The age old question: is there more than this? If so, is it sacred? Better find out - there's a lot riding on it, we Christians would say. Look to: archeology and history referenced in the bible. Look to the fulfilled prophesy. Open the bible and read it. It may speak to something that you hadn't anticipated, as it had me when I first cracked the spine of a bible and landed exactly on Psalm 23. I'd spend a lifetime trying to disprove the bible and never came to anything to negate it. Now my premise is: it is sufficient. Btw, statistically children go to the faith of their father.
really? i would be embarrased to admit this since even christian scholars have conceded that the bible is just a collection of primitive superstitions. and the prophecies. you have to be kidding. there are no specific prophecies in the bible that are not easily explained. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/farrell_till/prophecy.html Sometimes Christian apologists say there are only three options to who Jesus was: a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. But there is a fourth option: legend. (Bart Ehrman American New Testament scholar)
I really appreciate all the responses in this thread. So many of them have really got my wheels turning bigtime. My gameplan moving forward is to just expose my son to both sides in small doses and then let him decide what he wants to go with later in life. I don't see any harm whatsoever in educating him that way. I guess the thing that irritates me about religion so much, but particularly Christianity, is that believers are so convinced that they have it all figured out. Instead of just believing what they believe and leaving it at that, they somehow convert their "faith" into "truth" and then start preaching that doctrine to other people. Your faith is not truth, it's faith. It's a belief based upon the unknown, not evidence. And don't even get me started about biblical prophecy. I have been hearing that stuff for 25 years from various radio and TV personalities trying to correlate current events with passages from the bible and it's got to the point now that their track record is so bad I can't even bear to listen to it anymore. And of course, the most fervent of believers are always the most ignorant when it comes to other religions. All I have to do is ask an uber-Christian the following question: "So how do you feel about Buddhism?", and it's like I pressed their system-shutdown button. They have no clue what to say. Of course they don't because they've never taken the time to even investigate other religions. They believe what they believe because they were either taught that way as a child or because they stumbled across it later in life when they were going through a tough time. I don't want my son to be like that. I want him to be exposed to as many viewpoints as possible and let him decide for himself which one compels him the most. Perhaps it will be science. Perhaps it will be some form of religion. Perhaps it will be a hybrid system of both. We'll see.
Yes, Christians elicit the ire of most because of its claims to truth and knowing God. You should be skeptical; I'd be worried if you weren't. On whether it's legend: there are non Christian historians and extra biblical sources that refer to Christ - Josephus and Tacitus among them. Prophesy requires serious study because you have to actually know what was prophesied. There are answers if you're looking for them that aren't easily explained away. Bart Ehrman is a nay sayer du jour. Anthony Flew was one too. See what happened to him. There are scholars who negate the bible and there are scholars who don't. No surprise there. Regarding other religions - Buddhism, for example, is actually a philosophy that denies oneself and doesn't worship anything, per se, so could technically be concurrent with Christianity. A lot of religions come from the mystery schools of Egypt, if you're looking to do a study. One reason I believe in spite of claims of other beliefs is that it counters the human tendencies to make oneself better than others. It counters our desire to be superior. It says we should be servants and "look not to our own needs but to those of others." It says we shouldn't sue people. It says to love your enemy. Its god entered to be among the masses on a donkey, not in a blaze of glory. This a hard religion to practice. Not because of the suspention of disbelief, but because it's hard to love people and try to actively put God's will above your own. I'm sure I haven't convinced you. My husband is still an aetheist. My credentials shouldn't convince you either, that is if you knew what they were. You'll have to figure out for yourself.
