your thoughts on being saved

Seems to me it's not how many times one can be saved but by whom
And meThinks it is You, Yourself

Also, Heaven is a place that only you can define and enjoy the fruits of

 

No, god's original purpose was for man to live forever on the Earth. Adam eating the fruit cause a bit of a detour but that is still God's purpose for the Earth and mankind.

Well if you feel that getting snockered all the time and getting up the next day so sick that you wish you were dead, is a good time then you are probably on the right road but if you want a little more out of life than being wasted all the time, then I recommend the bibles teachings.

As for "hell" it is the common grave of mankind and not what most people of when the word "hell" is used.

Well in the words of my favorite book the Bible; "For the living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all" (Ecclesiastes 9:5)

There is a heaven but we aren't going there. There is a possibility of a resurrection but that is not to heaven but a return to life on Earth.

 

So a human interrupted and changed plans for the entire planet set by a god that is almighty.

You see no problem with this?

 

God created the world with certain criteria such as occupying the earth and having children. If those two human's didn't do what they did, they would have had children in the garden that was a paradise and God's plan would have continued.

But God never revoked his criteria for man to live on earth and start families but he did now had man no longer take of the fruit of life to live forever; That was the decision of the two people. It's true that now mankind have lost their right from inheriting these things from the original two humans but God is putting in place a road for us to enable our return.

Even though death entered the world because of Adam, life can still be very good, because God did not remove all too much about the paradise from us. We can still start families, have friends, fun and all the good life has to offer. The only differences is that we now die and can suffer from pain and must work to survive, but even then there is a comfort of the promise that this will not last forever for those that love him.

 

Ok,I'm just trying to put into words some thoughts I have on this,so if i don't say it right,PLEASE don't get all righteous on me. . . .

We are supposedly made in God's image.

So-what point or use does The Almighty Creator have for appendicitis,toothache,diarrhoea,the common cold,rickets,arthritis,indigestion,et al?

After all,wouldn't a Being who is all powerful and unimpaired by precedents produce a working model of Himself without such ailments and flaws?

I understand we're merely 'images' of Himself...but after all,if YOU were asked to produce a model of YOURself,would you REALLY give that model acne,a pot belly,buck teeth and a stoop,when you could come up with a robust,nobly-countenanced image of yourself?

Thus giving us lesser beings the hope and a chance to aspire to your excellence?

 

? You quoted my comment not to counter it, but merely to repeat what caused me to say it?

 

In John chapter 3, Nicodemus comes to Jesus and asks Him what a person must do to go to heaven when they die. Jesus replies "You must be born again." Note He does not say "You must be saved." In modern times, people have replaced the term "born again" with "saved" so you can see how it has lost it's meaning.

Jesus said "you must be born again." There is nowhere in the Bible where it says a person can be unborn after they have been born. In fact, there are several places where it says God protects His children from evil and not even Satan himself can snatch them from his hand. I believe once a person is born again, they are predestined for heaven and nothing can prevent them from going there when they die. In the same way, you are only born again one time, not multiple times. Once you are born again, you are one of God's children; there is no need or even reason to be born again multiple times.

About living the Christian life. There was a thief on the cross who was being crucified beside Jesus, and he mentioned that he believed Jesus did not deserve to die. Jesus told him something like "This day will you be with me in paradise." I believe when that thief died that evening, he went to heaven to be with Jesus. What Christian life did he live? He had about 4 hours or so after he was "saved" to live right, and I bet he uttered some curse words from the pain. The law was given to us to reveal sin, and to reveal to us that we are sinners. Nobody can keep the law to perfection, therefore we are all guilty of sin. So if we had to follow the law in order to go to heaven, noone would go to heaven. We are born again by grace through faith in Christ. If we are born again, we are going to heaven when we die. If not, then not. Salvation does not depend on how well we follow the law.

Jesus says you can tell a tree by its fruit. If a person is born again, they have the Holy Spirit living inside them and will have the fruits of the spirit in their life. Note that this also takes time to develope in a person; a young Christian might have very little fruit, but as they grow they have more fruit. Also keep in mind that the amount of fruit a born again person has depends on their genetics and environment. Basically, a person can not tell if someone else is saved by looking at them.

Galatians 5:22-23

New King James Version (NKJV)

22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

 

How are you doing with your wonderful time? I have never met anyone whose main goal in life was just to have a wonderful time then die, and I'm curious how that's working for you.

I've often thought that if I didn't believe in heaven, I would really go for it, you know? I would get a team together and rob banks and stuff till I had about a billion dollars, then I would live the rest of my life with a different escort every night.

 

You just can't get around the "almighty" thing, except that he has the power to make no sense and contradict the shit out of himself.

