So today marks 8 years that I’ve been doing this blog. That’s a pretty big milestone! I had two posts on November 14, 2006, and I thought it would be fun to repost them here (along with a little commentary).
Here’s the first:
Wish me luck… 🙂
So that was innocuous enough. Now here’s post number 2:
I think 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 best explains the way in which Christ’s gospel was/is a mystery. As vs 18 says:
18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
We can see from this passage that God’s plan of salvation makes no sense to those who refuse to believe it, but to those of us who accept it, it’s brilliant! Verse 21 goes on to say:
21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.
See, because the world is so “wise,” it views the concept of God as foolishness. They have been blinded by their own pretensions. For the Jews and Greeks of the day, it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in the supernatural; it wasn’t that they didn’t believe in deities. Their problem was that they thought they already knew what God would do. The Jews already had a fixed idea of what the Messiah would be, so when Christ appeared and didn’t lead them to victory against the Romans, they refused to accept him. The Greeks didn’t accept Christ because they couldn’t conceive of a god allowing himself to be put to death by his own creation. And because they already had things “figured out,” they missed their chance.
Today, people do the same thing. They would rather put faith in scientific theories that have not been proven. They would rather believe that all of the order we see in our universe (the fragile food chain, vast differences throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, the very specific orbits of planets, etc) was created through a giant explosion (something that, in all practical applications, has only been shown to destroy, not create). Have they been blinded by their own “wisdom?”
Too often, even those who profess to be religious only listen to their own ideas about what God wants. Many times they view the Bible as a collection of stories or suggestions, and not the “wisdom of God that leads to salvation” that 1 Corinthians purports it to be. How is that different from what the Jews and Greeks were condemned for?
Throughout the Bible, passages talk about truth and understanding. I firmly believe that God gave us understanding and intellect for a reason. We are supposed to be able to understand God’s message for us. It’s not supposed to be “mysterious” any longer. It’s not supposed to be some “better felt than told” experience. No, God’s word is supposed to be powerful and undeniable. It’s supposed to move us and touch us in a way that nothing else can. But for it to do that, we have to read it, study it, know it.
It’s a little painful to read through that. I cringe when I read how badly I understood things about evolution and the Big Bang back then, or when I alluded to non-Christians as just being those who “refuse to believe it”. It’s kind of funny, but I was guilty of the same thing I was accusing others of. I thought I had the answers, but I had never taken time to really examine any other point of view.
The one decent thing from the post that serves as a bit of foreshadowing about where I would eventually wind up is the last paragraph. You can see that while I was firmly ensnared in Christianity, I believed that it was not supposed to be utterly mysterious. It was supposed to be consistent and “undeniable.” It took a while, but I finally realized that Christianity just didn’t deliver in that regard.
Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little jaunt down memory lane. Someone suggested to me recently that I should think about doing this kind of review with more of my old posts. I’ve been considering it… Thoughts?
Finding Truth 
Adam? Is that you!
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. . .snort!. .. 🙂
aahhh. .. the jackassery on here is refreshing! 🙂
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“Adam? Is that you!”
I’m sure I must have used that name at ONE time or another, a least on a motel registration – I just hope it was as good for you as it surely must have been for me —
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“aahhh. .. the jackassery on here is refreshing!”
I don’t understand, it seems to follow me wherever I go –!
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Wow… 8 years? That’s utterly impressive! I need to start reading this. I knew you blogged, but for some reason I thought you stopped when you chose to believe in things differently. Glad I stumbled upon it. Can’t wait to see you guys in a couple of days and seek the comfort and wisdom of your words and thoughts. Love you both.
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faith? I think I have faith in my friends. Sometimes I may have faith in my car or that my house will hold up in a storm – things like that.
I kind of agree with Howie though.
If faith is belief that relies heavily on hope and intuition, then i think most people have that. But some hope and some beliefs are more rooted in reason and probability than others.
Also, I dont think anyone will have eternal consequences if they dont share in my hope and beliefs, nor would I violently oppose them and neither would I feel as though i had to shun them in anyway.
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@portal It was refreshing to see how neither Kathy or Nate resorted to calling each other crude names, that’s what I mean by decent.
so what you are saying, it’s decent and refreshing to repeatedly call someone a liar, as long as you don’t use crude language.
portal, that’s the most expletives deleted thing I’ve heard all day, and I just watched all 3 hours of “fox and friends”
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Hey Susane! Looking forward to seeing you too! ❤
And to everyone else, I'm catching up on comments, so I'll respond as soon as I can if I have anything worthwhile to add.
