I’m a Seventh-Day Adventist (Christian) - AMA!

[SDAchurchAMA]

Have you heard of the SDA church before, or are you unaware of its existence? Do you have any questions about what we believe in, or anything random you want to ask me?

Long-term Mumsnetter - posting this on a new account. I’m a woman in my late 20s looking for a few breaks from cleaning my house this afternoon as I get ready for some guests tomorrow. Ask away!

Thanks for answering!

I do agree that love, acceptance, and exemplary lives are good. It's interesting to hear that you aren't sure you believe some days. I found that I had to try to almost trick myself into believing as a child - but I always knew deep down that it just couldn't be true, and didn't make any sense. I spent many years anxious over my inability to believe, just in case I was wrong, or the devil was blinding me - but in the end I decided that the reason I couldn't believe was because it was entirely unbelievable. It does make me wonder what God would make of me though.

I don't think any all-knowing, all-powerful God could also be morally good though, if he destroyed everyone who didn't please him. There's no point in giving people free will if you just destroy all the ones who exercise it! It's not a morally correct action.

I believe what the Bible says, not a religious rhetoric that has been passed on through the years and was designed to keep people under control and in fear. If that’s also what atheists believe, then great?

I don’t believe in the separation of body and soul, as it’s not what the Bible teaches, so I don’t believe in eternal torment of the soul as per your second question. I don’t think eternal burning is physically possible, but our bodies (aka a person) being resurrected and living eternally, that I believe in, yes. Jesus’ resurrection is a historical fact.

God doesn’t endorse murder, slavery and rape. If you read the Bible through the historical and social context it was written in, and through an understanding of the language norms and limitations of the original text, you would usually find that God wasn’t this evil being you describe, and all Satan does is go around helping everyone and talking reason into people.

However, you are free to believe as you do, and I wouldn’t personally be able to convince you of the contrary.

It’s very interesting reading your perspective too. I found it much easier and natural believing as a child. It’s when I became a young adult that I started questioning things more and reasoning about it. To me, it makes a lot of sense, but I don’t spent my days thinking of “the devil” or wondering if God thinks I believe enough. He says that our faith could be as small as a grain of mustard, and He could work with that already. I don’t need to have a big faith in God, I just need to trust He can work with me even if I don’t understand all of it.

I don’t see free will as God destroying those who exercise it. You can have free will and reject God, or accept Him. In both cases you are exercising your free will. Accepting God doesn’t mean being religious in the traditional sense of the word, or belonging to any church, and we can certainly never please God with our imperfect human nature.

I also wanted to say thank you to everyone who has commented or asked questions. I didn’t expect to have so many messages and such a pleasant conversation on this thread - AIBU has scarred me 😂

So you don't think eternal suffering is possible, but you do think eternal happiness is? Hm. I'm not sure that makes sense.

How does God not endorse those things when his chosen people engage in them without censure, and without it being depicted as a negative?

I have read the Bible, frequently - I've been to Bible Studies, discussed it and so on (admittedly, many years ago), and really I saw no actual evidence within the text that Satan did anything evil, while God did plenty of immoral, cruel things, and then bragged about them. Honestly, it does a very poor job of painting Satan as a villain and God as the moral good.

But fair enough! Clearly we come at it from different angles, and see very different things.

It's not really 'free will' to choose if you'll be destroyed for choosing 'wrong', just as it's not real consent if your boyfriend will beat you for not consenting.

But I do appreciate your non-traditional views on God!

I don’t think eternal suffering is possible because I believe in death being final. I think eternal happiness is possible, but not here, only in a perfect world. I choose to believe that perfect world still exists.

Who said those people never were or never will be censured? We don’t know how God will judge them. All the awful things you’ve described in the Bible, I’d say come out as pretty negative to me. I don’t see them as anything positive.

You keep saying that Satan or God did immoral, cruel things. I actually think it was the people who did them mostly? That’s how the Bible reads to me. Evil people, whether in the name of God or Satan or neither, do evil things. It’s not either of those beings that are directly doing them.

I do like seeing it from different angles, so thank you!

So if I jump off a bridge without a parachute and plummet down and die, I wasn’t exercising my free will? I chose wrong, surely, but I’m the one who did the choosing, and got destroyed for it.

The second example makes no rational sense. If you are not consenting to your boyfriend doing something to you, his actions thereafter have nothing to do with your free will?

God makes a conscious choice to eternally damn or destroy those who don't follow his rules. He doesn't actually have to do it. He could do anything else. Whereas gravity (like in your bridge example) doesn't choose to destroy you, it's simply a natural phenomenon.

