The Upper Room

12:08 AM

@Richard Yeah, gotta say I'm not a huge fan of mods from other site stepping in and threatening bans for things that while wrong, aren't particularly uncommon beliefs in the very religion this site is about...

@Richard if you're ever in doubt about something going on in a chat room on a religious site, search for the Temperance room and ask one of us in there to check it out please.

Richard

12:24 AM

@waxeagle - Will do.

Only he is good.

4:19 AM

So, can we simply forgive Richard? I am a man who makes mistakes.

LCIII

4:54 PM

0

Q: What is the biblical argument against baptism by sprinkling/pouring?

What is the biblical basis for the idea that it is wrong or incorrect to baptize by sprinkling or pouring the water? Growing up as a baptist I heard this all the time. Related, but opposite: What is the biblical basis for baptism by sprinkling?

fredsbend

6:18 PM

@Onlyheisgood. We can certainly forgive both of you.

I'm wondering perhaps if I'm too cynical now that I've lost faith. I don't want to become one of those bitter Atheists. You know the ones who constantly conflate their personal experience with religion with the whole of the religious community.

A comment on the site read:

> there's a whole angel dedicated just to healing. :)

And my first response is:

> Just one? Out of legions upon legions? No wonder my back still hurts.

Which I feel like conflates my personal experience with the whole of religion.

My loss of faith is largely doe to being unable to reconcile the Christian God with the problem of evil.

LCIII

@fredsbend I don't know if spending lots of time online will help cure your cynicism :)

fredsbend

It makes no sense to me why people hurt and such horrible things happen to them sometimes, while an omnipotent and all-loving God stands by idle hands.

I have a lot of emotion about the issue, but I also feel like my argument is sound.

What do you guys think? Am I conflating personal emotion with logic on this issue with that knee jerk comment?

@LCIII Ain't that the truth. Especially on YouTube.

LCIII

@fredsbend Your argument is sound, you have a legitimate grievance.

fredsbend

but ...

LCIII

@fredsbend And I think you've become cynical because you've heard your whole life that God is love therefore it's his job to prevent bad things from happening to you and others

@fredsbend But God doesn't always work that way.

fredsbend

6:28 PM

@LCIII That's certainly my main goal for those I love (which does include all children, btw [I have a very soft heart for children]).

@LCIII I therein lies my problem. Why?

LCIII

@fredsbend And that is fantastic. Never stop that.

I think it's because we're not omnipotent. We're not God, therefore we shouldn't be expected to express love the exact same way he does, and doesn't command us to.

God commands us not to judge others, yet he judges.

He commands us to not seek revenge, yet he says that vengeance belongs to him.

But there's something deeper

At some point you have to ask yourself "Do I believe that God is good?". This was the first lie that Satan planted into Ever. "Did God really say....?"

If you decide by faith that God is good, no matter what, then life and hope and eternity fall into place.

Even when terrible things happen to you

And it's not a blind faith either. You are allowed to pray to God and ask him to reveal his goodness to you. Who knows what He'll do?

fredsbend

@LCIII I tried that a lot. The other side of the coin that flipped when I lost faith was that God never seemed real to me personally. I've had a few experiences, but they were weakly correlated with anything that might have been God.

So all the things that happen seem random to me. Not ordained by some super-intelligence.

AND ... God doesn't seem real in my personal life.

Faith to the contrary moves starkly against the grain of what appears to be reality to me.

LCIII

@fredsbend That all makes perfect sense.

fredsbend

In other words, it seem like denial that is really only useful in making sense of what is otherwise meaningless.

@LCIII So how do you keep faith?

My logical faculties have led me here. I believe that faith should be logical.

LCIII

@fredsbend To be honest, sometimes I have doubts. Everyone does. Jacob had to wrestle with God all night and sometimes I have to do that. In fact, last night I did. But what I do is I open up the scriptures and beg God to show me something. Anything that pulls my heart out and slams it on the table. Sometimes it's in Psalms or elsewhere. But for 20 years he's always given it to me.

And I've reached a steady point of faith in my life where any other path seems not only illogical, but stupid (for me)

Maybe you just need to wrestle God a little bit more?

And if you really want to go out on a limb, pray that God reveals to you nearby church to go and pour out these feelings. Flesh and blood interaction is sooo much better than online.

Maybe it's not intellectual arguments that are keeping you from the faith, but a matter of the heart you may not see yet. Maybe you'll run into a believer that was struggling with literally the same things as you and overcame it.

