Quote:
Originally Posted by ianch99
Follow the Gourd! No, the Shoe is the sign
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As a statement of personal faith this is commendable and should be respected as such.
However .... the elephant in the proverbial Ecclesiastical room is the contradiction of New Testament teaching (as I understand it) with the degree of wealth many professed Christians (or Muslims, etc) retain and more importantly see no problem in doing so.
This comes from a chocolate box approach in adhering to the religious texts. I follow the tenets I like or that will not compromise my lifestyle and quietly ignore those that I do not like. You have the patently ridiculous situation where the head of the state church has a personal wealth measured in the hundreds of millions. You also have people like Rees-Mogg regular spouting Christian homilies while sitting on a net worth ~£100 million and actively offshoring as much as he can to avoid paying tax. These are a couple of high profile examples but there are many more.
To me, this does not seem consistent with the broad message of the New Testament. Some of the more Evangelical Christian sects try and ameliorate this by the requirement to tithe part of your income but as to whether these monies go directly to the needy is open to debate.
TL;DR extreme wealth seems incompatible with New Testament Christian teaching unless I missed the parable where Jesus helps the rich man exploit the poor and maximise his wealth in offshore investment vehicles 
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You’re not missing anything and I quite agree with you. All too often Christians end up compromising their faith and it’s usually the pursuit of wealth that lies behind it. Jesus teaching is very much at odds with this, and he went so far as to caution people that where their treasures were, there their heart would also be; that his disciples could not serve two masters, and when it comes to the pursuit of wealth or the pursuit of heaven it really is a matter of one or the other.
The church often does better in poorer parts of the world because the other part of Jesus teaching on this is to trust God to provide material needs and focus on seeking the righteousness of God. That is a little easier to do when you have no wealth to hoard and little chance of accruing any. The very early church, which was often persecuted, often consisted in local congregations who pooled their financial resources to the point where they effectively held everything in common ownership.
Believe it or not I stood up and preached a sermon on this this very morning. It’s from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in Matthew’s gospel, chapter 6.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaymoss
So you are content as a REAL Christian following the man who ended Mosaic Law and bought in the laws based on love to believe the God you follow is A. Going to allow Satan to survive? and B. Damn humans to eternal pain and suffering???
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This is poor theological thinking. In the trade what you’re doing is called eisegesis - reading into the Biblical texts the things you wish were there, rather than the opposite (exegesis), which is to draw out of the text what is actually there.
God created beings with agency, i.e. with a personal will and the ability for self determination. It would be peculiar if having done so, he were to punish with abolition from existence any being that simply exercised their God-given will.
God is a God of mercy and also justice. Behaviour that falls short of his holiness makes it impossible for a being to endure his presence, but the death and resurrection of Jesus makes a way back possible. That’s mercy (and, incidentally, the only reason Jesus’ crucifixion isn’t an appalling piece of child sacrifice is because Jesus is fully God as well as fully man. He is the Son of God, but also God, which means the Cross was God’s idea and also God’s doing. He didn’t impose crucifixion on a third party, as would have been the case had Jesus been anyone else. Just one of the many reasons why Watchtower teaching is simply wrong. Without the Trinity, the Cross would be morally outrageous).
God is also just and ultimately will respect the wilfulness of those who choose to follow their own path. If you don’t want to be a citizen of the kingdom of heaven, then you won’t be. The only problem is, once you see it in all its glory, being excluded from it is an awful prospect. That, finally, is what hell is. To know that God in all his holiness is there, in a city which people can live in, but which you can never enter. For anyone interested, C S Lewis explored this in a novella called The Great Divorce. It’s well worth a read if you can find it in your local library.