God is setting rules, setting the punishment for not following the rules, and then trying to say you have free will in any meaningful way.

Tying into consent - if your boyfriend says, "You can say no to sex if you like, but if you disobey me then I'll beat you bloody and kill you, and if you obey me I'll buy you presents and adore you," is he really giving you a free choice? Or is he just forcing you to obey him for fear of what he'll do to you if you don't?

It seems terribly immoral, given God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and can see what we'll do before we ever do it - he's setting huge swathes of people up to fail, in essence. As a good 'father' he could teach people the error of their ways, not destroy them!

And why this weird insistence on blind faith, and hiding in the shadows? There's no need for it! It's totally pointless! And parents don't do that - good parents are present, visible, and guide their children with love and care, while still giving them free choices. And good parents don't destroy their children for making choices they don't approve of!

Basically, God is not a moral, responsible, or admirable person, based on the evidence given.

Just reading through the post so apologies if you’ve already covered my question … how much do you feel your beliefs are early indoctrination? I find it very hard to understand that people can believe in a persons interpretation of the world from an ancient book, when we have scientific evidence that, for example, creationism cannot be a fact, the planet has been shown to be billions of years old, life evolved from primordial soup, we’ve evolved through the ages to where we are now, and if the world continues, we will continue to evolve along with other life on earth. How do you justify evidence that’s clear, but believe that god put two people on earth to populate the world? Were they black, white, Asian, Inuit, Hispanic? How did these different genes evolve so quickly from Adam and Eve
as you can probably tell I’m not religious, I’m a scientist, and believe in facts rather than interpretation of an old book

So much to cover. 😁

What do you think about Ecclesiastes 9:5

I think you have to be careful when using OT passages in this context. Ancient Jewish views on the afterlife were that all people—good and bad alike—were believed to go to Sheol, a dark, silent pit where the dead lived on as weak shadows (shadaim or ghosts) without consciousness, praise of God, or active existence. So Jewish teaching at the time was that the dead knew nothing. That changes, along with many other things, in the NT.

Onto the consciousness issue and evidence from NDEs,

I am afraid they do not provide a scientific explanation for those events, only recount the evidence of them being reported. The article itself says:

The high percentage of accurate out-of-body observations during near-death experiences does not seem explainable by any possible physical brain function as it is currently known.

Correct, we do not have a scientific explanation for out-of-body experiences during NDE's, but we also do not have a scientific explanation for how consciousness arises in the first place. The standard scientific assumption is that it is a byproduct of brain activity. This is called the materialist explanation of consciousness. If there are large numbers of case reports in which people can reliably describe their observations of what happened to them while they were clinically dead and had no brain activity, the materialist explanation has a lot of explaining to do.

Another theory is called the transceiver model. In this model, the brain serves two functions. It acts as an interface to our physical bodies, and through them to the world around us, and it acts like a radio receiver or a filter, tuning in a universal or non-local stream of awareness into a single human focus. Think of it this way - if you turn off your TV set, does the program disappear? No, you just stopped receiving it. The signal is still out there.

There is a scientific theory as to how this could work, and it involves quantum physics.

https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness

We know that quantum physics is involved in many biological processes, like migratory bird navigation and photosynthesis, so why not consciousness?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantumbiology

On the question of reincarnation, I don't know what to believe. I don't think that children who remember past lives are being occupied by the souls of the deceased. I do think it's possible that as children, their brains are more open and that they have somehow connected to communication from the dead, including their memories. This goes back to the idea of the brain as a filter that normally blocks such communication. The filter theory may also explain acquired savant syndrome, in which people develop extraordinary abilities after having a brain injury.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/202403/the-mystery-of-sudden-genius

The Episcopal Church takes no position on reincarnation.

I started looking into all of this because I have a scientific/technical education and mindset, and while I have faith in the afterlife, I like the satisfaction of understanding how things work, or at least a plausible theory as to how they work.

I think you're spot on about how a church like the SDA can attract people who like a dogmatic set of teachings. I've also seen this in the RCC, which is one reason why I left.

I don't think a literal reading of the Bible always leads you to the truth. You are reading an English translation of Koine Greek, while Jesus taught in Hebrew and Aramaic. There are also passages that were added over the centuries to shape the message to what was thought at the time. And there are numerous discrepancies in the gospels, which is understandable because they were transmitted orally for decades before being written down. I don't think that any of this detracts from the core truth of the scriptures.

