TSW

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@mrmaidandmore @howertonjosh So you would argue unironically that, since she’s a “communist”, nobody should listen to her?

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@DeekUsa @SarcGasm1 @VivaldiVril 2/2. If it was an "owner issue", the attacks should be far more evenly distributed across breeds. So precisely how many mauled toddlers precisely are simply an acceptable risk for people to insist on the right to own this exact breed when there are countless others available?

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@DeekUsa @SarcGasm1 @VivaldiVril 1/2. Key term here might be rabid? Is that the basis of comparison? Also, when you say "those attacks are incredibly rare", we have 782 fatal attacks since 2000 (https://t.co/i5g7D3TqIn (mostly on toddlers)), representing the vast majority of attacks across all breeds.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@thescottbarber I don’t know that it’s any better if your system makes you adhere to ugly ideas that you choose not to express. If these posts help the church see the insanity and grotesqueness of the eternal conscious torment concept, let’s have more, until we stop accepting the idea at all.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

We don’t treat Jesus saying that “the eye is the lamp of the body” as an interpretive problem, even though it seems to draw on an understanding of the scientific world that we now know is incorrect. The meaning of the teaching does not depend on the physiology being right. When Jesus talks about Noah or Adam, I don’t see why it needs to be any different from the way we interpret his parables.

What does seem problematic to me is privileging ignorance and telling people to believe that God has structured reality to be fundamentally deceptive - that you cannot, for instance, believe scientific evidence across dozens of disciplines that shows the earth is very old and has had life on it for a very long time. There is still a great deal of mystery and room for humility around how that all worked. It seems to be more humble to accept reality as it is and question the way one is interacting with scripture rather than expecting reality to bend itself to my interpretation of scripture.

I don’t know anyone whose faith has been questioned for believing in young earth creationism. The practice of making scientific beliefs into a litmus test for Christian faith has run almost entirely in the other direction; people who have not had to study much science telling those who have that they are in error for not throwing all of it out in favor of a very specific and narrow interpretation of Scripture.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

I don't understand the "look at this silly/evil thing Islam teaches" line of critique if you're also, presumably, upholding a view of the OT that says that God himself told Israel to kill Midianite boys and non-virgin women but preserve the virgin girls for themselves, or allowed slaveowners to beat their slaves provided that they don't die. If questionable OT passages fall under the category of "God's ways being higher than our ways", and X is always moral if a passage of scripture indicates God said "do X", we are not really any less vulnerable to this line of critique than Islam, and if we are, it is a difference in degree rather than kind.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

"Safe" is a fascinating word choice. Safe from what exactly? Using scripture to justify immoral or harmful things? The other translations don't seem to have stopped that. Safe from hell? Because God has set up reality to decide whether you suffer eternally based on whether you read the right translations and came to all the correct conclusions?

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@cosmo_taco @MikeWingerii The HS has this annoying habit of not being controllable by the self-appointed gatekeepers of faith and doctrine.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

Americans forced those people on themselves by voting for them. One group of voters was told that what the other team was doing was so dangerous and immoral it could only be counteracted by their own dangerous and immoral people. That is why Trump is here. Do we want to continue the arms race to the bottom? Seems like if the bar is in hell, the way out might be to raise it?

[TSW @1985_tsw]

No doubt it was a lot more than that. But I think ECT still need to answer for the question, if one genuinely believes that the destiny of much-to-most of humanity beyond a certain age is eternal suffering, what is the coherent moral framework for why preserving life is always the greater good?

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@MillieJane3311 @thescottbarber Yes, we must vigilantly oppose those who may be misrepresenting the words and mission of Christ, as we broadly support a man who has shown no contrition for the bombing of an elementary school, and is openly threatening war crimes.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

Why are we still granting this subject the dignity of discussion? Just stop. You’re arguing with fractions of a percent of the population that thinks this is debatable while the rest of the world is going online and seeing the Overton window in evangelicalism right now is centered over “can we marry people with different skin colors”. It’s humiliating.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

1. So that our “Adam” nature could be put to death - we were crucified with Christ, per Paul. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ, all will be made alive”, and so that we could be co-raised to life with him and, through him, into union with the Father. Theosis.
2. We saw God in the flesh, and saw that he decided to forgive us and submit to our violence against him rather than lift a finger against us. We see in time and space the God who bleeds for his creation - “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.”

Would steer hard away from answers about Jesus needing to die for God to be just, or to satisfy God’s wrath, or God requiring blood sacrifices. Penal substitutionary atonement is a late and damaging theological idea.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@RuslanKD @GodLogic_GL Are you going to do Brown vs. Board after this? Witch trials? Whether chattel slavery was actually a good thing? He has already won by having this idea legitimized to the level of a mainstream debate.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

Authority? On whose authority do you base your claims about the retributive nature of God? Does the fact that you hold a majority opinion mean it has univocal support among all of the church fathers or even major branches of the church (it doesn’t)? I am simply trying to make sense of things the best I can, the same way you are. For decades, if there was a book defending the character of God in the OT or trying to square that with Jesus, I was on it. I did and continue to do my best to honor the text. There are beautiful hints and foreshadowings of a God that was much more merciful and gracious than the gods of their neighbors, and those are to be cherished. Trying to sincerely understand a lot of OT passages also raises a ton of questions when you simply try to be honest, and as with the OP, there is never any shortage of people lining up to shut down those questions.
Could be worth considering the possibility that someone who disagrees with you is not doing so purely for lack of understanding.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

Do you not believe that God intentionally visits suffering on people for disobeying him?
Do you not believe he executes retributive punishment?
This seemed clear from your initial defense of Leviticus 26. Have I misunderstood?
And do those traits look more like Jesus or more like an angry despot?

Yes, the church affirms the God of the OT is the same God revealed by Jesus, but that does not mean that the quality or accuracy of those two revelations is at all equal.

Trying to say there isn’t a massive tension between the life and teachings of Jesus and passages like Leviticus 26, then gatekeeping the faith by requiring acceptance of a picture of a god that may want to violently punish or destroy you but for Jesus, to me, does at least as much damage as Gnosticism.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

I spent 30+ years in the framework you’re describing. I’m quite familiar. And in 30+ years, I never once saw this Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God theology transform myself or anyone else for the better. Great at keeping people in pews, terrible at making them more like Jesus.

John says God is love. Not loving, but love itself. Holiness thus has to fit into love, not the other way around. And holiness has to look like Jesus, unless we’re denying that He is God. Jesus seemed intent on eradicating evil not with retribution and vengeance, but self-giving, sacrificial love. If holiness requires divine retribution, either Jesus does not reveal and is not God, or God contradicts himself on the cross.

I fully agree sin is a serious thing, and God treats it very seriously, but Jesus shows that it’s not like an angry despot with a fragile ego upset over being slighted. He is serious and “angry” about sin in the way that you are serious and angry about cancer in someone you love. We are the patient, not the disease.

Jesus taught us to relate to and talk to God as our Father. Whatever it means to be a perfect Father, it can’t be less than the picture of a good earthly father, and it cant be completely contradictory to the moral framework he laid out for how we are to treat people.

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@saltypsych @sometherapist *had

[TSW @1985_tsw]

@saltypsych @sometherapist If Jesus came to reinforce the idea that we already has all the right ideas about who God was from the OT, I think he would have had a much easier time with his ministry.