A Christian That Gets That Christians Don't Get God

RichD is one of our Christian commenters. No matter how much we disagree, we can always find a way to inject a little good humor into the dialog. He's smart, he expresses himself clearly, he doesn't seem to take it personally, he keeps his goal in view and he keeps a positive and humorous outlook which, in my view, exemplifies a "good Christian", adds tremendous value to the dialog, and to this blog in general. In my view RichD is one of the commenters that sets the standard.

In this comment from my article Heuristics and When Ones Values Are Out Of Sync With Ones Thinking, he's teasing me by using my name as a suffix. He's a pleasure to have around and I want to feature one of his comments where (for once) we do agree!

I say that Christians are Agnostic with a Bias for God and RichD seems to agree with me. He disagreed with a comment that another Christian named Logismous made and was providing a rebuttal to it. At the end of his comment he asks rhetorically if its not possible for Christians to come to an agreement on the Primary Tenet of Salvation. See what you think.

Hello Lee, Logismous,
I think I'll jump in, and most likely surprise you once again.

I think a key thing that comes up in all of this, and never really takes off, is as follows.



You, Lee, say you were once a Christian and lost your faith, so you obviously understand Christian doctrine. I think we could rule that part out of further discussions, even though I don't recall ever claiming this about you. Logis also claims to understand christian doctrine but not the same as lee, apparently (maybe that's apparentLee).

Logis added [the following bold italicized comment] that should clear everything up
If Christians disagree about things, it's not because we're not all listening to the same Holy Spirit, but because we each misunderstand Him in different ways. We actually claim that none of us understands Him well enough.



So obviousLee, no-one knows anything about God. Or did I miss something, because Logis also said she/he knows God because of the spirit that is always misunderstood differently by everyone. There that ought to clear things up.



So in reality we have a bunch of denominations of Christianity because they all have a different misunderstanding of the doctrine of Christ and they form their own groups based on these misunderstandings. Once saved always saved, saved by faith, saved by grace, saved by works, saved by faith and works, and so on. Which is exactLee what Lee, and others, are confused about.

How can anyone say they understand the doctrine of Christ if all Christendom claims to not understand it "well enough"? 

I agree that we don't understand everything about doctrine, but can't we get enough understanding to come to a consensus about the PRIMARY tenant of the gospel, Salvation?

Thank you RichD for agreeing with me for once, for constantly keeping me on my toes, and making me smile! Keep that BS detector calibrated and ever vigilant! I'll try not to set it off!

"If you were a god, how would you treat the children you created?"

In the comments section of my article Jesus Appeared To Other People, Why Can't He Appear To Me? Darrin started by asking me "What would YOU do as God?". Goprairie mentioned what she would do if she were God. Then Russ contributed what he would do as God. I thought the interaction was brilliant so I'd like to feature it and request responses from everyone meaning all categories from Believers to Non-Believers, Buddhists to Zoroastrians.

Here are the relevant comments.....

Lee Randolph said...
I would do things according to my values and principles which are...
* scrap it all and start over otherwise, knowing full well that I made the parameters, that unless I want to start over I have to work within the parameters and get down to a level that the human can comprehend
* to nurture
* to follow sound principles of communication, because humans demonstrate every day that their behavior can be changed in a variety of ways by a variety of stimuli, none of them having the potential force of a God.

goprairie said...
1) if you were god, would you reveal yourself? to me this is a big duh. what would the harm be? for god to make him/herself obvious to us would sure stop a lot of arguing and fighting and killing. if i were god as i usually hear god defined, i would want to make myself known and stop that kind of crap. like if my kids came home and didn't know if i was here and were about to do something wrong, i would cough to make myself known and prevent their bad behavior.

