Do you see yourself as religious (or not)?
Are you sure she wasn't Jehovah's Witness? That's standard JW operating procedure. I was raised Mormon (and my family is all Mormon) and I've never heard of that tactic from my old church. Unless it's some local thing or a new pamphlet. The LDS church has tried to mainstream for the last 30 years and avoids emphasizing the second coming. But I've been out of the loop for 5 years, so who knows?
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No longer trapped in hell. Well, not in the lower levels of hell. But I cannot change my username.
Oh, and I'm a pantheist. I am currently working on a web site that argues that the Bible is pantheist.
If you look at every appearance of God in the Old Testament (you will need a Strong's Concordance and lots of time!) it makes makes the most sense if God is nature, and prophets are his/her avatars. E.g. Moses speaking as God, and for proof he points to the burning bush, the cloud, the thunder, etc. As for the New Testament, John said it best: "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." The "word" is "logos" i.e. logic. God is logic, nature, that which "just is." As God said to Moses, "I am that I am." If we think God has done something bad then we need to reinterpret our thinking: how can nature or logic be bad? It just is.
People who claim to follow God frequently do not do so. How was the medieval church godly in any way? Even the Bible is just a record: their prophets made mistakes. Moses was prevented from entering the promised land because of one of his mistakes. The apostles Mark and Paul argued and could not work together. Probably even Jesus made mistakes: his teaching on divorce seems like a huge miscalculation. The point is that we should follow God, not man.
Then why have the Bible at all? Because we can learn from history. We can also learn from stories, as Aesop showed us. I tend to think the Bible is more historical than critics like to think, but that is a whole other topic.
All of this raises questions about whether God is personal, and what Jesus meant by various phrases, and about prophecy etc., hence the need to make a whole web site.
tl;dr IMO Christians and atheists should agree
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MarketAndChurch
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I follow the 10 commandments and that's about it.
However, I also believe that if God exists, it would go against his nature to put every non believer in hell.
And I also believe that sometimes stealing or some other form of law breaking with good intentions in some situations is alright.
I'm also scientific minded, I doubt that I'll ever be an atheist because there are too much questions left unanswered.
And I'd rather not risk an eternity to make such a daring leap.
exactly. And there are movements in Christianity that are just now beginning to deal with that troubling theological position of whether every human being who is decent but not a believer will go to hell or not.
I acknowledge things like stealing, I think that is what every believer ought to do, even if it is a greater and more moral thing to steal we should still admit it to ourselves because it is so easy then to rationalize it when your heart feels justified. I think the problem I have with Christianity is that there is no gradation in levels of sin, so stealing a paperclip is no different from murder... a sin is a sin and makes you impure, both will lead to a life of damnation in hell.
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ValentineWiggin
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No. I cannot throw in my lot with any religion for several reasons, not least of which is the lack of proper evidence.
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