 

God has given people a choice. They can choose to serve God, or serve themselves. If we had no choice, we would be the same as robots, forced to worship God. God is looking for people who worship Him of their own free will, without being forced to. This did not change God's plans; He knew what was going to happen.

God told Adam that if he ate of the treee of Knowledge of Good & Evil, he would surely die. The earth as created was perfect, with no disease or acne or buck teeth. Adam had a free will, and when he chose to serve himself rather than serve God on that day he died. That is the day his body began to break down with various diseases, which it would not have done had he chosen to obey God. Disease entered the world at exactly the same time as sin did. Disease is in fact a result of sin, not individual sin but communal sin; if there were no sin, there would be no disease. AIDS is a good example of this; if people were virgins until they married, and then remained committed to one partner until they died, AIDS would be cured. It would die out. I don't really expect to get the Nobel prize, but I have known the cure for AIDS since the time it became common here in the US.

 

Hey, I like buck teeth on some people it gives them character.

 

The whole salvation thing is nothing but job security for preachers.

You have no fucking idea how great that can be. :reddevil:

It can also be very ordinary. Another day, another dollar. The sun rises and sets.

 

Miss Karen, you are a very kind and intelligent young lady. A part of me has to wonder what happened to you to make you so bitter towards religion. I find it difficult to believe it was just a liberal college influence. I don't think that would cause such disdain. I think maybe it was the hypocrisy you saw in your parents, as I did in mine. Maybe something really bad happened to you, but I don't really think it was that bad because that would have destroyed the kindnesses you have shown people around here. Perhaps just love gone awry.

 

Now that's the kind of response that makes me really angry, because it communicates an assumption that no normal, emotionally healthy person could come to a different conclusion from your own.

I just call things the way I see them.

I know some really kind and wonderful people who come from a variety of religious traditions. Recently, I have had the pleasure of spending time with a sweet and gentle Hindu woman who has greatly impressed me. If I were to honestly and accurately describe her to my neighbors, probably 90% of them would say that what I was saying could not possibly be true because she does not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and does not trust exclusively in him for her personal salvation.

My backyard neighbor is a die-hard christian fundamentalist. When I walked around the corner a few years ago to meet him for the first time, he ordered me off his property because I had not been invited for a visit. I would rather live in a world full of people like this Hindu woman. She knows a hell of a lot more about life than that guy does. She has never read the christian bible.

 

Thank you for your honest and direct reply. It always helps me to assess my views and adjust them where necessary when I get honest feedback.

I have never met a normal, emotionally healthy person, so I wouldn't have any idea what they would think. In the book "Captivating" by John & Stasi Eldredge they discuss the hurt that most girls get from their father and then later on the men in their life (and some women), and in "Wild At Heart" he discusses the hurts that men recieve. I think it is safe to assume that everyone receives hurts in life and it influences their view of the world around them.

My wife's grandfather is agnostic, and we do not talk about religion much, but occasionally it comes up. We invite him to our house for meals occasionally, and he does not object when we say grace, he simply stands patiently and respectfully while we pray to a God he doesn't believe can be known. One time we bought him a Bible for Christmas, a nice expensive one, and I thought maybe he would throw it away. I mentioned to him afterward that I enjoy reading a chapter in Proverbs every morning and he said he would try that. A few months later when I saw him, he said he was reading those chapters every morning and was really finding a lot of wisdom in them. I saw the Bible setting on his dining room table. I thought it was very gracious of him to show respect for my religion even though he did not share it. If he had such a great disdain for my religion as to tell me the only reason my pastor pretended to care about me was for the money, my personality is such that I would not hold it against him because I would assume someone had given him a great hurt and he had reacted to it by assuming it was because of their religion and then assuming all others of the same religion must be like that as well.

I have no problem with people who are true to their religion, whatever that religion might be, and I also respect them for it. Your Hindu woman sounds like a great lady, and I wish more people would actually study what they claim to believe and then put it into practice. I do have a problem with people who claim to follow some religion and are petty and greedy.

Yes, some people who claim to be Christians are assholes in disguise. They are Christian in name only, don't know anything about what it means, and when they run into people most of the time they just scrape them off the bottom of their shoes. They are an albatross around my neck.

I don't believe I have ever met a free thinker, at least not face to face. All the people I know are completely influenced by their genetics and environment.

 

I meant that in a relative sense. 'Normal' is whatever state most of us are in most of the time, which is far from perfect. I have my issues, like everybody else does, but I'm not someone who is in need of professional help. I have known plenty of people who believe that, when presented with the exact same set of facts or alleged facts, all mentally healthy people will come to the same conclusions. I reject that assertion.

