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If you need background into why I believe; it would be easiest to pick someone
who had a similar experience, and read what they had to say, because it can´t be done in just a few posts.
Find and read
"Mere Christianity" by C.S.Lewis.
But what I believe is so interwoven or integral to how I think, it´s tough to dissect
without contrasting it to those that don´t believe. (But I don´t want to go in that direction.)
I went searching for
a cosmology that would explain the world as I perceived it.
Long story short, after many discards, christianity fit.
***Would I be approximately right in saying that for you ´christianity´
was the nearest religion you could find to fit in with what you personally think of as ´your truths´? Or am i wrong?***
No,
I brought into christianity only the concept that the universe had to have been created by a planning mind. It filled in holes
in cosmology I didn´t know I had.
***In other words, do you take from the bible what you see as truth, and leave the
rest?***
No, although some integrates more throughly than others. By its nature, I take all it says as truth.
But
realize this, I spent many years on a certain beach in California before I noticed that most of the sand grains weren´t sand,
but very tiny seashells. In like regard, there are some things in the Bible that take proper focusing, and make take many
years before they become clear.
How to explain one tapestry, when it would take explaining each thread to reach the
same understanding of the tapestry.
BTW--this is why I believe: not what I believe.
mea culpa--
I should have been more clear. But it's like the butterfly trying
to grasp what it was to be a caterpillar and explain it.
I may as well ask how did I pick my mate?
I asked God to reveal her, and when He did, it was unmistakable that
she was the one for me. I've only been married once, and it's lasted more than 20 years. Could I have done as well on my own?
No way to know, except intuitively, but I feel absolutely not.
Let's diverge a moment for a word on freedom, because I think this
is the difficulty for most to grasp about our relationship to the Creator.
Humanity was created to serve. Our nature and design is in serving
God and each other.
This was perverted and warped by the Fall, but that innate nature
we cannot escape. The software was corrupted, but the hardware is still the same.
That serving nature makes us a wide-open target for anything to enslave
us. We have a inner desire to serve, so anything strong can make us its slave.
How free are you? Can you have a kegger in the Forbidden City? Can
you have sex with each and every woman you see? Can you light up in the White House? You are not free to do things that your
conscience forbids, or society, or law and custom, or physics itself forbids. You can attempt, but the consequences are far
from free. You compromise and surrender and adapt at every turn.
At some point in your life, a hierarchy establishes itself. And everything
in that hierarchy owns a piece of you. A piece of energy, or attention, or habit and ritual, or contemplation, etc. And at
the pinnacle of that hierarchy is the thing you love, the thing that you're an abject slave to.
There's no escape from this, it's how we're designed. We will be a
slave to one thing or another; guaranteed we won't be left alone, isolated, and uninfluenced.
And we turn into the thing we serve. We reflect its nature and values,
its reason for being and its outworkings and ramifications.
What you love, you wish to immerse yourself in; to merge with, to
even become. It's all your focus and reason for existing.
Every human has this focus; and it's such a waste when it's aimed
at material things.
It's such a tragedy if it's aimed at the wrong intangible thing.
This is the spirit of the antichrist -- better to reign in hell than
be a slave in heaven.
What he never seems to grasp is that there are those who realize if
you're going to be enslaved anyway, why not pick the designer who knows what's best for you, to be a servant for?
And because of that design that you'll never escape, realize that
the design had a purpose for your ultimate happiness that couldn't be achieved any other way.
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There is Light and Dark? No, there is Light, and absence of Light.
We've given a negative or non-formed thing a name as if it were equal in reality to a positive or created thing. Created things
have their counterparts because of the Fall.
When you die, and you've had a relationship with God, there's God
to greet you. If you haven't had a relationship with God, then there's nothing for you. Because if God is all that is Reality,
to be outside the bounds of Reality is to have no existence at all. To visualise this, think of a black hole and the event
horizon. Past the horizon, and you fall to singularity in an instant--POOF, you're gone. But to an observer outside the event
horizon, since light itself can't excape, the image of you beginning the infall would last most of the life of the universe.
If God is the sourse of Reality, then we ask Him to dwell in us, to
change us, to become like Him: so that we become Real. If we have no piece of that Real in us, what is there for God to grasp
when we die?
It's not that He rejects us, it's us running away from Him.
There's a way we may not like, but it's not our game and not
our rules. He created us, we are created objects, the weird thing is that if we accept that, we're elevated into partnership.
I think it´d be crueler for God to keep those who didn´t want
Him. If they don´t like what they see so far...how are they going to like undiluted God?
Go your own way, make your
own universe, make your own rules, make your own afterlife. You have the freedom.
But I suspect, not the power. nolo
the stark
3/17/2003
6:28 pm EST
Re: GOD is EVIL and CRUEL
Hell, from the point of view of the believer, is a place of endless flame,
torment, and suffering.
For all I know, from the point of view of the unbeliever, it´s just a disco.
But cut
off from God is the point of Hell; anything else is icing on the cake. If He´s the source of every good thing...where are
YOU going to come up with anything?
Immortality is not what you want, even without punishment. Sooner or later, you´re
going to come up against the Imagination Barrier. Where you´ve explored all you can explore, dreamed all you can dream, done
all you can do and wrung dry your imagination completely. Given unlimited time, everything is possible. What then? Then everything
repeats. And repeats. On and on through infinity. Group mind? You´ll just reach repetition that much faster.
If you don´t
see this, you really don´t grasp the concept of immortality or infinity.
Test --- dream up a new color.
God
could create one. In fact, He´s the only one who can create. I´m counting on Him to supply an infinite universe of imagination.
If hell is simply being left alone, no more God, that is ultimately the most hideous fate a human could find themselves
in.
You simply don´t have the capacity of independant creative ability. You can only run permutations of what already
exists. Once you´ve run through all the permutations, universal boredom will set in. Forever. Without relief. Without change.
Without direction.
ahh, here´s another who wants dessert before dinner; and wants the
answers in the back of the book instead of taking the test.
Spirituality is warfare. So. Be soft. Be a prisoner. Whine
about things aren´t fair.
Grow up. Evil is all around, it certainly doesn´t need to be pinned on God.
Is it allowed?
You bet.
Adam fell, and we´re (as you all repeatedly chant) all connected. We´re contaminated with his flaw.
Now
the battle.
And to stand, we need a powerful Lord.
One who conquered Death, Sin, and all Enemies of God.
It´s
still playing out.
You´re trying to rush to the end of the story, where everything is right.
Not yet, you have your
own test to finish.
And you wouldn´t be so distracted if you didn´t keep looking over at another´s test.
Worry about
your own. Trying to play god and say what you would do, if you were god, just displays how thin your concepts are
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