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1. Stance on abortion among your brothers in church? As if brothers should even have one that matters? 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist th

1. Stance on abortion among your brothers in church? As if brothers should even have one that matters? 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell? Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I don’t come here as an atheist, just as someone who’s trying really hard to believe but finding no acceptable ground to stand at all. The only smart people I find religious (especially Christian) are ones who were born and grew up forced to go to church. Typically they’d give up on practising it in their teens, basically break every rule in their book for two decades and then somehow rediscover it because now it’s convenient to find some community and higher purpose in their life. The ones who convert from elsewhere when they are adults are almost always gullible and did so for the most transactional reasons you can think of.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago
> Stance on abortion among your brothers in church Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-united-methodist-position-on-abortion https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite... > Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology! Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.
- coliveira 6y ago
  The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    I think calling it a rehash is unfair. I would call it "independent discovery", where the same general lived human experience gives rise to the same general ideas about the universe and society and right and wrong. Religion is a technology for dealing with the experience of being a person.
    - coliveira 6y ago
      I don't think it is independent discovery, because Christianity was born at a time when Greek ideas were widespread (Palestine having been a Greek-dominated area for centuries before the arrival of Romans). I believe there was an amalgamation of elements from ancient Hebrew religion with other pagan myths mainly from Greece.
      - brundolf 6y ago
        "Independent" may have been overstating it, I just think something is being lost when we frame one religion (or even a subset of its concepts) as being purely derivative of another. Just because ideas are similar doesn't necessarily mean they have the exact same origin, and in fact I think it's much more interesting to look at the cases where they didn't have the same origin, because it tells us something about ourselves as human beings.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Mainline Protestant typically relatively neutral leaning pro choice.
KMag 6y ago
> 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell? I'm not a Baptist, but presumably nearly all of them find it sad and unfortunate and feel compassion for most of humanity. I'm not sure what you're getting at, though. Only believing things that make you happy isn't a very good philosophy of life.
brundolf 6y ago
> Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he's ever met". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between. Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about rules at all, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with rules you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with rules you become a bitter atheist. A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion. Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me. Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it. Most, I think, see that even if it does, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and osmosis, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into whatever. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads. I like this quote from Pope Francis: > We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.
- ramraj07 6y ago
  You say that most Protestants are loving people but that doesn’t seem to be the case at least in the US. Evangelicals are not the only group to vote republican/trump, but they are the vast majority. Very few Christians seem to see the problems (fundamental ones) with that regime but just want to vote for a madman because their goals are met at the expense of literal death and suffering (see Birx’s statements from yesterday). Again to iterate, it’s not just Christians who voted and continue to vote for him, it’s also a bunch of other people, but the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness, people who are afraid of everyone else and want their life to not change the world be dammed, so yeah can’t really see anyone supporting this ideology to be a good person.

AuthorizedCust 6y ago

> Stance on abortion among your brothers in church Denominational stance is reluctance: https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-united-methodist-position-on-abortion https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite... > Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell I am not Baptist. But the ones I speak to, who are dedicated fundamentalists, seem to believe that I am going to hell since I am not and will never be "saved" in the way they prescribe. Furthermore, in their view, nearly everyone who existed before Jesus's time is condemned to Hell except for a select few who foretold of Jesus's coming. Crazy theology! Also, keep in mind that Baptists have diversity. The Southern Baptists are the firebrand fundamentalists. There are others that are almost indistinguishable from mainline Protestantism.

coliveira 6y ago
The idea of hell was widespread in ancient times. For example, the Greeks believed it. They also believed that everyone went to hell. This is exactly the mythology that christians spread nowadays. The only difference is that Christians believed that the few who accepted Christ would be rescued from Hell, the same way Eurydice was saved by Orpheus (hence the idea that the church is the bride of Jesus). It is all a rehash of ancient myths.
- brundolf 6y ago
  I think calling it a rehash is unfair. I would call it "independent discovery", where the same general lived human experience gives rise to the same general ideas about the universe and society and right and wrong. Religion is a technology for dealing with the experience of being a person.
  - coliveira 6y ago
    I don't think it is independent discovery, because Christianity was born at a time when Greek ideas were widespread (Palestine having been a Greek-dominated area for centuries before the arrival of Romans). I believe there was an amalgamation of elements from ancient Hebrew religion with other pagan myths mainly from Greece.
    - brundolf 6y ago
      "Independent" may have been overstating it, I just think something is being lost when we frame one religion (or even a subset of its concepts) as being purely derivative of another. Just because ideas are similar doesn't necessarily mean they have the exact same origin, and in fact I think it's much more interesting to look at the cases where they didn't have the same origin, because it tells us something about ourselves as human beings.

Robotbeat 6y ago

Mainline Protestant typically relatively neutral leaning pro choice.

KMag 6y ago

> 2. Do you follow the edict that if you’re not baptist then by definition you go to hell? How do you reconcile this with having friends or anyone at all you care about who are then going to hell? I'm not a Baptist, but presumably nearly all of them find it sad and unfortunate and feel compassion for most of humanity. I'm not sure what you're getting at, though. Only believing things that make you happy isn't a very good philosophy of life.

brundolf 6y ago

> Point is, I’m not sure there is any middle ground that’s acceptable. I grew up fundamentalist, then swung hard atheist, then ended up, as one friend who went to seminary described it, "the most christian atheist he's ever met". I've known Christians ignorant and intellectual, hateful and openly loving, urban and rural, liberal and conservative, and everything in-between. Here's my take: A healthy faith is not about rules at all, or about finding a system for understanding the physical world or anything like that. If you get obsessed with rules you become a bitter fundamentalist; if you get fed-up with religion but stay obsessed with rules you become a bitter atheist. A healthy faith is about people. Yourself, your community, the world. Cultivating habits of forgiveness and growth toward yourself, and openness and love toward others. Having a specific segment of your life dedicated to contemplation of the most important things in life, and doing so in a community on a regular basis. The iconography and the texts, ideally, are just a communal conduit for those ideas; symbols people can point to and use to talk about their thoughts and feelings around this stuff with others, and also to spark new thoughts and points of discussion. Many (not all) of my close friends are christians, and none of them have ever tried to convert me. Some of them don't really think hell exists; most of them don't think some magic prayer is all that's needed to keep you out of it. Most, I think, see that even if it does, the best thing they can do for others is simply to love them and to help them be better through example and osmosis, if anything. They know they don't control others and they can't force them into whatever. They can only be Good and hope that it spreads. I like this quote from Pope Francis: > We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good: we will meet one another there.

ramraj07 6y ago
You say that most Protestants are loving people but that doesn’t seem to be the case at least in the US. Evangelicals are not the only group to vote republican/trump, but they are the vast majority. Very few Christians seem to see the problems (fundamental ones) with that regime but just want to vote for a madman because their goals are met at the expense of literal death and suffering (see Birx’s statements from yesterday). Again to iterate, it’s not just Christians who voted and continue to vote for him, it’s also a bunch of other people, but the common denominator seems to be an undertone of selfishness and heartlessness, people who are afraid of everyone else and want their life to not change the world be dammed, so yeah can’t really see anyone supporting this ideology to be a good person.