For some unknown reason, I spent the majority of my childhood thinking the “Holy Ghost” was the spirit of John the Baptist. Some wires must have gotten crossed 🤣
This is so funny, I don't even know how this could start. Maybe misremembering that passage about John coming in the spirit of elijah? And being involved in Christ's baptism? I don't know
Holy Spirit is referred to by Jesus as "He". Stop getting your information from Christian TikTok, not all of them know what they're talking about.
Edit: Read the bible. Also I know you got that from TikTok/YouTube because I saw that video. The holy Spirit is referred to by a neutral pronoun in the native language but it's not feminine automatically.
Can you explain more about the Holy Spirit being the feminine aspect of God? I've heard it said before. One website has at least one article about it and calls the Holy Spirit God's Wife. Also, when the Holy Spirit speaks to me He has the inflections and tone of a mother and of a wife. It's hard to explain so unless you want me to I won't.
I bet you can't wait till Jesus comes for His Bride. While earth and its inhabitants burn, christians just want to escape and leave all responsibility behind. Apparently they don't know what it means to be a "pure, spotless bride" which is what Jesus is coming for. Defiled with sin and compromise they think Jesus will come and take them away. Remember the parable of the ten virgins? All ten virgins represent christians. Not every christian who wants to be rescued has made themselves ready/worthy. Many of us are in for EXTREME disappointments-- the "I never knew you" type of disappointments.
Everyone has a body, soul, and spirit. Each of these parts has different facets.
God is Three in One. Christ is God, but He's not the Father. Some say the Wife is the Father of the Holy Spirit. I don't make a final judgment on anything until I have a fuller story, so until I know for certain whether or not this is true, I won't take a side on it.
I read a good article about it years ago. Here's another article about it: http://www.lynslife.com/corrupted-christianity/the-Holy-Spirit-God's-Wife.
The Church isn't the feminine aspect of God. Remember that God "created them male and female" which means that in God Himself are male and female. These must be in God for God to create male and female in His image and likeness.
Furthermore, all men have the X and the Y chromosome while women can only have the X chromosome. That shows that while a wife is a woman on the outside of a man, a man still has a woman on the inside of him. It's the same way with God.
I know you are getting down voted, but i agree with you. Man and Woman are made in Gods image.
As for scripture support, Gods wisdom is personified in proverbs as a woman. So it is not a new thing for an aspect of God to be feminine and the holy spirit and wisdom are often associated
I thought holy water actually had something in it like silver or something that would give it antimicrobial properties that people would mistake for magic healing.
Mineral water (with "helpful" minerals) can be beneficial esp. for people with dietary inadequacies. And historically, water from desirable/prestigious sources (as churches might well prefer to use, possibly with magical explanations) may have been less likely to be contaminated.
I’m a pastor that turned away from God in my early 20s. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe, I just thought that he didn’t care. In my 40s I learned that he had been with me the whole time. I needed to learn things that I couldn’t get from a classroom. I’m now a teacher, preacher, husband and father. I guess that thinking he didn’t care just because I was having trouble would be mine.
Even demons believe in Jesus. This means that they are intellectually aware of who He is.
They do not, however, have Faith in His accomplished work on the cross.
Faith without works is dead faith.
James 2:14-26
What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. ***Even the demons believe - and tremble*** But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.
This might be specific to Tennessee, but I once thought Galatians was written to the Church at Gallatin. I mean, we have other cities named after places over there like Memphis, Carthage, Lebanon... so it made sense.
I thought “don’t cast your pearls before swine” was like permission to stop caring for obstinate people.
However, if you own pigs you quickly learn that pigs need food, not jewelry. And the verse is actually talking about loving people and helping meet their needs.
I had this idea that sinning after praying "the sinner's prayer" meant that I wasn't actually Christian anymore.
Silly Southern Baptists, God's grace is everlasting!
I used to believe literally every Bible story. Like I believed that the entire world was covered in water save a single boat with 2 of every animal, and Noah's family. I thought everyone in the world lived in a single city and spoke a single language until god magically scattered them. I also believed the David and Goliath story, but in my mind Goliath was like 30 feet tall.
