(January 13, 2015 at 2:08 am)Godschild Wrote: You're right, however it's the business of the church and when someone who calls them self a Christian and we call them out, why is it you all jump on the bandwagon and question what we have to say?As I said above, I take the claims at face value. If a person claims to be Christian and then denies Christ or the Bible, then I figure he's more of a nut than a Christian, but if he professes to follow both then I just go along. The most important thing, to me, is what he believes and why he believes. We have had people here who denied being Christian yet used only the Bible as their source of teaching. Since I do not expect that every person here will make sense, I just shrug my shoulders and move on.
But you do understand that I do not recognize the authority of any individual or church to say who is or is not a Christian, yes? The Bible is too open to interpretation to say that one specific view or the other is the recognizably "true" version. I don't believe in your god or his existence, and I believe that the Bible is just a book of ancient writings cobbled together by men with an agenda that was more political than religious. Thus I don't have any stake in which interpretation is true and which person is following it to the letter. That's for Christians, true or not, to hash out among themselves.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