come on. surely when as you claim, you spent years trying to discredit it, you figured out that those two sources have been debunked. even if they hadn't it says nothing to the divinity of a man named jesus. look, if you want to say you believe because it feels good I might think you deluded and leave it at that but don't come on a public forum and insult the intelligence of those who know better by claiming that the bible cant be falsified. the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this." Albert Einstein
interesting to me that knowledge of Christianity is so lacking among Christians. you don't even know where the source of what you believe came from. Christianity, as practiced today has almost nothing to do with what jesus taught. what is believed and practiced in America today is not Christianity. its paulianity written down by someone who never met or even heard jesus speak. think about that. interestingly just today there was an article that attempts educate christains. Christianity Before Paul Paul is the most influential person in human history. I have in mind, of course, the West in particular. The foundations of Western civilization, from our assumptions about reality to our societal and personal ethics, rest upon the heavenly visions and apparitions of a single man -- the apostle Paul. We are all cultural heirs of Paul. In contrast, Jesus as a historical figure -- that is, a Jewish Messiah of his own time who sought to see the kingdom of God established on earth -- has been largely lost to our culture. In this holiday season, it is worth taking pause and thinking a bit about the historical origins of the Christian faith, and how much it depends on St. Paul. Visit any church service, Roman Catholic, Protestant or Greek Orthodox, and it is the apostle Paul and his ideas that are central -- in the hymns, the creeds, the sermons, the invocation and benediction, and of course, the rituals of baptism and the Holy Communion or Mass. Whether birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage or death, it is predominantly Paul who is evoked to express meaning and significance. The fundamental doctrinal tenets of Christianity, namely that Christ is God "born in the flesh," that his sacrificial death atones for the sins of humankind, and that his resurrection from the dead guarantees eternal life to all who believe, can be traced back to Paul -- not to Jesus. Indeed, the spiritual union with Christ through baptism, as well as the "communion" with his body and blood through the sacred meal of bread and wine, also trace back to Paul. This is the Christianity most familiar to us, with the creeds and confessions that separated it from Judaism and put it on the road to becoming a new religion. Paul never met Jesus. The chronological facts are undisputed. Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during the reign of Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor or prefect of Judea, in April, A.D. 30. As best we can determine it was not until seven years after Jesus' death, around A.D. 37, that Paul reports his initial apparition of "Christ," whom he identifies with Jesus raised from the dead. He asks his followers when challenged for his credentials: "Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" equating his visionary experience with that of those who had known Jesus face-to-face (1 Corinthians 9:1). Paul's claim to have "seen" Jesus, as well as the teachings he says he received directly from Jesus, came after Jesus' lifetime, and can be categorized as subjective clairvoyant experiences (Galatians 1:12, 18; 2:1; 2 Corinthians 12:1-10). These "revelations" were not a one-time experience of "conversion," but a phenomenon that continued over the course of Paul's life. Paul confesses that he does not comprehend the nature of these ecstatic spiritual experiences, whether they were "in the body, or out of the body" but he believed that the voice he heard, the figure he saw and the messages he received were encounters with the heavenly Christ (2 Corinthians 12:2-3). It was a full decade after Jesus' death that Paul first met Peter in Jerusalem (whom he calls Cephas, his Aramaic name), and had a brief audience with James, the brother of Jesus, and leader of the Jesus movement (Galatians 1:18-23). Paul subsequently operated independently of the original apostles, preaching and teaching what he calls his "Gospel," in Asia Minor for another 10 years before making a return trip to Jerusalem around A.D. 50. It was only then, 20 years after Jesus' death, that he encountered James and Peter again in Jerusalem and met for the first time the rest of the original apostles of Jesus (Galatians 2:1). This rather extraordinary chronological gap is a surprise to many. It is one of the key factors in understanding Paul and his message. What this means is that we must imagine a "Christianity before Paul" that existed independently of his influence or ideas for more than 20 years, as well as a Christianity preached by Paul, which developed independently of Jesus' original apostles and followers. I have spent my 30-year career as a scholar of Christian Origins investigating the silence between two back-to-back statements of the Apostles' Creed, namely that Jesus was: "Conceived by the Holy Ghost, Born of the Virgin Mary," and that he "Was crucified, dead and buried, and on the third day He rose again from the dead." Is it not striking that this oldest and most foundational Christian creed jumps from Jesus' birth to his death and resurrection, entirely skipping over his life? How did it happen that the way Jesus came into the world, and how he left -- Christmas and Easter -- came to define Christianity itself? Here Catholics, mainstream Protestants and evangelicals all agree. To be a Christian is to believe in the virgin birth and resurrection of Christ, and thus to participate in the salvation Christ brought to the world as God-in-the-flesh. In contrast, the original Christianity before Paul is somewhat difficult to find in the New Testament, since Paul's 13 letters predominate and Paul heavily influences even our four Gospels. Fortunately, in the letter of James, attributed to the brother of Jesus, as well as in a collection of the sayings of Jesus now embedded in the Gospel of Luke (the source scholars call Q), we can still get a glimpse of the original teachings of Jesus. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-d-tabor/christianity-before-paul_b_2200409.html?ref=topbar
For Christ sakes, you really know your Jesus. "I hate Christianity and let me tell you why" in ....oh...one million words.... --------------- "Before I was messed up on drugs, now I'm messed up on the Lord" ----Tommy Chong
The more you know about science you should realize ,Science does the same thing. case in point global warming freaks.
It sounds like you've come to a good conclusion here. And the raising of kids is a journey as they say. I use the term 'some believe' this or that about the bible. Much like on Ancient Aliens, where they say 'Ancient Alien believers think...' this or that. Not trying to put aliens in the same category as Christians, with a capital C, just the reference. And, God Bless You for taking the time to do the best thing for the next generation.
In my experience, that's because religion often has little to do with the existence of God. If God is believed (as many religions do) to be All-Knowing, then anything in the Bible would be like dumbing-down Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" to the "Fun With Dick And Jane" level for human beings to comprehend (to say the least). Any human being claiming to "know what God wants" with that primer as their starting point would self-identify to be a blasphemous charlatan anyway. If he gets the basic background understanding, he can work through to his own answers later if he is so inclined.