this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
34 points (88.6% liked)

Asklemmy

43995 readers
1265 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Reformed Christian. I was raised in a Christian family, and always believed in the basic concepts of God, heaven, hell, etc. But I mistakenly thought Christianity was about trying to be "good enough" for God until my mid teens. Around this time I realised that I couldn't be perfect, which was super distressing for a time. But then I read Ephesians 2:8-9 which says:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.

This was a big relief, as it meant that I didn't need to rely on trying to be good enough for God. I just needed to accept God's free gift of salvation. That's the moment I would say I became a Christian.

Since then, I've had times where I've questioned it all, but I always come back to the resurrection of Jesus. I find the non-miraculous explanations of the resurrection account to be so implausible that it makes more sense to accept that it's a historical fact. And if the resurrection's true, then it makes sense to believe the rest of it as well.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I have had bad experiences with Christianity personally such that it has left a permanent bad taste in my mouth, but it makes me happy to see people like you, who have found genuine solace in some of its teachings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This seems like faulty logic to me. What other things in your life do you affirmatively believe “by default” just because their counter-arguments seem implausible to you? Doesn’t it make more sense to not hold belief in something until you have evidence supporting that belief?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's not so much that I believe it 'by default'. Rather, when I've examined the historical case for the resurrection, the arguments that it really happened seem stronger than the arguments that it was a hoax, or a mass hallucination, or that he fainted etc.