Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
So they're a not a huge philosophical sticking point for you? That's awesome, if notWhoops, yeah. I skipped explaining why I included those two questions (one of them being posed by C.S. Lewis, originally), but I included them because yes, God could do both of those things if He created the rules. Kinda like when you're a kid and you made up games with rules, but you might change them when it suited you.
Allah is God... Islam is an Abrahamic faith, and Allah is their name for God. It's just not a name we would ever use. There's an organisation called Muslims for Jesus, and they still call God Allah, just as Jews for Jesus call Him Jehovah. But. The dividing line is Christ. Islam has no relationship with Christ, and that's what saves. I don't doubt there are cases where a Muslim has experienced God. But unless they're experiencing Christ, they aren't abiding in God, and that's the difference.
And yet He appeared to hundreds - possibly thousands - of people subsequent to His resurrection. It happened, whether we can explain it or not. And God is God - omnipotent and omniscient - whether we can explain Him or not.Sure, sort-of.
Premise: God is omnipotent. (an already impossible-to-grasp idea)
Conclusion: God can do anything he wants, including sending himself to hell while he simultaneously sits in heaven, then bringing himself up to heaven from hell to sit beside himself, then resurrecting himself from the dead on Earth, even when he wasn't really dead in the first place, he was in heaven the whole time...
You know what, you're right. I can't do it.
They shouldn't be. Christians are Christian by the grace of God. To believe themselves superior to atheists is unconscionable. Please know that those who would denigrate and mock people who don't know Jesus, also don't know Jesus; or, at least, they don't know His teachings.1: Most of the Christians I know are happy to mock atheists. I haven't sought out many Christian sites (outside of this one), so I don't know what they focus on.
I've heard that before, actually... it sort of confuses me. I've only been a Christian for 3 years, so I still remember how it was before. I remember going to gigs and feeling the adrenaline flowing and I don't understand how it's comparable to feeling the presence of the Holy Spirit during worship. They're honestly very different feelings. Both involving joy and excitement, sure, but both oranges and cider vinegar contain acid and they're easy to differentiate, too.
Actually, that's really interesting. I know that one of the things that finally pushed me over the fence into Christianity was the degree of hate I saw aimed at it. It made no sense to me that something with such beautiful teachings could be so despised by people who knew so little about it. The God Delusion and Zeitgeist and Religulous bolstered my faith perhaps more than most apologetics books have. Because the baseless hate and lack of integrity involved in them all (Zeitgeist, for example, has been debunked as profoundly unscholarly; God Delusion is emotive rhetoric, and Religulous is mockery, polemics and woeful editing) convince me that Christianity is the right path. Atheism I understand, but anti-Christianity is something else entirely, and being exposed to the most embarrassing example of the anti-Christian apologia just when you're asking these questions is sort of amazing, really.
