What is the Christian Church good for?

[coffeeveritas]

So which sense did you use to determine god is real?

I have to figure out how to put different quotes from different people into the same reply, anyway.

For me, something as big as God has to work on every level. God would have to be real to me personally, be present throughout history, be suggested in science, be of a superior character that I don't fully understand, and for Christianity to be true, the version of Him put forth (or Gospel) has to be totally Good in very deep ways. So when I saw that the church I was in taught nothing but how not to sin, and an amazing amount of guilt over the sins you do commit, while at the same time doing nothing of any real benefit to the world, I was skeptical. I saw that they taught that God was angry at sinners, but loving, that He was going to destroy the world in flames, but wants us to do good deeds, and that He was concerned about "justice" in the sense of condemning people to hell, but didn't seem to care about the suffering of children. No one was permitted to question this or raise objections. So using this sense of reality I was talking about I decided their "god" was a lie, and I said, "screw this" and walked away from that church. Now I'm a disciple of Christ, which is a term I use for clarity's sake, but it just means "Christian."

So it may seem weird that I thought the Christian church sucked so I left it for the Christian church, but there's a reason. It turns out there are many traditions in the church, and some of them just made up a bunch of stuff on their own, and some of them only occasionally refer to the Bible, and some of them say one thing in theory, but don't really believe it. (I don't want to sound too hard on them though, I was in the same place once, and I still consider them family. They'll get there, we're all growing.) Then there are some churches that teach this radical theory, "if you want to call yourself a 'Christian' you should find out what Christ taught and did, and follow that." That sounded pretty logical to me, so I looked into it. The view of God that I found in the Bible actually made better sense of the world for me, and it gave me a clear idea of how I could live in this world, and it answered a lot of big questions I had, and it made me see how all of it could be good, so that gave me hope. It made sense to my senses, it made sense logically, it fit together the big picture, it made sense scientifically, it made sense in the story of man, it made sense in my culture, it made sense to my personal experience, it worked on every level. So I used all of my sense of reality to see how God was telling a bigger story than I had been led to believe.

I tried to limit this to how I determined the reality of God, and do it succinctly, so I intentionally left out a lot. Needless to say I was surprised about how pretty much everything that I hear commonly said about Christianity is wrong. You can ask about any details you want to know, there is a lot to it. I hope his answers your question, let me know if anything else in unclear. Thanks for asking!