Should Christians take political sides?

[I Love An Atheist]

Ok well that misses the point of my post.

Was it about me calling Trump a "crude nationalist"? Could you please clarify what it was about?

 

[Revmitchell]

Was it about me calling Trump a "crude nationalist"? Could you please clarify what it was about?

Patriotism is not crude nor wrong. Period. Are you are liberal? Did you call a conservative stupid or ignorant?

 

[Steven Yeadon]

I think people need to believe in God before they will accept His Biblical morality. You will seem like you are trying to speak for God, to people who don't believe in God, if you speak of Biblical morality too forcefully. You have every right to say how you believe in living and what you believe to be true and right. If people perceive you as crossing the line of "live and let live", they will resent it.

Of course there are a lot of insecure people who can't take it if you do not affirm their own immorality. I lost my best friend over this, and it was painful. It was not because I condemned her mother for doing phone sex work. It was only because I did not express enthusiasm for it. "Well, Melanie thought it was cool!" So Melanie remained her friend, and I didn't. That is how it goes sometimes. If that's how it has to be, then so be it.

But the very first thing that needs to happen is that people need to believe in God. After that it is delicate and they need space. You can't pull the little tender shoot up by the roots to make it grow faster. Jesus works with us through the Holy Spirit to help us go from our zone of understanding one little step at a time toward God's zone of understanding.

But I hear you about the slander, hatred and accusations. Although I haven't received those very much in the brick and mortar world. Just online. I have received that treatment not for advocating for Biblical morality but only for stating unabashedly that I am a Christian and for standing up for Christianity and the image of God and the image of Christianity. For clearing up the record when Christianity is slandered and lied about. That is what got me attacked.

I am married to an atheist, but we have special instructions in the Bible to cover that situation. I am instructed by scripture not to preach to him, but to be an example to him, so that he may be convinced God's love is real.

The problem I have with this method is that it would never have worked on me, and I used to be a radical atheist.

I mean I needed desperately to count the cost of being a disciple, especially in this culture. I desperately needed to be convicted of sin, especially with the knowledge I was going to hell when I died as an unbeliever. I needed to recognize faith, that is blind faith, is a virtue if it is in the truth found in Jesus Christ. I needed to learn to trust the bible over anything or anyone else on earth. I needed to learn that a quiet and faithful life is best, not a life like in a movie, novel, or videogame.

I did in fact do this all wrong for twelve miserable years, assuming I could blend secularism and Christianity. It ended up taking a small miracle to save me and get born again.

I think people just need the truth, the more the better. Then they can make up their minds in light of it.

 

[1689Dave]

We shroud still support that which is biblical, as Christians!

Yes, but never political parties. Jesus said his kingdom is not of this world.

 

[1689Dave]

Why then the need to de-emphasize politics in your witnessing? I am confused. Do you do missionary work? Perhaps specific examples would be helpful.

We all do missionary work on the Internet. And you can make it difficult on Christians around the world if you are not careful.

 

[I Love An Atheist]

Patriotism is not crude nor wrong. Period.

I didn't call patriotism crude or wrong. I called Trump a crude nationalist. The context was that I was beginning to believe a crude nationalist is preferable to a sophisticated internationalist.

Are you are liberal?

No. But I used to be. "Nineties student me" was quite tame and old-fashioned compared to Millennial progressives, though. Had I not converted to Christianity five years ago, I would still be old-fashioned, but I did not stay the same. I changed.

My personality will never change. I will always have a liberal temperament in the sense of having "high openness" and "low conscientiousness". This is me. This is who I am.

But my values changed, and my eyes were opened.

The thing is that I always had a religious temperament, but without religion, it was an artistic temperament. But I needed to believe in something. This is what got me misled. I was not satisfied with letting the world get worse. I wanted to make it better. I was not satisfied with no meaning in life. I wanted meaning. These very impulses, when not obedient to God, were the impulses that made me progressive at the time.

Did you call a conservative stupid or ignorant?

Not since George W. Bush was president.

 

[I Love An Atheist]

We all do missionary work on the Internet. And you can make it difficult on Christians around the world if you are not careful.

Give me an example.

 

[1689Dave]

Give me an example.

WWW = world wide web. And you can produce a false image of Christ bringing persecution on others by espousing political views.

 

[I Love An Atheist]

WWW = world wide web. And you can produce a false image of Christ bringing persecution on others by espousing political views.

Give me an example of a Christian producing a false image of Christ, bringing persecution on others by espousing political views.

 

[I Love An Atheist]

The problem I have with this method is that it would never have worked on me, and I used to be a radical atheist.

I mean I needed desperately to count the cost of being a disciple, especially in this culture. I desperately needed to be convicted of sin, especially with the knowledge I was going to hell when I died as an unbeliever. I needed to recognize faith, that is blind faith, is a virtue if it is in the truth found in Jesus Christ. I needed to learn to trust the bible over anything or anyone else on earth. I needed to learn that a quiet and faithful life is best, not a life like in a movie, novel, or videogame.

