Jesus Christ. Lived the life we should have lived and died the death that we deserve. Just so we can go and live with Him. No love is greater than that.
I sure did feel the love and embrace of the son of God as his proud followers directly contributed to various traumatic experiences and abuses growing up that fucked me up as a child and led to me being an emotionally and mentally stunted adult. If this is God's love, I ain't impressed, and don't gimme that shit about having my faith tested cause the sadistic bastard that sees global suffering en masse and explicitly allows it is not deserving of my faith.
Cool that your religion brings ya peace and joy mate, genuinely happy for ya. Shit sucks in the world and we all need some form of comfort, but my advice? Keep it to yourself.
I'm so sorry to hear that. Satan does infiltrate places where God is meant to be. What I am sharing is more than a religion. It's a relationship with and eternal security in Christ. I stress this enough, the things that happened to you when you were younger WERE NOT okay in any way, shape or form. Bad things happen in schools as well, and other places that are supposed to be a sanctuary. Please don't allow your bad experience to reflect poorly on Christ. I think it was Gandhi who said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
All of these things are insignificant compared to Heaven. I think Job 38 illustrates God's perspective on this perfectly. This life is all we know right now.
Revelation shows God defeating Satan. It will happen. Satan's power is limited right now. Right now we have Jesus to save us in the meantime.
raped children don't matter compared to my mental comfort
The disgusting selfish ego of the religious is the part I can never empathize with or sympathize with.
So, you admit God must change in the future to defeat Satan? You do not believe he is capable of defeating him as he is?
So God is neither all powerful nor perfect.
You do not worship the main texts of Christianity with those claims.
Notice how you don't actually want to discuss the topics or respond to the things I've said. You want to inject some fluffy talk to reinforce hiding your eyes from the discussion to pretend like you are participating.
If I worshipped something as a God, I would be devout enough to discuss it with a person instead of just talking over their statements about it.
Let's revisit where my previous comment started
God was incapable of defeating him when a child was being raped and a perfect being is not capable of change.
The next child being raped will be watched by your God, too, as he will never be capable of defeating evil, as a perfect being will never change.
You are happy to worship an imperfect powerless God who let's children be raped because a book written by child rapists said things might get better one day.
Did you just edit my message? I never said that. I never said God needs to change, it's just something He will do as described in revelation. And what's this about the Bible being written by child rapists? It seems atheists cannot come to a consensus on who wrote it, but this is new. Then why doesn't it proscribe child rape and justify their actions, if it were?
Romans 3:10-12 ESV
[10] as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; [11] no one understands; no one seeks for God. [12] All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”
[23] for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
John 3:16 ESV
[16] “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
1 Timothy 1:15 ESV
[15] The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.
Acts 16:31 ESV
[31] And they said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
Romans 8:1-2 ESV
[1] There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. [2] For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.
On relationship:
Matthew 18:19-20 ESV
[19] Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. [20] For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.”
Romans 8:26-27 ESV
[26] Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. [27] And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Romans 8:34-35 ESV
[34] Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. [35] Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
My favourite thing about that video is that it uses deception and misrepresentation and lies (Come on, it even refers to Bart Ehrman as a "pious protestant"), exact tools satan would use 😂. It does capture satan's personality perfectly though, pretending to be the good guy.
Woa, never met anyone who actually took Christianity that literal. That must be a wild experience to believe in literal devil and god, sin and all that stuff - that's a trip and a half. Kind of speechless - that's just wild.
I don't know, I guess I was curious because this seems so important to you and I wasn't expecting you to hinge your whole belief system on one ancient book.
I wasn't raised around religion nor have I ever really been around it, so I find it fascinating. My, bad, I guess it was a big ask.
Yes? Because they are attestations of a guy who literally rose from the dead and fulfilled many verifiably older prophecies. We literally have surviving copies of prophecies about Jesus that were made before He was born. I'm sorry if I'm coming across as irate. Literally had someone tell me that it would be better if I and basically everyone I hold dear to me was dead. Along with 4 billion other people.
but by doing so you revealed that your beliefs are derived from a book that tells you to have those beliefs.
You do realise that is not an argument at all? That's like saying
"how do you know how to build this ikea bookshelf"
"I read the instructions"
"But you cannot use the instructions to prove that you are in possession of the ikea bookshelf"
You didn't ask me why I believed in Christianity. You asked me to specify what parts of Christianity said that salvation is free and then got upset when I referenced letters from the Bible, which is THE collection of documents about Christianity.
I feel like you weren't actually wanting to reason with this, and were just looking for a way to get me to quote Scripture so you could accuse me of circular reasoning and use your napkin image.
They did, it's just that you have two billion people ignoring them because they aren't in the compilation Rome put together and everyone else ignores them because of exhaustion hearing about the Rome version their entire life.
Super interesting stuff and way ahead of its time, understandably opposed by conservative Judaism at that period, and extremely different from what most people think was being discussed (nearly the opposite one might even say).
But it's one of those rabbit holes that's only worth going down for personal discovery, as nearly nobody gives a crap about it for varying reasons.
Jehovah is a Lovecraftian monster with strong PR. Eternal torture for everyone who dared to be born is an indefensible concept that you glibly praise. As if the opportunity to kiss up to the entity threatening to shred your soul, forever, is some great gift, and not a grotesque exaggeration of every human dictator demanding limitless praise.
If you had infinite power to reshape the universe, and that universe still included hell, you would have to be some kind of asshole. Nevermind that the threat of torturing the average person, for any length of time, is horrific beyond consideration. Even if you said it only applied to the Hitlers of the world, the folks who did incomprehensible evil - why the fuck does your universe include incomprehensible evil?
And your apologia is to blame the powerless ants. Disgusting.
I find it problematic that you say it's a death we deserve. God is all like, "worship me or be tortured forever!" That's kinda toxic to be honest, and doesn't sound like love to me.
We chose hell. Hell was made for satan and his angels. Heaven is prepared for us. And whether we don't like something or not doesn't dictate it's truth. I don't like Trump but he still exists.
However, you dodged my point. Do you honestly think a "loving God" should torture his creations for eternity for not worshipping him? That doesn't sound evil to you? Also, are the people from other cultures that were around before Christianity in hell?
They would not admit that objectively Jesus and christianity is one the key factors of success of the west, and you dont even need to be a believer in God or a god to admit it.
Some even speculate that protestantism itself within Christianity helped grow literacy rates by encouraging Bible reading, however the Roman Catholic church has done a lot for science as well.