But maybe you won't :)

Maybe the first church God will lead you to will be full of hypocritical idiots. You might need to wrestle a little more with God after that.

@fredsbend I know you're just a stranger on the internet (making our relationship the shallowest possible), but I'll pray that God reveals to you what you're looking for. I believe he will, if you're open to it.

fredsbend

6:51 PM

Maybe.

Like I said though, I'm not going to simply will this logical inconsistency away. I don't see how my heart (which the Bible says is a wicked thing) can help me change reality.

I trust what appears real.

God, as described in Christianity, does not appear real.

With God's description, per Christianity, we should expect certain behaviors, but I don't think we actually witness them. It is therefore logical to conclude that the description is inadequate or false.

So I've settled on false, because we also expect that God to be clear about who he is. When eternal life in on the line here, He sure seems quite vague.

fredsbend

7:23 PM

This post on world building encouraged some provoking thoughts:

44

Q: How would society react if the existence of a god was scientifically proven?

Let's assume that : The scientifically proven god is omnipotent and omniscient The god stays as how it was acting even after the proof, meaning natural disasters still occur, the speed of light is still the way it is, and the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west. The god is a singul...

society religion scientific-development

Some of the posts delved into the idea that there really is nothing that would keep people faithful except for continued proof.

Probably in deleted comments, but one such observation was that the God in the Bible might be real, but his power exaggerated.

His interactions were mostly real and happened every now and then. What was the effect? The Hebrews were always in and out of faith.

Moses came and they all believed for a good while. Then God kind of stopped with the pillar of fire and those things. Then the Hebrews forgot about it because, let's be fair here, do we really believe Grandpa remembers everything or does he tend to exaggerate?

blackfyre

7:42 PM

Hi. I want to discuss possible interpretation or a religious dream that I had. Since it is not on-topic as a question

Its not ontopic, someone suggested to discuss in chat. If some will be interested in giving opinion then let me know. Thanks

Jon Ericson

@fredsbend I think the logical problem of evil is more or less solved:

Alvin Plantinga's free will defense

Alvin Plantinga's version of the free will defense is an attempt to refute the logical problem of evil: the argument that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God in an evil world is a logical contradiction. Plantinga's argument is that "It is possible that God, even being omnipotent, could not create a world with free creatures who never choose evil. Furthermore, it is possible that God, even being omnibenevolent, would desire to create a world which contains evil if moral goodness requires free moral creatures." While Plantinga's free will defense has received fairly...

But I don't really think that makes the problem go away. It just changes the ground on which we grapple with it.

blackfyre

8:42 PM

I am mentioning that dream and its backgrond below, so that someone might share an opinion:
My background is of another Abrahmic religion, not Cristainity though I'm getting inclined towards it. I'm mentioning it here because Christians do belive in same God and prophethod, and I would like to hear their opinion.
I had that dream long ago, when I was quite devoted to my religion. In that dream I saw the prophet of my main religion, he was sitting near a wall and was smiling, above him was a small light bulb emitting some light. In dream, I was much younger than my age(a child), I was standi…

fredsbend

8:56 PM

@JonEricson Well, I'll check that out, but I'm not hopeful I'll be convinced.

@JonEricson As this comment hints on.

@blackfyre I am agnostic recently. I have a few opinions about dreams, but they are secular in foundation.

I do believe that dreams can say something about you and your perceptions, but they cannot say anything outside of your own thoughts.

However, I believe that most dreams are nonsense.

The question is, does this dream say something about you and your thoughts at the time or is it nonsense?

Jon Ericson

@fredsbend His book (which is dense and short) is wonderful reading. But I was left with an empty feeling after reading.

fredsbend

Let's start with why you are suddenly thinking about it again years later. What is it about this dream that has so impressed itself upon you memory?

@JonEricson Ha! Yeah. empty feeling is that other side of the coin I mentioned. The other reason i left the faith.

If that's the case with this book, it certainly won't bring me back to the faith.

But I'll still give it a go when I get some time.

But not its lunch time.

Jon Ericson

Christopher Wright wrote a book called The God I Don't Understand that argues God doesn't ultimately tell us why evil exists. I can't really summarize his conclusions, but his is a stronger argument if you aren't hung up on the logical syllogism: "God is good, evil exists, therefore God cannot exist".

blackfyre

9:22 PM

@fredsbend, well actually how I saw that dream was also interesting to me, I prayed to God to show me my prophet in a dream like He has shown him to other people, and then suddenly I was laying down and was asleep and had that dream. At first I thought, it was my imagination, but I could feel that I had actually been asleep. So, I believe God answered my prayer and showed me a vision. But I now do not understand what it means.