I did in fact do this all wrong for twelve miserable years, assuming I could blend secularism and Christianity. It ended up taking a small miracle to save me and get born again.

I think people just need the truth, the more the better. Then they can make up their minds in light of it.

Very interesting. I guess I shouldn't assume too much about what would work on somebody else, based on my personal experience.

 

[Steven Yeadon]

Very interesting. I guess I shouldn't assume too much about what would work on somebody else, based on my personal experience.

What did it take to make you born again? What truths had the biggest impact?

 

[I Love An Atheist]

Yes, but never political parties. Jesus said his kingdom is not of this world.

Since Jesus was God come in the flesh, it makes it problematic to insist that Jesus' words and examples can mean nothing for this life but only for the next. This position is more of a Gnostic or Manichean or Platonic one. It strictly separates the body from the soul and opposes them to each other. The Hebrews had no disdain for the material world.

I do indeed agree that Jesus' kingdom is not of this world, but I don't agree it follows that we can never support political parties. I think it follows that we not fall for Dominionism on the Right or Social Gospel on the Left. But those are extremes.

Faith without works is dead, as Jesus' brother James said. Part of our works involves politics, although if push comes to shove, morality should always come above politics. Morality first, politics second. But not morality first, politics not at all.

 

[Yeshua1]

Yes, but never political parties. Jesus said his kingdom is not of this world.

We should vote for those who support Christian morals/ideals, and not antichristian agendas like gay marriage and abortion!

 

[I Love An Atheist]

What did it take to make you born again? What truths had the biggest impact?

My prayer experience convinced me that God is real and God is good. At first I prayed to the "power of love". I didn't know who or what I was praying to. I had a kind of Joseph Campbell, Masks of God perspective. I decided to pray to Jesus as kind of a "mask of God" because I was most comfortable with Jesus, because that was my childhood religion.

As time went on, I think the Holy Spirit worked with me to make me believe that God I prayed to and who helped me was the same one who inspired the Bible. My eyes were opened to believe that the Bible is really God's Word.

I became aware that lots of people are channeling spirit beings and writing things they are given, and the things they are writing are diametrically opposed to the Bible message. It seems there are so many cultures and so many religions, but over time I could see they are more similar than I used to think they were. Over time I could see that their fruits are not as good as the fruits of orthodox Christianity, the kind of Christianity where you believe that Jesus Christ was a real person who came in the flesh as the one and only Son of God. Now I can see that there are only two options, where before it seemed like there were many. I can see who is the author of confusion and Who is not.

I think the Holy Spirit had to work with me to open my eyes in this way, or I would have been a goner for the New Age teaching about Cosmic Christ Consciousness and may have fallen for the concept of a series of World Teachers, with Jesus Christ only being one of many.

I'm really not that smart, so I know I didn't figure it all out on my own. I know where all my smart thoughts led me to in my life over the years. I had a head full of infinite options, and a very poor sense of which ones are true and right and best. My own comprehension of complexity is limited, so I know I had to have had help picking out the signals among the noise.

 

[Yeshua1]

What did it take to make you born again? What truths had the biggest impact?

It took the Holy spirit making me realise that I was a lost sinner, that Jesus died in order to save me from hell, and that I had to receive Him by faith! He used 2 baptist students in College to share with me for about 3 weeks before the "light bulb" went on!

 

[I Love An Atheist]

What did it take to make you born again? What truths had the biggest impact?

One more thing. I didn't talk to anybody about my new faith except for my husband -- but only a little bit with him -- and one aunt. He got a laugh out of it when I said I prayed to the power of love, making a crack about the Huey Lewis song from the 80s, the same one in the Back to the Future movie.

My aunt said things to me that she had no idea what it meant to me. She said the perfect thing at the perfect time. One time she said to me, "In him there is no darkness, there is only light." It seemed trite to me and I didn't pay much attention. She repeated it in her email reply, and it was the only thing she said in her reply. It was unusual.

It meant something to me. I was working on a novel that had a theme about an astronaut's consciousness being eaten by an alien. As the alien ate the consciousness of the astronaut, the astronaut experienced becoming compost and then started to experience the other composted consciousnesses that had previously been eaten by the alien. As the process of being consumed continued, the astronaut experienced multiple experiences from multiple perspectives, including animals, plants, minerals, aliens and the universe.

It was simultaneously horrifying and enlightening. The evil was spreading through the astronaut's consciousness to Earth.

The astronaut had to fight it. She had to start at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder and work up.

Each time she worked up, she would complete a challenge. It was going to be an online interactive story with a game at the end of each chapter.

At the end of it, she would find the Godhead of the universe.

The alien was not evil. There was no evil in the universe, only evolution.

