nathan1977 said:
In response to Irvine's post...
What frustrates me about the time-honored "let me pull the Bible out and show you where you're wrong" argument is that people who do so miss one fundamental fact -- the laws and commandments in the Bible weren't meant for people who didn't follow Him. Both Old and New Testaments were written to people inside the church, not outside it -- helping them to understand their calling, their freedom, their new identity. Our pastor has taken to pointing out recently that the Scriptures don't make sense outside of a relationship with God. It's time to stop making people "behave" before they've even met God, and actually be God to people -- which is going to require a whole new way of doing things. Maycocksean's post about the scriptures being God's way of starting conversations with us is right on the money. The Bible is the collection of God's words to us, meant for us to have common ground to relate with Him. Not meant to be a bludgeon.
i thank you for the post, and greatly appreciate what you've written above, and agree with you, but for the sake of furthering the discussion about what is and what is not antagonistic and how we might unwittingly be antagonistic when we don't intend to be, i want to respond to something right here because i think you might not realize how unintentionally even a paragraph like this might come across as antagonizing to non-Christians or atheists or agnostics.
i understand that you're operating from a different starting point than i am, but in these words seem to be an assumption that, yes, there is a God, that, yes, i am worshipping the right onw, and that, yes, there are people who aren't yet aware of what i know but that's part of my mission is to spread His (and even using the capital "H" is quite assertive) word.
i know we want to steer away from endless qualifications, "i believe" or "imho," but i think what many people do react to is the way in which many christians speak about god as if he's a person and there's something they know that others don't, very much, "i was once like you." it's not that people who are atheist are missing something in their lives or are unaware of God or angrily choosing to ignore God for whatever reasons. some people simply look around and through simply clarity and logic don't think that God exists, that there's no "there" there, that religion is a human fabrication meant to explain the unexplainable and shield us from the paralyzing paradox of the human conditon as we await our impending deaths.
it gets back to a theme that i hit on several times -- that faith requires doubt. and the posts by Christians that rankle me most are those that are assertive of a reality that they feel should be plainly obvious to all, and if you don't see it it's because you've just misunderstood something.
and i fully understand that the basic thought blueprint up above cuts both ways, absolutely, and there are many people who will say things that i might agree with but i, like you, might find the manner in which it was expressed to be disrespectful. but, and maybe this is just me, something seems different when being assertive about earthly issues (from abortion to NoKo to Iraq to taxation to suburbal sprawl) versus being assertive about the metaphysical. i am much more receptive to someone saying, "an embryo deserves the same status as a human being, period" than i am with someone saying, "Jesus died on the cross to absolve us of sin, period. accept it, or not."
but that's me.
I wasn't insulted at all.
