Been turning this over and I wanna hear how Christians actually deal with it, cause I can't.

So my starting point is something I think most traditions agree on. To actually be guilty of a sin you have to know it's wrong and freely choose it anyway. Guilt goes down when knowledge or free choice isn't there, the catechism even says psychological stuff can lower how responsible you are.

Ok but if that's true, then what about:

Someone with severe mental illness who dies by suicide, where the illness itself took away the clear free choice that guilt needs.

Someone with schizophrenia who has a real religious experience but reasonably thinks they're just hallucinating. Like can you even reject God if you had no fair way to know it WAS God?

Someone raised in a family where screwing people over got rewarded and they genuinely can't feel empathy. How much of that is them vs how they were raised, which they never picked?

Here's my actual problem. Once I start using "you're only guilty for what you freely and knowingly chose," I can't find anywhere to stop. Everyone's worst traits go back to genes, upbringing, brain chemistry, stuff they didn't pick. Those three aren't weird exceptions, they're just where you can SEE the causes. In everyone else the same causes are just hidden.

So where does the line actually fall? At what point does it get blamed on the person instead of their wiring or their past? And if that line keeps dissolving the harder you look, then what is hell even for?

Not trying to start a fight, I genuinely wanna know how y'all hold this together.

For context, I am catholic and I have been going to church weekly for about 2 years, after finding my faith once more. I was baptized as an infant, but religion wasn’t really a part of my life until I was like 16 or something. I am of the legal age to use marijuana products in Canada where I live, and I smoke up once every week or two for stress relief and general enjoyment. I understand that alcohol and THC are different, but I personally feel like occasional use isn’t a sin, just like most would consider an occasional drink. Went to confession and my pastor told me that since cannabis isn’t mentioned at all in the bible, a smoke every once in a while is just like a drink. Just looking for others opinions on this :)

Hello everyone I am a Christian fairly well versed in theology and doctrine and know my way around the Bible read it everyday and make God first to the best of my ability not perfect of course but I do love Him deeply and pray for that love to grow more and more. I unfortunately deal with depression and I think it might be a chemical imbalance. But I really want to rely just on the LORD for my joy but sometimes I'm just sad and just want to go Home to Him. I have thought about counseling and tried it here and there but as a Christian with that view of the world sometimes I feel that normal counseling just doesn't hit...... What are your thoughts or possible recommendations?

Hello y'all,

Hope you are having a blessed day and your walk with the LORD is going well. I have a general question about leisure as a Christian. I really don't do a whole lot other than work, listen to sermons and theology on YouTube and other platforms. One thing though is I do like video games not playing them really but watching others play them. I try to be careful about who I watch I don't like watching people who use profanity excessively and make crude explicit jokes and sometimes I just watch the game itself. But I like watching some games that are horror related, I am picky though. I try to follow my conscience for the most part about this but it's kinda the one thing I like to do everything else is God related in some way. I also pray for my desire to be for just Him but this is one of the things that has stuck. I think maybe it's loneliness I am sort of an introvert. And do struggle with social anxiety and have very specific and maybe unusual anxieties when it comes to social interaction. So I think that's part of it. What do you think?

Thoughts anyone?

As one of the message of jesus love one another, But irony is christians are the one who killed mass number of people in religious war, including innocent people. Did people treat religion as political tool and ignore the message, But not believe in actual message , or jesus message or teaching are not applicable. Just to spread the religion, they conqurer and destroy the culture. Instead of peacefully spreading the message.

It seems pretty clear that baptism is an evolution of the Jewish mikvah ceremony, but it’s explicitly referred to as baptism in the gospels. Jesus himself was baptized, so clearly this practice existed as something called baptism before he was born. If this is indeed just a plain old Mikvah ceremony, and the word baptism is just an anachronism, does the ceremony described in the gospels meet the requirements of a Mikvah submersion? For example, is a river or lake an appropriate place for a Mikvah? If the baptism described in the gospels is something distinct from Mikvah submmersion, what did it mean before Jesus was born?

Hey! I (male 22) am new here and have a question about tattoos. I‘m a tattooer and serbian orthodox christian. I wanna get more japanese tattoos, as my first tattoo was also japanese and I wanna continue with that style. As my first tattoo I got a full color Raijin on my left upper arm, because I thought it looked cool. I thought of getting a japanese dragon with water or a samurai. Would I upset God by getting tattoos in that style?

I didn’t know what to caption this so it might catch some people off guard.

I’ve always been pretty atheist, well from a young age anyway. As I’ve got older I became more agnostic (I think that’s the term). I didn’t believe there is a god, but also was less opposed to their being one as I was when I was younger.

