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Originally Posted by bvc Modern day christians have a bad habit of thinking faith is a thing, something they possess, and something to work up, stir up, or release, but that's not biblical faith. |
What do you mean by "a thing"? The Bible refers to faith as a gift of God (Eph 2:8), so it is certainly something more than a mere
human belief. After all, Jesus founded and perfected our faith (Heb 12:2), and he
is God. So faith is not
merely belief, but in fact is
knowledge of God, given by God himself. We can stir ourselves up to love and good works in light of that faith, but the faith itself remains steady, since it does not rely upon our own effort, but God's. I'm not sure exactly what you were meaning by your post, so I am not sure if I am agreeing with you or not; merely clarifying my own position.
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Originally Posted by PaulFXH Actually, the majority were, or at least called themselves, Christians. |
I am aware of that.
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This is an innappropriately facetious remark that does little to support your point of view.
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No it isn't. If the "Christians" you spoke to were not even able to give you a sound definition of the
cornerstone of Christianity, then they are either uneducated in their religion, or immature, or both. How is mentioning this inappropriate
or facetious? It seems both appropriate and necessary to point this out, lest you get a false impression of what biblical faith is. Far too many people
think they understand Christianity because they have spoken to, or were even brought up as, "Christians"—despite that there is nothing biblical about any of the doctrines they think they understand.
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1) Galileo was forced to essentially retract his view that the earth revolved around the Sun rather than vice versa by none other than His Holiness, the Pope. Even with the retraction, he was still made to spend the last thirty years of his life under house arrest.
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How is this a rationally-based obstacle to belief in the Bible? It is an historical event which has been vastly misrepresented and misunderstood by the majority of people, both religious and non; but it doesn't even describe a rational objection to the Christian faith, let alone a current one. Galileo was not alone among
Christians who believed in heliocentricism
and the authority of the Bible, instead of geocentricism and the authority of a doddering old fool.
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2) Many Christian sects have, even today, great difficulty in accepting the Theory of Evolution in preference to the Intelligent Design assumption implied in the Bible. Nevertheless, the Catholic Church did, in recent years, issue an encyclical more or less proclaiming the validity of evolution. However, this was 141 years after the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species".
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I don't really care what the Catholic Church has or has not done, nor what orthodox science believes. Since science relies on faulty presuppositions to begin with, any attempt to interpret data according to those presuppositions so as to arrive at "evidence" will generally result in error. Evolutionary Theory is only a "rationally-based obstacle" to belief in the Bible if one erroneously believes that evolutionary theory is rational. Since this is not the case, there is no problem.
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Originally Posted by SigmaX If we admit that the definition of faith seems to be a little different for each of us, will it help us to get to the core of the issue? |
Obviously it is different; I am clarifying the meaning of
biblical faith, as opposed to the faith of other religions.