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I am religious and believe in free will

71 (27.7%)

I am religious and do not believe in free will

10 (3.9%)

I am not religious and believe in free will

114 (44.5%)

I am not religious and do not believe in free will

61 (23.8%)

Total Members Voted: 251

[Helgoland]

Sounds like a great place to launder money though - not that I'm suggesting it's being done, but there must be plenty of opportunities.

[TempAcc]

That is actualy is a nice medium for laundering money in many countries, especialy the ones in which religious temples are exempt/partialy exempt of taxation and donation programs are involved. Altough this isn't a problem related to religion, just how some churches choose to organize themselves. Its one of the reasons to why I've distanced myself from organized protestantism in my country (and in some cases, catholic organizations), but again, this isn't a problem inherent to organized religion,  but more related to many forms of state protected non-profit organizations.

[penguinofhonor]

My grandma's old Baptist pastor embezzled a ton of money from their church over a few years. There is a lot of trust in churches that can easily be abused. Even after it became public, people sided with him and expelled people from the congregation for going to an alternative church service or talking about it to the news. The church basically split in two, with a new, smaller church forming out of people who were "expelled" (I don't think anyone actually had the right to ban them from the church or anything) and the people who thought expelling them was wrong (my grandma being part of the latter group). I think the original congregation stopped supporting the pastor so much once he went to jail.

[Rolan7]

It seems like most modern Christians agree that Jesus is the source of good Christian morality.  Love thy neighbor.  Turn the other cheek.  Those who live by the sword will die by it.  Be generous to the poor.  Don't judge others because you aren't perfect either.  It's a pretty cool morality, and I'm glad people follow it.

The only issue is that it's the opposite of what the Old Testament God does and commands.  What would Jesus do?  Not those things.

So...  Why do Christians insist that the God in the Old Testament is at all connected to Jesus?  During the 3rd and 4th centuries, when the New Testament was being written and edited, there were many Gnostics who objected to this inconsistency.  But in 367 Athanasius, a bishop in Alexandria (Africa), decided which books would be in the New Testament.  (This list was approved in 382 by Pope Damascus I).

Who gave them that authority?  Emperor Constantine I.  He was ordering Bibles written as early as 331, decades before the church finalized canon.  This *Roman Emperor* selected a branch of Christianity and threw the weight of the Empire behind it.  Right or wrong, this branch won.  And they hid the Bible in Latin for literally a thousand years (until the 1450s, when their grip slipped).

No wonder medieval "heretics" like the Cathars called out the great contradiction, the utter difference between the OT God and the NT God/Jesus.  And I didn't mention this last time, but they payed very dearly for that.  Pope INNOCENT III had them slaughtered.

When they discovered, from the admissions of some of them, that there were Catholics mingled with the heretics they said to the abbot “Sir, what shall we do, for we cannot distinguish between the faithful and the heretics.” The abbot, like the others, was afraid that many, in fear of death, would pretend to be Catholics, and after their departure, would return to their heresy, and is said to have replied “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius - Kill them all for the Lord knoweth them that are His” (2 Tim. ii. 19) and so countless number in that town were slain.

That's how afraid they were.  The Catholic Church had tried reasoned arguments earlier...  And utterly failed.  These ascetics believed in spiritual growth over worldly power and wealth.  So they were wiped out by worldly power.  It was arguably the first of many such purges in that era.

Isn't this the sort of thing modern Protestants should be examining?  Now that the Church can't stomp it out?  The God in the Old Testament is an absolute monster.  His actions aren't mysterious, they're antagonistic to love and tolerance.  He literally demands fear, blood sacrifice, and the death and rape of other tribes.

He isn't Jesus, to put it mildly.

[Arcvasti]

So...  Why do Christians insist that the God in the Old Testament is at all connected to Jesus?

There's at least one "heresy" that posits that the God of the Old Testament is a "Separate and lesser" being then the all-loving God of the New Testament, although they're still sorta associated with each other.

[UXLZ]

That's what faith gets you. Honestly, I don't even get why the OT is a thing anymore.

[Telgin]

Or why it's selectively applied.

Really, the disconnect between the old and new testaments was a big part of what drove me to stop trusting anything in the Bible and ultimately drop Christianity altogether.  Knowing that it was humans that decided on what went into the Bible and what didn't (that is, learning that it wasn't originally a single and continuous document) hurt a lot of my faith in it too.  After all, if I was able to insert a verse or ten here or there and distribute my own version, who was to say that any particular version was legitimate at that point?

And if you can't trust in the only tangible part of Christianity, then there's not a lot of reason to trust the rest for me.

[Calidovi]

Or why it's selectively applied.

Really, the disconnect between the old and new testaments was a big part of what drove me to stop trusting anything in the Bible and ultimately drop Christianity altogether.  Knowing that it was humans that decided on what went into the Bible and what didn't (that is, learning that it wasn't originally a single and continuous document) hurt a lot of my faith in it too.  After all, if I was able to insert a verse or ten here or there and distribute my own version, who was to say that any particular version was legitimate at that point?

And if you can't trust in the only tangible part of Christianity, then there's not a lot of reason to trust the rest for me.

I absolutely agree. A moderate inconsistency in understandable and even appreciated though it can be easily faked. But when there are two opposite viewpoints that the author tries to connect in the work, then that just becomes horribly unreasonable and contradictory.

