Confused if I'm Christian or not.
Hello, I've recently started thinking about what I believe and honestly it's been a little stressful.
I've been going to a small Christian church ever since I was 7.
But it wasn't up until now that I started thinking "do i believe in God or not?"
So I thought maybe getting other people's opinions about why they believe in God, and why they don't, might help a little.
I want to gather info from both sides, so if you could comment your opinion that would be much appreciated!
1
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5 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.I think by questioning it you might be answering your own question. According to the Bible any amount of doubt, or lack of faith rather, would constitute damnation. So by you not being sure you might be answering some of your own questions. However, here's my two cents. I have always had a battle mentally with the belief in a higher power because personally i have a hard time believing it all came from nothing. So I took a kind of deist approach to religion and would now consider myself agnostic or maybe even a pantheist (still battling it myself) but what i can tell you is that personally I doubt the existence of a Christian god. Or any of the abrahamic religions. It's hard because truly you have so many existential questions that can truly only be answered when you die. So it comes down to "faith" but I truly think that you can't have real "faith", at least according to Christian doctrine, if you question anything. Have you tried to consider Paschals wager to see if that helps? The belief that it's better to believe and be wrong than to not believe and be wrong? Maybe that will help you. I have many agnostic friends who stand by that thought and it actually brought them more into religion and less into questioning anything. It's difficult but you'll figure out exactly what you believe or don't believe. If you do determine that you do believe maybe at that point you'll realize that questioning it at one point actually strengthened your faith.
RickyCharette
Level 3
July 31, 2018
0
I never learned anything that would convince me that god exists. I'm not a Christian because the one requirement to be a Christian in the church I grew up attending was to believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God. Ergo, if I haven't been convinced of the existence of god then obviously I don't believe that he had a son. I took a religious studies class in college where I learned that Christians aren't the only ones with ridiculously stupid beliefs.
People stopping believing makes prefect sense to me, I'm amazed that they ever believed in the first place.
PhoebeCat
Level 7
July 31, 2018
0
Do you believe in someone above the natural order, who created everything (whether in 6 days or 6 billion years)? Do you believe that person has a specific interest in your life and fate?
Do you believe people have souls that survive death, and go to some kind of afterlife? Is there a God in charge of that afterlife?
If your answer to those questions is yes... you then have to read the Bible and ask, "Do I believe that the God described in this book is the God who is really in charge of the universe? Could a God petty enough to worry about what kind of animals people eat [biblegateway.com] and who actually calls a woman "impure" during her period [biblehub.com] also devise the laws of physics?
Would that God choose 12 tribes living in the desert to be the only ones to hear his message, and then furthermore send himself, in the form of his son (because Jesus is also God, and God is God) to be a sacrifice to himself to atone for the sins of everyone on the planet... but only if they had heard of this sacrifice, and accepted the bargain? Is this a just bargain to begin with? Would you accept someone else taking a death sentence for a crime you committed? And what if the death sentence were for the equivalent of littering?
Would a God capable of creating the universe care if you have sex outside marriage? And send you to eternal torture for that "crime", unless you accepted the Jesus bargain? Because that's what the Bible states, literally.
These are the kind of questions, going back to my 20s, that led me to disbelieve in the literal truth of Christianity. Christianity can be a metaphor, resurrection considered as the death of our animal consciousness and the rebirth of self as a spiritually aware person... but even that was not a satisfying answer to me eventually. I had to admit that there is almost certainly no divine creator, and certainly not the one described in the Bible. That book is the mythology of the Hebrews, nothing more.
But if you truly believe it... then you are a Christian. If you have doubts, you owe it to yourself to explore them honestly and see where that exploration leads. I suggest The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins as a good place to start reading.
Paul4747
Level 8
July 31, 2018
3
You lay that out well. Do you believe in superstition or reality?
@rogueflyer I believe I need to get to bed now, but I will answer more fully in the morning... deal?
@Paul4747 If you're in Michigan it must be late. BTW the question was possed to the original post.
@rogueflyer Ok, you accidentally posted it as a reply to me. I misunderstood. Sorry...
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