She would come back to Earth from her experience wise, with all kinds of knowledge and inventions to share. And she would live in a Dogon village, among the Dogon people of Africa, who had made statues of aliens who taught them about the companion star of Sirius that we cannot see with our naked eye.

Since she got all this knowledge by being eaten by this alien in outer space, and she was a black woman astronaut, she was Blackbird. The Beatles had a song about Blackbird flying "into the light of the dark black night". She flew into black outer space, and she became enlightened.

She was supposed to be like a mythic hero, going into the underworld and bringing knowledge back into the community.

So you see the significance my aunt's words had to me at that time, with that story in my head. I had never told her about my story.

 

[Steven Yeadon]

My prayer experience convinced me that God is real and God is good. At first I prayed to the "power of love". I didn't know who or what I was praying to. I had a kind of Joseph Campbell, Masks of God perspective. I decided to pray to Jesus as kind of a "mask of God" because I was most comfortable with Jesus, because that was my childhood religion.

As time went on, I think the Holy Spirit worked with me to make me believe that God I prayed to and who helped me was the same one who inspired the Bible. My eyes were opened to believe that the Bible is really God's Word.

I became aware that lots of people are channeling spirit beings and writing things they are given, and the things they are writing are diametrically opposed to the Bible message. It seems there are so many cultures and so many religions, but over time I could see they are more similar than I used to think they were. Over time I could see that their fruits are not as good as the fruits of orthodox Christianity, the kind of Christianity where you believe that Jesus Christ was a real person who came in the flesh as the one and only Son of God. Now I can see that there are only two options, where before it seemed like there were many. I can see who is the author of confusion and Who is not.

I think the Holy Spirit had to work with me to open my eyes in this way, or I would have been a goner for the New Age teaching about Cosmic Christ Consciousness and may have fallen for the concept of a series of World Teachers, with Jesus Christ only being one of many.

I'm really not that smart, so I know I didn't figure it all out on my own. I know where all my smart thoughts led me to in my life over the years. I had a head full of infinite options, and a very poor sense of which ones are true and right and best. My own comprehension of complexity is limited, so I know I had to have had help picking out the signals among the noise.

I will share some of my own story.

Though first I have a question: When did you have an experience or revelation or choice or something in which you can say you were born again from above and changed forever?

I'll be forward and honest as to why I ask, I myself never had such a thing to point back to and say "I had life-change because of that." As a Christian mixing atheist rationalism and Christianity, I was never able to answer that question except to say "at baptism."

So, two years ago, when I had put blind faith in Jesus' resurrection, after declaring him my Lord for twelve years, I had a life-changing event. I knew that I had missed something vital the whole time because of this life-change and even got re-baptized. Since then I have been able to really act like he is my Lord, as opposed to saying it and going after other things all the time.

I hope that you and all like us that came from secularism have the same certainty and power to our faith, at the very least the knowledge of a changed life points to the accuracy of the Gospel.

As for what got me out of atheism, I'll be candid: I, on a whim, prayed for three natural disasters within several months from a God that I didn't really believe in, to test His existence. Those three natural disasters all happened within two months of the prayer. I have been told by Christian friends that He had those events planned, but of course He led me to pray so that I would know He exists with an insane probability.

Another amazing thing was that the guilt for praying such a wicked prayer changed me in one way: I abandoned radicalism and the desire to eventually have a violent atheism. I used that experience to repent of that monumental sin, knowing I had the heart of a monster to ever want to be a radical, violent atheist.

I did pretty well for six months, but I started to work at a Christian bookstore that helped to maroon my faith. This is because I would not practice discernment or wisdom with the books I read, or with my life experiences. I also got wrapped up in the Charismatic movement.

In addition, I moved away from the Christianity of my repentant heart and more towards the faith espoused by Christian leaders, which was disastrous in my case. As a former radical edging towards violence one day, I needed to go down a unique path to find wholeness.

In the end I was foolish according to Proverbs and I also ran after what my itching ears wanted, never having learned the way of wisdom at all. Seeking wisdom is thus something I know is of prime importance in our lives. As far as I am concerned, I paid twelve miserable years for my lack of heartfelt faith and lukewarm attitude to obedience. Then again, I just thank God I'm saved and did not wind up a false professor bound for hell.

 

[Salty]

Yeshua1 said: ↑
We shroud still support that which is biblical, as Christians!

Yes, but never political parties. Jesus said his kingdom is not of this world.

I am very involved with my political party!

I have run for public office twice and in a former town, I was the Chairman of my Party.

 

[I Love An Atheist]

When did you have an experience or revelation or choice or something in which you can say you were born again from above and changed forever?

I don't think I can claim anything that has been both sudden and complete. For me it has been gradual, with quantum leaps coming at some times, but only occasionally.

 

[kyredneck]

I don't think I can claim anything that has been both sudden and complete. For me it has been gradual, with quantum leaps coming at some times, but only occasionally.

You're not alone.