04-23-2019, 06:50 PM
Quote: @"pumpf" said:
@"KingBash" said:
Unless I missed it, I don't see what religion has to do with the link you posted. Christians got massacred on Sunday... and now some more people got attacked... and "religion" is to blame?Responses above.
EDIT (Tuesday morning):
See?! This is what religion does. A bunch of retards now escalating tension over nothing.
Religion is always to blame. Yes. People are doing this because of religion.
As someone was trying to point out (I think) previously in this post: people are evil and do evil things. And I mourned- and prayed- when the 30 Muslims were killed. I think we both agree that both events were tragedies. Although I think it would be intellectually honest to say that 200 people getting killed is a bigger tragedy than 30 being killed. I doesn't mean that the death of the 30 are not tragic; just that there's less victims. But to those personally connected to the deceased, the numbers don't matter at all. There could be no greater tragedy (to them) than the loss of their loved one.
And I really don't understand all the angst that my post created. Christians were killed on Easter... the holy-day which guarantees them that- after they die- they will live again. Easter is Good News for Christians. That's all I was doing: reminding those who mourned, that the people who died were receiving the goal of their faith.
Because to non-religious people like myself, I just roll my eyes at the response is all. It's just so predictable how you guys justify this kind of stuff. As I said, my reaction was, "Wow, that's fucked up." Yours was, in my opinion, a way of looking on the bright side of things when you shouldn't have... but that's because I don't believe that bullshit. You do, so I guess we'll just part ways there.
And no, Bullazin, the Christian faith is NOT about being like Christ. Unless you mean that we will become like Him- after we, ourselves, are raised to new life. Other than that, you have completely missed Paul's point. The people that Paul warned about were the Judaizers: Christians who said that you had to follow the Law in order to follow Christ. You're doing the same thing that the Judaizers did: claiming that- in order to be a Christian- you have to DO something. You don't. It's not really all that hard to interpret: "not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith".
And, since you're interested in Paul's writings, you may be familiar with this nugget (from the 2nd chapter of his letter to the Ephesians): But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved... For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast." Or this one, from Rom. 3: "For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus"
I could go on, but the point is that your article is horribly wrong regarding Paul, his writings and the emphases of his theology. Although Christians are most assuredly supposed to live lives that reflect the goodness of God... that's not the point. The point is that our righteousness (right standing before God) comes not through our own efforts to be "good" (which could never be good enough), but rather through the gift of grace that comes to us by faith. Paul preached many sermons / wrote many letters against the very message of the Salon article. That shouldn't be too surprising though, considering how little they know about Christian history or content. The article begins by calling Paul the "inventor" of Christianity: which is just plain wrong on so many levels. And their hermeneutics just get worse from there. "Re-thinking Easter" is nothing more than a modernist attempt to undermine the Gospel. It basically takes Paul completely out of any other Biblical context and presents him as some kind of independent writer, whose writings had nothing to do with his own experiences and beliefs... and everything to do with the modern, liberal idea of "goodness". It's all a lie. Even the comment about the "theory of substitution" is wrong. But this writer is not a serious theologian, so I wouldn't expect that they would know anything other than what other, like-minded people have told them. This is the same guy that said the Resurrection shouldn't be taken literally, but rather should be viewed from the post-modernist perspective (my word not his) that it could mean different things for different people- but that it really WASN'T about being alive again (and certainly not about any kind of reunion with God in heaven) but rather a new way of living and thinking. To him Paul would say: "If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied."
Jay Parmini is a gifted writer. But he's no theologian.