Heaven seems awful 2 me-"Theist laughs at loudly & with great cruelty"

[Godscreated]

 I've found many pastors lacking in an understanding of the scriptures. I'm not saying that I'm an expert, I allow the Holy Spirit to guide me and since you do not believe the Holy Spirit is real then you have never had his guidance. That means you have only a historical understanding of the Bible. The Bible is a spiritual guide to life for those who believe in Christ.

GC

What precisely has the Holy Spirit guided you to understand that escapes us ordinary mortals, GC? And I'm not talking about warm fuzzies or the tumescence you experience when you read about Jesus.

Omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. Who Christ is, the Trinity and who the Father is. Just for starters.

GC

GC

[Godscreated]

 I've found many pastors lacking in an understanding of the scriptures. I'm not saying that I'm an expert, I allow the Holy Spirit to guide me and since you do not believe the Holy Spirit is real then you have never had his guidance. That means you have only a historical understanding of the Bible. The Bible is a spiritual guide to life for those who believe in Christ.

GC

Isn't it interesting how many pastors claim that they have the "holy spirit" guiding them, so therefore they have the right interpretation - and then they point at the other pastors who have the "holy spirit" guiding them as well, but they have the wrong interpretation.   I mean, just in modern mainline Protestantism, you have:
Lutheran / Anglican / Calvinist / Continental or American Reformed / Presbyterian / Congregational / Anabaptist / Free Evangelical / Methodist / Holiness / Baptist / Pentecostal / Charismatic and Neo-Charismatic / Christ Apostolic / Zion Christian / Quaker / Adventist / Family International 
   and there are dozens of splits in each of these sects, and I know I didn't even begin to name all of them . . . all split from each other because one group who had the "holy spirit" disagreed with another group who had the "holy spirit".  

I was baptized Southern Baptist and then raised Church of God Holiness.  You should have heard the trash talk from the pulpit in the "Holiness" church about all of the other deluded "so-called Christians" who did not follow the scriptures properly.  

And they all claimed to be guided by the "holy spirit".  How interesting.  Apparently the "holy spirit" doesn't understand the wholly babble either.

 It boils down to one thing, a persons willingness to accept what the Holy Spirit teaches without laying heavily on preconceived notions. Those who have wrong ideas and reject the teaching of the Holy Spirit is the reason there are so many denominations, that and people following wrong teachers. Like I've said before I'm Southern Baptist but I do not hold to all the teachings of the church, are they right or am I or maybe neither, but I'm still Southern Baptist because I believe the Southern Baptist are closer to the truth than any other denomination.

GC

[KevinM1]

I really want to see a cripple fight between all the theists on here who proclaim their personal views on faith are objectively true and everyone else is wrong and technically non-believers because of it.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

---

Isn't it interesting how many pastors claim that they have the "holy spirit" guiding them, so therefore they have the right interpretation - and then they point at the other pastors who have the "holy spirit" guiding them as well, but they have the wrong interpretation.   I mean, just in modern mainline Protestantism, you have:
Lutheran / Anglican / Calvinist / Continental or American Reformed / Presbyterian / Congregational / Anabaptist / Free Evangelical / Methodist / Holiness / Baptist / Pentecostal / Charismatic and Neo-Charismatic / Christ Apostolic / Zion Christian / Quaker / Adventist / Family International 
   and there are dozens of splits in each of these sects, and I know I didn't even begin to name all of them . . . all split from each other because one group who had the "holy spirit" disagreed with another group who had the "holy spirit".  

I was baptized Southern Baptist and then raised Church of God Holiness.  You should have heard the trash talk from the pulpit in the "Holiness" church about all of the other deluded "so-called Christians" who did not follow the scriptures properly.  

And they all claimed to be guided by the "holy spirit".  How interesting.  Apparently the "holy spirit" doesn't understand the wholly babble either.

---

 It boils down to one thing, a persons willingness to accept what the Holy Spirit teaches without laying heavily on preconceived notions. Those who have wrong ideas and reject the teaching of the Holy Spirit is the reason there are so many denominations, that and people following wrong teachers. Like I've said before I'm Southern Baptist but I do not hold to all the teachings of the church, are they right or am I or maybe neither, but I'm still Southern Baptist because I believe the Southern Baptist are closer to the truth than any other denomination.

GC

The Southern Baptists = the church for the slave owners.  If there's a lake of fire they need to be tossed into it for eternity.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Atheist obsessions with theological purity reveals the noninclusive scrupulousness of their mindset. The vast majority of Christians are very ecumenical. We agree on the widely accepted essentials, like the Lordship of Jesis Christ, but can amicably disagree over lesser issues like infant baptism. The atheistic critic that somehow thinks varieties of religious expression are a sign of incoherence is one that cannot differentiate between things that matter and those that do not.

