Have you been born again?

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Making a decision is as much a work as putting on your pants. It is an action and a result of the exercise of will and mind.

Faith does not come from out of the blue. It comes from thinking and feeling.

ruveyn

Which we believe is inspired by the Holy Spirit.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

I wasn't born again yesterday

Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Taken to its logical conclusion the Holy Spirit inspires evil and much as it inspires good.

I think it is total nonsense. Along with the concept of original sin.

ruveyn

Well, the concept I think has to do with one's desire not to be held back by their past failings and to be able to start anew and have a second chance at life. Its a rather potent idea. It could also have to do with gaining a new, profound awareness of things that shakes your view of reality down to its very core.

I see original sin as the separation between is and ought. We have ideals of perfection, whether its the sinless nature of Christ or the heroism and courage of Superman, but we often act in petty ways that contradict our own ideals. Its not bad that we have these ideals, and I think they're useful for gaining an understanding of ourselves and what we want to be in life as people. I see the holy spirit as more real than the historicity of Christ, because it can be experienced directly. I think its another way of describing the sense of warmth and acceptance people get from genuine expressions of bonding, with community, family, or even complete strangers.

You're more than welcome to your opinion.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Maybe the baptism suddenly becomes invalid and then Yahweh says "Here, have back the stain of original sin!" Of course, if you consider the idea that the Christian god is totally omniscient and would have known who would reject Christianity and who would not, before creating them, then the baptism would have been meaningless to begin with. The Christian god would have already known which Christians would reject Christianity, so would have planned on them doing so, which must mean he plans who goes to Hell or Heaven.

Not really. Foreknowledge of someone's decisions doesn't preclude their ability to make those decisions. Just because God knows what we're going to do doesn't mean that WE know everything we're going to do. We still have a choice. Further, I think that God not only knows the decisions we'll make, He knows all the POSSIBLE decisions we'll make and those outcomes. So even if we choose something that doesn't fit "the plan," God still knows all possible outcomes and can still use those outcomes to carry out His will, whether those decisions on our part are intended for good or evil.

Baptism is already meaningless in the sense that it has no power to save. So I disagree fundamentally with Mindsigh, though perhaps if it's worded a little differently Mindsigh might be right. I'd word it this way: Only if you are baptized of the Holy Spirit are you saved. The conversation with Nicodemus was about being "born again," not baptism, and being born "of water" simply means being born physically and a certain type of water that is involved with that. Being "born again" means being born into the kingdom of God, essentially believing that the blood of Christ has removed your sin from God's sight. All believers receive the Holy Spirit. Of course this didn't make much sense to Nicodemus because Nicodemus didn't yet know how the story was going to end at the cross.

Physical water baptism, on the other hand, does nothing for salvation. It is a symbol that represents what we believe. It goes back to ancient Hebrew purification rites. John continued the tradition as something that points to the coming Messiah. Note that Jesus never baptized anyone Himself, but He DID command His disciples to be baptized and to baptize new converts. So we not only attach Christian symbolism to an old purification rite, we also continue it in obedience to Jesus' teachings.

If someone claims to accept Christ and then rejects Christ, I have doubts as to whether there ever was a genuine acceptance. If someone accepts Christ through faith, they fall under God's protection and therefore cannot fall from grace. For someone to be able to fall from grace implies they were never within grace to begin with.

Yes, I find this type of mindset quite worrying. thechadmaster, are you saying that if you did discover that in fact there is nothing after death, that you would then want to do bad things rather than good? Most people are intrinsically inclined to do good things. I don't like the idea that there are people who only do good so that they may be rewarded in the afterlife.

It really doesn't matter if we know what we will do before we do it, if the Christian god already knows, it is still predetermined, whether or not this foreknowledge is revealed to humans.



You do have a point here. If the Christian god is real and everything goes according to his plan, then he has already decided from the very beginning who is going to believe in him or serve in him as well as who will not believe in him or not serve him. He would have already known that some people would accept Christ through faith and then one day discover that their reasons for believing were wrong, so of course they would have never been Christians because obviously they were destined to go to Hell long before being born as part of the Christian god's plan.

That's a bit like saying if a couple got married and then got divorced, you doubt there was genuine love in the relationship.

Or I used to love peanut butter sandwiches but now I hate them so maybe I didn't genuinely enjoy eating them before.

Mindsets and beliefs, just like preferences, do change, I think.

Definitely. We learn, grow and adapt. As a child we may believe in Santa Claus but as we learn more about life and the world the belief is dropped. Similarly with many other beliefs and preferences. I used to love pineapple but dislike it now. I used to like weak tea but now prefer it strong. I used to think the Christian religion / God was real, but now I think it is just a social meme - a sort of mind virus that passes itself on from generation to generation and is quite contagious; most kids pick up whichever strain of the virus is endemic to their country and region (Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism etc). A few kids have natural immunity or become cured if they have the benefit of a good scientific education. However, many succumb to the disease and pass on the virus to the next generation.

In regard to baptism, the role of free will (or lack of), and irresistible grace (once saved always saved) there are different points of view from denomination to denomination.
In your Baptist, reformed, and evangelical traditions, baptism is only a symbol of acceptance. In the Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox beliefs, baptism is regarded to be a means of grace, through which God can deliver the gift of faith to any believer by the water and the word. I can only speak for the Lutheran view, but my faith regards the sacraments of both baptism and communion to be physical manifestations of the Word, and inseparable from the Word.
In regard to free will - Luther and the other major Reformation thinkers like Calvin and Zwingli thought it existed in mundane matters - or to our own detriment (as human nature without Christ separates us from God) - but in regard to matters of salvation, that was entirely in God's hands. Calvin's theology centered on a double predestination, in which God chose some to grace, and others to damnation. While Luther, while believing in predestination in that ultimately we had no free will regarding salvation, saw that predestination centering on the gift of grace.
Which leaves us with the third point of whether grace was either resistible or irresistible. Calvin, his posthumous rival Arminius (the theologian, not the liberator of ancient Germany), and modern Arminians (which includes most evangelicals) all believed grace was irresistible - or to put it more plainly, once saved, always saved. Lutherans and Catholics, among others, on the opposite side believe in resistible grace - that is, it can rejected at anytime. But that doesn't mean that the Holy Spirit won't come back to the individual, or won't fight to keep that soul. But the free gift can be obstinately rejected by the individual - which god has already foreseen.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Last edited by Kraichgauer on 08 Sep 2012, 1:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

after your "second" birth you would go sour again, just like you did after your first birth. True not only for you, but everyone else. Humans are prone to error, laziness and bad judgement.

ruveyn