/christ/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

Pascal also had the same realization.

For Pascal the human condition is an enigma. For man is at the same time miser-

able and yet great. On the one hand, his misery is due principally to his uncertainty

and insignificance. Writing in the tradition of the French skeptic Montaigne, Pascal

repeatedly emphasizes the uncertainty of conclusions reached via reason and the

senses. Apart from intuitive first principles, nothing seems capable of being known

with certainty. In particular, reason and nature do not seem to furnish decisive

evidence as to whether God exists or not. As man looks around him, all he sees

is darkness and obscurity. Moreover, insofar as his scientific knowledge is correct,

man learns that he is an infinitesimal speck lost in the immensity of time and

space. His brief life is bounded on either side by eternity, his place in the universe

is lost in the immeasurable infinity of space, and he finds himself suspended, as it

were, between the infinite microcosm within and the infinite macrocosm without.

Uncertain and untethered, man flounders in his efforts to lead a meaningful and

happy life. His condition is characterized by inconstancy, boredom, and anxiety.

His relations with his fellow men are warped by self-love; society is founded on

mutual deceit. Man’s justice is fickle and relative, and no fixed standard of value

may be found.

Despite their predicament, however, most people, incredibly, refuse to seek an

answer or even to think about their dilemma. Instead, they lose themselves in

escapisms. Listen to Pascal’s description of the reasoning of such a person:

I know not who sent me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am.

I am terribly ignorant of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor

my soul and that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects upon itself as well

as upon all external things, and has no more knowledge of itself than of them.

I see the terrifying immensity of the universe which surrounds me, and find myself

limited to one corner of this vast expanse, without knowing why I am set down here

rather than elsewhere, nor why the brief period appointed for my life is assigned to

me at this moment rather than another in all the eternity that has gone before and

will come after me. On all sides I behold nothing but infinity, in which I am a mere

atom, a mere passing shadow that returns no more. All I know is that I must soon

die, but what I understand least of all is this very death which I cannot escape.

As I know not whence I come, so I know not whither I go. I only know that on

leaving this world I fall for ever into nothingness or into the hands of a wrathful

God, without knowing to which of these two states I shall be everlastingly consigned.

Such is my condition, full of weakness and uncertainty. From all this I conclude that

I ought to spend every day of my life without seeking to know my fate. I might

perhaps be able to find a solution to my doubts; but I cannot be bothered to do so,

I will not take one step towards its discovery.

Pascal can only regard such indifference as insane. Man’s condition ought to impel

him to seek to discover whether there is a God and a solution to his predicament.

But people occupy their time and their thoughts with trivialities and distractions,

so as to avoid the despair, boredom, and anxiety that would inevitably result if

those diversions were removed.

Such is the misery of man. But mention must also be made of the greatness of

man. For although man is miserable, he is at least capable of knowing that he is

miserable. The greatness of man consists in thought. Man is a mere reed, yes, but

he is a thinking reed. The universe might crush him like a gnat; but even so, man

is nobler than the universe because he knows that it crushes him, and the universe

has no such knowledge. Man’s whole dignity consists, therefore, in thought. “By

space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like a mere speck; by thought

I comprehend the universe.”

This is an excerpt from Reasonable Faith, by William Lane Craig. An amazing work that will show you that our Faith its a great one inside and outside. It will give you a glimpse of the greatest minds of these 2000 years.

Read it.

Part 1 of 63

>>9472

>Hi /christ/, I have something to tell you. I was once a fedora-tier deist and converted to Christianity later on, but I fear that I converted because of too shallow of a reason.

Aaaaaaahh, the doubts of the new Christian.

Firstly, welcome to the family, brah.

Secondly, know that you will always be attacked by doubts about your motivation for becoming a Christian, about your quality as a Christian, about the depth of your faith, about pretty much everything. Let me tell you the truth: the world is divided in two parts, the Lord's and those that want nothing to do with Him, and those that want nothing to do with Him want YOU to have nothing to do with Him. They – and I am more speaking about the former-angels that whisper in human ears – want above all else and 'by any means they can find for you to either fail to take proper root as a Christian, or to achieve anything as a Christian. They want you to be discouraged, disappointed, lacking in faith, doubting, depressed, … ANYTHING other than a successful, God-dependent, God-serving believer, and they will stop at nothing to achieve this. No barrier is too high, no scheme too evil to achieve this goal.

If you have become a believer, you have entered a spiritual war, and that war will not end until your life does.

