my brother is being a troll

[miknik5]

I'll look into that link, though I'm left wondering exactly how my brother could have found Methodism hurtful. Dr. Rosenblatt seems to be dealing with victims of fundamentalist burnout.

The only thing I can think of, one time our church youth group leaders were living together before marriage and an older woman at church raised it as an issue and it lead to a little bit of a discussion about their behavior (but no actions were taken against them by the church council). And my brother was attached to both of them and liked them a great deal, whereas he saw the woman as just a church busybody. At the time I sort of understood where she was coming from, even if I didn't care for her tone. The youth group leader's fiancee was a feminist and activist type, and while I appreciated both of them and thought they were decent people, I also recognized that their situation was not the best model for behavior for youth.

I think he's just been influenced a lot by the Dawkins or Hitchens type of atheism. That God and the Bible are silly and incoherent. He's actually not so opposed to religious rituals. He just doesn't understand how God fits into that. I think because he knows so many conservative Christians in his time and certain things like the extreme pietism is not something he likes. Perhaps because he associates it with that childhood experience.

He doesn't see the decency and kindness of people at my church the way I do. ELCA Lutherans are some of the least judgmental Christians I have ever met. But yet he finds that offensive and lazy? I don't get it. Maybe he just likes to argue. I ended our conversation just by telling him, that's not a good thing to do.

Maybe I should ask him some time if he wants to talk to my pastor or go to church, but otherwise I'm not going to hang out with him if he keeps berating the people I love. This is the second time we've had this kind of conversation. The first time he told me a few weeks ago that it was sick to see anything sacred in Jesus suffering, and that Mother Theresa was a hypocrite.

Can you clarify what you mean.
You say he says it's sick to see anything sacred in Jesus suffering, and that Mother Theresa was a hypocrite

Is it because he believes that those who belong to GOD should not be physically sick and anyone who belongs to GOD, should be able to make one physically well

 

[FireDragon76]

Is it because he believes that those who belong to GOD should not be physically sick and anyone who belongs to GOD, should be able to make one physically well

No, it's nothing like that.

I think he's just angry, resenful, and self-absorbed.

 

[LordDuncanBurneWilke]

Do you and him get along outside of church?

 

[Rescued One]

No, it's nothing like that.

I think he's just angry, resenful, and self-absorbed.

I know what you mean. People who have been deeply injured, if they haven't learned to forgive, don't want anything to do with a religion that tells us to forgive others.

And it isn't necessarily helpful to spend your life trying to get that person to change. It can, in fact, be depressing.

Matthew 10:14
If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, leave that home or town and shake the dust off your feet.

Know that you aren't the only Christian who deals with this. You are learning compassion for other Christians who share that experience. I would prefer to not have an unbeliever drive me to church unless he/she is willing to stop the verbal abuse.

You need positive, kind people around you to give you some emotional support.

 

[Phil 1:21]

What does Jesus tell us to do to our enemies (a strong word, so let’s just say people that intentionally anger us)? He says to love them and pray for them. That’s hard to do, so sometimes I have to pray to God first to take my anger away so I can forgive them and pray for them. If Jesus could forgive the people who nailed him to a cross, we should be able to forgive an overly irritating sibling.

 

[ChristianFromKazakhstan]

Yesterday my brother just confronted me after church with something rude. He started asking questions about our church, in a way that was attacking the character of the people there and telling me "your church is obviously failing to be relevant to young people".

It really made me upset. He is irreligious, and the things he said were very hurtful.

First, I pointed out that yes, we do have young people at our church, but older people often attend on wednedays during Lent. Then he asked why we only have additional services during Lent, and we pointed out that the additional expense of keeping the doors open all the time couldn't be justified given Florida's climate. Then he started attacking the "business" of our church, that obviously we were not making money like a real business, that the people were just lazy Christians (which I found extremely hurtful).

Then, I told him that was my religion and I didn't think it was a good idea to discuss those issue in that manner because he obviously did not understand what we believe, and the very good reasons we do what we do. That he did not understand our ways, it would be spiritual confusion and cheapening grace to run our church in the way he suggested. That it was God's job to draw people to the church ultimately (this bit really bothered me because I knew hew would not understand this, but that's the exact way I became part of the church- people do show up as guests without having to have external inducements or manipulation). Then he said, well, you all are obviously failing then (at this point I became completely frustrated).

On reflecting on this, it seems like he just is being a troll at times. I confronted him about it, but he acted like he was doing me a favor in engaging in such a confrontational conversation. Which just seems like something a sick mind says. So, it bothered me a great deal.

I think he is very right in his way. Church is corrupted beyond repair. Because It operates not like Jesus intended.