Thanks!
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Wisdom? Without honest objectivity, wisdom cannot exist and I’ve shown over and over here that honest objectivity is lacking in Nate’s thoughts/ comments. I’m not desiring to call anyone a liar, I’m just pointing out the truth.
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Kathy, I’m afraid you have not shown, at all, much less over and over, that anyone here lacks honest objectivity except for maybe you.
When points and questions get piled on to you where you cannot ignore any more, you remove yourself from this blog, presumably to let it blow over, and then you return, not address any of those points, but only say that so and so lacks honesty and objectivity.
with all honestly, it’s impossible to have a productive conversation with someone who wont responds to or acknowledge the points/questions presented to them.
yet, for some unknown and perhaps miraculous reason, I am still willing to engage you. i’d like for you to answer some of the above questions and maybe even address some of the points that you have ignored multiple times, as they keep getting placed before you, over and over.
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Kathy,
if you ever get serious about discussing the issues and actually looking at the points, you might consider looking here:
https://findingtruth.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/tyre-by-the-numbers/
for tyre by the numbers. You can either recant your claim of 99% fulfillment, or show where this count is off base.
remeber, saying that someone is a liar, a liberal, un-objective is just making claims. backing up those claims with something substantial is always preferred.
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William, you repeatedly bombard me with multiple, long comments, often asking the same questions that I’ve already answered several times. I’m glad others read your comments because I don’t get past the first line or two if I read them at all. You are playing games by making the very same accusations against me that I’ve made repeatedly against everyone here.. almost word for word. The difference is that my accusations are backed by the facts, yours are not.
I’ll debate any points you want if you keep it short and to the point.. and I haven’t already addressed it.
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I dont recall you addressing much at all, which is one of things I’ve mentioned several times, but no point going over that now, i guess.
Do mind starting with these:
1a – where were the angels encountered at Jesus tomb (please provide scripture)?
1b – where did Mary, Joseph and Jesus go after leaving Bethlehem (please provide scripture)?
1c – what day was Jesus crucified on, passover or the day before (please provide scripture)?
1d – during the triumphal entry, how many donkeys did Jesus have with him (please provide scripture)
1e – how many people are in the linage of Joseph and Jesus (please provide scripture)?
if i remember correctly, these were first asked after you said there were no contradictions in the gospels.
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You’ve repeatedly refused to answer these, Kathy – how honest and objective is that?
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see what a liar she is. she won’t answer the questions because she can’t.
Kathy, where are your “facts” that William, or Nate are being dishonest?
you have no “facts” to back up your accusations, because your accusations are false,
i.e. you are the liar..
answer the questions you lying coward.
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she won’t answer, she never does, all she can accomplish is to sling a few insults and run and hide. how embarrassing for jeeeezzzzuuuuussssss to have died on the cross for a pathetic thing like that. I bet he regrets it now. I’m sure if he had it to do all over again he would tell his heavenly father gawd to go &%*$ himself.
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@Kathy “I’ll debate any points you want if you keep it short and to the point.. and I haven’t already addressed it.” https://findingtruth.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/8-year-anniversary/#comment-23214
well, you haven’t debated or addressed these 5 points:
1a – where were the angels encountered at Jesus tomb (please provide scripture)?
1b – where did Mary, Joseph and Jesus go after leaving Bethlehem (please provide scripture)?
1c – what day was Jesus crucified on, passover or the day before (please provide scripture)?
1d – during the triumphal entry, how many donkeys did Jesus have with him (please provide scripture)
1e – how many people are in the linage of Joseph and Jesus (please provide scripture)?
and you never will because you area lying coward that refuses to admit that you’ve lost the debate.
you should go back to school and get your GED. it’s pathetic for a woman of your age in the united states to have the education of an 8th grader.
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and kathy,
maybe you’re looking into these issues and see the problems, but you still believe it’s all right somehow, but you cant explain how.
Admitting that is better than pretending there is no issue. It’s okay if we must agree to disagree. It’s okay with me if you want to take it all on faith, while acknowledging that it at the very least can look problematic.
But it’s something else to act as if these discrepancies aren’t there and to act as if it’s all so clear that the bible is perfect.
and again, just because someone can imagine and concoct a “possible” (and I use that term loosely) resolution, doesn’t mean that that imagined resolution is correct or that it should be accepted by default. If that were true, everyone would default to a belief in everything.