I live in an area of New York called the Hudson Highlands. It's liberal leaning, but semi-rural enough to have conservative views as well. I think the SDA churches in my area lean more toward traditionalism and conservatism. The Episcopal Church is considered very progressive and liberal. I tend to think that, because it is built on the three pillars of faith, tradition, and reason, it gives members some latitude in reaching their own conclusions.

America is certainly a land of great religious diversity. I think that's because it was founded in large part by people fleeing religious persecution, at least in the early days. Religious tolerance is considered a core American value, even if we haven't always achieved that in practice.

@SDAchurchAMA You raise a fascinating point about Jude 1:9. However the Assumption /Resurrection of Moses is not found in the Old Testament, but comes from a 1st-century Jewish apocryphal text called The Assumption of Moses, which Jude is quoting. Even if we accept that Moses was uniquely resurrected ahead of time, this actually defeats the Adventist position. If Moses was physically resurrected and Elijah was translated, they would both have physical, glorified bodies on the Mount of Transfiguration. Yet, Christ’s own resurrection is explicitly called the 'firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep' (1 Corinthians 15:20). If Moses was physically resurrected unto eternal life centuries before Christ, then Christ was not the firstfruits of the resurrection. Catholicism resolves this beautifully: Moses’s conscious soul appeared from the afterlife (Sheol/Abraham's Bosom) to testify to Christ, demonstrating that the dead are conscious and waiting for the final redemption of their bodies.

@SDAchurchAMA Regarding the Thief on the Cross - The argument to move the comma ('Truly I say to you today...' ) is a grammatical stretch invented purely to defend soul sleep. In the Greek text, Jesus uses the phrase 'Amen lego soi' ('Truly I say to you') dozens of times across the Gospels. Not once does He ever add the word 'today' to qualify when He is speaking. It is always redundant to say 'I am telling you today.' The word 'today' (sēmeron) always qualifies the action that follows.

Regarding Jesus not ascending to the Father yet: In Catholic theology, 'Paradise' in Luke 23:43 does not mean the highest heaven of the Father's ultimate glory. It refers to the 'Bosom of Abraham' or Sheol—the place where the holy souls of the Old Testament were waiting. When Jesus died, His human soul descended to this realm (as stated in 1 Peter 3:19, where He preached to the spirits in prison). Jesus and the thief were together in that paradise 'today' (the very day they died), before Christ's physical resurrection and ultimate Ascension.

@SDAchurchAMA Catholicism absolutely agrees with 1 Corinthians 15! Without the physical resurrection of the body at the end of time, our faith is pointless. We do not believe humans are meant to be disembodied spirits forever. But soul sleep confuses the state of the body with the state of the soul. When Paul uses the metaphor of 'sleep' (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 4), he is describing the physical appearance of the dead body in the grave, not the cessation of the soul's consciousness.

Regarding Ecclesiastes 9:5 ('the dead know nothing'), we must look at the context of the book. Ecclesiastes is written from a purely earthly perspective—'under the sun' (a phrase used 29 times). From a strictly material, earthly view, the dead know nothing of worldly affairs, 'their love, their hate, and their jealousy have already vanished' (v. 6). If we take Ecclesiastes 9 literally and absolute, we must also accept verse 5 which says the dead 'have no further reward.' If they have no reward, then the resurrection itself is denied! We cannot proof-text one verse from a poetic Old Testament book to overwrite the explicit New Testament revelations of conscious life after death.

@SDAchurchAMA You are entirely correct that Revelation is full of rich temple symbolism. They are under the Altar of Sacrifice because their lives were poured out as a holy offering to God. But comparing them to Abel’s literal, inanimate blood misses a massive theological difference. Abel’s blood did not speak; God used a metaphor. In Revelation, the souls are given white robes and are told to rest a little longer (Rev 6:11). Metaphorical blood cannot wear robes or be spoken to.

Are they suffering or distressed? No. Their cry is not a cry of selfish, earthly malice or unhappy distress. It is the cry of divine justice. Holy souls in heaven desire God’s justice to triumph on earth.
Do they see our suffering? Scripture shows the cloud of witnesses surrounds us (Hebrews 12:1). Seeing earthly suffering does not distress them because they see it through the lens of eternity. They know that 'the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed' (Romans 8:18). They look down not with agonizing panic, but with perfect intercessory love, praying for us to win the race.

@SDAchurchAMA "What do you think about Ecclesiastes 9:5 and Paul saying in Thessalonians that the dead in Christ will rise first? Do the souls come back to earth to join the resurrecting bodies?"

