Sad our church turned its back on dd

[TeenLifeMum]

Dd has been to church all her life. At one point we moved to a different church that suited us more but we made lovely friends etc and dd was attending youth group until she was 15. Suddenly she was less keen but focusing on GCSEs so we didn’t push it. With clubs etc for the other dc, regular attendance dropped a bit but we were fairly relaxed.

I believe in god but have always had issues with “the church”, but put that aside to be with people of faith.

I recently learned why dd stopped going to youth - they did a full session on how they should pray for gay people in the hope of healing them. How they are so angry about people loving each other is beyond me.

dd is gay. Her girlfriend is loving, kind, polite, and caring. I want all my dc to have loving healthy relationships so have no issue and naively thought others wouldn’t care. Turns out they do. Two of her closest friends stepped away due to her being gay (parents we’d met through church) and now she understandably doesn’t want to go to church, and neither do I.

I’m angry. I hope they’re really proud of themselves from their high horses. On the off chance they’re on here - no, you’re not good Christians.

Thanks for humouring my rant.

It's funny how didactic people become when their narrow, black-and-white view of things is examined and doubt is cast on its validity.

And how the ones who lay claim to being loving and following a God of love are so often entirely ready to be utterly hateful.

– as we have seen above.

No babies were harmed - as I said previously, the "children" here are symbolic. They represent the people (not minors) who have "committed adultery" with the woman who is likened to Jezebel i.e. those who listened to and followed her false teaching.

Your first point is a very tired argument @HowardTJMoon and one which I already posted about upthread.

how many Christians are righteous in their rejection of gay people

What do you mean by this?

...happy to ignore the instruction to keep the Sabbath holy which is part of the Ten Commandments

Keeping of the Sabbath, or Shabbat, was part of the Law of Moses and something religious Jews still observe today. This is one of the laws which Jesus fulfilled through His death and resurrection. Christians traditionally meet together on a Sunday as it's the day Jesus came back to life. Jesus declared Himself "Lord of the Sabbath" and said "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." Like the ceremonial sacrifices, keeping Shabbat was a foreshadowing of the Messiah to come. We are no longer under the Old Covenant, it has been replaced with the New. Does that mean Christians have a licence to sin? No! Does that mean none of the Old Testament applies? Also no!

Ah symbolic. Bit like the creation story then.

Not at all @User364837. Different books, author, time frame, message and theme. You cannot conflate the two.

“Mental gymnastics of apologetics” was a phrase used up thread by another poster and it resonates.

also love that catch all of “oh and if you think that makes no sense it’s just because of your lack of understanding/spiritual maturity/Holy Spirit in you definitely not because…. It actually makes no sense. That is in no way possible.

its also very clever as then you have people sitting there in home group not agreeing or understanding what they’re hearing but thinking that must be because of their own “immaturity” and if they question it out loud people will see that.

Genius! 🤣

The Emperor's New Clothes relied on that sort of group-think, didn't it.

It isn't meant to be clever @User364837. If someone wants to discuss something at a house group, I'd hope they would feel comfortable enough to do so. It's the people trapped in cults who are discouraged from asking questions and seeking the truth.

Believing in the innerancy of Scripture (as I do) doesn't mean taking everything in the Bible, word for word, literally. When Jesus said, for example, "I am the Vine" and "I am the door" He was obviously speaking figuratively!

Inerrancy means that every sentence, when interpreted correctly (i.e., in accordance with its literary genre and its literary sense), is wholly reliable. What conflicts there are about biblical interpretation ultimately must be ascribed to the fallible interpreter, not to the infallible text. C.S.Lewis Institute.

So do all you infallible interpreters read Koine Greek with full cultural understanding such as one only has of one's use-tongue? If you do, how easy was it to get a copy of each original? Do you rely on the Vulgate Latin for your interpretations? (Is none of you convinced of the theory of Peshitta Primacy? Tsk.)

What you are saying amounts to nothing more than "people (unspeciified and probably unknown) have decided what the text actually is and that it is infallible, and I go along with that". You might as well be a Roman Catholic who still believes in the doctrine of Papal Infallibility.

Lord lord, when I consider how much the meaning of so many words has changed in this language during the past two centuries alone, I find such certainty remarkable.

(Oh, and btw, the Lewis Institute has spelt inerrancy right. One n, two rs, by choice, not two ns and one r as you have it.)

The whole concept of inerrancy seems to be about a religious group essentially marking its own homework. Because of course the 'correct' interpretation is always the one formulated by US, never the one formulated by THEM. Forgive me if I find that laughable.

Marking their own homework seems like a very apt analogy to me. Thanks!

It would be laughable were it not pathetic.

of course the 'correct' interpretation is always the one formulated by US, never the one formulated by THEM.

..What conflicts there are about biblical interpretation ultimately must be ascribed to the fallible interpreter

I wasn't talking about interpretation @pointythings, which as I said can vary, it's about believing the Bible to be the inspired word of God.

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16-17.

Anyone who thinks that something written in Koine Greek or Aramaic can be assumed to mean the same when it has been translated into English/German/Japanese or modern Hebrew or modern Greek has never known someone whose job was translation, and can I feel safely be filed under "oh, good grief" and ignored thereafter.

As someone who is fluent in four languages and has done translation work, I concur.

I'm assuming you didn't watch the whole video. He's done a whole series on the Bible, I'd encourage you to check them out.

Which languages out of interest?

To add, here's a summary from another of his talks on the same subject:

In the last 150 years we've discovered a lot of very old manuscripts. In those newly discovered manuscripts, we have found zero new readings of the Bible. All we've done with them is to confirm which of the readings we already have is more likely to be the original - which explains some of the differences in each translation of your Bible - some of them more modern, some more ancient. We're not getting new readings, we're confirming old ones - we're just getting more confident about the original text. Has the Bible been changed so much by scribes that we cannot recover its original text? No - it has been copied by scribes so much that they can't hide the original text. It was copied so early and so frequently that you can't hide what it said - you can't change it, you can't remove it. There's no reason to doubt that we have the Word of God handed down to us faithfully.

Differences between translations of Scripture will be subtle and ultimately don't change the original meaning of the text.
For example, here is the Parable of the Lost Coin (Luke 15:8-10) in four different English translations:

Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?
And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost.
Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. - King James Version

“Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and seek diligently until she finds it? And when she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’ Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” - English Standard Version

“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Doesn’t she light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” - New International Version

“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one. Won’t she light a lamp and sweep the entire house and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she will call in her friends and neighbors and say, ‘Rejoice with me because I have found my lost coin.’ In the same way, there is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one sinner repents.” - New Living Translation

Here's the actor who plays Jesus in The Chosen reciting the Lord's Prayer in 1st Century Aramaic - Jesus' main language.

If people are made by God, to his design, how can that design be flawed?

in the beginning God created everything to be very good. But that creation did not remain in its perfect state, as is clearly seen by the condition of the world. Everything is flawed.

Well that's a nice get out clause. I am not having a go at you, it's a very long time since I have been to church consistently and my memory of doctrine is flawed.
Is there an explanation of why creation is flawed, please? I have forgotten.

@bogstandards the entire argument about translation and manuscript still hinges on that initial leap of faith where you have to accept they are the word of a deity rather than the writings of humans. So that still means nothing to me.

A more mainstream explanation than the one you have already had is that we have free will. We are children who God loves not puppets. We don't control all the actions of our own children, after all.
But free will is dangerous.