(April 17, 2014 at 4:09 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote:(April 17, 2014 at 3:40 pm)Confused Ape Wrote: I didn't know about them and just looked them up on wikipedia. Some of them are atheists who still believe that Jesus was a wise teacher but I'm baffled by -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_a..._existence
I'm not sure how people can be atheists if they believe that God used to exist but is now dead.
Wow, that's even more elaborate than the ones I knew. The self-described "atheist Christians" that I knew were people who rejected the idea of a god or afterlife but nonetheless considered themselves followers of the "wise teachings of Jesus".
On the surface, given our cultures reverence for and rose-colored glasses view of Jesus, this seems reasonable enough. Maybe they liked the parts about "love thy neighbor" and "do unto others..." but they might not regard themselves as devotees of Jesus if they bothered to read the rest. After all, a substantial part of Jesus' teachings are about devotion to his father god and salvation from Hell. Another significant part are unfeasible teachings like his outlandishly extreme pacifism and poverty.
My suggestion, were I to meet an atheist Christian today, would be to read the Gospels with a critical eye before embracing the teachings of Jesus. The few wise things he did preach were not original and the rest, to put it kindly, wasn't that great.
Christians and atheists are alike in that they have numerous differing opinions among themselves. One thing that means is that people think for themselves. If you read the bible you find there are certain passages that are very clear and easy to intrepret while others are less distinct. In Romans 10:9 Paul wrote "if you confess with your mouth the lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." That's what distinguishes a Christian from a non-christian - our belief in Jesus as our savior and the son of God. A "christian atheist" is not a christian. Jesus never said you must interpret all the scriptures in the same exact way in order to be saved. There are correct and incorrect interpretations for every verse in the bible and the more you study it, the more the Holy Spirit will show you. It wasn't meant to be easy.