2) god used to have personal relationships with people. sure, but now we call those personal relationships forms of mental illness. that he 'appears' so differently to people is reason to beleive it is a product of the person's own mind. i know a man who today believes he is a 'prophet' but oddly, the stuff god says thru him is the widely accepted views of a white male 60-something conservative. if god were really appearing to my friend, would there not be some thing that he would disagree with my friend about and that my friend would find challenging and shocking? yet oddly, each prophesy he 'hears' is spot on with what he knows and believes. dead giveaway to me that it is his own brain playing tricks on him, that he is then trying to pass off on us as the word of god. i am pretty sure if god revealed him/herself to me, there would be some surprises!


Russ said...
goprairie,

Great comment.

Question for you: If you were a god, how would you treat the children you created?

For me, like you, goprairie, I would make sure that, at least occasionally, they knew I was there. That's one mark of a loving father. I most certainly would not single out one of them to be nonsensically chatted up out of an incendiary shrubbery, and then, in a monumental display of omniscient stupidity actually expect that everyone concerned and impacted would get the message. Fact is, I would counsel my children that they would do well to simply ignore any and all claims made by each and every forthright forsythia, sincere salvia, ardent arborvitae, and profoundly philosophical philadelphus. Plants are notorious liars.

If I wrote them a book, say three thousand years ago, I would have told them useful things, remembering that, I am, after all, modeling a loving father. Let's say, that although I am omniscient, omnipotent, and whatever other omni's I want to be, I decided not to disclose too much all at once. While I could have kept nuclear bombs and microelectronics in reserve - they would have been really difficult to implement given the technology of the time - I still could have given them much useful information.

Remembering that I actually do love my children, that is, I love every single one of them, in my book I would not pit them against one another by calling some of them my "chosen people." I would not claim to love my sons and daughters while continually demonstrating that I see my daughters as second rate chattel. I would show them a constancy in love that would allow them go to sleep each night assured that their loving father would never intentionally harm any one of them. If I did indeed have the power to destroy my children, being a loving father, I would make sure they were never aware of that awful terrifying thought.

My book for my children would contain lots of good tips: wash your hands; pork is healthy food, just cook it well; slavery is out, period(don't want to interfere with someone's freewill, now, do we?); health problems are caused by germs or a person's own failing body - not demons or witches - so the proper response to someone's illness is empathy, caring, and compassion, not burning them, torturing them, or chaining them to a wall; here's a simple recipe for soap, and here's how you use it; the earth is not the center of the universe and it is much closer to correct to say that the Earth goes around the Sun; here's how to make a printing press; you are related to every living thing on the planet; enjoy sex; avoid violent conflict as far as possible; don't kill those who disagree with you; and, the world is more comprehensible when you approach it systematically through science.

In the introduction I would point out that this material is the best stuff I had available to me, and that as they learn better ways to do things they should update the book with that new data. Being a loving father know-it-all, I would permit updates that were a closer reflection of reality than were the book's current contents and I would disallow those ideas that went too far afield.

I'm guessing I could get all I want to say to them into a 100 page trade paperback in 12 point type, including indexes and appendices (Hey, it's some handy tips from a loving father, not Encyclopedia Britannica). Then, being omnipotent and all, I would drop one copy into the lap of every person on the planet each of whom would be able to read it in their native tongue regardless of age, literate or not(all that omni has to be put to work somehow). Periodic updates would be similarly dispersed.

So, goprairie, if you were a god, how would you treat the children you created?
1:33 PM, January 28, 2009

goprairie said...
russ - not sure what you are asking, but i will toss a couple things out -
i have never tried to write a book for them with all my knowledge, cuz i am here for them. i don't hide in a closet but let it be known that if they have a question or issue or idea, we can talk and we have for their whole lives talked about what is current with them and what they need to know now. i make myself known and available.
if i had written them a book 3K years ago and i had put errors in it, like to hate gay people, i would certainly write them a note now saying hey, i was wrong on that one or hey, i changed my mind or hey, you are misinterpreting that one.
that god does such a poor job of this brings his/her existence into question. anything that tries to make excuses for god not being present to us is making more problems. it is more likely there is not god and when i look, i find alternate answers that make more sense for every single thing ever attributed to god.
9:58 PM, January 28, 2009