 

[david.d]

First of all, if he is agnostic, then he is trying to get the best of your emotions. I've had agnostic friends over the years and they seem to want to make other people question faith instead of questioning their own faith. From my experiences, you need to try to ignore how he makes you feel and make him dig into his beliefs. As long as he thinks he is making you question your beliefs, you'll never be able to get him to open up about his. I've never met an agnostic that knew what they believed or didn't, they just wanted to make everyone else question themselves.

I think a lot of agnostics are just children of God that have very little faith and many of them seem to have a calling that Satan has tried to drown out [thats just my opinion]. All you can really do is pray for him and be strong in your faith, hopefully you can be an example to him.

 

[LastWord]

Jesus brothers (perhaps cousins) had some advise for him.

His brothers therefore said to Him, “Depart from here and go into Judea, that Your disciples also may see the works that You are doing. For no one does anything in secret while he himself seeks to be known openly. If You do these things, show Yourself to the world.”
John 7:3‭-‬4 NKJV

But they said this not because they wanted Jesus to be more "relevant" but because they did not believe.

Christianity is not a business. God has those who are his through the drawing of the Holy Spirit and not through the entertainment, manipulation and propaganda of men.

In church, as you know being Lutheran, God is there giving us his gifts in Word and Sacrament; Jesus is giving us his body and blood in with and under the base elements of bread and wine, for our assurance. These elements that God chooses to use, water, bread, wine, and the preached word are lowly, they are not showy; they appear insignificant. Your brother, nor really any of us for that matter, will not understand this because we are Glory Seekers. We want a god of our choosing or we will have no God at all and left the Holy Spirit convinces us in much the same way as name and the leper's servant girl convinced Naman to hearken to the simple word of the servant of Elijah and dip and be clean.

Do not let it frustrate you; let it motivate you to pray for him and to do good for him.

I will say, Capital idea in listening to any of Rod Rosenblatt's lectures!

 

[sparkle123]

Sorry to hear about this. Your brother was out of line, even with the statements on Mother Theresa and the suffering of Christ. People who are content within themselves don't go picking fights in such a crude way. I have family that is similarly inclined to make, um, provocative statements about Christianity. I've heard some real nasty things and had to tune it out and move on. I feel for you. Suppressing that kind of anger and irritation takes its toll--which is why I avoid family that can't extend respect for differences. I do the obligatory things, but that's all. I simply don't know of any constructive response other than prayer and retreat.

 

[stuart lawrence]

I mentioned that he was irreligious at the beginning, which means he doesn't go to church.

He was raised Methodist, the same as I was. But he is agnostic now.

Would you say the Methodist church you were raised in preached the truth of the Gospel message?
Just wondered. Only for a few years, I was critical of many churches, due to the legalism I was raised with

 

[FireDragon76]

Would you say the Methodist church you were raised in preached the truth of the Gospel message?

I can't remember many sermons from back then, and those that I do, I don't remember positively. Many of the churches we attended were extremely liberal.

The message was more moralistic, and not really legalistic. There were positive experiences I had in the Methodist church, though. I remember the people being kind and warm, and their devotion to Jesus, and that impression stayed with me.

I had a religious conversion as a teenager, around age 13, but my brother never seemed to have one. The first minister I really connected with was actually a Presbyterian chaplain on a military base I was living at. She was the first person that really preached a message that was something I actually cared to listen to. Her preaching was a lot like the type of stuff I encounter now in the Lutheran church I go to. She preached about sin and God's forgiveness, mostly. Communion and baptism were also more important for her than it had been in the Methodist church.

I started studying and reading the Bible, as well as asking the chaplain questions once in a while, and she would loan me books to study in response to my questions. My turn towards spiritual things seemed to alarm my dad, he didn't understand it. My aunts also had that type of experience as teenagers, both wandered through evangelicalism before eventually becoming Catholic.

But when I came back to the US with my family, we went back to Methodist churches and the message preached went back to liberal moralism. Both me and my brother helped out at the church recording the services and sound engineering, but at the end of the day there was very little real spiritual connection, and once we both hit college, we stopped attending and my brother became openly agnostic, and I just became irreligious, a "none" who believed in God but was very skeptical of organized religion.

I think the lack of preaching about sin made it hard to connect with Methodism, spiritually. It made it hard to make sense of the world. The humanistic spirit didn't seem to fit with my experiences of the darkness in human nature. The more I learned about the world, the more naive that message seemed. Methodists very rarely had a corporate confession of sin and they didn't preach about sin very often.

 

[Blade]

Sometimes when God is working in our lifes and HE shows us something we need to change work on we see the sin in others and try to point it out.

 

[Tangible]

Sometimes when God is working in our lifes and HE shows us something we need to change work on we see the sin in others and try to point it out.

And sometimes other people can be jerks and treat us badly because they are sinners just like the rest of us.