Of course he did. In the writings of any religion that has been around for 2000+ years, you are going to find examples of timeless wisdom and profound insight into human nature. King Solomon and Confucius and The Buddha and the author of the Tao Te Ching all had things to say that many people have found to be useful to their understanding of life. Hindus (and most Unitarian Universalists, and Masons) tend to believe that all of these great teachers were inspired by a Higher Power, but you can still benefit from what they have left behind if you believe (as I do) that they probably wrote only out of their own knowledge and understanding, which was obviously far above average.

When you have millions of people down through the ages trying to figure out what life is all about, and how we can all get along with each other in a civilized way, a few of them are bound to come up with some ideas that are worth considering. It's inevitable. There doesn't have to be a Higher Power at work to make it happen.

I don't know your pastor personally, so maybe he likes your personality and honestly cares about you as a person. That says nothing about why he chose the particular career path that he is on.

'Disdain' is not a word that I regularly use or even think about, but I guess it fits the way I feel about the ethics and honesty of religious leaders in general, within the context of an organized Western religion. I find them to be quite a cynical bunch. They know how to say the right things to the right people at the right times. The successful ones know how to get results, by whatever means necessary. Flawed human beings have been deeply involved in every step in the development of the Bible and everything that is based on it.

When someone claims to be offering ordinary people eternal life, they obviously have strong motivation to believe it could be true. They desperately want it to be true, so they will be inclined to give you every chance to convince them of it. False hope is a commodity that many will pay dearly for. Wherever there is a strong demand for a service, someone will come forward to supply it.

I can't point to one specific bad experience I have had, but I am not anywhere near as easily fooled, misled, and manipulated as I used to be. I understand the tricks. Knowledge is power.

I don't know if your church is liberal or conservative in its theology. Since the thread title is about being 'saved', that brought my focus to the evangelical side of the movement, which is all about spreading a conservative and traditional view of salvation that rejects all other religions as worthless, evil, demonic, and filled with every kind of ultimate spiritual darkness. You know the standard quotes about Jesus being the only path to eternal life.

If you want to talk about theologically liberal churches, that's a whole different subject. Though I still don't find much in common with liberal pastors, they do tend to be less cynical, from my point of view. But their concepts of salvation, when you try to pin them down to details, can vary so much that I don't know how you could ever discuss them as a group. There have to be a hundred variations. The haziness of it all diminishes their credibility.

That pegs you as a liberal christian, and the average fundamentalist would seriously go after you on this point, painting you as a heretic. I know all the scripture verses they would use against you. In fact, in a formal debate, I would have a much easier time defending fundamentalist christianity than liberal christianity, if I had to represent one or the other. The liberals pick and choose which verses they are going to care about, which is hard to defend from pure logic. There are so many human judgment calls made by the people who do the selecting.

All anybody can do is try to think for themselves. You will never do a flawless job of it, but that's no excuse not to make the effort. I know I'm better at it than I used to be.

There is nothing I respect more than honest attempts at independent thinking.

 

"Liberal" and "Conservative" are labels I try to avoid. I believe the Bible contains no errors, so in your book I guess I would probably be conservative. On the other hand, my cousin was saying they had a vote in their church whether they would allow homosexuals into the church and he voted no. I asked him why he voted no, and he had no answer for that. I told Him Jesus hung out with homosexuals and asked him how he felt about that. No answer there either. He did not believe there were homosexuals on the earth at the time Jesus was here, and I had to explain to him that the term "sodomy" probably came from the city of Sodom, which according to the Bible was destroyed for its sin. This possibly happend around 3123 B.C. (that is 3000 years before Chirst) from the back plume of a meteor. I believe there have been homosexuals about as long as there have been people. I believe not allowing homosexuals in your church is the same thing as sending everybody home who went 56 miles per hour in a 55 speed zone. So I guess that makes me somewhere between a liberal and a conservative. Doesn't seem like either label will fit.

To me, it's important to actually read the Bible and see what it says, not just to go by what other people tell me it is supposed to be interpreted as saying. So I guess that attitude makes me a conservative fundimentalist Christian. On the other hand, I don't have a fish on the back of my car.

 

Saved from what?

 

Fundementalist Christians believe those who are not "saved" will spend eternity in hell. I know this because that is how I was raised. So if you are "saved" you have been saved from an eternity in the lake of fire, otherwise known as hell. In actually reading and studying the Bible, I am not so sure this is exactly what it means. It does definitely say that those who are not born again will not go to heaven and will be separated from God for eternity.

 

im not a christian and didnt read the bible, but it says something about reencarnation? i always thought christianism never said anything about reencarnation..?