[Orange Wizard]

*mumbles something about the bible and internal consistency*

[redwallzyl]

Well just do as I do and except that the old testament is simply a classic example of an oral history that's been written down. It's hugly warped and such by the generations and so it can just be ignored. The only part of the Bible that really matters is the whole Jesus part. The rest is mainly peoples opinions on that part( the new testament that is).

[Rolan7]

Ignoring it isn't bad.  Better than trying to take lessons from it.
But, I'm just saying...  That God really acts like Satan.

[Telgin]

Distressingly so at times.  And let's not get started on how warped the idea of Satan has become.    Actually, I'm pretty sure that was discussed just a few pages back, and probably before that.

Well just do as I do and except that the old testament is simply a classic example of an oral history that's been written down. It's hugly warped and such by the generations and so it can just be ignored. The only part of the Bible that really matters is the whole Jesus part. The rest is mainly peoples opinions on that part( the new testament that is).

Ultimately this is what most Christians do I guess.  After all, you literally can't apply a lot of it to modern life in most countries anyway without severe repercussions, and I'm pretty sure even the most die hard and fundamentalist Christians would balk at some of the things it tells us to do.

It's also interesting to see various justifications for why parts of it are still relevant but not entirely enforced.  See my previous comment on why you're just supposed to say that homosexuals are going to Hell rather than murder them.  I guess you could say that Jesus's teachings say that, but it requires quite a few leaps of logic in my opinion.

[UXLZ]

What was it, Satan was originally a servant of God whose job was to test Humans?

And now he's the King of Hell. Which no one actually knows the appearance of, but everyone's certain what it looks like.

but it requires quite a few leaps of logic in my opinion.

Just about every religion on the planet has a few, or more than a few (or at least the ones I'm aware of.)
Faith: It makes up for all shortcomings in logic.

[Telgin]

What was it, Satan was originally a servant of God whose job was to test Humans?

And now he's the King of Hell. Which no one actually knows the appearance of, but everyone's certain what it looks like.

Something like that.  A Jewish scholar could probably say a lot more than I can, but the character depicted as Satan in the old testament was a tester of humanity and employed by God.  Hence, the book of Job is no longer 100% crazy and is just unbelievably awful instead.

Somehow Satan became some fallen angel in the new testament and got roped into being the one who caused humanity to fall in Genesis despite there being no direct evidence for any of that to my knowledge.  People claim he was the snake in the Garden of Eden, but the only reason to think that is some line later in the Bible calling Satan "the old snake" or something like that.  If you look at Genesis from a purely Jewish standpoint, then it was literally a case of a snake telling Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.  I think anyway.  I'm not sure what differences exist between the old testament and the Torah or other Jewish documents.

but it requires quite a few leaps of logic in my opinion.

Just about every religion on the planet has a few, or more than a few (or at least the ones I'm aware of.)
Faith: It makes up for all shortcomings in logic.

Fair enough.  That said, this is probably what was the final nail in the coffin of my religious practicing.  I quickly realized that the Christian God was perfectly happy for me to burn in Hell because He knew that under my current life circumstances I would never believe in His existence.  He knows that I can't accept that He exists without more than tenuous word-of-mouth type proof of His existence, and that's too bad because He won't show up on Earth for a few minutes one day and let people know he exists.  I've always said that it should be impossible to even doubt the existence of a real god, but... it seems to be the other way around for me.

I recognize that faith is a big part of what it is to be a Christian, but I just can't do that, and that means I have to go to Hell according to many / most Christians.

Hmm, speaking of Hell, that's another interesting topic that has been altered quite a bit over time from my understanding.  Supposedly the words for it in the original texts were referring more to burning trash mounds or something, not a place that evil and unbelieving humans would spend all of eternity in the most painful existence imaginable.  I guess that the people who interpret Hell as being more of a place where your soul is destroyed might have been on to something.

Boy do I wish I could have these conversations with my local preacher... I'd love to hear his answers for some of this.

[TempAcc]

The concept of an eternal hell, like we see in current day christianity, did not exist in judaism, and there isn't much of it in early texts that formed the bible. In fact, contrary to what many people think, the notion of a "purgatory" like gehenna (IE a place where everyone's souls, even the non wickedm, go to so that they may pay for their sins, purify themselves and eventualy be released from) is older in judaism than hell as we know it. Well, at least thats how the Kaballah describes it. The interpretation of Gehenna as an actual place may not even be accurate, as it may have originally been used to describe the shame one feels after realizing how far from God they've placed themselves, through their sins.

I thiiiiink that in the book of enoch, hell (tartarus) is place in which the watchers (fallen angels who betrayed God and mingled with humans) are trapped, and there's no mention of human souls going there.

Christian hell comes mostly from the new testament, and even then it isn't eternal before the apocalypse. In fact, if you were wicked in life, you just stay there until the resurrection of everyone ever during the apocalypse, in which the dead will be judged alongside the living, according to the bible, and the wicked may redeem themselves then, since they would already be aware of their sins by passing through hell.

The idea of an eternal hell is also denied by gnostic christians and spiritualists/spiritists, in which there's no actual hell, since we are already in the worst part of existence (material existence and mostly ignorant of God and our true nature).