As a, ahem, Savior's advocate to Why Christianity is wrong, one of D. James Kennedy's books, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born, outlined a number of sociological and historical significances of Jesus' life. At a later time I can share these.
For all the human mistakes of any religion, every religion has done some good, and Christianity has done very much good.
You can be "saved" nomather who you are and where you come from,anyone can become a Christian,which is nice.
If you become a Christian,you can be thought that your past sinds are forgiven...I dont know much how other religions wiew this subject.
The bible sais God is Love,which I totally agree on.
The bible has a lot of good in it,no thoubt.
and change their life for the better,make them feel calm and relaxed at last.
Christianity seems unique in that it wipes the slate clean.
I am not sure even Judaism or Islam have a comparable concept.
Christianity: this is not good weighing more than evil. This is about evil being washed away, being paid for, cha ching, God says, what
evil? I don't have a problem... there isn't any sin.
It is the concept of cleanliness taking away dirt...... because Christianity teaches that Jesus never sinned, and is qualified to clean anybody who will be cleaned and will follow. That is what soap does, right? But Jesus isn't just 99.44%.... He is 100.000000%
Maybe He burns it up now and then..... gets white hot..... like a nuclear bomb
I wonder, what do the other religions do about evil, outnumber it? That wouldn't work in the Christian concept of Existence..... God would have a problem..... "I saw that atomic speck of sin on your foot, come no closer.... "
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Granted, you could fill a thread with the historical abuses of Christianity. My dad made sure to remind me of those. Those who forget their history may end up repeating it. I don't have my Dad's perspective on say, World War II, when Germans who were "Christians" (usually Catholic) were so ready to kill "Jews and Communists and a total of 12 million people".... exactly what was Dad so certain about Christians so fallable about becoming.....
Christianity seems unique in that it wipes the slate clean.
I am not sure even Judaism or Islam have a comparable concept.
Christianity: this is not good weighing more than evil. This is about evil being washed away, being paid for, cha ching, God says, what
evil? I don't have a problem... there isn't any sin.
It is the concept of cleanliness taking away dirt...... because Christianity teaches that Jesus never sinned, and is qualified to clean anybody who will be cleaned and will follow. That is what soap does, right? But Jesus isn't just 99.44%.... He is 100.000000%
Maybe He burns it up now and then..... gets white hot..... like a nuclear bomb
I wonder, what do the other religions do about evil, outnumber it? That wouldn't work in the Christian concept of Existence..... God would have a problem..... "I saw that atomic speck of sin on your foot, come no closer.... "
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Granted, you could fill a thread with the historical abuses of Christianity. My dad made sure to remind me of those. Those who forget their history may end up repeating it. I don't have my Dad's perspective on say, World War II, when Germans who were "Christians" (usually Catholic) were so ready to kill "Jews and Communists and a total of 12 million people".... exactly what was Dad so certain about Christians so fallable about becoming.....
I have a iteresting belief that i'd like to share with you guess who.I believe to one that you call Christ and the one I call teacher or Enlightned one met at some point during their travels a exchanged ideas though choose to interprit them differently. and nether Christ Nor the Buddha ever wrote down there one ideas budda had a scribe and the Bible is the book of scribes.
Well, about eleven to thirteen hundred years after the founding of Christianity the then current crop of Christians decided that the world would be better off if it were Christian, and effectively went to war against the whole world. How long is it since the founding of Islam? Hmmmm........
Oh we had Dirty Bombs and that back then? ;p
"Uh Oh, here comes Jesus with his RPG-7"
Didn't that happen in "Passion of the Christ 2: The revenge of Jesus"?
*grins*
Interesting point Ian..... 0 A.D. + 1100 AD Pope Urban (God Wills It) sends Christians to liberate Jerusalem
0 A.D. + 1900 AD (by the end of the 1800s, Christianity had reached its maximum extent on Earth, especially as czarist Russia reached its maximum extent in Asia)
Islam, I think 622 A.D. (that would make it 1385 years of Islam)
The first widespread Christian colonization of the world was about 1492 (Spain: most of the Western hemisphere, Phillippines)
Not quite yet, but close......
Do you read Nostradamus... scary stuff..... The last pope, Peter the Roman, ministering to the saints in a time of tribulation, (speculated to be a Muslim attack) (St. Malachy back in 11?? AD claimed that that would be the NEXT POPE, we have the penultimate pope Pope Benedict XVI)
Scarier.... worse.... nuclear conflict instead of conventional war with the Muslims
Although I feel much safer in the United States..... they'd have to get their ships past our navy, our planes past our air force
Although, that's what Japan said in World War II.... Japan planned to win World War II, they thought they could sink us on our side of the Pacific, the Long Lance torpedo.... technological innovations.....
