Is the Christian God's love unconditional?

[Woolmark]

Ok, some questions which have been playing on my mind, I am genuinely interested.

Surely his love is on the condition that you are a) a Christian and b) follow his rules?

Also, if God loves everyone as much as he does, why can't he save everyone by simply appearing to them? If I could save my children by doing this then I would in an instant, rather than turning up at the end and destroying the ones who weren't Christian.

Sorry, what do you mean by comparing human choices and what god wants?

What choices we make as a society such as saying about it being illegal to be homosexual. That was human choice.

We can not say the leaders of the country are following god.

Why is it wrong for two or more consenting adults to have sex with each other?

I did not say it was wrong.

Sorry! My mistake!

Hettie I'm happy for you to explain what you mean when you say "Christians who actually understood what they were saying when they say this would probably stop saying it ". I knew you would disagree with me, not sure why I felt the need to share my thoughts! Late night madness! .

BackOnlyBriefly I don't feel the need to debate creation, I avoid it! I find it quite devisiive. I totally believe there could have been a literal Adam and Eve, I just don't think there was. But i don't feel the need to argue it with other Christians, we have far more in common with each other than things we do not agree on. I just wanted to make the point that not all Christians take everything literally. But we have spoken before and so I am sure you know that I guess, as I say, I just wanted to connect, late night madness! .

Hettie I'm happy for you not to explain too. Just wanted to offer an olive branch! [olive branch emotion]

Italiangreyhound that's fine. Just wanted to make the point that christianity is not one single unified school of thought versus atheists.

I know you don't go along with a word for word literal bible. I would have guessed actually that you would say there couldn't possibly be an Adam & Eve, but I wasn't far wrong there since you say you don't actually think there was.

Certainly there are other Christians on here who would dismiss Adam & Eve completely. I think it came up just a couple of days ago.

I would think that literal bible/creationists are probably in the minority now, but I'm not quite sure because there seem to be quite a lot in the US.

The bible is the word of god. I dont understand all the most christians dismiss the bible of course they dont or they wouldnt be christians.
It is like saying you are a doctor but you refuse to use the medical research.

Italian

No need for an olive branch - I'm happy to explain what I meant, I would have done this morning (I'm not usually that enigmatic) but I was too tired. Still too tired now, so I'll address it tomorrow at some point.

Trust us, we do know that not all Christians are literalists. In fact, we know that not all Christians are.....anything. There's something like 40,000 separate denominations all believing something different. I prefer to address each belief, whatever it is, as a separate entity. Although I must say that, for me, the liberal Christian view is every bit as bonkers as the notion that a man ever lived in a whale, a snake could talk or a burning bush spoke. The central core of Christianity, and what it's attempting to say about us, the universe & the nature of reality is so stunningly ridiculous that I struggle to understand how anyone with any sense can believe it.

So, really - the whole "it's poetry/analogy/metaphor" doesn't increase credibility in my eyes. It may be metaphor and so on....but the truth that it's supposedly revealing is still too ludicrous to believe, so who cares if it's just metaphor?

(NB: No, I'm not saying that anyone who does believe it has no sense, just that I genuinely and profoundly cannot understand why they do).

God can do amazing things, things we cannot understand.

Yes he can Sunshine.

Back you know I would have no idea exactly how many people are creationist. I think you would be surprised (how many there are). I am not sure this is always because they have unpacked that idea and worked through it but because actually they have accepted everything as a package, and feared if they don't believe one bit that the whole thing will fall to pieces. Because our faith is so precious to us it can feel very risky to do that.

I wonder if many people have chosen to do as I do and say I don't really know and I don't really care, I am happy to accept Adam and Eve as real people or not, it doesn't really affect my thinking much.

I think people who come on here and debate regularly are so brave, because it can feel risky.What are people who have no faith risking? (This is a genuine question .)That they will find a life-enhancing faith? Those of us who have a faith and come and debate may find it challenging. Once we have accepted these challenges we work through things in our lives.

When the chips are down, I want to turn to God. He is the only one who can get me through. He can help me make sense of life because belief in him takes the focus off me and onto him, in a good way! Faith is so amazing, it literally changes your perspective, things that seemed like a terrible burden can become a blessing.

I think the need to have a faith in something bigger than ourselves is very much part of being human. So although, of course, there are people of no faith or atheist or whatever, I wonder if that is a faith in itself. Does it bring comfort, does it explain things? I am just (as the American' say) spit-balling! Just thinking aloud.