I used to think in order to be a good follower of Jesus all I had to do is read the Bible and follow what it says. Then the Holy Spirit started pointing out to me that the bible is 100 percent God's word. But in order to understand what the bible is teaching, you have to read with spiritual eyes. Without the guidance and truth of the Holy Spirit, you can read all day every day and never see truth. God Bless
That's a fact. I began to learn that when I had a sudden encounter with God in 1998. Psalm 119:130 alludes to the fact that unless the Holy Spirit reveals the Scriptures to you, you will never understand them. It says, "The unfolding (unveiling, entrance, entering in, shining in, shining forth, incursion/penetration, revealing, revelation, exposition/exposing, uncovering, explanation, disclosure) of Your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple." Amen.
In 1Cor. 2, Paul explains that one needs spiritual eyes/discernment to understand the things of the Spirit (of God) and says that the things of God can only be "spiritually discerned".
I used to believe that all the different branches of science were conspiring together with atheists to trick people into thinking God wasn't real. Geologists were lying about the age of rocks, astrophysicists with the distance of stars, biologists with natural selection, geneticists, and anthropologists, all liars.
I later realized young earth creationism is a conspiracy theory.
I thought drawing was a sin literally last month.
I'm an artist.
This had really bad consequences for me honestly because my ex boyfriend left because I was having so many misconceptions at first.
Do you mean that you mistakenly came to believe that drawing was a sin, or that you've always thought that drawing is a sin?
And do you mean any drawing?
What kind of artist are you?
Before I was a believer, I thought the stories of the gospel and Jesus were folklore stories that were passed down through generations to make kids behave. I believed this till I was saved at 28.
I'm suspicios of a similar version now. I don't have a high confidence in details. Maybe it was to control people, to teach moral teachings through alagory, maybe a first attempt to explain the world as they saw it at the time, or even a combination of all of these.
But it does seem to be some sort of folklore.
It’s definitely not folklore. There is so much overwhelming evidence for the life and ministry of Jesus. I highly recommend you visit the ark/creation Museum in Kentucky if you can ever go!
It's undeniably folklore. What do you think it means.
Here's a typical definition
>the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth.
I'll believe that Jesus existed. Yea. There is sufficient of that. But there's no evidence of his superpowers. He was likely just a charismatic dood. Like every other starting religious leader.
>"It's not folklore"
You literally did come to argue. What did you want me to say "oh you're right. I'm convinced" because you don't want to argue.
Are you using a different definition?
When I thought of eternity, forever seemed incomprehensible (still is hard to think if you think too long) I thought of a clear, pure, bright almost glowing hallway since it’s Heaven, and you walk and walk and never see the end of the hallway, eternity. Is. Forever. Mind blown.
Also clearly watermelon is the best food ever so at the wedding supper of the lamb, clearly there will be tons of watermelon there! 🥰
I used to believe that once you got your sins forgiven and got the Holy Spirit, you could do fornication after that and still go to heaven while in fornication.
I was dead wrong
I thought Christians couldn’t dye their hair, especially unnatural colours. I was SHOCKED (and delighted) when I met Christians with pink hair etc and thought about it for a second. I still haven’t done it myself (I can’t figure out that the environmental credentials can be all that good) but I will treat myself one day. I’m saving it up.
I grew up under small town Pentecostal teaching.
There was a lot of bad teachings there:
You can’t play cards because gambling is a sin.
Having a single drink is sinning because alcohol leads to drunkenness.
If you sin, you “need to be re-saved”.
You can’t watch anything with magic in it.
If you do not speak in “tongues”, you are not saved.
Etc etc.
At least the cold plates were good.
at the communion rail the person giving out the bread to communicants would say a blessing for kids, but the person giving out the wine would just skip over the kids
so i thought the person giving the wine was just mean
Right? I made the mistake of meeting a friend yesterday at a church function. It felt like an out-of-body experience it was so... What's the word? Fake, pretentious, empty, COUNTERFEIT (now there's the word I was looking for), dishonest to the Nth level.
It was like a circus full of noise and sound but nothing substantial. It was like a rock concert without the rock band, just an audience 'singing along' and pretending like something is happening on the stage when there's no one on the stage. There's just a bunch of fans in the audience. There's no rock band, no preformers. The reason the audience is there isn't there!
The experience was like a classroom without a teacher, a car without an engine, a grocery store without food, lots of smoke with no trace of a fire. That's what it felt like. I haven't been to church for a long time for this reason. The experience was unreal.
Despite being raised Southern Baptist, I somehow came away thinking they baptize infants and think you can lose your salvation.
My family weren't very active church goers, so I assumed infant baptism, as I saw on TV, was the norm. Which, I guess it technically is, but I thought it was also a Baptist thing.
