(September 28, 2015 at 11:56 am)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:(September 28, 2015 at 10:08 am)Drich Wrote: Tested by the wind and rain points back to the parable of the wise and foolish builders Jesus told. In essence to be tested by the wind and rain equates to having one's faith tested by whatever means you need to prove or have your faith/belief fail. Yours failed when you put it through "Demonstrable reality." that was a storm your system of belief could not endure, because (according to Christ) Your's was not a faith/house built on the truth of who God/He really was.
Ah, that. Shifting sands. Gotcha.
So what you're trying to suggest here is that a "faithful" person is one who believes so strongly that not even reality can shake his belief.
Nice. If reality constitutes a "storm" against your "faith", which you feel you must resist, then you're in a cult. Congratulations.
No. A believer has little need or room for faith. One believe, because he knows what the truth is. I don't need faith anymore, because I have been given opportunity to believe, and I took it. Belief differs from faith because belief is tangibly based acknoweledgement resulting in action of what one knows to be true. Faith is believeing without anything tangible to believe in, and acting on what they want to be true..
That is the difference between jumping out of an airplane with a bed sheet in hopes of making some sort of a parachute on the way down, and Jumping out with a parachute that you know works, and understanding why it works, thus putting you in a position of a working belief that your chute will open and do it's job.
If you believe you had belief, and it could not stand up to basic rational thought.. I hate to be the one to tell you it was only faith in your system of belief, and again according to Christ that belief is the 'house' that the winds and rain tested and came down on itself. If what you know to be true can whether any storm then that belief can be solidified as Truth.
Is that cultish behavior in of itself? (Belief in what you know to be true) Only if your looking to hit the panic stop button on this particular conversation. (It's easier to label someone crazy than it is to go line by line and prove that they are using their own content.)
Cultish behavior is easy to identify in that one believes in something but has no reason for belief. They believe because the cult believes.. (which btw sounds more like some of your peers who believe in science, yet they do not understand a fraction of what they believe in.) My beliefs are based on what God has done for me over the last 20+ years. Not because someone told me what to believe. But because I have personally witnessed and experienced what was laid out in the bible. Most of which happened before I knew what it was I was looking for. It wasn't till years later that I could verify what I had experienced. Again, non of which was 'church'/cult taught.
