(October 1, 2014 at 6:45 am)Hezekiah Wrote: I in no way was trying to condemn anyone. I simply stated that no one alive today knows exactly what he'll is like. If you did you'd be dead and in hell. And at that point I don't believe your in a position to send someone a postcard describing your experience.I was not referring to you specifically. I have found that most Christians are quite certain of their beliefs and of the basis for those beliefs; I certainly was during the 30+ years I was a Christian. They claim to have a very clear idea of what hell is like, and heaven, and pretty much anything else they subscribe to. There is some logic behind this-- if they're really in touch with god on some level, why wouldn't they know for sure? Jesus promised them the truth, after all.
Also, I've been a practicing Christian since I was 8 (granted I fallen in and out of the faith a few times since then) regardless, I feel confident enough to say I'm well versed in Christian Theology.
Sure, when asked to explain these terms and concepts in detail, many of them seem incapable of doing so clearly. And I find that people of the same denomination may have very different ideas of how things work when they explain themselves. Their certainty is as much a flimsy belief as many of their doctrinal ones.
"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