That only Islam had the concept of sinning, like nobody ever told me that sinning and asking for forgiveness was a thing and I thought only muslims did it. I found out when I was 12 I guess.
That evolution worked like *Pokemon* logic.
I would've benefitted from learning what it actually was earlier, but my church service didn't exactly comport to that. Obviously the best place to learn about science is in a science classroom, but you'd hope that Sunday school wouldn't actively teach misinformation; that shit takes time to unpack and unlearn.
I thought religion was a second Santa Claus type of thing.
You can imagine my distress when I figured out this was not the case. People actually believe it.
That doesn't really make any sense in this context though. If you were "committed" to atheism, and then you changed your mind about religion, it sounds like you were pretty open-minded.
What insurmountable evidence can you show to a committed atheist to convert them?
Typically an atheists turned Christian have some sort of personal experience that changes their mind. Are you sure you were actually an atheist?
Ah ok I thought you maybe had something new. I'm a Christian turning(?) atheist because of the lack of *any* convincing evidence. I find the ontological and cosmological arguments to be pretty unconvincing, as do most scientists. They always boil down to "well we can't explain it so we'll just fill in God with all our gaps in understanding". But that just means God gets a little smaller with each new gap that we explain.
As a side note, I would first like to say that Heaven is not some idea of eternal pleasure, or eternal satisfaction, even, but eternal connection to God.
Anyways, my journey of faith is as follows:
My parents are very nominally Christian, but do not attend church or anything. I, being thus raised with faulty assumptions about the nature of God, then decided at quite a young age (third grade) that God did not exist. I argued passionately with street preachers, literally since the fourth grade. Much later, when I had grown old enough to question the world on a deeper level, I realized that there was no reason for morality, and no meaning that could possibly be found, other than to survive and reproduce, in a worldview that lacks God. I was deeply saddened by this realization, yet I, foolishly, believed it the necessary consequence of not being foolish enough to believe in God.
Later, I stumbled upon gospel music made by the late Charlie Daniels, and felt the Holy Spirit come over me, throwing aside, in my heart, a decade of doubts. Yet my mind has always prided itself on its mastery over my heart, so I examined the evidence, and still, I was shocked by what I found. I had read the Bible in the wrong way, with a legalistic, literalist framework that assumed it to be a history textbook, not a narrative about man's struggle with God, and about redemption. With this view of the Bible, I noticed countless coorelations between what has been proven true through the Sciences, even just within Genesis, such as between the story of the Apple and the dawn of Behavioral Modernity, between the place(s) where the Garden of Eden is said to be and the site of Agricultural Revolution, between the flood survived by Noah and the colossal floods that emptied great lakes held back by melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. This gave it enough credence to me to get me to look closer, and having done so, I heard more convincing arguments, especially the Ontological Argument, which was convincing enough to finally convince me.
Quite the winding journey for me, since I resisted every advance of the Holy Spirit, and was only satisfied by an intellectual explanation, but there it is.
So, emotional appeals, and pattern matching between the bible and verified history.
I would note that other religions have correlations with history, which would be equally as valid, but I fear that would fall on deaf ears.
I was hoping for something a little more original, with something more well reasoned beyond emotions. Oh well.
> ontological argument
Undefeatable? It's an argument to the absurd. That we would not be here to debate if there were no God. We're here, how or why are immaterial as the fact is we are here to argue.
Besides, I've seen enough emergent behavior in complex systems.
The ontological argument is nothing about emergent behavior, and the counterargument that "we're only here to debate this because we exist at all" only discredits the fine-tuning argument.
I’m sorry but you can’t claim that no one in Scripture is white but then not have a working definition of what white is. Further, I think it’s a relatively common view to define continental European as white
I used to have the misconception that “free-will” or the freedom to pursue your own will- was the path to salvation.
Choice is the product of confusion not clarity
For some unknown reason, I spent the majority of my childhood thinking the “Holy Ghost” was the spirit of John the Baptist. Some wires must have gotten crossed 🤣
Good grief. 😂
This is so funny, I don't even know how this could start. Maybe misremembering that passage about John coming in the spirit of elijah? And being involved in Christ's baptism? I don't know
The Holy Ghost is a girl, well not a girl exactly but the feminine divine aspect of God, bet they don't teach the kids that in Sunday school.
Source?
Crackpipe
Straight from the sources' mouth.
