Jump to content

Hornet

Members
  • Posts

    107
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by Hornet

  1. Just out of curiosity, what kind of sermons do you hear in churches that embrace progressive Christianity? In my experience with evangelical Christian churches, I have heard a lot of expository preaching where the preacher would explain the meaning of a particular text of Scripture and how it applies to our lives. In some evangelical churches, the preacher speaks on a different topic every week. In other evangelical churches, the pastor preaches through an entire book of Bible before speaking about another book of the Bible. The main point of the sermon in evangelical churches has to do with God or Jesus. Even if the preacher talks about marriage, one's career, money, and so on, he will talk about how those topics relate to God or Jesus. Evangelical preachers will talk about what is morally right or morally wrong, but they don't merely give a moral lesson. They talk about how God saves people from their sins.
  2. Inanimate survival mechanisms are not concerned about what is morally right or morally wrong. Survival value is not the same as the rightness or wrongness of an action.
  3. Things such as moral values and the laws of logic can only come from personal things, not from impersonal things. The uncreated cause of all things that began to exist must be personal.
  4. Do you believe that when it comes to religious beliefs a person should just go with whatever he thinks works for him?
  5. Having a relationship with God is important. Some people go through the motions of participating in rituals or church activities without having any sort of love or affection for God.
  6. He probably meant, "If something began to exist, then something must have caused it to begin to exist."
  7. If someone asked you, "How do you know that your religion or belief system is true?", how would you respond?
  8. If a society bans same-sex marriage, then is that society morally wrong for doing so? If so, then what moral standard are you using to judge other society for being morally wrong?
  9. Maybe religious people should come up with non-religious arguments against same-sex marriage.
  10. God defines what marriage ought to be. God says that same-sex marriage is wrong. I think that this is better than saying, "Same-sex marriage is wrong because two people of the same sex cannot procreate" or "Same-sex marriage is wrong because it is unnatural."
  11. One's religion or worldview is going to influence one's political philosophy. One's religious beliefs are going to affect one's views about freedom, liberty, the rights of other, what the government should prohibit or not prohibit, and so on.
  12. My source for this is Colin Humphrey's book, The Mystery of the Last Supper. You can read about his book here: http://www.cambridge.org/asia/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521517553
  13. According to the Synoptic Gospels, the Last Supper was a Passover meal whereas the Gospel of John says that the Last Supper was before the Passover. How do you resolve this alleged discrepancy? This is resolved by understanding that the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John were using different calendars and that these different calendars give different dates for the Passover. The Synoptic Gospels use the pre-exilic Jewish calendar which was based on the Egyptian lunar calendar and John uses the official Jewish calendar which was developed during the Jewish exile in Babylon. According to a reconstruction of the pre-exilic Jewish calendar, in A.D. 33, the year of Christ's death on the cross, the Passover meal was on a Wednesday. According to the official Jewish calendar, the Passover meal was on a different day.
  14. I don't see it as an evangelizing tool. The purpose of praying in restaurant is to give thanks for the food. The purpose doesn't have to be to show off.
  15. I believe that omnipotence should be defined as having unlimited power rather than the ability to do anything. Since God has unlimited power, He cannot have any weaknesses. Since God doesn't have any weaknesses, He cannot do evil. Just because someone cannot do a certain task does not mean that he is lacking in power. For example, no one can make a square circle. Not being able to do this task does not mean he is lacking in power. He cannot do it because the task is logically contradictory.
  16. God knew where Adam and Eve were. He was testing them to see if they would give honest answers.
  17. To prove to us that He can love those kinds of people. To prove to us that not everyone who claims to be a Christian will continue to follow Christ for the rest of their lives.
  18. Heaven is located somewhere. It has a finite size. Heaven is eternal in the sense that it will exist forever.
  19. Heaven is a real place and believers in Jesus will spend an eternity in heaven. I think that free choice or free will is the ability to act according to one's desires. Free choice or free will defined in this way is compatible with determinism. This notion of free choice doesn't need the agent to be able to do otherwise. If I perform action X and I had the genuine desire to do it, then I have free will even if I could not have done otherwise.
  20. A lot of faith healing is bogus. I remember going to a church where a sick person went to the front of the sanctuary. She had her right leg lengthened by a faith healer and she was declared to be healed. People actually thought that she was healed. If someone claims to be a faith healer, I would love to see him go into a hospital and heal all of the sick people instantly. I believe that God can heal people and do miracles, but I don't believe that having your right leg lengthened by a faith healer is evidence of being genuinely healed of your sickness.
  21. Hell is supposed to be a place of punishment for those who deserve it. I don't believe that God gets His jollies by sending people to hell.
  22. I talk to people about my faith. I sometimes ask people the following questions: Do you think that God exists? Who do you think Jesus is? What is your church background? What did you learn about God or Jesus from your church experience? Why do you think that Jesus died on the cross? Are you a good person? If God were to judge you based on His moral standard, would you be found innocent or guilty? Would you like to hear how God made a way for you so that you can be saved from your sins? Several years ago, I had a friend who was an atheist and he initiated conversations about God more than I did. He would frequently ask me about different church denominations, why I thought that God exists, whether God can create objects too heavy for Him to lift, how I knew that the Bible was the word of God, and so on. He wasn't interested in becoming a Christian. He enjoyed talking about religious things. He would ask religious people how they know that they are going to heaven.
  23. There is a kind of relativism called "moral relativism", which says that moral truth is relative to the individual person (Ethical Subjectivism) or relative to a person's culture (Ethical Conventionalism). If moral truth is relative to the individual person, then whatever I think is morally right is in fact morally right. If moral truth is relative to a person's culture, then whatever a person's culture says is morally right is actually morally right. Moral relativism is different from ethical objectivism, which says that there are universal moral truths that exist independently of what human beings think. According to ethical objectivism, torturing babies for the fun of it would be morally wrong independently of what I think or what my culture thinks or what some other cultures think.
  24. There is a kind of pluralism called "religious pluralism", which says that all religions are equally valid as ways to God. If this is correct, then there is no good reason to do evangelism.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

terms of service