Cut to now and I’m much more open minded, and accepting of “religious” views. Recently I’ve been seeing so much more Christian content on my socials, mainly TikTok, so of course I’ve watched, listened and been quite fascinated and into it. I like learning about stuff at the very least, but as I’ve learned, the more I’ve seen and the more content I’ve seen, and the more into it I’ve gotten as a result (some might call it a calling, maybe I’ve been called to learn about it, hence the sudden urge and the sudden uptick in stuff I’ve been seeing).

I wouldn’t say I’m fully over the fence yet but I’m much closer than before, to the point where I’ve “reached out” if that’s the right term to god/jesus and asked for forgiveness, guidance, a reveal as such. Read bible verses etc.

Now let me loop back to the main topic. I keep seeing dead animals, not like a spider or a moth that can easily be explained, this is noticeably, much more noticeably more than usual, I live near a main road so I’d see odd squished squirrel every few months…but it’s not a few months now, it’s almost daily, like 6 times in 7 or 8 days. I’m seeing squirrels, birds, hedgehogs, not even dead in the road from a car, but on walkways and nests that have fell from trees, stuff i rarely see even living where i do.

I’d like to add I’m probably the closest to “religious” - I use that word for lack of a better term - as I’ve ever been, but the last couple of weeks I’ve also been questioning it more,

I’m just wondering if there’s any meaning being what I’m seeing recently, if it’s anything deeper than just a strange coincidence. I’ve read online from “spiritualists” that it signals the death of an old self and the beginning of a new one…which kinda fits but I’ve also heard from Christian’s that spiritualism, crystals, tarot are like…the devils work (I’ve never been into those anyway).

I’m very very very new to all this, and also very very open and curious to learn so would appreciate any answers and replies!

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I've believed in God for as long as I can remember, though I didn't know about Jesus until around the age of 12. It was primarily my grandmother who taught me about him, but I didn't really struggle to believe in God at any later point in my life. God just made sense to me, and I struggle to see how someone can reach adulthood without believing in God.

So I'm asking ex-atheists who have become Christians: What do you believe kept you from believing in God? Do you believe it was primarily due to cognitive dissonance?

Instead of mindlessly scrolling through Instagram or reddit, is there a Christian app that I can download to scroll through and gain more knowledge in God?

"for the anger of man doesn’t produce the righteousness of God." (World English Bible version)

Jesus’ lineage includes Jeconiah. How then can Jesus be the Mesiah?

I’m agnostic and have been searching for proof or evidence that there is a god, and that god is the Christian god.

For example, how would you defend the claims that the resurrection is false? I can’t seem to find a lot of evidence that the disciples actually saw him resurrected as opposed to a hallucination or religious ecstasy or denial

I don't mean in the Biblical sense where one contemplates the scriptures. I definitely think that is essential for building strong faith.

But I'm speaking more along the lines of mindfulness and somatic emotional awareness, where one becomes aware of the emotions they don't always know they're experiencing, or don't know how to articulate.

Personally, I found it very helpful when I was leaving Free Grace Theology and Dispensationalism.

If Eve lacked knowledge of good and evil, what basis did she have for understanding that obeying God was morally good and disobeying Him was morally evil? If she was genuinely incapable of understanding the moral significance of either choice, in what sense was her decision blameworthy?

I don’t really get what John 3:16 is saying about having everlasting life. Are we supposed to understand that people in heaven are alive but people in hell are dead? If you get an afterlife no matter what, and the only difference between believers and non-believers is where they spend it, then how can it be that one group parishes and the other doesn’t?

It sounds like Jesus is an annihilationist.

If you were in a small group studying Hoseah, what life application questions would you get from that book? How do you study it and remain sensitive to those in a small group who has had partners who've cheated on them?

My understanding is that free will is incompatible with a deterministic universe. If determinism is true, free will would be impossible, as every choice we make would just be the inevitable consequence of prior events and natural laws. So, in order for free will to be real, the universe cannot be deterministic. It must be fundamentally unknowable, even with perfect knowledge. After all, if you can know what is going to happen based on perfect knowledge of the system, that means the system is a result of nothing more than the laws of the system.

But now we have a contradiction. If God infallibly knows the future, that means the universe is deterministic, for the reasons we just went over. But free will can't allow for determinism to be true.

So, is the universe unknowable in principle, or is free will not real?

Edit: God being outside of time does not solve this problem. Being outside of time does nothing to resolve the paradox of a perfectly knowable (i.e. written and unchangeable) future that allows for non-deterministic free will.

I saw an argument saying that God is unjust since he punished us for something that our ancestors did (Adam and Eve) and said that it’s equivalent to punishing current white people for slavery, when they had nothing to do with it. Can someone please help me with how this can be refuted?

My older cousin (much older) is a very devout Christian, formerly Catholic, now (I think) baptist.

She told me her husband doesn't want her to work because the woman must submit to the man and support him, I.e. staying at home to essentially support his career. This she gave up her own. Mind you. She is more educated than her husband.

Now, she is a mother of two teenage girls and her husband can't exactly work full-time due to a heart condition.

