What is the only purpose of the Christian religion?
.
Over2 billion people ore Christians, one third of the population of earth. over 200 million people in the US are Christian, two thirds of the population. Most people know the basics of Christianity but most do not understand it. SO think of this.
WHAT IS THE ONLY PURPOSE OF CHRISTIAN TEACHING.?
There are many commandments in the bible. They cover many areas of life and worship. Still, all are designed to teach only one thing, to accomplish one purpose.
WHAT?
Tags
Who is online
93 visitors
All opinions civilly stated are welcome
This is one of the necessary things we must do to achieve the purpose.
That also required to achieve the purpose.
Eternal life is through the name of God's only son Jesus and in Him only, "the good news"- the free gift from God. (John 3:16)
You have it.
The only purpose of teaching the Christian doctrine is to teach people how to get to heaven.
The only reason to be a Christian is to learn how to get to heaven
The only reason for any religion is to teach people how to get to that religion' s idea of the good future life.
To be saved and to do God's will and tell others how to get there.
Or till you die, whichever comes first.
If you follow it to the end you win the perfect prize, eternal life.
We have two correct answers, to get to heaven.
Still, all other opinions are welcome.
True, that is my opinion.
You or anyone else is welcome to offer a differing opinion.
Maybe we should vote on what is right???
wrong.The church can only teach. it cannot force obedience.
OK. But then what is the purpose of getting to heaven?
True. It is the end of this world, this life.
Those who believe and obey look for a new life after this one.
That is all at of being Christian.
I agree.
We are not born with eternal life, we get it when we believe and obey until the end.
It is not free. It must be earned and followed to be kept. Heaven is the goal of Christianity.
WE have no proof heaven does not exist. God created a universe, not individual people. If we truly love one another as we love ourselves we are obeying Jesus.
To obey Jesus is the way to get to heaven. Heaven is perfect. This world will never be perfect but we all should work to make it better.
Everyone will spend eternity in heaven or outside heaven. Everything good will be in heaven. Everything bad will be outside heaven.
To me it is easy to choose.
Good question.
NO.
"No person can know the mind of God."
We can understand the teaching he sent to us by Jesus.
That is true.
As a non-Christian, it beats the hell out of me (pun intended) what the purpose of Christianity is. Certainly, history is replete with so many examples of behavior by Christians that is so unlike how the prophet Jesus Christ lived his life, it all seems to me like Christianity is one large group of organized hypocrisy.
To each their own I guess.
Lol - Christians have cornered the market on forgiveness? Surely you jest.
Ever wonder why the church is adamant about "teaching" at the earliest age possible? You honestly don't think that has something to do with forcing obedience? Aka indoctrination.
Great. Now think about how miserable you will be spending eternity in heaven. ETERNITY!!! Think about it - it's a fatally flawed concept - there is no way that an "eternity" spent as yourself will not eventually becomea maddeningly hideous fate.Don't think of eternityas just a word, think of it in terms of years - like think aboutspending1,000 years as yourself, and then multiply that by 50 trillion years, and then multiply that 600 trillionyears, and then realize that the total amount of time you havearrived at is only a drop in the bucket in relation to"eternity". Any reasonable person would come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with the whole "eternity in heaven" concept. The only reasonable fate that one could be rewarded with for a trivially short human lifetime ofvirtuousity, would be to be given the opportunity to start overwhen you grow tired of such a "paradise". Unfortunately, that is not part of the Christian doctrine.
It depends on how you define salvation and works. If you believe and repent you are saved from paying for your sins. Jesus said those who obey my commandments are my family. Children of God enter heaven. Obeying the commandments could be defined as works or good deeds.So could sharing the gospel.
In Christianity the rule is one person, one vote. Jesus is the person who has the one and only vote.
Either God exists or nothing created everything.
Before the beginning was nothing. Science and religion agree on this.
The mind can conceive of the ideas of God but cannot create God.he mind of a man created the idea of gravity but gravity existed before people existed.
It is the same with God.
