I made a comment that I would probably not be considered a Christian to most at this point in my life, and some wanted me to elaborate.

To be clear, there are things that I still believe. I do think the evidence point towards a designer God. I do believe in objective morality. I do believe that the Bible is the closest description of morality that represents reality.

Is Jesus the son of God? I don’t know. Is there an afterlife? I don’t know. And frankly I am not too interested in these questions. I don’t think knowing these answers helps me live an optimal life. I think that if God exists, and he is a good God, then any sort of eternal punishment. And from what I can see from the moral reality, I think the possibility of a non good God is negligible.

What’s cause the shift in my beliefs?

I think it started with the fact that I never had an emotional attachment to the Christian religion. I never got anything beyond intellectual/philosophical satisfaction. So the whole church and rituals just does nothing for me. So what am I left with?

Another big turning point for me was a simple realization. In the Christian world people often say things like “God told me to do…” or “I prayed on it and…” etc. When what they mean is “I decided to do X, and I am justifying it by invoking God”. They talk as if they are hearing a third party. If you replaced God with “Sally” while listening to a group of Christians, one would really believe that Sally did all these things.

This is no revelation. But what struck me is this. If this is common place today, what’s to say that it is not how people talked 1000 years ago? It would be understood by the readers then as it is now. I think that puts a very different spin on Judeo/Christian religion. We will never really know.

I also don’t think most Christians seem to understand the bible. Is that arrogant of me? Yeah, probably. This cosmic Daddy waiting to spank you is completely missing the point.

Anyway, this is a quick overview. I'm sure I missed a bunch of stuff. If you have questions let me know.

Why are you trying to live a optimal life? For me living a optimal life is God supporting me and me being content in all circurstances from what God gives me at the time. I might be sick I might be healthy. I can do things that God has given me the ability to do like diet and workout if the circumstances allow me to. Or more like God allows me to. Doing these things might make me healthy or they might not either.

God gives me the ability to make money in a legal honest way not on only the pay for things but to give to others who are wanting or needing things. This life is not the main focus either like some fake christian teachers and the unbeliving world tend to believe. The focus is on the next life which is being in heaven which is achieved by accepting the gift of salvation. The gift is given to you when you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins, was buried and he rose on the third day as it says in the bible. You have to realise you are a sinner first. Sometime in your life you may have lied stole so you may decide to repent for your sins. Repentance is not about turning your life around trying to stop sinning or turning from sin that some false teachers claim. It's a Change of mind about your sin and coming to God and asking for forgiveness. And then beliving the gospel which is that Jesus who is God died for your sins was buried and rose on the third day.

Once you are saved then you might start to stop sinning. This takes time and noone will stop sinning completly. We all slip up from time to time and come back and ask God for forgiveness. Then living a optimal life is about telling other news and maybe they will become saved too. Using Gods resources which come to you help people to get to heaven. Doesn't take millions of dollars like some false teachers say. You can pray for people which will get you rewards in heaven which costs you nothing. Getting rewards in heaven are better than fast cars big houses big bank balances all that stuff. Which when you die none of the worldly stuff comes with ya.

Well said!

Why would I not want to live an optimal life?

What does it mean to say "God gives me the ability..."? What would it look like if God did not give you that ability?

Why stop sinning at all? What's wrong with sin? How do you define sin?

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What does it mean to live an "optimal" life? What are you optimizing?

I wouldn't say that my attachment to Christianity is particularly emotional. And I don't think that "church and rituals" are core to Christianity. But I do frame things around a pursuit of Truth, if such a thing even exists. (Christianity asserts that there is such a thing. Other religions may not.)

I'm also wary of such things.

We can know some things from the writings and other features of Christianity at the time. For many, the God spoke through the formal Church structures, and so didn't speak to the "regular folks" that often. I think it would be considered heretical to say that "God told me" something. That type of thinking is an outgrowth of the Protestant reformation, which decreased the distance between "regular folks" and God by removing the formal church as the intermediary.

But even then, it's not clear to me that "God told me" was immediately a normal part of the Christian experience. I really don't see evidence of people wandering around claiming to hear from God. And those that did (Joseph Smith, for example) seem to have ended up taking divergent theologies.

I think we come to understand the Bible through our cultural experiences. So I don't think it's necessarily true that "it would be understood by the readers then as it is now." Among other things, there were far fewer readers, and so most of what people would know would be through listening, and that would not be listening to only the Bible (though I believe Bible reading/recitation is part of the Catholic mass), but rather through someone else explaining it to them. This probably left less space for individual interpretation.

No, probably not. I would agree with you that most Christians don't understand the Bible. I good number of them haven't even read it, and don't think critically about it.

I think this is true.

To live a happy, healthy, successful life where I provide the most amount of value to the most amount of people given my abilities.

I want to be clear, I didn’t mean it in a negative way. Many people get a lot out of their church and community. They find comfort in the beliefs etc. I just never had that.

