The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Again if you were a true Christan in you past then you would be one today. Your salvation is not based on you or what you can do but on the death burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you never had a relationship with God or you don't have one now then you were never a Christian.

Stimbo: I referenced the Bible because it is the revealed word of God.
Redbeard: Was your account a norm in your daily "Christian" life? Those people who define faith as just a feeling without anything to back it up are defining it incorrectly. I used the bibles definition because it is God's word.
Rob: if stuff is being made up then you can prove it wrong
Rocketsurgen: your statement of flawed but there is nothing wrong with you is a contradiction. You either have nothing wrong with you or you are flawed you can't have both. If you say you are prefect then you are arrogant and if you are flawed then you have to be comparing yourself to a standard. Everyone knows there is a standard even if they don't agree on what that standard is. This is because we are made in the image of God and we instinctively know that we aren't what we are supposed to be.

Are you seriously so delusional as to think you have some special, personal revelation that is different from the experiences of people who are sitting here telling you that, when they were Christians, they would have said exactly what you are saying now? We also thought we had a special, personal revelation from the Lord of Hosts through His Son the Savior of Mankind. That's what makes a Christian - accepting that as Truth™, on faith, and believing that our "sins" are then paid for by the sacrifice of the Son on the cross. We were not just churchgoers who hummed along with the tune, so to speak. I'm sorry you have trouble accepting that, but that is the reality.

Telling us we were never "really" Christian is to call us liars, because we thought we were, we believed we were just as much as you believe you are. Yet people walk away from Christianity all the time, even preachers who have dedicated their lives to Jesus but started to see things in the belief system that conflicted with testable reality.

Faith is a feeling. You feel you have evidence because you believe and consider that to be sufficient, which gives it a sense of reality to you... or as Paul called it "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen".

My statement is not  flawed. An arbitrarily-defined standard of "perfection", which no human being can meet, is a basic psychological-breakdown technique used to get people to do what others want them to do. I'll give you an example. The cosmetics industry spends millions of dollars a year on commercials which are written by people with the psychological training to convince women (and, increasingly, men) that they are not naturally beautiful enough and thus are in need of the company's products to try to meet that standard. They tell you that you have a flaw, and then they tell you that they can sell you the solution.

Does that mean we're not flawed? We all have flaws; even the most beautiful person you can imagine is still not "perfect" in beauty. The key to happiness is realizing that you are flawed and fine just the way you are.

When you learn to let go of the hold that religion clearly has over your mind, telling you it has The One Right Way™ and that even though you can never meet that standard of imaginary perfection, you should still buy their product, you will free yourself as we did.

Right now, you sound like Tammy Faye Baker, wearing pounds of makeup and insisting that it makes her beautiful (rather than just depressing to everyone who sees through the facade).



So you say, "Everyone knows there is a standard even if they don't agree on what that standard is." We don't agree on what the standard of perfection is because it's imaginary. It is made up. As for your "everyone knows" part, I'll end with another Robert Heinlein quotation:

"If 'everybody knows' such-and-such, then it ain't so, by at least ten thousand to one." -Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love