Eternity is a difficult concept. However eternity is not defined and what we would do is not defined. We could live 600 trillion different lives. Nothing bad is allowed in heaven, nio sadness, no regret. There may be a start over every 100 years,. Everything good is to be in heaven, everything bad outside.If there is an eternity it would be much better to be inside than outside,.
Much like sending kids to pre K, kindergarten and school to indoctrinate them in the social norms.
That is part of it.
Surely you don't read??
Libraries have books but certainly don't have a monopoly on books. Christians also breathe. So do others.
there are hypocrites and murderers and rotten people among atheists, agnostics, Muslims,Chinese, Americans.
Christianity is one large group of organized hypocrisy.
Group smearing is bigotry whether aimed at race or religion or gender.
There is good and bad in every group.
That is my opinion which is generalized. You have your opinion.
Social norms serve a purpose. Teaching kids that there once was an ark that held millions of animals isjust lying. There are many religions that exist throughout history and today - teaching little kids only about one of them is as biased and indoctrinational as it gets.
Wrong - what you arereferring toismore commonly recognized asreincarnation. That is a concept in some religions, but most certainly NOT in Christianity. If it were, then scripture would surely alude to it. Instead, Christianity wants you to simply allow faith to cloud any attempt at critical thinking .... and say empty things like "nothing bad is allowed to happen in heaven."
If the answer is forgiveness, then it is probably the weakest answer imaginable - since forgiveness has absolutely nothing to do having religion. One can forgive and not have any belief in a god whatsoever.
Matter cannot be created or destroyed. That means nothing created everything or God created everything. which is more logical.?
I agree living by Christ's message on earth without thinking of heaven would make a better world.
lDo you decide what my kids should learn?? Do you decide what serves a good purpose?? All teaching is indoctrination, all teaching is biased,. Parents can decide whether and which religion to teach.
If you want to teach you children lies, thenChristianity is an excellent way to start since it is all built on lies. Nearly everything about it wasbastardized from paganism, and fed to the masses under a different cover with the goal of demonizing sex, forcing the male gender into dominance, and delegitimizing every other religion. You may think thatthis just amounts to passing along harmless traditions, but in actualityyou are spreadingthe roots of sexism and intolerance into young minds before they have the ability to reason away such negativity.
There is a world of difference between teaching a child to share, and teaching a child something as hideous as "you were born a sinner, and it's all because the first womandisobeyed god." Right from the very beginnings of scripture, it is clearly stated that woman is second to man, not even created in the same way, but instead merely fashioned from a piece of him and only to serve him. Teaching social norms serves a noble purpose. Religious indoctrination serves a nefarious one.
What is the difference between totally ceasing to exist and eternally existing as a happysnapshot, without even the capability of determining why you are happy? What possible purpose would that serve?How is that better than the cognitive freedom you have right now? An endless moment implies a permanently static situation. How could that possibly be better than being given the chance to dynamically experiencelife all over again, for better or for worse? It really shouldn't be such a distressing and far fetched concept that when you die, you just permanently cease to exist in every aspect other than the memories of those you had an impact on. No heaven, no hell, no gods, just uninterupted space and time - so make the most oflife and do your best to imprint yourself into the memories of others, because that is the only way to exist once you assume room temperature.
The virgin birth of Jesus is a creation built on centuries of identical stories inpaganism. No Jesus, no Christianity. It's really that simple. In fact, early Christianity, prior to the finalized formation of canon, had many concepts - some of which were even polytheistic, having up to 365 distinctgods. It took generations of committeediscussionat the Council ofNicea to boil down all of the stories of yore into an agreedupon book we call the New Testament. There may have been some good intentions throughout this process, but the fact is that the average Christian has no idea about the roots of what they hold to be sacred.Those roots were discredited and destroyed asbest as possible, but the truth willnever entirely go away.
My apologies - those were rhetorical questions. I've seen enough of your commentary to know you are not one of the flock.
Hal A. Lujah
If you said this about blacks you would be called rightly a racist hater.
You smear 2 billion people. You are blinded by hatred of something you don't understand. You distort facts.
