church attendance has fallen to less then 50% USA

Surely you can’t have faith in God unless you get it by the grace of God.

I read that twice and it still does not make sense.

God has made me such that my skepticism means I am an atheist.
He obviously did not intend for me a place in heaven, but made in me a candidate for hell.

Yeah, it’s a circle–a paradox.

More than circular or paradoxical … heaven, hell, reward, punishment, virtue, sin … don’t make any sense if God is doing everything.

Even Jesus coming to retrieve the “lost lambs” is nonsensical.

You’re standing outside a worldview in which those things do make sense. Although I don’t know your worldview, I suspect it might not “make sense” looked at from inside that worldview.

It’s not like just anything goes. There has to be some minimum amount of logical consistency.

Why?

Why not?

Some of the greatest logicians in the history of Western civilization including Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Alvin Plantinga and numerous others have supported the Christian vision with thorough-going systematic logical arguments. Who here has read all of them let alone refuted their arguments?

So are you now saying that it(specifically grace) is logically consistent because of the arguments of these logicians?

Your previous “Why?” answer seemed to suggest that it does not need to be logically consistent.

I’m saying there is plenty of logical support for a Christian vision if a minimum amount of logical consistency is what you require.

Okay. Maybe I disagree with them about what “minimum” means.

Faith doesn’t come through logic. Or at least not through logic in a narrow technical sense of the word.

Faith can’t be incompatible with logic. That would mean that God is illogical. (And unreasonable and irrational.)

Why would God create humans with the ability to reason and then expect them not to reason when it comes to questions about God?

It isn’t that logic is incompatible with faith. I pointed to a few of the logicians who stood in faith. It’s that where we stand in or out of faith is not something that we reason ourselves to using logic in the narrow technical sense of the word. Where we stand in our consciousness is in the first place phenomenologic not formal logic. And that consciousness is affected factically by our historicity.

You for example have some interpretation of what Christianity means according to what you’ve read or been taught or exposed to somehow. Do you suppose that you have exhaustive knowledge of Christianity and all the multifarious interpretations and ways and viewpoints from which it can be understood? You have an understanding. Do you believe it’s adequate to the subject at hand which is Ultimate Reality?

Now Job is an archetype of the man of faith. When he was struck with tragedy and suffering he couldn’t understand why. He didn’t have an adequate theological understanding or answer to the problem of evil that had beset him existentially. But he stood in faith and waited for God.

So a person standing outside of a faith may be satisfied with their understanding of it. But if a person standing on the inside recognizes that their understanding is inadequate, they will seek a better understanding. If anyone thinks they have the ultimate understanding they are self-deceived.

As the mystics of every religion have understood the transcendent is beyond thought. So whatever understanding we have of it is at best a pragmatic/metaphoric/symbolic approximation.

The best things can’t be said and the second best are misunderstood. That’s because the second best are using the objects of time and space to refer to Transcendence. And so they are always misunderstood by being interpreted in terms of time and space. The third best is conversation.

So here we’re conversing, trying to use the second best in order to talk about the first. Hopefully we do this in recognition that, as the Tao Te Ching says, the Tao that can be spoken is not the Eternal Tao.

You have bring me into it.

Why am I ignorant or arrogant or whatever you think I am, when I state some opinions?

No, I don’t think you’re ignorant or arrogant. I’m just asking questions too–wondering where you stand and how you hold your position.

A non-practising Christian, means a non-practising Christian… a person is part of that Faith, but has stopped practicing it, it can refer to any non-practised religion.

I am a non-practising Roman Catholic, in that I only attend Mass when family matters dictate I do, but otherwise I don’t… tho I wouldn’t mind attending Mass now-and-again. :-k

@Bob… I had planned to attend Easter Mass, and all Services and days were booked up… apparently it was the same for all the churches in London and probably beyond.

Easter Mass… it’s a start.

I’m referring to the Community spirit, and not to religion… when ‘refugees’ up-and-leave when the free money stops, you gotta start thinking… and don’t even get me started on that demographic’s crime figures.

Well… illegal immigrants and fake refugees aren’t allowed in anywhere but the West, and my parents were neither of those.

Not every concern is about hate or intolerance, but about real-time societal issues.