Ok, so I was not clear. I was referring to the times in the Bible that these sorts of statements are made. Like “Then God said to David…” There are some examples where it’s explicate. But many times it’s “And then God did this thing”. Readers of the Bible today take that as God explicitly did that thing. What if it was the same as when people today said “God saved me from…” or whatever. If so, what are the implications? People today know that when someone said “God told me…” that there was no third party voice. So did people 3000 years ago have that same understanding?

So your idea of an "optimal life" includes concern for other people? What do you mean by "value"? Does it includes your value to them as a friend, someone who cares about them, someone who empathizes with them, someone who shows them kindness? Do you think your ideas of "value" to others is informed by what you know about the life and teachings of Jesus and how they relate to our relationship to others? For example, the Good Samaritan, the Woman at the Well?


PairTheBoard

I've heard Self help gurus and even prosperity church pastors use the term providing value. Basically it s about giving people what people want. And the whole idea of doing that means you make a ton of money hopefully.

You see things like get ripped in two weeks from business people who talk about providing value. People don't want to spend a year dieting and training to get there but would rather spend $299 after clicking on the false clickbait.

That's the exact opposite of providing value.

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Value means many things. And providing value to the most people given one's abilities would be very different things to different individuals.

If I am a master widget maker, and people need widgets, when I make and sell my widget I am providing value. Maybe I am a great writer. Writing books that give people comfort or allow them to escape their day to day and relax provides them value.

I think that every individual has a certain capacity to provide value for others. It is my belief that we are morally obligate to provide such value. So say you have the capacity to cure cancer. But instead you choose to live the life of a surfer. Under my belief you would be living an immoral life.

Sure, it includes these things. But is not limited to them. Just being kind etc is just one aspect for most. But keep in mind that I am talking about the most amount of value to the greatest number of people. So say you are a really great friend, spouse, parent etc. You also have the capacity to create the next gen internet that will allow for millions of new jobs. But you chose to be a 3rd grade English teacher. I would say you are living an immoral life.

Absolutely. The teachings of Jesus and the bible continues to be the foundation of what I perceive to be the reality of objective morality. I just don't care if Jesus was the son of God or not. And to those that make the argument that "Jesus was either crazy or the son of God, if crazy we should ignore him", I think that is a silly argument. Truth is not contingent on the person saying the truth. His teachings are either true or not. If true it doesn't matter his mental state.

Then in my view you are a friend of Jesus and it doesn't matter what those from this church or that church say about you. It doesn't change the fact that you and Jesus walk together. Jesus didn't tell his disciples, "you must say I am this" or "you must say I am that". When asked who he was he answered with the question, "who do you say I am?" The truth is, you answer with your life just as he did with his.

In my view, your decision for the morality you describe amounts to Choosing Love and anyone who Chooses Love has a right to call themselves Christian if they want to.


PairTheBoard

I don't necessarily disagree with your assessment, but I think you would agree most people would not consider me a Christian.

Love one another. Bear good fruit. It's not about crying Lord, Lord.


PairTheBoard

Granting that these terms are all rife with difficulties when trying to get into the specifics, that's not a bad way to try to operationalize the term.

Got it. I think that's probably true of a lot of adults who are in the same type of "post-Christian" boat.

In my view of "community," a lot of the failures of contemporary (American) Christianity is the it has isolated people from each other rather bringing people together.

With regards to "comfort," I'm less certain that comfort was ever supposed to be the goal of Christianity. If you look at the history of the church, early Christianity was NEVER comfortable. Comfort was not a driving force for participation.

Understood.

I would say that those early religious writings wrote with a different sense of how God interacts with the world relative to humanity. God was certainly involved in the world, but God worked on a lot of macro-level things. He spoke to/through leaders (or people who would eventually become leaders), and he acted on the level of nations and not everyday interactions.

Also, a there was probably a lot more "community" involved into reading into those situations, and it's not unreasonable that some of those narratives were revised with the benefit of history looking backwards. The strongest contemporary analogy I can think of is how a lot of conservative Christians saw the Trump election as God's hand at work to help them, but I suspect that 50 years from now the narrative may be revised to see this more as a form of God's judgment of Christians in America (obvious speculation is obvious).

So I still think that there would be a different sense in how it was understood at the time compared to how it's understood now. The Post-Protestant Reformation God is a lot closer to individuals and leads to a more individualized faith. So if you combine the individualism with the "closer God" that is involved at the personal level, I think you read and understand God's interaction with the world very differently.

Sure, explaining any further would be a many hours conversation.

Yeah, I would agree.

I'm not saying that was necessarily the goal. But just that many find comfort in belief in God, some sort of certainty and an end "justice". I don't look for comfort in beliefs, I'm not sure that I'm capable of that. My point was only that because I had no emotional tie it was much easier to move away. Many people in my experience also wrap their identity in with their beliefs. I've never done that (mostly I'm just not built that way). Which makes it hard for many to change their core beliefs.