So I'm really not trying to cause any offence at all! I want to say these things because I feel it is just too easy to dismiss people of faith as bonkers when really, the vast majority of the world for the vast majority of time has believed in God and sought to connect with him (using him here as opposed to it, not as opposed to her).

Hettie Christians are unified around their belief in Jesus as Lord (God) and belief in God as the trinity. I totally get where you are coming from in that it is hard sometimes to work out what we believe as we are a very diverse bunch. Strangely in the rest of life diversity might be viewed as good yet in faith circles can be seen as bad, obviously from those within faith groups but also from others too. Belief can be hard. Would you describe your thoughts/feeling that there is no God as a belief? Genuine question .

At times it feels useless to try and explain why belief in God is so important and for me not actually bonkers! I find it very sad to see lives lived without God in them, because I believe God transforms, but you know I am not sure anyone can be argued into believing in God!

I simply want to come and put my thoughts across. I know that when Christians come on here and defend their faith it can feel costly, it can be challenging and hard to do it. Which is one reason I do not do it very often now, prefering to talk to people about things we have in common instead of taking an adversorial stance!

I think with God life has more depth, he makes us more human. It breaks my heart to see how many times Christians (myself included) have screwed up. I also know that it is hard to take us seriously as a bunch for this reason, just as I could say the same for the human race! But it is serious and we are just like anyone else, a bunch of people who make mistakes!

Because you find it so ludicrous that we can believe in God, don't you ever wonder why we do? And if you wonder that you may see that it adds to people's lives in a good way (yes a million examples of where this is can be counter proved!) but there are examples where faith has changed people's lives for the better.

Would you just write that off as a fluke?

You do not need to explain anything, I seriously just wanted to connect. As I said before.

I see people of faith sharing and I want to share too, because I have a deeply held conviction that genuine sharing and genuine faith in God can be a positive thing. I am firmly with the Christians although I know I won't agree with all the things others may say! And I am not sure God is constantly revealing things as much as we are constantly uncovering what is already there, and we will uncover things about life and how we should live but we will, as imperfect humans, keep getting it wrong! i think the Bible is very hard to understand, but there are lots of bits that are very easy to understand. Like love your neighbour, yet historically people and nations fight with their neighbour! There is an old hackneyed phrase, it is not the bits of the Bible I don't understand that I have trouble with, it's the bits that I do!

Quickly, before anyone comes on upset at my comment And I am not sure God is constantly revealing things as much as we are constantly uncovering what is already there of course God reveals things to individuals! However, the Bible talks of lots of amazing things that feel counter-cultural, like love your neighbour and love your enemy. So when we have these things on our heart and say God revealed it to me, I would also say it is kind of in us, God has put his hopes in our hearts already. And times come in life when things get 'revealed' like sand washing away on a beach and revealing a beautiful shell, it was already there and suddenly the clouds lifted (so to speak) and we see it.

For me, an example of this would be women in ministry. The church sought to keep women out of some ministry for many years, and the world in general did too. I think it was wrong of the church to do that and the church was influenced by life in general and patriarchy n particular. Certain passages in the Bible were used to prop up the idea that women should not lead. I will not go into it all here, it is well known and there is even a thread on mumsnet here. Anyway, in my lifetime the C of E has chosen to ordain women and I very much hope in a short while will make them bishops too so there is equality of service. Other churches have already taken this full step and others lag (in my humble opinion woefully behind).

Some may ask why God has revealed this now! I (and others) would argue that the Bible speaks of sons and daughters who will prophesy.

"And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions." (Joel 2:28 NIV).

In the new testament it talks of us all (male and female) being one in Christ Jesus.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3:28 NIV).

Jesus hung out with women and actually allowed them to be the first witnesses to his ressurection at a time when women could not be witnesses in court.

pastormark.tv/2012/04/03/women-witnesses

So I guess the reason I feel things are uncovered is that I think God does not change his mind, he has laid all things out and we are trying as a people to mature and understand and move towards our fullness in God. And I don't think God wants anyone left out. He also does reveal individual things to us, and uncovers in our lives things of significance. But I am happy to be bombared with verses where the Bible uses the term reveal. They are revelations as they are new to us but I do not believe they are new to God and so it is not like he is constantly updating his thinking.

Must go to bed! Nighty night, as they say in panto, pyjama pyjama!

I don't see my position as a belief, it's not a place I have arrived through faith. I just don't see any good reason to believe in a god yet again. I need some reason to change my mind. Imagine if I asked you why you don't believe in Allah etc. your answer might go a little way to explain why I don't believe in your god.

I spend some of my free time debating lots of different things. I like debating woo. I like thinking. I think debating ghosts is my top favourite woo debate though.