I don't tell you this to frighten you – because the one that is in you is FAR GREATER than the one who is in the world, and the one whom the Father has given to Christ, NOTHING can snatch you from His hand – but to make you aware of what is happening, of what to expect. And the attacks will come from other people, often from those people who you thought were closest to you, from strangers, from circumstances, and from your own mind into which the enemy will frequently whisper their toxic sludge of ideas.

What can you do when all of hell and most of the human race is arrayed against you?

P R A Y

R E A D Y O U R B I B L E

DEPEND ON GOD. SEEK HIM E V E R Y D A Y !!!

You need to dose-up really heavily on God's medicine to help inoculate you against the toxic filth the enemy will try to poison you with, you need to really get to know the promises of God about never abandoning you. Doesn't mean hard times won't come, because – believe me – they will, but it does mean that no matter what happens, nothing and no one can take you from Jesus' hand.

>Hi /christ/, I have something to tell you. I was once a fedora-tier deist and converted to Christianity later on, but I fear that I converted because of too shallow of a reason.

The point is that no matter what door you came to Christ through, you came to Christ. The door no longer matters, the destination is what matters. And once you are His, He won't let go.

>>9489

Part 2 of 4?

>>9472

>Although the main reason I became Christian, was because I realized one worrying pseudo-philosophical thing that I never noticed. The more I grew up, the more aware I became of how horrible the world itself is, and how many downright evil people are there. There is a lot of suffering, and ultimately, there is far more evil than there is good. I then realized, that without God, there will be people that might suffer their entire lives, and never get anything out of them, there are people who might destroy lives of others, and still get away with it, I could fail at life, die and just disappear. I started feeling horrible emptiness, and looking at how horrible the world was. I realized, that if I won't at least hope that God exists, I will go completely insane. So I started clinging to that hope, and eventually it became a belief.

I remember reading or perhaps hearing someone say that the present generation may have grown up with more atheism than there has ever been before, it's also the most connected and aware time in human history – they Lord has counterbalanced the atheism with a really clear picture of "look how shitty the world actually is"

And it is. This world has always been bad, always will be, and if you read the poets, authors, apologists and theologians from years back, you'll see that no one has ever viewed the world as nice. What changed is that around the late 1800's we began believing our own marketing. See, at that time, people like Nietzsche started telling us human beings were gods and shouldn't be brought low by constraints like morality and religion – throw off those shackles and be the man you were meant to be. So, Adolph Hitler did.

And people like Karl Marx said, the system is all wrong and we need to destroy it, and rebuild it from the ground up into a more perfect system, so Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot did.

It's called Modernism and it is the belief that mankind can improve, even to perfection, the world. It came indirectly from science, which was making, just like now, such astounding headway into discoveries, new technologies, new medicines, we were improving the lives that were possible in ways NONE of our forebears could ever have imagined possible. And this created such an optimism that we thought that it might just be possible that, one day, we could eradicate ALL disease, and, said Marx, we could eradicate ALL poverty, and, Nietzsche said, we could eradicate all barriers to human endeavour, make at last the perfect man!!

And if you need more, look at all those science movies, cartoons or science fiction books of the 1880s to 1950s: such optimism for science, such optimism for the perfect human, for the perfect civilisation, that humans would explore the galaxy and bring such virtue everywhere we went, because we were perfected now. Disease would be gone – H.G.Wells was the first to think that possible, though he did put a twist on it by making it the only defense we earthlings had against the martians – we would have perfect babies (genetics will soon have that for us), we'd explore limitless planets, conquer the whole universe, human civilisation would rule over all, that inexorable tide of human perfection would not be stopped, only slowed, by the ape-like or lizard-like lesser races of less-evolved aliens. Oh yes, science fiction was full of it.

We swallowed it. And you and I have grown up in a world that, largely, believes that still. And, in and of itself, it's not a bad thing – of course we should be trying to eradicate disease, alleviate poverty, bind wounds and make peace, and there's no doubt we have made the world better and better over the centuries, but only in the past two have we ever believed that such improvements could be achieved without the Grace of God. We began believing WE were the answer for everything, and rejected this notion of God as primitive and immature. Mature, advanced civilisations wouldn't have gods anymore. That was how we got out of the dust, but it wouldn't serve to retain such thinking in the modern age.

t.b.c.

>>9489

>>9489

Part 3 of 4

>>9472

Can you hear that still echoing in the world still? It's an old thought, and it's called Modernism.

