smiley wrote:Yes, I feel it is perfectly justified. I've felt doing the same many times for similar reasons.
cslewislover wrote:
There are people who come to call themselves Christians, but they don't seem to have a real inner foundation in their faith. I have read of some people like this, that have an experience with God (an inner spiritual awakening, if you will), and realize that their earlier "faith" wasn't much of anything. This person may have been like that, only having gone the opposite direction. I looked a bit, quickly, at what he wrote, and it seems like what I've described. There are plenty of people who go with what sounds best to them at the time, but one has to have faith, not just a degree of intellectual agreement. Everything he says is so far removed from Jesus and how He approached us and how He wanted us to view Himself and God.
And can't this same reasoning be applied to any other religion? When arguments fail, we should rely on our "inner feeling" that our God is real. No, that's an extremely dangerous path. It gives Mormons, Jews, Muslims and so on all a justification to keep their faith no different than it does to Christians. Arguments and objective evidence should always take priority over fallible personal experiences.
And I see truthman is still rattling off his No True Scotsman nonsense. Faith is a convinction. To say that faith is "false" is to say that he was never
convinced that Christianity is true, which is absurd.
Smiley, sure, everyone can have feelings about their faith. But you are dismissing the work of the Holy Spirit. I'm not saying that He is a feeling that can be explained, because I don't see how it could be done. Yet, it could very easily get to the point where a person, in order to feel that they are of the true religion, would need to exhibit something to show it - like speaking in tongues! No, you don't have to exhibit something for other men to see, but I do think a person can have (and should have) some sort of encounter with God to let them know they are His child. I very much believe this, and that this is biblical, otherwise it could very well seem that is simply our decision (it is our decision, but God calls us with His spirit - He is involved). As for feelings like that, supposedly, within other religions, who is to say that they aren't God? I'm not saying that all religions are true, either, but all humans have the capacity to turn to the true God. If someone does that within the context of another religion - because that is all they know - then that person can be saved. A lot of Muslims and Mormons don't even know what their religion is about. Jesus himself said that a person has to be born again and spoke of the Spirit in this context. A believer indeed will be born again in the spirit, and if they can know it, then that helps them stay in their faith. None of this takes away the need to know things rationally and logically - that's why this board exists - but in the end, that is not how we come to God. God made Himself knowable, but He did not make Himself knowable in measurable ways or ways that the "wise" would find definitive.