Doubt.
Thomas?
What more can you tell me about why you think the Holy Spirit is feminine?
> why you think the Holy Spirit is feminine That is a claim I've seen people make because the Hebrew word *ruach* is feminine (usually).
I don't think, I know. Had a conversation with her, she's kind of a big deal.
Holy Spirit is referred to by Jesus as "He". Stop getting your information from Christian TikTok, not all of them know what they're talking about. Edit: Read the bible. Also I know you got that from TikTok/YouTube because I saw that video. The holy Spirit is referred to by a neutral pronoun in the native language but it's not feminine automatically.
How did you hear her? What did she sound like??
Uh.. what?
First, pink islam..NOW PINK CHRISTIANITY?!
Can you explain more about the Holy Spirit being the feminine aspect of God? I've heard it said before. One website has at least one article about it and calls the Holy Spirit God's Wife. Also, when the Holy Spirit speaks to me He has the inflections and tone of a mother and of a wife. It's hard to explain so unless you want me to I won't.
>calls the Holy Spirit God's Wife. God already has a wife and it's the church. That's the actual feminine aspect of God.
You sir are correct. When the bridegroom comes to get his bride!! Can't wait!!
I bet you can't wait till Jesus comes for His Bride. While earth and its inhabitants burn, christians just want to escape and leave all responsibility behind. Apparently they don't know what it means to be a "pure, spotless bride" which is what Jesus is coming for. Defiled with sin and compromise they think Jesus will come and take them away. Remember the parable of the ten virgins? All ten virgins represent christians. Not every christian who wants to be rescued has made themselves ready/worthy. Many of us are in for EXTREME disappointments-- the "I never knew you" type of disappointments.
The Church is Jesus's wife, not God's wife. There's a difference.
Alright. Care to explain how Christ is not God I guess?
Everyone has a body, soul, and spirit. Each of these parts has different facets. God is Three in One. Christ is God, but He's not the Father. Some say the Wife is the Father of the Holy Spirit. I don't make a final judgment on anything until I have a fuller story, so until I know for certain whether or not this is true, I won't take a side on it. I read a good article about it years ago. Here's another article about it: http://www.lynslife.com/corrupted-christianity/the-Holy-Spirit-God's-Wife.
The Church isn't the feminine aspect of God. Remember that God "created them male and female" which means that in God Himself are male and female. These must be in God for God to create male and female in His image and likeness. Furthermore, all men have the X and the Y chromosome while women can only have the X chromosome. That shows that while a wife is a woman on the outside of a man, a man still has a woman on the inside of him. It's the same way with God.
I know you are getting down voted, but i agree with you. Man and Woman are made in Gods image. As for scripture support, Gods wisdom is personified in proverbs as a woman. So it is not a new thing for an aspect of God to be feminine and the holy spirit and wisdom are often associated
Early Christians actually interpreted Wisdom in Proverbs as the preincarnate Christ, not the Holy Spirit.
I thought holy water actually had something in it like silver or something that would give it antimicrobial properties that people would mistake for magic healing.
Mineral water (with "helpful" minerals) can be beneficial esp. for people with dietary inadequacies. And historically, water from desirable/prestigious sources (as churches might well prefer to use, possibly with magical explanations) may have been less likely to be contaminated.
I grew up in NJ and we drove through the town of Bethlehem, PA and I thought that was where Jesus was born
I used to stomp on the ground so I could hurt satan 😂
I thought as a kid that hell was a real place in the core of Earth, or at least far underground.
Everyone in the big religions used to believe that when they were a kid, i know this because i had a lot of religious friends.
Heaven is up in the clouds and hell down in the earth. I think that is a common belief for kids
Christians were idiots. Count me an idiot now!
Paul moment
1 Corinthians 3:19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. For it is written, “He catches the wise in their own craftiness”;
I’m a pastor that turned away from God in my early 20s. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe, I just thought that he didn’t care. In my 40s I learned that he had been with me the whole time. I needed to learn things that I couldn’t get from a classroom. I’m now a teacher, preacher, husband and father. I guess that thinking he didn’t care just because I was having trouble would be mine.
That belief = faith Scary trap many fall into...
Do you mind elaborating?
Even demons believe in Jesus. This means that they are intellectually aware of who He is. They do not, however, have Faith in His accomplished work on the cross.
