What are your questions about religion/theology/God/heaven/hell/etc.?
Don't expect any answers from me. I'm just wondering what you're thinking about.
A couple of the things that I have struggled with are the two very different Gods portrayed in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible -- the angry, judgmental God of the Old Testament vs the loving, merciful God of the New Testament.
These two very different distinctions of God are incompatible in my way of thinking.
I've kind of reconciled it in my head that the Old Testament God is a god of man's design (religion) and the New Testament God is the real deal that Jesus came to help us understand. I'm not sure if that makes any sense or not because it is difficult for me to explain it in my head, much less try to share it in words. Sometimes I sort of think in feelings instead of in words. Does anyone else do that?
Most of Christianity seems to use Jesus as a kind of get out of jail free card to the Old Testament God's wrath and eternal condemnation, but that doesn't work for me anymore. I'm not sure that it ever really made sense to me. I guess I accepted it because I trusted others that taught it to have understood it better than I did. I think we were all believing and teaching a misunderstanding or perhaps a known falsehood without really knowing what we were doing.
I saw this meme recently...
...and thought to myself, "See? The whole evangelical thing makes no sense when you put it like that!"
What would Jesus say about that?
I think he would fall into his Sermon on the Mount rhythm with something like, "You've heard it said that God is going kick your butt if you don't follow all of the rules, but I'm telling you that's just religious manipulation and your leaders trying to control you. God loves you!"
What if people actually knew Jesus followers by their love rather than by their hate?
What if people stopped using religion to control and manipulate people?
What if we worked to bring love and understanding to our community instead of striving for personal wealth and power?
Does God really love me?
Does God love everyone?
I have questions.
Do you?
John
I am not trying to go on the attack here, just to give my honest reactions to the questions you posed to readers.
ReplyDeletethe angry, judgmental God of the Old Testament vs the loving, merciful God of the New Testament
My understanding is that most of the stuff about Hell is in the New Testament, not the Old; likewise, most of the Bible's condemnation of homosexuality is in the New Testament, even if not in the cited words of Jesus. Christopher Hitchens said that overall the God of the New Testament is more evil than that of the Old.
It seems to me that a good first question to ask about any interpretation of the Bible is, "Did Christians before modern times ever come up with this interpretation?" A lot of the modern "liberal" (if that word is applicable in this context) interpretation of the Bible seems designed to twist it into conformity with a late-20th/early-21st-century morality and sensibility that nobody during most of the previous two thousand years could even have imagined, much less shared. Millions of Christians during those centuries believed with an intensity scarcely conceivable today, and studied the Bible intensively. They went right on burning witches and heretics and launching Crusades and killing homosexuals. If they failed to find the interpretations and meanings preferred by moderns, it seems likely that those interpretations and meanings are simply not there.
The alternative, it seems to me, is to believe that Jesus somehow anticipated and "really meant" the kind of values, morality, and concepts of goodness held by modern liberal Christians, despite all those things being utterly alien and unimaginable in the time and place he lived in, and that all those generations of pagan-persecutors and witch-burners and gay-killers were getting it wrong, until the current generation when liberal Christians finally became the first to understand what Jesus (and God) really meant all those years ago. I'm sure you can understand that seen from the outside, from the viewpoint of the non-Christian, this seems very implausible.
"the New Testament God is the real deal..." Oh, come on, the New Testament God is just as phony as the Old Testament one.
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