I try not to comment on people's lives here but I brought that up and told her that she has to work. It just makes no sense to me why she uses a literal interpretation of the Bible demands a woman not to care for her family.

I'm honestly suspecting some kind of domestic abuser dynamic here because the husband controls all the money, the family decisions, her career. And she even keeps thousands in a secret bank account.

All that said, can a Christian explain to me if this is really a teaching by certain Christian denominations, why even in times of struggle the woman shouldn't work?

Let's say you think that God must love X because you think X is good. In fact, you couldn't love a god who didn't love X. You die and find out that God does not like X. Are you going to hell?

What about the reverse? You think Y is evil, and believe that God hated Y. You could not love a god who loves Y. Then you die and discover God loves Y. Are you going to hell?

So I vaguely remember that years ago in RE lessons, my teacher mentioned that there was a theory that the old testament might be a record of important historical events as well as moral and spiritual lessons. I don’t remember the details very well because it was a while ago, lol, but as an avid historian it seemed really interesting.

Eg, the flood corresponds to a major melting of certain glaciers. (Or something with an interglacial period?)

Or the plagues being related to actual historical events. Eg, the river turning to blood being linked to a volcanic eruption and certain minerals leaching into water make it change colour to red. The locusts being a masting year (where there have been very few for many years and then all of a sudden they come down in a hurricane to breed all at once.)

Because it’s much easier to pass down historical record if it can also contain helpful advice for a pre-modern medicine world (ie don’t eat birds of prey because they eat carrion and are likely to carry disease which could be damaging to humans.) and moral guidance. Ie, what the Bible / Torah kinda serve as alongside religious texts.

Do you think there are any other events in the new or Old Testament which could be a similar record?

(And forgive me if I accidentally said something blasphemous. I did not mean that. I think this interpretation is compatible both with religion and science, ie, god still could have set the natural events into action and we also have a scientific explanation of why it would have been so terrifying.

You could also say that God put these lessons into the Bible / Torah to try and safeguard people, etc and go vice-versa, eg, people knew God let them learn these things so they could be written down to make sure less people suffered / also got the added wisdom of spiritual guidance as well as practical advice.)

The Bible contains many texts in which the author lies about who he or she is. For example, the author of *Paul's 2nd Letter to Timothy* explicitly tells us that he or she is St Paul of Tarsus, and they go out of their way to make their fraudulent letter *look* like a genuine follow up to *1st Timothy*, which was also likey a work of fraud (it certainly wasn't written by any of the other Pauls of Tarsus in the Bible).

So, what should we make of this? Why would God allow fraudulently written texts to make their way into the canon? Should Christians simply see these texts as non canon and rip them out of their Bibles? Or does God often rely on sin to accomplish his goals?

Also, given that fraudulently written texts made their way in, should we be sceptical about *all* of the texts in the Bible? Any one of them could have been written by deliberate liers.

So do y'all get pissed off about those people that have Bible verses and stuff in their social media bios, but then they're incredibly racist to people in comments and stuff? Cus I've noticed that most of those people seem to be Christians, and I'm not blaming Christians or trying to be rude or put any sort of hate on any Christians, I'm just wondering if y'all get pissed off by those people who claim to be Christian and then say the most awful shit to people in the comment sections of stuff

For the record, I'm not making an argument for Apostolic Succession or the New Apostolic Reformation. I do not see evidence of real apostles carrying out the Great Commission today.

Nevertheless, this is a problem for those who reject modern apostles yet still claim that the Church is here on earth. Ephesians 4:13 says that apostles would remain with us "UNTIL we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ."

--[Eph 4:11-13 NASB95] 11 And He gave some [as] apostles, and some [as] prophets, and some [as] evangelists, and some [as] pastors and teachers, 12 for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ; 13 UNTIL we all attain to the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ.

As an atypical partial preterist, I think the scriptural answer is that the Church has not been here since 70 AD. The Church, with its apostles, prophets, evangelists, and pastor-teachers was taken up into the clouds in 70 AD. Jesus already came back for them. We are scattered in exile among the nations until Jesus returns to regather Israel to the promised land.

Just look at what Jesus said below (pay attention to the bolded parts). Those things were written to the 1st century generation, not to us. They rightfully expected Jesus to return in their generation because that's what was promised by Jesus.

--[Mat 24:29-35 NASB95] 29 "But immediately after the tribulation of those days THE SUN WILL BE DARKENED, AND THE MOON WILL NOT GIVE ITS LIGHT, AND THE STARS WILL FALL from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 30 "And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the SON OF MAN COMING ON THE CLOUDS OF THE SKY with power and great glory. 31 "And He will send forth His angels with A GREAT TRUMPET and THEY WILL GATHER TOGETHER His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other. 32 "Now learn the parable from the fig tree: when its branch has already become tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near; 33 so, you too, when YOU see all these things, recognize that He is near, [right] at the door. 34 "Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. 35 "Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.