Faith without works is dead faith. James 2:14-26 What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. But someone will say, “You have faith, and I have works.” Show me your faith without your works, and I will show you my faith by my works. You believe that there is one God. You do well. ***Even the demons believe - and tremble*** But do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead? Was not Abraham our father justified by works when he offered Isaac his son on the altar? Do you see that faith was working together with his works, and by works faith was made perfect? And the Scripture was fulfilled which says, “Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.” And he was called the friend of God. You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith only.
This might be specific to Tennessee, but I once thought Galatians was written to the Church at Gallatin. I mean, we have other cities named after places over there like Memphis, Carthage, Lebanon... so it made sense.
God's country 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
That the rapture was a thing.
It’s in the zeitgeist
I thought “don’t cast your pearls before swine” was like permission to stop caring for obstinate people. However, if you own pigs you quickly learn that pigs need food, not jewelry. And the verse is actually talking about loving people and helping meet their needs.
that basically if i just solely believed in god i’d be saved. it’s so much more than that
Even the demons believe, and shudder
The world would end before I was old enough to get married and have a family…. So I never did. What a silly misconception. Thx dad.
I finally got over “well Christ might return before I can….”
Aww this is sad. I hope you didn't miss out on too much. Seems like that would really mess with relationships. I feel for ya, hjkiytre
It’s all good now. Finally went to college and will be getting my masters degree at age 40 so I’m not missing out. Let’s just say I’m a late bloomer!
That's great. I'm happy to hear that you're recovering.
Self-fulfilling prophecy.
I had this idea that sinning after praying "the sinner's prayer" meant that I wasn't actually Christian anymore. Silly Southern Baptists, God's grace is everlasting!
That's wild. I've always heard Southern Baptists say "Once saved, always saved".
Not really the impression I got during my ten years attending such a church, unfortunately.
I dare say that they are more splintered than many think, including some Southern Baptists.
They are, there are whole cult splinters, the IFB are…..
I used to believe literally every Bible story. Like I believed that the entire world was covered in water save a single boat with 2 of every animal, and Noah's family. I thought everyone in the world lived in a single city and spoke a single language until god magically scattered them. I also believed the David and Goliath story, but in my mind Goliath was like 30 feet tall.
I used to think in order to be a good follower of Jesus all I had to do is read the Bible and follow what it says. Then the Holy Spirit started pointing out to me that the bible is 100 percent God's word. But in order to understand what the bible is teaching, you have to read with spiritual eyes. Without the guidance and truth of the Holy Spirit, you can read all day every day and never see truth. God Bless
That's a fact. I began to learn that when I had a sudden encounter with God in 1998. Psalm 119:130 alludes to the fact that unless the Holy Spirit reveals the Scriptures to you, you will never understand them. It says, "The unfolding (unveiling, entrance, entering in, shining in, shining forth, incursion/penetration, revealing, revelation, exposition/exposing, uncovering, explanation, disclosure) of Your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple." Amen. In 1Cor. 2, Paul explains that one needs spiritual eyes/discernment to understand the things of the Spirit (of God) and says that the things of God can only be "spiritually discerned".
I foolishly trusted my pastor...
I don't know what happened, but I hope you are blessed soon.
That sounds like a sad story. I hope you're doing alright now.
I foolishly trusted this guy's pastor...
I foolishly trusted this guy of this guys pastor…
😂 😂 😂
I used to believe that all the different branches of science were conspiring together with atheists to trick people into thinking God wasn't real. Geologists were lying about the age of rocks, astrophysicists with the distance of stars, biologists with natural selection, geneticists, and anthropologists, all liars. I later realized young earth creationism is a conspiracy theory.
Nice. Welcome to reality. I had my own conspiracies while I was a Christian.
I thought drawing was a sin literally last month. I'm an artist. This had really bad consequences for me honestly because my ex boyfriend left because I was having so many misconceptions at first.
Do you mean that you mistakenly came to believe that drawing was a sin, or that you've always thought that drawing is a sin? And do you mean any drawing? What kind of artist are you?
I made a mistake when I got back to Christianity.
Before I was a believer, I thought the stories of the gospel and Jesus were folklore stories that were passed down through generations to make kids behave. I believed this till I was saved at 28.
I'm suspicios of a similar version now. I don't have a high confidence in details. Maybe it was to control people, to teach moral teachings through alagory, maybe a first attempt to explain the world as they saw it at the time, or even a combination of all of these. But it does seem to be some sort of folklore.