I also debate about things that are less enjoyable to think about like MGM and FGM. I'm pretty much a debating/thinking type person, as most of us are.

head I see faith as something everybody has. The choice is what you put your faith in. Me putting all my Faith in God, means it is not elsewhere.

Faith is the belief in things that are (have) not seen (by yourself). So by the definition I have, you will have a form of faith and in turn belief. You will act according and make decisions according to you belief system, be it Scientific principles or something else.

Before you tell me Science is not a faith because concepts are superseded if new data comes to light, revelation can be like this, because, as Italian said, as more is revealed to us understanding deepens.

^being seen. Typo.

Interesting as this does relate to John Locke, (developer of the concept of empiricism) and his view that knowledge is based on our own experiences being written onto the 'bank slates' of our minds.

^'blank slates' another typo!

Because you find it so ludicrous that we can believe in God, don't you ever wonder why we do? And if you wonder that you may see that it adds to people's lives in a good way (yes a million examples of where this is can be counter proved!) but there are examples where faith has changed people's lives for the better
Would you just write that off as a fluke?

Try this thought experiment.

Imagine that I was part of a lottery syndicate with two friends that I trusted implicitly. One of them calls me up on a Saturday evening to tell me that we've won £10m, and my share comes to £3.3m.

Once I'd picked myself up off the floor, I'd be buzzing with happiness. I wouldn't be able to contain it - all the things I could do! (Giving half to charity, naturally )

I'd have hope for the future - no more worrying about the gas bill. I'd be dying to share my good news with my family, promising them that their worries are over too.

And so on.

Now imagine my friend calls three days later and says, "Whoops. I was looking at last weeks ticket. We haven't won anything. Sorry".

I hadn't won the lottery - it wasn't true. But the lottery win didn't have to actually be a real event to make me happy - I just had to believe it was true.

There are many, many reasons why faith survives & is so widespread. It doesn't have to be true to make people happy or give them hope - they only need to believe that it is.

So while it's not a "fluke", your happiness in your faith says nothing whatsoever about whether it's actually true.

And if we're specifically referencing the Christian God, then it's not true. That can be proven very quickly and unambiguously. When you make the specific claims about the properties of your god that you do, you go further than you realise to prove that he/she/it doesn't, and can't exist.

Oh - and by the way, I'd have saved myself a crashing disappointment if I'd relied on evidence instead of putting my faith in my friend, wouldn't I? Evidence matters, always. Why do so few theists understand this?

Do you actually know what empiricism even means, Capsium? Or for that matter, what John Locke actually meant?

I see faith as something everybody has

Then you're wrong again. I have faith in nothing. It's a childish concept invented to allow people to believe rubbish without blushing. I have no need for "faith".

Hettie, I think you have done Italian Greyhound's brave posts a bit of a disservice here, and have missed their point. I think Italian has tried to explain in a very honest way what it is like to be a person of faith, and has exposed her own vulnerability in doing so -- as she says, it is very costly to subject something that is vital to your sense of your own well-being to constant ridicule. It would have been gracious of you to acknowledge that. But instead, you just charge in with the same hackneyed charges that Christianity is not true.

It can't be proven quickly and unambiguously that Christianity is not true. You can certainly doubt it. You can certainly bring forward arguments that it is not true. But you can't prove it -- any more than you can prove that it is true. The proof game is one with no winners.

Your 'thought experiment' shows how little you understand how arguments work. If it was truly a thought experiment it would be designed to help think through, at a theoretical level, a particular problem, and would thus be constructed in an open-ended way. In fact, it is tendentious it is constructed so as to illustrate a particular point and can only come to one conclusion. This is not unprejudiced critical thinking rather it is a form of twisting the evidence in order, quite spuriously, to prove a point.

Actually, Hettie, empiricism is a good example of a widely misunderstood philosophy. It's often thought, quite wrongly, that empiricism is a philosophy that shows that we can discover through the experimental method what exists, and that only what can be empirically evidenced can exist. Actually the reverse is true.

Empiricism, says everything we know we know through the evidence of our senses, and we can only know what we know through our senses. It then goes on to say that we cannot have any objective knowledge of the world, only a subjective knowledge we can only know what we feel or see. We cannot know that anyone else feels or sees this, or if there is any relation between what we feel or see and what is actually out there. Descartes concluded this means we can only know that our own thoughts actually have any real existence - the external world might be simply a dream and we can have no evidence to the contrary. This leads to the 'problem of solipsism' empiricism leads to the problem that we cannot know anything outside of our own subjective impressions.