Christianity - The only religion that makes sense of the world?

[cardw]

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Don’t you find it highly hilarious that you find yourself defending the Egyptian king based on a biblical account of a bible you don’t believe in while at the same time attacking the God of the NT who gave us the Ten Commandments, the same laws that would immerse this nation in a great deal of domestic security if all its citizens, on a voluntary basis, decided to abide by the spirit and the letters of the last six commandments of the Decalogue?

I find it rather humorous that you don't know the story.

[John317]

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cardw: No one has yet to make a convincing case that Christianity makes the most sense.

Doesn't it make perfect sense to you that the Eternal God who made the universe would become a human and perform healings and other miracles and then die and be raised back to life and go to heaven and prepare to return again with millions of His angels to judge the world and to save those who are looking for Him?

If that is not completely reasonable and rational, please tell me what is.

Have you read Soren Kierkegaard?

Check out what the Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say about his views on what we're talking about:

Quote:

Christian dogma, according to Kierkegaard, embodies paradoxes which are offensive to reason. The central paradox is the assertion that the eternal, infinite, transcendent God simultaneously became incarnated as a temporal, finite, human being (Jesus). There are two possible attitudes we can adopt to this assertion, viz. we can have faith, or we can take offense. What we cannot do, according to Kierkegaard, is believe by virtue of reason. If we choose faith we must suspend our reason in order to believe in something higher than reason. In fact we must believe by virtue of the absurd.

Much of Kierkegaard's authorship explores the notion of the absurd: Job gets everything back again by virtue of the absurd (Repetition); Abraham gets a reprieve from having to sacrifice Isaac, by virtue of the absurd (Fear and Trembling); Kierkegaard hoped to get Regine back again after breaking off their engagement, by virtue of the absurd (Journals); Climacus hopes to deceive readers into the truth of Christianity by virtue of an absurd representation of Christianity's ineffability; the Christian God is represented as absolutely transcendent of human categories yet is absurdly presented as a personal God with the human capacities to love, judge, forgive, teach, etc. Kierkegaard's notion of the absurd subsequently became an important category for twentieth century existentialists, though usually devoid of its religious associations.

According to Johannes Climacus, faith is a miracle, a gift from God whereby eternal truth enters time in the instant. This Christian conception of the relation between (eternal) truth and time is distinct from the Socratic notion that (eternal) truth is always already within us — it just needs to be recovered by means of recollection (anamnesis). The condition for realizing (eternal) truth for the Christian is a gift (Gave) from God, but its realization is a task (Opgave) which must be repeatedly performed by the individual believer. Whereas Socratic recollection is a recuperation of the past, Christian repetition is a “recollection forwards” — so that the eternal (future) truth is captured in time.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/

The wikipedia says this about some of his views:

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The leap of faith is his conception of how an individual would believe in God or how a person would act in love. Faith is not a decision based on evidence that, say, certain beliefs about God are true or a certain person is worthy of love. No such evidence could ever be enough to pragmatically justify the kind of total commitment involved in true religious faith or romantic love. Faith involves making that commitment anyway. Kierkegaard thought that to have faith is at the same time to have doubt. So, for example, for one to truly have faith in God, one would also have to doubt one's beliefs about God; the doubt is the rational part of a person's thought involved in weighing evidence, without which the faith would have no real substance. Someone who does not realize that Christian doctrine is inherently doubtful and that there can be no objective certainty about its truth does not have faith but is merely credulous. For example, it takes no faith to believe that a pencil or a table exists, when one is looking at it and touching it. In the same way, to believe or have faith in God is to know that one has no perceptual or any other access to God, and yet still has faith in God. As Kierkegaard writes, "doubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard.

[cardw]

Doesn't it make perfect sense to you that the Eternal God who made the universe would become a human and perform healings and other miracles and then die and be raised back to life and go to heaven and prepare to return again with millions of His angels to judge the world and to save those who are looking for Him?

If that is not completely reasonable and rational, please tell me what is.

[Lutz13]

Correct me if I am wrong, and I may very well be. But doesn't Christianity separate from the others due to Grace?

[cardw]

Correct me if I am wrong, and I may very well be. But doesn't Christianity separate from the others due to Grace?

Actually Christianity is not the only one that has a concept of Grace. Buddhism expresses this as Nirvana which means to extinguish. Karma is seen as the flame and for one to enter into Nirvana one needs to extinguish the flame of Karma, both good and bad. This is why Buddhism is often referred to as the middle path. This is also why it tends to place emphasis on compassion and being non-judgemental. These concepts are another way of expressing Grace.

Buddha is also quoted as saying blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth over 500 years before Jesus.

So this syncretic progression of belief draws on many different traditions. It is Christianity that denies its debt to other traditions and declares itself as the only truth.

[Lutz13]

Originally Posted By: Lutz13

Correct me if I am wrong, and I may very well be. But doesn't Christianity separate from the others due to Grace?

Actually Christianity is not the only one that has a concept of Grace. Buddhism expresses this as Nirvana which means to extinguish. Karma is seen as the flame and for one to enter into Nirvana one needs to extinguish the flame of Karma, both good and bad. This is why Buddhism is often referred to as the middle path. This is also why it tends to place emphasis on compassion and being non-judgemental. These concepts are another way of expressing Grace.

Buddha is also quoted as saying blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth over 500 years before Jesus.

So this syncretic progression of belief draws on many different traditions. It is Christianity that denies its debt to other traditions and declares itself as the only truth.

Interesting. So Buddhist don't work to get to Nirvana? I do not know much about Buddhism.

I believe blessed are the meek goes back even further than Buddha.

[Felix Florimon]

find it rather humorous that you don't know the story

The experts in memory or how we remember things say that, usually, memory is not exact about details. This is why many times we need to textually quote from an original source.

Genesis 12:10-13. “Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, ‘I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.’”

According to the verses mentioned above; even though the pagan Egyptians had their moral codes about marriage, those codes were not strong enough to avoid the generation of fear in Abraham that a pagan Egyptian (who had great military authority), would kill him in order to include Sara in his group of concubines.

FF

[cardw]

Originally Posted By: cardw

find it rather humorous that you don't know the story

The experts in memory or how we remember things say that, usually, memory is not exact about details. This is why many times we need to textually quote from an original source.

Genesis 12:10-13. “Now there was a famine in the land, and Abram went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, ‘I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.’”

According to the verses mentioned above; even though the pagan Egyptians had their moral codes about marriage, those codes were not strong enough to avoid the generation of fear in Abraham that a pagan Egyptian (who had great military authority), would kill him in order to include Sara in his group of concubines.

All this story tells about Abraham was that he was ignorant and ignorance breeds fear.

Abraham was wrong about a number of things in this story so why should be trust anything Abraham's fear.