The basic teaching of Jesus was treat others as you want them to treat you.
You can only be compared to an extremist partisan republican screeching all democrats are evil.
That, like all blind group hatred, is pitiful.
Bruce-162825
Excellent.
I fully agree.
Bruce-1628250
People like that never get it. They are incapable of discussing without bigoted insults,.
Again, a good comment from you.
"What we do know is that Jesus did live. Jesus did teach. And, Jesus was crucified by the Romans and died."
Of course - because the son of god, who is the pinacle of absolute perfection, somehow did not recognize that personally writing about his ministry would have avoided the confusion that we are speaking about right now. In fact, it took decades for anyone to write anything at all about the most important being in the history of humanity. Meanwhile, plenty ofhis contemporariesof arguably lesser importance, were recording their history and being profusely written about by other scholars. Son of god born of a virgin andperforms miracles, is crucified and rises from the dead to ascend into heaven - nah, no point in writing about such mundane happenings - let that history be the subject of heresay for a few decades before anyone bothers themself to write anything about it. Your facts are nothing but decades old heresay from people who didn't even coexist with the legend.
"You can take your 365 gods, and the council of Nicea and everything else you want to use to DEFLECT the TRUTH and shove the up your canons."
Uhhh, yeah - unfortunately, that is part of the real historical record. No need to be nasty, by the way. From what I understand, the mythical Jesus was a big fan of the truth. I doubt he would be cool with following up a denial of the truth with such boorish language. Or is it that you wish for others to treat you that way, so you treatothers that way?
"I" distort facts? That's hilarious. "I" am the only one in this conversation who is using facts. Is it a smear to use facts?
Gee, I wonder where your mythical savior got that idea from? Perhaps Confucius - who happened to have lived (for real - part of actual history) hundreds of years before Jesus was invented, and who originated the expression that you attribute to Jesus. How original.
Why is it that theists always fall back on the claim that anyone who doesn't believe just doesn't understand? We understand far more than you do. We look at all the evidence, unlike you who allow yourselves to be blind to anything that doesn't fit into your box thinking.
This is how blind you are to the subject of this conversation - I am saying that Jesus was not even a person, and you are claiming that I implied Confucius must havepersonally met Jesus. This is a synonymous with how some Christians are inherently baffled by whatit means to be anatheist, because they cannot even conceive of a world without god. It's like when a Christian says to an atheist, "if you don't believe in god, then why do you talk so much about him?" They are so impossibly indoctrinated by their religion that life without it is the equivalent of fantasy.
If you were to give a speech to a massive crowd of people, and you began with "I have a dream", would the people listening immediately jump to the conclusion that you personally met MLK, or would they conclude that you simply repeated his well known words without giving him credit? That is was the mythical Jesus has doneto the real Confucius.
LOL - thank you for proving my point. I especially liked the implication that is YOU that knows what a REAL atheist is! Stop it - you're killing me. I'm sure you've used this line on many atheists, and I'm sure it has been pointed out to you a million times that it is not possible to actually hate something that does not exist. So why do you and your ilk continue to push this backwards rationale?
I hate country music - and it exists. I hate brussel sprouts - and they exist. I hate commercials - and they exist. It is completely absurd for me to say that I hate unicorns - because they don't exist. Do I hate the concept of unicorns? Meh - whatever - not my thing really, so I don't have an opinion. Would I hatethe concept of unicornsif people lobbied the government to teach children in public schools that unicorns do exist? Hell yes I would. Is any of this getting through?
Do you honestly think that the information I provide is just made up in my head? Are you so deprived of actual history on this subject as to never have been exposed to concepts I speak of? You seriously should do a little research yourself.
It must be difficult to muddle through life with such limited comprehension skills. Let me spell it out for you - I, like all "real" atheists, would not bother tovoice an opinion on a religion if the followers of that religion were not imposing that religion on nonfollowers. If someone wrote an article about a religion that I had never heard of, and that had no interest in pushing itself on others with wildly inaccurate statements and a bigoted agenda, then I would "pass it by." You won't find me raging against Buddhism or Taoism, because they aren't imposing on me.