Yes, conceptually, that is exactly what the theology of the Final Resurrection entails! At the Second Coming, Christ returns with the souls of those who have died. As St. Paul explicitly writes just three verses earlier: 'God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him' (1 Thessalonians 4:14).

If the dead were utterly non-existent or sleeping unconsciously in the dirt, Jesus couldn't 'bring them with Him' from heaven. Jesus brings the holy souls with Him, and those souls are reunited with their physical bodies, which are raised incorruptible from the earth. The Catholic view perfectly unifies both truths: immediate conscious intermediate survival with Christ at death, and the ultimate, necessary triumph of the physical resurrection at the end of time.

I'm sure OP will be along to share her take on this, but I thought I'd briefly share mine.

Reading Genesis literally, in English, is misleading. In Hebrew, Adam can refer to an individual, but more commonly means "man" or "humankind". It is closely linked to the Hebrew word adamah, which means "ground" or "earth". Modern Hebrew uses ben adam to mean a "human being" or literally "son of Adam."

So Genesis tells us simply that God created humankind. Similarly, the Hebrew word yom is translated as day, and can refer to a single 24-hour day or an unspecified period of time, just as it does in modern English (e.g. "in my mother's day"). Also, the sun and the moon were not introduced until the fourth "day", so the first "days" would not have been 24-hour solar cycles.

There is no fundamental contradiction between Genesis and evolution when you go beyond a literal reading of the English translation and dig into the original Hebrew a bit.

The consequence of sin is death, pain, and suffering. God doesn’t inflict those things on us, it is Satan and the evil in this world who cause the suffering, because they want people to turn away from God and accuse Him of being unjust and untrue (see that first sin in Eden).

This goes against several verses in the Bible, one of the clearest being in Isaiah 45 where the Lord specifically states he creates evil/woe depending on translation.

If Eden is the first sin, then what is the fall of Satan? Was that not sin within this framework?

If reading in context as you encourage, Satan is not in Eden. There is nothing in the text of Genesis that makes that claim - a talking serpent is just a talking serpents - and the authors had no concept of Satan as or had the potential to be an antagonist to God. As we see in Job, Ha-Satan asks God's permission repeatedly, because he is the accuser, the tester, the challenger. He is doing his job and does not work in any way against God's will within those texts. He is little different from what's seen in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles when God asks the heavenly council (a very common concept in that time and region) for a spirit to volunteer to be His lying spirit in the mouths of King Ahab's prophets to lead him to his death. His lying spirit - that spirit acts with the authority and power of God to do what is a sin to bring about death because God willed it and chose that spirit to act in that way.

The wages of sin being death and suffering is what God decided the wages were, just like he decided the solutions that for reasons only God knows did not involve eating the fruit of the tree of life to gain eternal life, but needing to wait for alternative, messier solutions.

So Jewish teaching at the time was that the dead knew nothing. That changes, along with many other things, in the NT.

That changes within Jewish cultures with the influence of Greek and later Roman cultures. That's when Jewish authors were writing the Books of Enoch and similar texts well before the NT. These writings expanded the cosmology and brings in threads of different cultural ideas into Jewish frameworks. We can see the impact like the spirits and demons that first came in during the Babylonian exile being expanded, and then a wider options for an afterlife in those groups that agreed with that idea (that's never been universally agreed), and later the idea of Satan as competition trying to ruin God's plan. These show up in the NT, but they started to change in Jewish writings in the few centuries before. Quite a bit, like the Books of Enoch, fell out of popularity in Jewish communities by the time of the writers of the NT, though the NT does quote it and it was - and still is - kept by some Christian communities,

@SDAchurchAMA The Catholic Church never banned the Bible itself; she banned unauthorised, inaccurate translations that sneaked in theological heresies. Before the printing press (1440), every Bible had to be painstakingly hand-copied by Catholic monks. They were rare, incredibly expensive, and chaining them to church lecterns was done to prevent theft, not reading. In the Middle Ages, groups like the Albigensians and Lollards produced vernacular translations with altered verses to support dangerous social and theological ideas. For example, John Wycliffe's translation included prefaces attacking civil government. The Church stepped in to regulate translations to ensure text accuracy, just as modern publishers protect copyrights. Faithful Catholics who could read Latin or authorised vernacular texts (like the German Mentelin Bible of 1466, printed decades before Luther) had full access to Scripture.

@SDAchurchAMA The Council of Trent (1545–1563) did not modify, add to, or change the canon. It merely reaffirmed the exact same 73-book canon that the Church had used since the 4th century.

The 73-book canon (including the Deuterocanonical books like Maccabees and Wisdom) was officially listed at the Council of Rome (382), the Council of Hippo (393), and the Council of Carthage (397).

