Your Religious Views

I am 100% Atheist.

i am having a hard time understand why some of you guys can consider yourself Christian when you believe in evolution.
how can you be Christian and not believe that the bible is accurate. the bible is the word of God after all.
so if you think the bible is wrong, then why not also believe that the hole God and Jesus story is wrong as well?
 
I am 100% Atheist.

i am having a hard time understand why some of you guys can consider yourself Christian when you believe in evolution.
how can you be Christian and not believe that the bible is accurate. the bible is the word of God after all.
so if you think the bible is wrong, then why not also believe that the hole God and Jesus story is wrong as well?

Here we go...!

Believing that the bible is accurate is not the same as believing that the bible is literal in all cases - specifically in this case, the first part of the book of Genesis. I don't see the bible as a science textbook, and I believe anyone reading it that way has, quite honestly, missed the point. The purpose of the story of Genesis isn't to give us a scientific account of creation, it's to set up a picture of how our relationship with God was initially intended to be, and where it fell short. Take it as an extended metaphor.

Picture this the other way around and suppose we had a detailed creation account to the minutest detail in Genesis - to start with, what would that have achieved in regard to the original audience? Would they have understood the key message? Would they have understood any of it? Heck, if you think of this as a complete, 100% accurate and explainable account of the laws of physics, would we even be able to draw anything out of it today? I doubt it. We've certainly come a long way (scientifically) but there's still many more fundamental unanswered questions, and almost definitely many other unanswered questions we don't even know we should be asking yet.

Ok, so if the creation story is a metaphor, why not just take God / Jesus as an extended metaphor? Amongst other reasons, if that were the case then the entirety of the bible would be undermined, it's absolutely key and central to the entire endeavour. Treat Jesus as a metaphor who didn't really exist and all the prophecies in the old testament become irrelevant fiction, the gospels become fallacies, and Paul's letters and the early church just shouldn't have existed. Regardless whether you actually believe the above is true, as logic stands it's pretty darn difficult to believe the bible is the word of God if you believe that God / Jesus didn't exist or weren't who they said they were. It's comparatively much easier to treat part of Genesis as a metaphorical account.
 
that's a valid and good point. i have nothing too add to your detailed post. it explains Your religious view very good.

some Christians will say that you are not a "Real" Christian after reading your post. they will say that you can't pick out stuff to believe in and see the rest as a metaphor. they will especially have a problem about the fact that you believe in the big bang. Some Christians will say that you are gonna Burn for that.

so my big problem with religion is that there is SOOO many possibilities. So many Different religions and different ways to understand it. and all this talk about hell and a punishing afterlife just because you didn't believe in something unnatural described in a book, is just rubbing me the wrong way.
to me if there really is a God, he will make things clear so you wont Burn in Hell(or jahannam and other religious versions of a "Hell") for eternity just because you picked the wrong version/"point of view" of a certain religion.
 
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I have a couple of questions for both sides of this debate.
Please bear in mind my knowledge of the big bang is very very little and my knowledge over Christianity is even less.

The big bang theory, to my knowledge nobody knows what caused the big bang? Could it be possible that God caused the Big Bang?

BikerEcho quoted above saying many Christians believe your will "burn" for not believing in god or even worst let's say for sinning etc. Doesn't the Christian religion firmly believe in forgiveness? When does this come into play?

If I slept with my fiancé before marriage, could I be forgiven or would I be destined for hell?
 
The big bang theory, to my knowledge nobody knows what caused the big bang? Could it be possible that God caused the Big Bang?

There are no evidence pointing against it. so it could be possible that "some God figure" started it.
problem is that it would not be any of the "God/Gods" people appreciated today because religious holy books describes how the world came to be and all descriptions goes greatly against scientifically facts and says nothing about a big bang.

BikerEcho quoted above saying many Christians believe your will "burn" for not believing in god or even worst let's say for sinning etc. Doesn't the Christian religion firmly believe in forgiveness? When does this come into play?

If I slept with my fiancé before marriage, could I be forgiven or would I be destined for hell?

according to the bible you can be forgiven if you pray enough. I believe you can be forgiven for anything if you truly mean it and accept Jesus as the son of God and all that stuff. I think it even goes so far that you can be forgiven for even murder.
problem here is that you need to ask for forgiveness. We are all born into sin because our great great great great great................................................ great great parents Adam and Eve eat from a tree that God forbidden. If we don't ask for forgiveness we will burn. so if the Bible version of God is true, more then 2/3 of all mankind will Burn
 
some Christians will say that you are not a "Real" Christian after reading your post. they will say that you can't pick out stuff to believe in and see the rest as a metaphor. they will especially have a problem about the fact that you believe in the big bang. Some Christians will say that you are gonna Burn for that.
Sure, but everyone chooses how they interpret any literature to a certain degree. If I'm reading a science textbook on evolution and I see the classic cartoon with the giraffes and their necks (the shorter ones dying out because they can't reach the trees), do I assume the science textbook is false unless all trees are as tall as giraffes? Do I assume that there's one day between the frames, one century, a million years? Do I assume the text underneath the cartoon is describing this cartoon, or something else entirely? These are all assumptions and interpretations taken as common knowledge in our culture and our society, so we know exactly how to read into them.

The key is I'm not "picking out stuff to believe in" any more than they really are. Unless they are (for instance) wearing clothes made of more than one fabric amongst many other things (Leviticus 19:19., they don't have a leg to stand on in that debate.

so my big problem with religion is that there is SOOO many possibilities. So many Different religions and different ways to understand it. and all this talk about hell and a punishing afterlife just because you didn't believe in something unnatural described in a book, is just rubbing me the wrong way.
The bible's message is one of forgiveness, and it does tell us that no-one will be judged until everyone has been given the chance to see and repent. Unfortunately I don't have time to dig out the corresponding passage now, but will later if you like.

The big bang theory, to my knowledge nobody knows what caused the big bang? Could it be possible that God caused the Big Bang?
I believe God set the universe in motion somehow. Whether he did this directly through the big bang, or through something else entirely, I don't know - and I fully support and encourage science to try to investigate this as much as they can. Just because we don't really know what caused the big bang, I think it would be a disservice to God to just "wheel him in" (as Dawkins puts it) to cover up our lack of knowledge.

BikerEcho quoted above saying many Christians believe your will "burn" for not believing in god or even worst let's say for sinning etc. Doesn't the Christian religion firmly believe in forgiveness? When does this come into play?
Yes, it does believe in forgiveness - from *anything* you could do. The key is you have to accept Jesus as saviour and ask for forgiveness - there's debate on when you can still do that, but some maintain you could do it after you died and still be saved. It's nothing about praying "hard enough", you just need to ask (the murderer on the cross alongside Jesus asked for forgiveness and it was simply given to him then and there.) Heck, some maintain that *everyone* is saved somehow (look up universalism.)

Regardless, going into Christianity because of a "fear" aspect is the wrong way about it - if you believe it's true, then there's nothing to be afraid of (because you can be forgiven easily enough) and if you believe it isn't true, then there's nothing to be afraid of because, well, you don't believe it's true!
 
Faith isn't just believing something, faith is trusting what God said. Also remember that religion is a man-made way to merit one's way to heaven, whereas redemption is God-made way to pave mankind's way to heaven through His merit.

Genesis 1:5
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Genesis 1:8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Genesis 1:13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.

Genesis 1:19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis 1:23 And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

Genesis 1:31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
 
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Faith isn't just believing somsthing, faith is trusting what God said.

Where do you get this definition from?

Anyway, there's two main issues I'd have with this viewpoint.

Firstly, in the gospels Jesus uses many simplifications, ideas and stories to get his point across - commonly known as parables. Do you believe these actually happened? I would assume not, because the context and reasoning behind these parables is relatively clear cut. However, if we remove this clear introductory context and take, for instance, the parable of the prodigal son:

Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.' So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living...

...and so on. So if we take this parable as a metaphor and not something that literally happened, are we turning our backs on Jesus' teaching? Of course not - it's a parable, it's very purpose is a metaphorical account in order to illustrate the moral points that Jesus was putting across (in this case, forgiveness.)

Secondly, if you're tying your faith to the above statements then you're not tying your faith to what God said, you're tying them to a particular translation from the original Hebrew of what God said. The Hebrew word for day used here is "yom", and that can mean a period of light, a period of 24 hours, a season, an "age", an indefinite length of time, or a fair few other things. Take its meaning as "age" (which, incidentally, is almost definitely the correct translation in Genesis 2:4) and suddenly the argument for a metaphor grows exponentially in strength, and young earth creationism becomes as much biblical fantasy as it is scientific fantasy.
 
Believing my daddy was going to give me a horse didn't get me a horse.
Believing my daddy was going to give me a horse because he said so got me a horse.
Believing that being baptized until we know every frog by name doesn't get get us salvation.
Believing "ON" the Lord Jesus Christ gets us salvation because God says so, and we can either trust that, or have only belief.
 
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