause some conflicts, but if we don't even try, we'd have either a literal book of too many rules to accomplish anything written by a god who is changing and confused, or a set of suggestions and neat stories from which no conclusions or applications can be drawn.
god doesn't exist. you people are idiots. learn to think for yourselves.
The truth is, that we have always tried to justify our ways using God's word, the bible.Even tho it is the wrong way to go.
To Skyhook. Even Darwin never said that man descended from monkeys. His claim was that we evolved, through different evolutionary paths, from a common ancestor.
Truth is, Humans came from monkeys
your right the word was inspired by god that as they was moved by the spirit of god they wrote man cannot understand god he said my ways are not like your ways my thoughts are not like your thoughts god is to deep for us to fully understand that why he gives his word in part you have to have the spirit of god to understand what he doing god created medicine and the technology the church is in institution were people can be save not a house debate
I love what you have said.It amazes me about that it was the roman church that sent everything crazy.it was the so mother church that blamed the jews for the black plag.If we would read thus says the LORD we won't be as we are but we want it to say that whites are right and blacks are the slaves that jews are greedy and so on and on instead of loving one to another helping one another lifing oneanother up to GOD BE THE GLORY FORVEVER AND EVER AMEN.