I think there is a lot of truth in what you are saying. I would honestly have to take a hard look. I think that for me this thought of mine gave me pause. And I don't have the motivation to really pursue it further. I don't think knowing the truth about this really gives me much value. I don't think I would change my way of acting.

Not exactly the same, but I remember an episode on House in which the patient, a well-known cancer researcher and therefore a 'worthy' patient to heal, had recently decided to abandon her research in order to pursue more personal activities. It did a pretty decent job of presenting both sides of the argument.

If she had never done any research, that'd be more like your example.

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Why equate "Choosing Love" with "calling oneself Christian" in the first place? Why not just leave it at "Choosing Love"?

This way you won't perpetuate the falsehood that being Christian means being a good person and/or being a good person means being a Christian.

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Got it. Yes, there is an emotional impact for some when it comes to both stepping into and stepping out of various faith traditions.

How are you built? In other words, where do you place your identity?

This may well be true, but it could also turn out to be surprisingly false. A lot depends on the way that you hold those truths and how you let it impact your sense of identity. If it is a non-identity-impacting belief, then yeah. Nothing changes. But for many people, there is at least some element of identity-formation that is involved in belief, and so there is at least some ways in which behaviors are changed. (For better or worse... well... that's another story.)

I was asserting the right of any person Choosing Love to call themselves a Christian if they want to. This in spite of the condemnation of them by some so called Christians who claim they don't "cry Lord Lord" according to just the right theology/Christology formulas and/or magical beliefs.

Someone who Chooses Love need not associate themselves with Jesus. But I believe Jesus sees them waking with him whether they see him there or not.


PairTheBoard

My point was less about how Christians define being a Christian internally, but about the external idea of defining a good person as being synonymous with the label 'Christian'.

e.g. if you say to someone doing a good act, "that was very Christian of you" instead of simply "that was very good of you".

I don't think I've said anything that would suggest doing that.

However, if you consider yourself a Christian according to my sense of the term and you have a friend who you know rejects "Christianity" but shows love toward others with kindness, empathy, charity and tolerance, you are spared the thought, "too bad he's going to hell because he doesn't accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior and only begotten Son of God, Redeemer of his sinful nature fallen by original sin." And he is spared from picking up such an attitude from you, or worse hearing you tell him. Instead, he picks up the attitude that you and he are brothers. No need to offend him with proselytizing. But if the topic comes up you can certainly tell him you consider him an equal in faith. Just don't be offensive about it.



PairTheBoard

At the risk of flogging this to death...

Your sense of the term sounds exactly like that to me:

Why should it matter at all for someone to be able to feel comfortable calling themselves 'Christian' for the sole reason of their being a loving person unless you are equating the concepts?

Edit: switch 'Christian' with some other terms for clarity (Muslim, Hindu, Rotarian, scientist, conservative etc).

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you saying that I'm equating the two concepts but not admitting it? Or are you suggesting I'm equating the two concepts but I shouldn't be? Or are you saying that it shouldn't matter if a person who believes Choosing Love means he walks with Jesus is uncomfortable calling himself a Christian because some "Christians" say he doesn't qualify? Or are you saying he should be uncomfortable in that case because he's not really a Christian based only on Choosing Love?

If I'm relating to a Muslim or Buddhist or otherwise, and they tell me they arrived at Love as their ultimate concern in life by way of their beliefs, I might explain my view that we are brothers in faith and I respect how they arrived on our path.

It seems to me you're trying hard to be bothered by something in this. Before asking more questions, why not tell me where you're coming from?


PairTheBoard

And it seems to me that you're nit-picking over something that is clear (or clear enough). No offense

I'd just be repeating myself at this point, so I'll just repeat my initial comment and see if anyone else wants to chime in, otherwise call it a day. Perhaps I'm not being as clear as I think and/or perhaps you're being more obtuse than you think!

BeaucoupFish: I can understand where you're coming from, it's like there's a certain kind of ethnocentrism (religiocentrism?) involved in conflating "good" with "Christian". A certain kind of provincialism which sounds like it ultimately makes other perspectives second-class.

At the same time though, I can see PTB's perspective too:

I think it's reasonable to recognize in that universalizing impulse something that's also expansive, open to others, and which is valuable in that sense. In practice, I think the people who tend towards expressing themselves in this way also tend to be more open to other cultures, religions, etc. than those who more strongly emphasize group boundaries. So I'm not sure we have to be too negative about people relating things back to their own local perspective in that way, even if it is ultimately a kind of ethnocentrism. There's a real difference between meaning "All good people are Christian" and "Only Christians are good people", even the phrasing is awkward.

We are all rooted in our own traditions one way or another, it's perhaps somewhat inevitable that we express our understandings in the symbols we are most comfortable with. If we can recognize the equivalent value of different symbols and different perspectives then I think that's a good thing, regardless of that tendency.