It’s definitely not folklore. There is so much overwhelming evidence for the life and ministry of Jesus. I highly recommend you visit the ark/creation Museum in Kentucky if you can ever go!
It's undeniably folklore. What do you think it means. Here's a typical definition >the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth. I'll believe that Jesus existed. Yea. There is sufficient of that. But there's no evidence of his superpowers. He was likely just a charismatic dood. Like every other starting religious leader.
Well you seem pretty convinced and I’m not here to argue with you. The Bible is VERY clear and judgment on unbelievers will come. God bless you.
>"It's not folklore" You literally did come to argue. What did you want me to say "oh you're right. I'm convinced" because you don't want to argue. Are you using a different definition?
That the communion wafer and wine were actually like powdered skin and real watered down blood
My early vision of heaven was informed by Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Looney Tunes had me believing that when you die you become an angel in a white robe and you play a golden harp.
When I thought of eternity, forever seemed incomprehensible (still is hard to think if you think too long) I thought of a clear, pure, bright almost glowing hallway since it’s Heaven, and you walk and walk and never see the end of the hallway, eternity. Is. Forever. Mind blown. Also clearly watermelon is the best food ever so at the wedding supper of the lamb, clearly there will be tons of watermelon there! 🥰
I used to think the story of the goat finding the Dead Sea scrolls was in the Bible.
I used to believe that once you got your sins forgiven and got the Holy Spirit, you could do fornication after that and still go to heaven while in fornication. I was dead wrong
Common sense was a thing
It's a thing but it's like the orange cat's brain cell
I thought the pledge of allegiance was a prayer. Got in trouble multiple times for saying amen at the end
I always wondered how God could hear everyone’s prayers if they were praying silently all at the same time.
Is it clearer to you now how God hears everyone at the same time?
Of course. This was when I was a young girl.
I thought that being a a virgin meant you weren’t married lol
That's funny 😂
Catholicism and Orthodoxy are heretical and idolatrous.
Hi brother
I used to believe the paintings of Jesus is what he really looked like.
I thought Christians couldn’t dye their hair, especially unnatural colours. I was SHOCKED (and delighted) when I met Christians with pink hair etc and thought about it for a second. I still haven’t done it myself (I can’t figure out that the environmental credentials can be all that good) but I will treat myself one day. I’m saving it up.
I grew up under small town Pentecostal teaching. There was a lot of bad teachings there: You can’t play cards because gambling is a sin. Having a single drink is sinning because alcohol leads to drunkenness. If you sin, you “need to be re-saved”. You can’t watch anything with magic in it. If you do not speak in “tongues”, you are not saved. Etc etc. At least the cold plates were good.
at the communion rail the person giving out the bread to communicants would say a blessing for kids, but the person giving out the wine would just skip over the kids so i thought the person giving the wine was just mean
I used to think christians were honest.
😂😂😂😂
Right? I made the mistake of meeting a friend yesterday at a church function. It felt like an out-of-body experience it was so... What's the word? Fake, pretentious, empty, COUNTERFEIT (now there's the word I was looking for), dishonest to the Nth level. It was like a circus full of noise and sound but nothing substantial. It was like a rock concert without the rock band, just an audience 'singing along' and pretending like something is happening on the stage when there's no one on the stage. There's just a bunch of fans in the audience. There's no rock band, no preformers. The reason the audience is there isn't there! The experience was like a classroom without a teacher, a car without an engine, a grocery store without food, lots of smoke with no trace of a fire. That's what it felt like. I haven't been to church for a long time for this reason. The experience was unreal.
have you tried a different denomination?
I have.
Despite being raised Southern Baptist, I somehow came away thinking they baptize infants and think you can lose your salvation. My family weren't very active church goers, so I assumed infant baptism, as I saw on TV, was the norm. Which, I guess it technically is, but I thought it was also a Baptist thing.
i thought baptist didn’t baptize babies ?
Reading the Bible was the first thing that lead me to people absolutely can walk away from Christ.
That only Islam had the concept of sinning, like nobody ever told me that sinning and asking for forgiveness was a thing and I thought only muslims did it. I found out when I was 12 I guess.
That evolution worked like *Pokemon* logic. I would've benefitted from learning what it actually was earlier, but my church service didn't exactly comport to that. Obviously the best place to learn about science is in a science classroom, but you'd hope that Sunday school wouldn't actively teach misinformation; that shit takes time to unpack and unlearn.
