Consciencebound

Posts Tagged ‘bible’

Does faith actually give us information that we cannot get with our senses? Can we gain knowledge by faith? Or is it an assumption that we make about what someone told us that God has said? Or is it something that we throw up like a white flag of surrender when we realize that we don’t have enough information but we still feel like we have to defend our belief?

In the Bible we are told:

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Interesting discussion on morality from a youtube vlogger. Most memorable quote is at the very end of the video,

The problem is not that people don’t believe in objective morality, the problem is… that they do.

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When pondering the subject of morality, the subject of God’s actions and the questionable morality of those actions often comes up. When I refer to God’s actions, I would be referring to any religion which seems to make a claim to actually knowing what God’s actions are. In my case, Christianity is the closest to home and so that is where my questions are directed.

We are told by Christians that we derive our morality from God himself. We are told that without God there would be no morality and that God gives us moral directives which come from his nature. So a certain thing is not moral just because God says it, but rather it is moral because that is part of who God is and he can do no wrong.

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My friend Paul wrote this and I thought it was really good so I am re-posting it here.  It provoked a very long discussion on Facebook which has been quite good.  I hope you find it interesting…

I am writing from exile. I have been out of the Church now for over 4  years, because ultimately, my conscience led me here. As many of you know, I was once a Calvary Chapel Pastor and missionary, but it slowly stopped making sense. I do have reasons for this, but that is not what I am writing about now. I was taught to believe that people like me became this way because of a gross sin, or because they loved the world more than they loved God. I now know this to be a lie. I am really not much different morally than I was then, nor do I wish to pursue things that would harm myself or others. Ironically, to be quite honest, I think I’m a bit more moral than I was then. I am most definately way more honest.

I’m not writing to make a case for leaving Fundamental Evangelicalism, because I know that to be a waste of time. The real point of writing is to ask a question to those who prefer Dogma over their own conscience when they collide. My question is:

If Conscience brought you to believe a certain Dogma, what do you do when that same conscience tells you to leave it?

A friend of mine who is also no longer involved in Christendom uses the analogy of Martin Luther. Martin Luther, upon leaving the Catholic Church, gives conscience as one of the reasons for his “protest” against the Catholic Church. “For a man to deny his conscience is neither right nor sane…..here I stand I can do no other”. As a Protestant, I found that statement to be very moving. I still consider it to be moving. However, the Catholic Church found it to be heresy.

For whatever reason, the high value of following ones “heart” seems to be a commonly held belief. As Joseph Campell puts it, to “Follow your Bliss” seems to be the key to happiness and fulfillment. He goes as far as to say that Maslow’s theory of five human needs mean nothing to a man who lives his passion. Following our heart is obviously a foundation for happiness and true fulfillment. Read the rest of this entry »

I love that the internet is full of so much information that 15 years ago, was only available to a very limited amount of people. This video is taken from academicearth.org which like The Teaching Company (teach12.com) has classes from prominent teachers and professors across the world that you can watch or listen to only academicearth.org is free. This video is of a class at Yale university which is an introduction to the Old Testament of the Bible. If you are interested in understanding more about the Bible as a literary book, this is a great video to watch. Some surprising things that you might learn is that the Old Testament is NOT:

1) The OT is NOT a Single Book with a single point of view but rather a collection of many different writings from divergent points of view that are often not in agreement.

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 I came across this site today that I thought was pretty good.  There is  a lot more on this site than just he page I link to but the section on the Bible I found to be pretty good.  This is coming from a skeptical and atheistic point of view but I believe it represents in some manner what much scholarship today has to say about the Bible.  Read it just as skeptically as the writer is about Christianity.

The sections discussed on this page are the following:

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This is a video version of one of my more popular posts entitled truth seeking. Let me know what you think.

Below is a conversation that I had via email with a friend of mine from the past that i have not talked to in a long time. He had just heard that I had left the faith and I believe him to be a very sincere man. I wanted to try and point out how easy it is to be blinded by our own beliefs that we do not listen to people who are opposing us. I know that I have done this myself and am probably guilty of still doing it but I want to try and be as open as possible to what the truth is and that means truly listening to people’s questions and thinking them through. This can be a hard thing to do especially when you have Read the rest of this entry »

Leaving The Fold: Testimonies Of Former Fundamentalists

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Mostly because I could identify with so much of the personal experiences of the people who wrote in it. Ed Babinksi has collected various people’s “testimonies” of their experience with fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. From a review on Amazon, “33 former Christian fundamentalists explain how and why they first embraced, and later abandoned, that belief system. Of these, eight have become atheists, eight (including Babinski) agnostics, one a wiccan, and one a Zen Buddhist; the remainder have remained Christian” Read the rest of this entry »