TEC said-
Faith is a gift... but as with any other gift, can we not accept or reject it?
"Faith is a GIFT?"
I suppose if you repeat that glib "appeal to come join in on the ignorance" enough times, you might actually start to accept it unquestioningly (like other statements that when uttered only CONFIRMS that someone has not put alot of thought into their firmly-held beliefs, eg the "if God wanted to make robots who HAD to love him, he wouldn't have given humans the gift of freewill" nonsense. It's off-topic, but I demolish it on my blog in an article on the Adam and Eve paradox).
I see faith as a "gift" as much as I see someone giving the gift of a frontal lobotomy to another.
I would NEVER voluntarily sacrifice my skeptical inquisitive nature to blindly and unquestioningly accept beliefs of ANYTHING: I LITERALLY would HAVE to experience the "gift" of closed-head trauma and massive brain injury to become a non-thinking drone, a robot. So YES, I reject that paradoxical "gift".
And so continues the paradoxical nature of Biblical beliefs, where up is down, left is right, first is last, least is greatest, faith is a gift, etc. You stack enough of those ideas into one brain, and it gets incredibly confusing to untangle it.
If we harden our hearts, for instance, are we not rejecting it? (if you recall the author of hebrews stating... today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts)
That is, if God doesn't harden your heart FOR us: are you not aware that God has no problems intervening with humankind's free will, if he decides he wants to put on a magic show, eg God's hardening the heart of Pharoah, in Exodus?
So your God not only intervenes with free will and causes a made-up problem (sin) which he LUCKILY ALSO dispenses the "gift" that CURES the problem (faith)! What grand luck! Sounds like the writers of the Bible were clever men who understood how to write a work which created an imaginary problem that also just happens to provide the imaginary fix. (I believe Dateline runs periodic hidden-camera sting operations on such scammers who offer harmful solutions to imaginary problems you never know you even HAD, until they told you about it!)
Just curious: don't you notice more than a SLIGHT similarity between the tactics used by the Mafia (not accidently named Godfather, BTW, based on their familiarity with RCC) and your God, with thinly-veiled threats of "offers you can't refuse" or "protection rackets"?
We can ask for Truth though... we can ask for faith... and if we ask, if we knock and seek, then the door will be opened, the Father WILL answer. That is the promise.
Sure, you can ask Santy to bring you a toy doll, too, and if you're a good girl he might bring it to you, IF YOU JUST BELIEVE HE WILL!
In any case, do you have a direct/straightforward answer to the question I asked? I'll leave out disciples, and just focus on the apostles, themselves, because I agree that would be different.
Do you think the apostles had faith?
For the record, I am doubtful that the characters depicted in the accounts aren't just highly-fictionalized and legendary versions of the real apostles; and just like Jesus, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they truly believed Jesus WAS the Jewish Messiah, and hence only one of a long string of delusional claimaints to appear in Israel and Judea: it was a "thing" to do, esp as the tensions between the Romans and Jews grew in the 1st-2nd Century. The tensions escalated into an outbreak of the Roman/Jewish War where hundreds of thousands of lives were lost on both sides, due to religious extremism and zealotry.
That stated, some of the characters are portrayed as showing little faith (eg Judas Iscariot, Doubting Thomas) to those who are more pious; it's a medley of faiths on display, where a believer can pick "their" favorite apostle (and swap their iconography like trading cards). The apostles evolve over time, so the question then becomes, does God use a weighed-average of their lifetime faith readings, or does he bias more-heavily towards the faith readings obtained towards the end of someone's life? Curious minds want to know....
PS mass-murderer Jeffery Dahmer was killed in prison while serving a life sentence, but claimed to be a believer in Christ for a few years before he was killed. Assuming he repented of his sins before he died and accepted the gift of salvation, is Jeffrey going to Hell, or to Heaven?
Adam