If instead, they made wild claims implying that women are inferior to men, and that your homosexualitywill cause you to suffer for eternity, and that the earth was put here for us to rape however we deem fit, and that a creator told them to run for office, and that every religion outside of those that are Christian are false and that belief in them will cause to you burn in hell for eternity, and made hundreds of other offensive agenda driven claims, then I, and every other "real" atheist, would jump all over it like white on rice. You can make all the claims about your mythicalJesus that you want, but the bottom line is that no matter how splendid you make him out to be, supporting the Jesus myth only serves to strengthen the system thatseeks to impose itself on society with self serving discrimination.
Since you are so convinced that I actually believe in god and that I also hate god, do you also think that I must be a terrible person? Am I incapable of charity? Do I beat my children? Do I cheat on my wife? Do I sell drugs in schoolyards? I must do all of those things if I am masochistic enough to tell a real god to his face that I hate him, right? You would be shocked to learn how virtuous of a person I am. Or maybe I am just insane.
Who said that anything in this discussion constitutes an impostion on anyone? I didn't say that at all, and you know that. I'm talking about religion imposing on those who are not followers. Don't try and distract from that message with a strawman accusation.
Did you happen to catch the title of this article? What is the only purpose of the Christian religion? Obviously, there could be a million responses to such a question, regardless of whether the author thinks there is only a single one. Your answer was forgiveness. I thought that was pretty comical. Christianity imposes on everyone, and then forgives them? See the irony? This mentality is demonstrated by the Catholic church, when they protect the pederasts on theirstaff, and then never excommunicate them even when theyend up convicted and in prison. Excommunication is reserved for actions that go against their agenda - like abortion and women seeking priesthood -this extreme judgementis clearly not intended forsomethingas minor as theraping of a child.
I'm litterally lol-ing. Tell me Bruce, how does one hate a god that they believe exists and expect to not be horrifically punished for it? You don't need to say anything more once you make the claim that I hate a god that I truly believe exists. From that accusation alone, it can logically be implied that I am either a masochistic anarchist, or I am insane. I forgive your err in judgement, since logic does not often play a role in the religious mind.
Deism works for me.
The Age of Reason , by Thomas Paine
How on earth are you attempting to compare something who's existence is entirely obvious and testable inliterally every aspect of physical life, to something that it eternally hidden and untestable? We finally exposed the Higgs Boson, and up to that point it was as unobservable as your god. Scientists were careful not to identify its existence as a certainty until it was observed. Theists would be wise to take the same approach.
You won't bother addressing my comment because you CAN'T. Just look at your weak attempt to address even a portion of it - you had to point out a minor misspelling just to put some meat on it, because you know your side of this exchange is indefensible. You won't do a lick of research to verify anything that doesn't fit into your cherry-picked box thinking about Jesus's over-ridingimportancein relation tothe rest ofscripture. What's it like to live in a bubble, where everything makes sense because you are the only one doing the talking and the listening? How about providing some sources that support the notion that MMLJ are all that really matter for a "real" Christian? You won't find any, because you are the only one delusional enough to propose such a concept to your audience of nobody.
Awww ... you took your friend request back. I hear you are pretty famous for that. I guess our commonality on the subjects of guns and Obama are not enough to maintain a friendship. Christopher Hitchens was right - religion does poison everything.
Pardon me, Mr. Civility, you forgot to remind me to "shove my BULLSHIT gibberish nonsense bogus made-up crap up my canons." I don't believe I have stooped anywhere near that depth of incivility. Is that the kind of civility you are promoting in your blog? And what is this about me sending you emails? You sent ME an email! I was only being civil when I returned it with an entirely civil message, including a thank you for the offer of friendship. It appears that one of us has a twisted definition of civility. You are just as irrational as you were when Future History schooled you on newsvine.
Since I neglected to read all the comments, I may be putting something that is already written in them.
I believe the one purpose is to do "God's Will". In saying that, I believe you need to have faith in God and know "God's Will"........will be done.