As for, why I am thinking about it now, is because I feel this dream is about my current situation i.e. I was a child in the dream , that I think is my belief level. There was darkness at back, i.e. agnosticism, a man from the darkness told me about the prophet, i.e. the video of that man I saw. It was when I watched that video and returned to my religion, that this dream came back to my mind, and started to make sense

The main confusion is what that dream says about the prophet. Is it okay to not recognize him, or am I making a mistake by being agnostic i.e. I know he is there but I'm chosing to ignore him. There was light at the prophet, but then why is his audience in darkness.

curiousdannii

9:59 PM

I don't often ask for votes here, but I still think this question is on-topic, and it only needs one more reopen vote. (I do not understand Flimzy's opposition to it at all.)

11

Q: According to evangelicals, before the Reformation, who were Christians if "Catholics are not Christians"?

Every now and then I hear non-Catholic Christians, usually evangelicals, say things along the lines of "Catholics are not Christians" or "the Catholic Church does not teach the true gospel". Unless I am mistaken, Catholicism and various Orthodox churches were virtually the only Christian "denomin...

catholicism church-history evangelicalism christian-identity

fredsbend

@curiousdannii I was on the fence, but there you go.

Honestly, I don't usually agree with Flimzy's close reasons.

I think he's a little to pedantic at times.

curiousdannii

@fredsbend Great! I don't want to ignore good arguments, I just don't understand at all why he thinks it's a problematic question.

@fredsbend That's one of the hardest questions: why does God delay? I think it's a question every Christian would have trouble with, because it can't be answered clearly. For the moment I'm able to trust God on the basis of my understanding of his past lovingness, even if I can't see how his love in his delays now

My partner has trouble believing that God is really loving when there are so many people he doesn't seem to be going to save

fredsbend

11:09 PM

@blackfyre Well, it sounds to me that you were already dwelling upon the Prophet long before you had the dream. Your current thoughts were already on him. Dreams are often a jumbled mess of what we have experienced or thought about while last conscious.

In my opinion, you had a dream about the prophet because you were thinking about having dreams about the prophet.

A prophet as "the light of God" is a very common theme. It is not unique to your dream. It is an element that you could have already been mentally primed to think about.

Also, consider how long it's been since the dream.

People already have trouble remembering dreams. Compound that with eyewitness being the most unreliable, you might have actually come to believe some of the elements of the dream that you describe were certainly in the dream, but they were not.

In short, though you are convinced in your memory, it may be deceiving you.

A final point: Interpretation, by nature is vague and can easily be fabricated. For example, I'll make this up on the fly, but from a Christian base assumption (because yours is not that).

The prophet was surrounded by darkness because the world is full of darkness. The prophet was in light, but it was a weak light. His followers were not even in weak light, but in total darkness.

This means the prophet's followers do not find any true light by following the prophet.

And what light that is there, the weak little bulb on the prophet himself, is quite like mans efforts to make his own way and glory than let the true light of God's glory shine on and through him.

You stand there in the middle as a child.

You are innocent, young, and unable to comprehend the gravity of the situation.

That being, you are following a false prophet.

And all the other followers, so convinced of the prophet's legitimacy, are actually lost in darkness all the same.

But even as an impressionable child, and after being told this is God's great prophet (PBUH), you remain apathetic. You remain unchanged ... unimpressed.

Though innocent and easy to deceive, you have one true virtue as a child.

You see things as they really are and are not heavily influenced by societal pressures. You don't have the adult tendency to prefer denial over the glaring truth.

Your dream is telling you that your religion is a man made effort amidst a sea of darkness.

fredsbend

11:27 PM

So you see, you can make a dream mean almost anything.

I turned the whole thing around to make it sound like it was telling you that the prophet is nobody, rather than someone you should recognize.

Another interpretation, the audience is in darkness because most of the prophets followers do not truly listen to him or follow him.

We can lead this in to something that puffs you up as in a unique position to follow the true ways of the prophet.

Again, you see, we can take this and bend it anyway we want.

BUT, like I said previously, I'm recently agnostic, so I'm inclined to not see any significant meaning outside of your own psyche.

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