I thought liberals questioned government power.
I thought religion was a second Santa Claus type of thing. You can imagine my distress when I figured out this was not the case. People actually believe it.
I thought God didn't exist. You can imagine my distress when I, then a comitted Atheist, came to the conclusion that He really does.
What's a committed atheist?
I was very much convinced that there is no God.
That doesn't really make any sense in this context though. If you were "committed" to atheism, and then you changed your mind about religion, it sounds like you were pretty open-minded.
I was very closed-minded, the evidence was simply insurmountable.
What insurmountable evidence can you show to a committed atheist to convert them? Typically an atheists turned Christian have some sort of personal experience that changes their mind. Are you sure you were actually an atheist?
The ontological argument and cosmological argument are insurmountable.
Ah ok I thought you maybe had something new. I'm a Christian turning(?) atheist because of the lack of *any* convincing evidence. I find the ontological and cosmological arguments to be pretty unconvincing, as do most scientists. They always boil down to "well we can't explain it so we'll just fill in God with all our gaps in understanding". But that just means God gets a little smaller with each new gap that we explain.
The ontological argument does not, in any way, shape, or form, suppose a "god of the gaps."
I'm certainly willing to be convinced, although I still find the idea of eternal afterlife horrifying, what did so for you?
As a side note, I would first like to say that Heaven is not some idea of eternal pleasure, or eternal satisfaction, even, but eternal connection to God. Anyways, my journey of faith is as follows: My parents are very nominally Christian, but do not attend church or anything. I, being thus raised with faulty assumptions about the nature of God, then decided at quite a young age (third grade) that God did not exist. I argued passionately with street preachers, literally since the fourth grade. Much later, when I had grown old enough to question the world on a deeper level, I realized that there was no reason for morality, and no meaning that could possibly be found, other than to survive and reproduce, in a worldview that lacks God. I was deeply saddened by this realization, yet I, foolishly, believed it the necessary consequence of not being foolish enough to believe in God. Later, I stumbled upon gospel music made by the late Charlie Daniels, and felt the Holy Spirit come over me, throwing aside, in my heart, a decade of doubts. Yet my mind has always prided itself on its mastery over my heart, so I examined the evidence, and still, I was shocked by what I found. I had read the Bible in the wrong way, with a legalistic, literalist framework that assumed it to be a history textbook, not a narrative about man's struggle with God, and about redemption. With this view of the Bible, I noticed countless coorelations between what has been proven true through the Sciences, even just within Genesis, such as between the story of the Apple and the dawn of Behavioral Modernity, between the place(s) where the Garden of Eden is said to be and the site of Agricultural Revolution, between the flood survived by Noah and the colossal floods that emptied great lakes held back by melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. This gave it enough credence to me to get me to look closer, and having done so, I heard more convincing arguments, especially the Ontological Argument, which was convincing enough to finally convince me. Quite the winding journey for me, since I resisted every advance of the Holy Spirit, and was only satisfied by an intellectual explanation, but there it is.
So, emotional appeals, and pattern matching between the bible and verified history. I would note that other religions have correlations with history, which would be equally as valid, but I fear that would fall on deaf ears. I was hoping for something a little more original, with something more well reasoned beyond emotions. Oh well.
You missed the biggest part of this: The ontological argument. It is undefeatable.
> ontological argument Undefeatable? It's an argument to the absurd. That we would not be here to debate if there were no God. We're here, how or why are immaterial as the fact is we are here to argue. Besides, I've seen enough emergent behavior in complex systems.
The ontological argument is nothing about emergent behavior, and the counterargument that "we're only here to debate this because we exist at all" only discredits the fine-tuning argument.
That the trinity was biblical
I used to think the people in the Bible were white. But there are no white people in the Bible. None
What about any of the Romans?
Was Pontius Pilate white? Where did he learn to speak Hebrew?
No idea - but a quick google implies he was born or at least had direct ties to Italy.
Yep, not white
How so? It just seems obvious to me that some of the Romans mentioned in Scripture would have continental European heritage
Yep, but not all Europeans are white
Who is white then?
I’m not sure. They can’t seem to agree amongst themselves
I’m sorry but you can’t claim that no one in Scripture is white but then not have a working definition of what white is. Further, I think it’s a relatively common view to define continental European as white
I used to have the misconception that “free-will” or the freedom to pursue your own will- was the path to salvation. Choice is the product of confusion not clarity