Fyi - the "bullshit" part of the sentence is the least offensive part of it. Impasse granted. Good talk - I sense that you missed me.
If the purpose is so illusive and the Bible is no help, it seems Chrisitanityin its religious sense has had its day. Time to move forward with something without all the dogma and commandments.
I for one am sick of people trying to define a man who lived over 2000 years ago. We know so little about him, if he even existed at all. Why not just admit that a myth was born, controversy ensued, fighting and inqusitions began, the myth got pervertedand not much good has come from the entire debacle.
Bull Shit I suppose you have a hot line to God and are arrogant enough to think you speak for God!? You have a very narrow view of God- how insulting!
I've been following this and I think that Phoebe expressed herself better in the second comment. Her first one, would mean that all other faiths are damned. That is hurtful to those who believe deeply, but differently.
What is the only purpose of the Christian religion?
The same purpose of all man made religious concepts on Earth.
To gather a following (customer base) and make lots of money off of them.
All organized religions are money making operations.
Many of them are as big as the biggest Corporations.
Suz,
Yes she did. But am I not allowed to express that it is hurtful to say that her edict on people who don't believe is well.. damning?
I was raised in two faiths Catholic and Jewish. I would hate to think that my Jewish parent was damned.
And frankly, I don't think that Jesus would have said that, too.
I don't understand that reference.
Suz,
It's not a matter of being right or wrong. I'm not trying to be right. What I am saying is simple. We chose to express ourselves in many ways. When we can say something in a kinder way, then we should.
I have no problem in what Pheobie believes, since that is what her faith teachers her. But her first post made me feel uncomfortable and her second one didn't.
Anyway, I don't want to have a silly dispute with you. You're my friend and that is what's more important.
brightstarone,
I wish it were that simple. If one views religious faith through dark glasses the only thing they'll ever see is its dark side. Religion has also done much good despite the fact that it has been continually abused and manipulated by those who seek power, riches and fame. Therein lays the problem. It's ultimately all about how religion affects the persons character.
You can easily judge the character of a person by how they treat those who can do nothing for them.
Boy there's a lot of dark there.
That is true.
Yes some people believe in a God of Judgement and Hate, and some believe in a God of Love.
My wife believes in a God of Love that's why I married her, even though I don't believe in organized religion (non-believer) but I do believe in Love.
And it has worked out very well.
That's true.
So true, AeonPax. Jesus had much to say about this, and gave us the tools necessary to identify the pretend Christiansand hypocrites...so as to not be like them.
I believe and really from the age of about 9 or ten that all religions are designed to be good. To lead to everlasting life and if your a Mormon a chance to be a god. I don't believe in everlasting life I do believe we need to love on another and if there is a here after all religions provide a path to it. If God wanted to save Humans (I detest the term mankind) he would have sent sons to the indians the Humans in Africa and India and South America. Every religion has a kind and caring side unfornutatly many have a mark of the devil side believe like me or I KILL YOU!
All religions many far older than Christianity are equal in human rights or better. I am not a schollar in Religion only one who has researched over my 68 years well couldn't do to much the first 6 or 7. Maybe I'm just to old for the agressive younger generation. I believe Perrie has a better handle than most on Religion Both of her Parents and their relatives have a equally great life expectancy to enjoy in the great here after. I only find it agrivating that the selfishness that anyone believes only one concept (path)is correct. Many religions are basically identical in nature. Muslims have a lot in common in their religious views and history with Judiasm and Christianity only man has twisted their religions to makethem unique. The Catholic church chose to cherish the resurection and many others followed suit at approximately the same Century long after Jesus death.Not all religions believe in the Resurection. God gave his only son thensaid do over! Really. Remember the movie Caddyshack theDoly Lama I believe it was told to him he would finally find total peace in death and he felt he had that to look forward to. Faith is just that which we choose to believe and letguide us to -------!
AeonPax well said and true. When a person is down and out with no relief in sight it helps keep a flicker of hope alive. I believe if Jesus existed and lived a life as stated to treat all with respect and deciency. His actions are a greatexample to live by.
Propagate false hope?