I don't think the military is around to protect our freedom. I think they're here to protect our loot (some would say we extorted it from other countries, ruinous foriegn loans, neocolonialism or something that may have made sense in college....) And of course, if something does happen to world agriculture, and we have a mob of a few billion people coming this way, yes, we will need to kill a few billion people.....
I shall do something I don't normally do: parrot a popular saying. "It's not God I have anything against, it's his fanclub."
Which is to say, there are many good parts of the Christian doctrine, but Christians only comply with it to varying degrees. And also, Christianity, like most religions, is really inconsistent--for each good thing, its negation can also be justified on biblical grounds.
Let's be realists, Pakrat. If we can only feed 2 billion people and we have 8 billion people, we are going to lose at least 6 billion people, mostly from war or disease, not from starvation, and it would be fairly quick.
Maybe it would be a good time to lift Christianity's moratorium on suicide and break out the cyanide pills? Actually, no, Jesus would want a few saved souls on the way out, always.
Oh no a thread about positives of christianity has turned into a god the avenging - a war god dooming billions to death through modern day warfare.
I feel stupid actually sharing something personal and positive about Christianity.
Maybe you are right. Maybe I was wrong. God is just a nasty *** who glorifies death.
Rossco-I really liked what you shared in your post. And that has been my experience as well-especially when I remember my very loving grandparents..
They believed in a loving God- which was reflected in how they lived their lives and treated others.
Why choose to believe in a dominating-war-type-angry-god who sits in judgement and must be feared? Especially as we have, apparantly, free will?
Sorry, I've been watching too much Mega Disasters (series on the History Channel cable channel, Arts and Entertainment Networks) again.... but that would explain where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come from....
1. Most of human existence..... sickness, famine, war.... very few people compared to today
2. A paradise, today......
a. Oil-intensive agriculture sucking the groundwater dry, blowing through all the top soil, we can feed 8 billion people, and even some meat animals, TODAY
b. We have modern medicine to fight bacterialogical illness (except for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, viruses are harder to fight, but some can be fought with vaccines)
c. Since World War II, war was become too scary to imagine, in our part of the world, our civilians don't live with war, our military inflicts it elsewheres. Did you know? Until World War II, wars killed more people by disease than by war? (Thank DDT and sulfa drugs/penicillin)
3. So, let's go raise a big family
4. And a few more generations....
5. And wham! Suddenly we can't make enough food any more.
6. Hunger is immediate.
7. War is next. Hungry people won't sit around waiting to starve to death.
8. Illness sets in among hungry people who have weakened immune systems
9. Then you start seeing outright death to starvation
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I should have been a friggin scientist on the History Channel.
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We've also been very lucky with nuclear weapons. We've prevented nuclear war for 58 years since the Soviets detonated Joe 1.
I wonder how long we prevented war after we invented the wooden spear, the flint spear point, the arrow, the sword, the first firearms, the rifled musket, the Gatling gun, the submachine gun....... Or was there already a nuclear war before our recorded history (refer to Doomsday 1999 A.D., Charles Berlitz, curious archeological discoveries in Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa that suggest that when J. Robert Oppeinheimer was reading the Baghavad Gita, he was reading history, not mythology?)
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Heck, everyone knows Christians in a bygone era opened up orphanages and schools and hospitals (along with spreading the Word), and for example, the Seventh Day Adventists are still associated with medicine now.
Not to say God loves that kind of thing, He doesn't, and Christians don't either, but I think that is how the Four Horsemen saddle up.
I am sorry, I have a poor attitude. But then again I did get a diagnosis of major depression.
(You can tell a lot about a guy from what he tapes off TV)
Most Ardent Representative?
Are Christians so scarce around here?
You should see the trunk of my car..... My car can't get through a snowstorm but God forbid you'll survive buried ten feet in snow.... even if the car's battery is dead
Winter -10F sleeping bag
Portable 12V rechargeable battery
Portable heater plugs into 12V cigarette lighter
Snow treads
Yes, I own a copy of The Day After Tomorrow too......
Go ask an optimistic Christian..... in fact we're all optimistic, because the end of the book is optimistic.... we just haven't gotten there yet.
Yupp,and it should be hard to prove there is no life after death...how likly is that?