It was Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformers who modified the canon in the 16th century by removing those 7 books from the Old Testament because those books contained explicit support for Catholic doctrines like purgatory and praying for the dead (e.g., 2 Maccabees 12:46). At Trent, the Catholic Church simply drew a line in the sand against Protestant subtraction, formally declaring the historic canon infallible.

@SDAchurchAMA A careful reading of the structural grammar in Acts 15 reveals Peter’s unique, foundational authority. Acts 15:7 says there was "much debate." Then Peter stands up and gives his doctrinal ruling. Immediately after Peter speaks, verse 12 states: "The whole assembly became silent." Peter’s speech completely settled the doctrinal question that Gentiles do not need circumcision.

Paul and Barnabas then speak to provide missionary testimonies supporting Peter's point. Finally, James speaks. James was the local Bishop of Jerusalem. He does not issue a new doctrine; he says, "Symeon [Peter] has described to us how God first intervened..." (v. 14). James uses the Greek word krino (v. 19), which is often translated as "my judgment," but in this legal context means "I propose" or "my opinion." As the local bishop hosting the council, James simply proposes the practical, pastoral compromise on how to implement Peter's doctrinal decision without offending local Jewish sensibilities.

Catholicism fully agrees that the Church is built on the foundation of all the Apostles. However, every foundation has a primary anchor stone, and Christ explicitly singled out Peter to hold the keys (Matthew 16:19).

@SDAchurchAMA We do not need a Pope to bypass Jesus; we have a Pope because Jesus chose to govern His visible church on earth using human instruments. Going straight to God is something Catholics do every single second in personal prayer. The Pope does not block access to Jesus.

However, Jesus is a King. When a king leaves his kingdom, he appoints a Prime Minister (Vicar) to maintain visible unity and settle disputes among the citizens. Without a visible, final authority to interpret Scripture, Christianity fractures. The proof is in history: Protestantism and independent Bible-study movements have split into over 30,000 different denominations, all claiming to be guided by the Holy Spirit, yet disagreeing on basic doctrines like baptism, salvation, and the Sabbath. The Pope exists to preserve visible, global unity so that "they may all be one" (John 17:21).

@SDAchurchAMA First, the Catholic Church has always taught that salvation is by grace alone. The Council of Trent explicitly condemned anyone who says a man can be justified by his own works without divine grace (Decree on Justification, Canon 1). The debate with the Reformers was not about grace, it was about faith alone (sola fide) excluding charity and sacraments.

The religious wars of the 16th century were tragic, bloody, and politically complex. Heresy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was not viewed as a simple difference of opinion; it was viewed as treason against the state because it tore apart the social fabric of the kingdom. While individual Catholic monarchs and inquisitors tragically executed heretics, Protestant Reformers did the exact same thing when they gained political power. Martin Luther fiercely advocated for the slaughter of thousands of peasants during the Peasants' War and supported the execution of Anabaptists. John Calvin had Michael Servetus burned at the stake in Geneva for denying the Trinity. King Henry VIII executed tens of thousands of faithful Catholics (including St. Thomas More) for refusing to reject the Pope. This violence was a tragic failure of human sinfulness on both sides of the era, not a reflection of Catholic Church doctrine.

It's been nice debating with you! I hope our conversation has given you food for thought! Goodnight and God bless.

“Were the carnivores not carnivores before the fall?”
I believe they weren’t, but I have no idea what they would’ve eaten. It’s not something that consumes my sleep to be fair.

Maybe you should give it some thought. Such explanations seem incredibly convenient and completely implausible. To ignore the discrepancy and illogical nature feels almost blinkered “I can’t explain that, but I believe god made it happen somehow” even though it makes no sense at all.

Out of curiosity, how do you explain all the bad things that happen in the world?

Well, it’s not Satan. Diseases and parasites are just evolution, as are genetic conditions. Abuse and cruelty are the result of division and tribalism. To be able to actively hurt and harm another creature (animal or human) requires a detachment, a belief that they don’t matter, or are somehow less worthy. Those who abuse animals will shrug and say ‘it’s just a dog/cat/horse etc’ VAWG is justified by ‘it’s just a girl’, Hitler convinced an entire country that Jewish people were not deserving of basic human treatment, and so on. But it’s not a fallen angel whispering in peoples ears, or sending his minions out to corrupt us.

On a related note, why does god allow natural disasters? If it’s too much work to prevent every tiny misfortune befalling each individual person on earth, surely god can at least do something about floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis?