Did They Not Pray Hard Enough

[Drich]

Why would I need to ask god to provide me with what he wants for me?

Because not everyone wants what God wants for them.

What you are describing is that god wants something for me, knows what it is, and knows it will be beneficial for me. But he won't give it to me unless I ask?

Yes. Why? because the primary ingredient in what God wants for you contains a large dose of humility. Not the kind that is forced onto people, but the kind that willing A/S/K for it.

2,000 years of trying and there is still no interpretation that does that, as far as I can tell.

Because God did not give an absolute or difinitive version of Christianity. It is all based on the indivisual and what he can comperhend. Because we are all different our expressions of faith will look different.

Instead, there seem to be even more denominations of Christianity. I think this speaks poorly of the Bible, that it is beyond the scope of its audience to make proper sense of it.

The same God that established Christianity established Judaism. Judaism is a religion with absolute absolutes, and a very strict structure with no room for interpertation. So why wasn't christianity constructed the same way? Look at how Jesus railed against the Jewish leadership of the day, how he pointed out over and over that thier worship was extreamly mechanical and did not include any effort in up holding the spirit of the law.

Christianity is Freedom from the Law as a means of righteousness. Christ Gave us one change that is to love the Lord our God with alll of our being and to love our neighbor as our self. again because we are all different our worship/the way we worship will be different.

Hence the reason for so many different expressions of Christianity. Now no one man or group of men has the power to dictate what is and is not worship. We simply do the absolute best that we can.

This also strikes me as a flaw in the book, that it is so easy to get the wrong understanding by reading just parts of it.

If Christ is at the center of your worship, no one's worship is right nor is it wrong. For the same grace that attones for our sin when we willfully disobey God's expressed will, attones that much more when you are doing your 110% best and 'get it wrong.' We all get it wrong at some point in our journey.

Maybe I'm just picky, but I think a guide book from a supreme and wondrous creator should be so amazing that reading even just parts of it would knock our socks off, so that we'd want to read all of it over and over and learn the secrets of the universe (or whatever it is that the supreme creator wants it to tell us).

Which is why I am in absolute awe over it. Because it is all of that and a box of thin mints.

We see it as flawed from the perspective of every rule based religion on the planet, but again because Biblical Christianity is not rule based, then it should not be a list of rules.

The bulk of the NT draws a picture of what or how a believer lives, and why he lives that way.

But that's just more of what I was talking about. You have created a god that is supposed to be extremely difficult to "find." So that anyone who doesn't find him simply didn't know how to look, or wasn't persistent enough, or whatever other reasons can be used to explain why someone who made a sincere effort to find god didn't find him.

It takes an hour of honest question asking to find the direction you need to find God. Some a little more some a little less. We (most of us) have been given between 70 and 90 years to take an hour and honestly look.. Whether you do or not is between you and God.

I'm just not impressed by a god that seems determined to lead people astray for reasons that I can't fathom. He seems to be toying with us out of sheer spite.

Your not being lead anywhere. You have been given an alotment of time and this whole planet to wander and do as you will. If you A/S/K you will find God as it has been promised if you do not, then again your free to live this life anyway you choose.