You'll see it today, even, in the quest for the A.I. singularity, when we are no longer just men but truly gods who make life. Oh, yes, THAT is really what A.I. is about. Or human augmentation, the folks who put magnetic sensors in their fingers, who plan around cybernetic enhancements to our bodies, who believe that one day we will conquer the basic cell processes in our bodies that we will never have to age (refer Jupiter Ascending for that) and will live essentially for ever. Yes, these are not science fictions, they're real scientists working on real things. I keep mentioning science fiction because that's where these ideas that permeate our culture are most obvious, where the knife cuts through the fabric and you get the gleam of the steel of what we're really aiming or hoping for.

But it's that same old thought: humans don't need parenting from some "ancient sky fairy" any more, we're ready to be gods, now, thanks.

But then the cynicism started kicking-in in the 1960s. For some, it was "spirituality" was missing, so they went to India and brought back "eastern mysticism" to the hippy movement in California. For others, the perfect man was too monochrome, too standardised, and they began thinking about the diversity of human beings and decided that no one view of the world was the only right one. Enter POST-modernism, which has made its #1 doctrine "you have no right to judge me" (except when I disagree with you, then I can do that to you). Science fiction started growing tentacles, and the idea of the evil of man entered the culture. But, although we could believe in evil, we still held tight to the belief that humans could be perfected and that people weren't inherently evil, just poorly-educated.

And we grow up in a culture that believes these things, but that every time something goes wrong, something in practice doesn't fit the theory of human perfection, it's always that something needs to be adjusted, but that the underlying ideas don't need changing. Like, y'know, that whole "God is dead" thing.

>I realized, that if I won't at least hope that God exists, I will go completely insane. So I started clinging to that hope, and eventually it became a belief.

So, I guess I am saying you're coming to God from a door a lot more people will enter over the next few decades. For God says WE are the problem, we're selfish, we're prepared to f–k each other over for a dollar, we're interested in #1 first with our families, maybe our country, a distant second, but other people are second-last. God is last, of course. And we cannot help ourselves. Heck, we don't even see that as a problem. And the few people who do recognise it as a problem certainly do not want to believe that some "ancient sky fairy" is the solution because, remember, we still believe that idea that gods were for the ancient peoples who didn't have science and microscopes and couldn't see the remnants of the big bang in their telescopes. Not for we sophisticated mature adults of human progress.

But God called you.

He made you see what others refuse to, and you believed. You saw the world for what it is, and you despaired. You saw human beings for what we are and you felt the hopelessness others refuse to feel. He told you, "I have a better way, and you believed Him," and you saw the Cross and you recognised truth in it. Maybe not in a way you can explain, but your heart knows that God is the only one who can fix this.

>Wasn't that reason too shallow?

I dunno. Now that you've read all this, you tell me – still feel shallow? Or do you feel as though you're just seeing something that millions of others refuse to see?

t.b.c.

>>9489

>>9490

>>9491

Part 4 of 4

>>9472

>What should I do to make my faith deeper?

In one word, exercise it. okay, that is two words You might not understand yet what God has called you into, and this is where prayer, study and truth come into their own. You need to understand what you've been brought into.

Are you attending a church?

Do they have a "new Christians" course, or are they making one of the mature probably-elder Christians guide you into faith?

Alright, do they have a small groups programme? ANY sort of discipleship?

If not (and maybe even if they do), let me commend to you this site:

http://www.navigators.org/Tools/Discipleship%20Resources

(Or even try this one which seems better set-out: https://www.navigators.org.au/nav-tools/ )

Go to the Topical Memory System:

http://www.navigators.org/Tools/Discipleship%20Resources/Tools/Topical%20Memory%20System

And look-up, read, contemplate and understand, consider the meaning of, and even memorise those scriptural verses.

Have a look at their wheel illustration. Check out the 7-minutes with God thingy. Navigator's illustrations and methods can be hokey, but for all their quirks, they've helped God pour the foundation of my faith.

By all means, have a look around.

And then, while it's been a while since I have done any of these, I remember these being very useful:

http://www.navigatorstores.com/navigator_storebooks_slash_ministry_resourcesbible_studies

I've also included the attached.

It isn't about do this that particular way, it is about doing whatever it takes to arm yourself with knowledge of God, scriptures, so that you know the promises of God, so that you understand how He looks on you and what He has saved you for. It's about arming yourself with a method for prayer, a certain practical way of doing things so that eventually it become second nature to pray. It's about being discipled by someone, or someones, more mature in the faith who can help you strive to be continually improving (and to begin "outputting"), that is going deeper and deeper into God. Because believe me when I say the enemy is doing everything and anything they can to undermine you from that day-you-chose-to-believe forward.

One final thought

You gave me the impression of being a newish Christian. Sorry if that's inaccurate, if I am insulting your maturity in Christ.

:eof

>>9499

if you're the BO or mod, then open up the post length limit and we'll be golden.