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Hi Nate,
Congrats on the anniversary!
It is very interesting to read your second post because this is exactly how I used to think as an orthodox (fundamentalist) Christian less than a year ago:
Non-believers are simply blinded by sin. They think that they know it all, but as the Bible says they are in utter darkness. They are spiritually dead and cannot understand the things of God by their own mental abilities, no matter how intelligent they may think they are. Only the power of God’s Word can break into that darkness and expose them to God’s truth. Once exposed to God’s Word, if they will repent (stop being stubborn) and “call on the name of the Lord”, God will gift them faith and they will the see the Truth and will believe…and they then will be filled with wonderful joy and peace!
What nonsense.
Now, as a non-believer, I run into this same mentality with conservative Christians all the time. Of course, these Christians won’t accept for a second that I was once one of them. I obviously didn’t do it right, I wasn’t really a Christian.
It is really hard to break this “lock on Truth” that conservative Christians have been programmed to believe. I have come to the conclusion that trying to point out the discrepancies and scribe alterations in the Bible to conservative/orthodox Christians is a waste of time. No matter how glaring the discrepancy, they always have a comeback. (Their clergy and apologists have had 2,000 years to come up with one harmonization after another.) I also no longer bother arguing morality with them. To conservative Christians, their god IS morality. His actions cannot be questioned. So I leave out any discussion of morality, immorality, “good and “evil”.
So this is what I now say to them: Your religion and your god condone Ethnic Cleansing and Genocide. I want nothing to do with any organization or entity that perpetrates, endorses, or justifies the wholesale slaughter of men, women, and children.
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Gary,
That really is nonsense. I have had Christians tell me, no matter how much I gave Christianity a shot, that I didn’t do it enough because I’m not one yet. All I can do is shake my head.
How did you ever get out of that way of thinking?
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“I have come to the conclusion that trying to point out the discrepancies and scribe alterations in the Bible to conservative/orthodox Christians is a waste of time.”
Yeah, but it’s SO much fun!
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Thanks, Gary. And you’re right about how aggravating that mindset is. I’d like to echo Gliese’s question — how did you find your way out of it?
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How did I find my way out?
Answer: One day in February of this year I was bored and decided to surf the internet for “ex-fundamentalist (Baptist) Christians”. I was myself a former fundamentalist Baptist and I wanted to share with these poor, misguided souls the Good News: the reason they left Christianity was not because Christianity was false but because they had been following the wrong VERSION of Christianity! The true version of Christianity was orthodox Lutheranism (the denomination to which I had converted just a few years earlier). If I could only share the true version of Christianity with these (poorly informed) ex-Christians they would come running back to Jesus with tears in their eyes and open arms!
My “surfing for Fundies” that day took me to Bruce Gerencser’s blog. And it has been “downhill” ever since! 🙂
Bruce immediately began taking a wrecking ball to my fragile world of Biblical Inerrancy. I fought him valiantly, secretly hoping to convert this former fundie pastor back to Jesus. But eventually, Bruce grew tired of debating my many, many, many baseless assumptions (the same assumptions that Nate and many of you face here with Kathy and other Christian fundamentalists). But instead of completely blowing me off, he told me to go read a couple of Bart Ehrman’s books.
I was blown out of the water.
I grew up a Baptist preacher’s kid. When the Sunday school teacher asked a question regarding the Bible, my hand was always the first up in the air. I was always on the Bible debate team that debated other Baptist youth groups. I then attended evangelical churches in my twenties, liberal churches in my thirties, and back to fundamentalism in my forties, settling on orthodox Lutheranism as the closest Church to the Church of the Apostles. However, during all this time, not ONE pastor in any of these denominations ever told me that my inerrant Bible was full of scribe additions and alterations, such as the Johannine Commae. I knew that the English translations of the Bible might contain some translation errors, but the idea that God had not preserved his Inerrant Word, every jot an tittle, in the existing Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic manuscripts shook my conservative Christian belief system to the core. The more I looked at the evidence, or more accurately, the complete lack thereof, the more disturbed I became.
Bruce or one of his readers then referred me to DagoodS’ deconversion story. I began debating, and losing debates, over several weeks with Dagood. These adversarial debates eventually turned into discussions, that eventually led, four months after stumbling onto Bruce’s blog, into my complete and total deconversion from the Christian religion.
That’s my story.
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Beautiful! Love reading stories like this!
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Fascinating!
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