ViaCrucis
Confessional Lutheran
- Oct 2, 2011
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Hi, I'm new here and I'm always been athiest. I don't know anything about religion so I hope I don't offend anyone with my questions or ignorance. I want to believe in god and I do in a way but there's things that I can't not believe in order to believe god exists.
1. Why are gay people not accepted in most religions? I'm not gay but I have a lot of friends that are. Why are they told that they are sinners and horrible people and unworthy because they love someone who is the same sex. If god created man in the image of himself then surely he made gay people too.
It's worth pointing out that in Christianity everyone is understood to be a sinner. It's not a derogatory term, it's really just a simple acknowledgment of the fact that we fail to do what we ought do and often do what we ought not do. I'm a sinner as much as anyone else. Being a sinner doesn't mean being a terrible person, it just means being a fallible human being that often screws up.
To address your main point. The reason why gay people are often vilified by many Christians is because these Christians are failing at their calling to love everyone. Because Christians are likewise sinners.
There are sectors of the Christian Church that represent a highly vocal, vociferous, and often toxic minority. Often having far less to do with the teachings of Jesus or the historic teaching of the Christian faith and more to do with a highly culturalized Christianity that serves to maintain the social status quo.
Regardless of how a Christian comes down on the question of homosexuality, the Christian only has one appropriate path to take when engaging homosexual people: Love them completely and utterly without prejudice or pretense.
St. Augustine of Hippo referred to the Church as a hospital for sinners, in modern parlance this is often contrasted by speaking tongue-in-cheek of the Church as a social club for saints. Everyone in the Church is a sinner, the Church is to be a place of healing and acceptance for everyone. The Church is never to be a social club for the self-righteous, doing so destroys the mission and integrity of the Church at its heart.
Because at the heart, at the center of the Church is Jesus Christ. If we deny Christ, whether by word or action, then we are not acting as members of His Church. If we are not loving others, as He loved others, then we are not acting as the Church, but as a self-righteous social club. And the way we can ask ourselves if we are really acting as Christ's Church is by looking and examining our own lives and seeing how we treat other people, in particularly, how we treat those people who are often despised, rejected, ignored or mistreated in our society.
Because the Heart of Christ is always with the the marginalized.
2. Why do new born babies and innocent children die when they haven't even had chance to sin?
In Christianity we believe that each and every person is born subject to Death. The problem of Death is, arguably, one of the chief problems which Christianity tackles. It is addressed by our confession that Jesus died and rose from the dead and in Him and by Him is victory over death; inaugurated here and now by our union with Him in our Baptism and made perfect and complete at His return at the end of history when the dead rise, death is extinguished forever, and God renews the universe and there is World without end.
3. Why if god created the world did he create Africa and Ethiopia the way it is? Why is that part of the world so badly designed that it can't sustain life and so many people and children are dying from starvation! No child deserves that!
A big problem in many African nations has a lot to do with corruption. In the case of Ethiopia, it was in fact at one point in its history a very powerful kingdom; it hasn't always been the way it is now.
Changes in climate, greed among the powerful, an unwillingness among more well-to-do nations to offer more support for those suffering in other nations. Pick which ever you want really; I'd say all the above.
4. I believe in evolution and that is one thing that I can't not believe and I guess that's the one thing that is stopping me believing in god. I can believe that god created everything but I can't ignore that there were dinosaurs roaming the earth before Adam and eve and of course the prehistoric people that evolved from apes. They have skeletons of dinosaurs and of homoerrectus and so on. How can I fit that in with believing in god? Is there a way I can believe both?
There's nothing about evolution that is inherently contradictory with the Christian faith. There are hundreds of millions of Christians all over the world that don't struggle between accepting science as well as their Christian faith.
Indeed, notable scientists in various scientific fields are themselves ardent Christians. Here are some notable Christians who embrace evolutionary theory:
Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, established the BioLogos Foundation, and Evangelical Protestant Christian.
Paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, Pentecostal preacher and one of the first to propose that dinosaurs may have been endothermic.
Physicist, theologian and Anglican priest, Rev. John Polkinghorne.
Geneticist and Eastern Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky, pioneer in the work of modern evolutionary synthesis.
Theologian and Anglican priest Alister McGrath, who holds a doctorate in molecular biophysics.
These are only some of the most famous.
There are plenty of Christians who don't hold scientific degrees who embrace it; and they are found thoroughly across denominational and theological lines: Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Protestants (including Mainline as well Evangelical).
It is, in fact, again, a rather vocal minority of Christians in the world who are violently antagonistic toward science.
A strict, wooden, literalist reading of, for example, the creation narrative in Genesis 1 is not a prerequisite of Christianity and is no where demanded. Indeed, Christians have been reading and understanding the creation narrative in other ways since antiquity. Christian theologians such as Origen of Alexandria (3rd century) and St. Augustine of Hippo (5th century) argued for an allegorical approach. Many Christians today likewise embrace a non-literal reading as the more sensible understanding of the creation narrative in Genesis 1 given the employment of poetic language and the use of parallels as it pertains to the six days of creation. For example, check out the Framework Hypothesis. This is not a rejection of the Creation Narrative, it is an interpretive exegesis which seeks to understand the underlying textual and theological aspects going on in the text without butchering it through unjustly imposing ourselves onto the text.
There's lots more I have to ask about the bible as I am reading it and intend to read every word of it.[bless and do not curse]
Thanks for your time!
-CryptoLutheran
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