[The Grand Nudger]

There's no reason to invent a fantasy world where different christian sects don;t have intractible and fundational differences to defend yourself against a toothless argument.

That different sects disagree means different sects disagree.  I don't know why they would all be expected to form a coherent whole when cobbled together - that sounds unreasonable....and the fact that they don't implies nothing other than that the sects have differences.....a total no-shit statement.  If they didn't....they wouldn't be considered separate sects. You can choose to point to infant baptisms or the type of music from the choir as examples of the differences, but this is disingenuos to the point of contempt. The single greatest reasons for christian sects to schism...throughout history and today, have been christology and interpretation. The very nature of christ, and what the book -actually- says, commands, and compels us to do. I'd call that theologically non-trivial.

[ohreally]

How does holy spirits guidance get to your brain? What is the method of transmission?  Where does the Holy Spirit live in downtime that it's not communicating with you?  What part of your brain structure is the holy spirit interacting with?  

 The Holy Spirit shows Christians the truth of scripture, is it through the brain, maybe. It is through a Christians desire to learn about the God we worship and love. Is it through the spirit God places in each person, probably.

GC

You didn't actually answer any of my questions except to say you don't know, and I love that you have no clue or guess or any type of insight at all to something that communicates with you.

[KevinM1]

 The Holy Spirit shows Christians the truth of scripture, is it through the brain, maybe. It is through a Christians desire to learn about the God we worship and love. Is it through the spirit God places in each person, probably.

GC

You didn't actually answer any of my questions except to say you don't know, and I love that you have no clue or guess or any type of insight at all to something that communicates with you in a material way.

That's GC's way.  If it's not a baseless assertion, something regurgitated from the bible, or a baseless assertion with a regurgitated bible quote (the good ol' one-two combo), he can't really reply with anything.

[Crossless2.0]

What precisely has the Holy Spirit guided you to understand that escapes us ordinary mortals, GC? And I'm not talking about warm fuzzies or the tumescence you experience when you read about Jesus.

Omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. Who Christ is, the Trinity and who the Father is. Just for starters.

GC

GC

Unconvincing. Are you saying that if you became a believer in some sort of cultural vacuum, armed with nothing but a Bible, that the "Holy Spirit" would have been necessary for you to infer God's alleged characteristics, the Trinity, etc., or are those doctrines implicit in the text and available to be teased out by a careful reading?

As it is, you didn't become a Christian in a cultural vacuum. Each of the beliefs you listed have been a part of normative Christian belief for centuries. You inherited these doctrines, and I don't believe for a moment that you arrived at them 'independently' with the help of the so-called Holy Spirit. Normative Christian doctrine is the lens through which you read the Bible, and your predisposition to accept it all as true is what provides you the certainty that you believe correctly. No immaterial spook required.

[drfuzzy]

---

Isn't it interesting how many pastors claim that they have the "holy spirit" guiding them, so therefore they have the right interpretation - and then they point at the other pastors who have the "holy spirit" guiding them as well, but they have the wrong interpretation.   I mean, just in modern mainline Protestantism, you have:
Lutheran / Anglican / Calvinist / Continental or American Reformed / Presbyterian / Congregational / Anabaptist / Free Evangelical / Methodist / Holiness / Baptist / Pentecostal / Charismatic and Neo-Charismatic / Christ Apostolic / Zion Christian / Quaker / Adventist / Family International 
   and there are dozens of splits in each of these sects, and I know I didn't even begin to name all of them . . . all split from each other because one group who had the "holy spirit" disagreed with another group who had the "holy spirit".  

I was baptized Southern Baptist and then raised Church of God Holiness.  You should have heard the trash talk from the pulpit in the "Holiness" church about all of the other deluded "so-called Christians" who did not follow the scriptures properly.  

And they all claimed to be guided by the "holy spirit".  How interesting.  Apparently the "holy spirit" doesn't understand the wholly babble either.

---

 It boils down to one thing, a persons willingness to accept what the Holy Spirit teaches without laying heavily on preconceived notions. Those who have wrong ideas and reject the teaching of the Holy Spirit is the reason there are so many denominations, that and people following wrong teachers. Like I've said before I'm Southern Baptist but I do not hold to all the teachings of the church, are they right or am I or maybe neither, but I'm still Southern Baptist because I believe the Southern Baptist are closer to the truth than any other denomination.

GC

So - you're saying essentially the same thing that I said.  You're saying that that other guys are wrong.  They claim to be led by the Holy Spirit too, but either the Spirit's message is being blocked or warped, by their own preconceived notions or wrong teachers.  My point is if the Holy Spirit was capable of sending a clear and concise message, there would be no blockage, and no wrong teachers.   Everyone who was being led by the Holy Spirit would be in total agreement - no matter which church, which version of the Bible, which culture or language.