Hey man, I appreciate you responding and giving me your history. To be honest, I myself used to be like that white lady. I started living for Christ about 4 years ago. And when I first started living the life, I too thought the best way to convert people was telling them that they were going to hell. And yeah, on some people, that will work. But what do you do when you encounter people who don't necessarily believe there is a hell. Then I opened up the bible one day and read "the love of God draws a man to repentance." And it dawned on me that I was trying to use the wraft of God instead of the love of God to lead people to Christ. So I had to go back and repent for that. And now when I meet other people who don't believe in Christ, I just walk in the love of God towards them because I know that will prove God is real more than telling them that they are going to hell ever will.

>>(Mcbadfeet wrote) My parents never really talked bad about Christians, but moms did point out contradictions that baffled her. Like in Exodus when God hardened Pharoah's heart so he wouldn't let Moses's people go. Or why would an omnipotent God have anything to prove to the Devil in the story of Job? As far as I see that tale, it proved that Job was indeed faithful, and that the Devil could make a damn fool out of God. >>

It was funny to hear you say this. I too grew up in a "back in the woods baptist church" where I didn't get any understanding of the bible and saw people who said one thing and did something else. I too had questions about this so called loving God who uses bad things to teach good people a lesson, like Job. But 4 years ago, I went to a church that actually taught the word, with simplicity and understanding and saw things in the bible I never saw before.

Take Job for instance, it looks like God allowed satan or used satan to teach him a lesson. But after studying the bible, I realize that God was showing us something about the devil and how he works. Of course it would take me a long time to show this to you in the bible, but I will throw this out and hope that you'll do some more research into it. If you study the bible you will see that God actually created man to be a higher being than the angels, which satan being of the angelic class. I don't have time to show you scripture, but if you think about it, the bible says salvation is for man. God gave man an entire planet and all the angels do is serve us. There are no female angels in the bible. Therefore the angels don't have sex or the ability to reproduce themselves. In Genesis, the bible says God created man in His image and His likeness and said that man would be like Him. He didn't say we would be like Him and the angels. This is important yet unfornutately, a lot of Christians don't know this. According to the bible, there are two things man has to do in order to walk in the power we have over not only angels, but anything that is not human(i.e. sicknesses, animals, weather, demons, and etc), we must be hooked up to God and we must believe that we are hooked up to him. Job was righteous because he was hooked up to God in a covenant. But if you read Job, you'll see he really didn't believe this because every morning, he rose up making a new covenant with God as if his old covenant had expired. He feared that God was going to kill his children when God was the one protecting them. The bible says that fear operates the opposite of faith. If you are sick, and you got faith that God will heal you, your faith will cause that to come to pass. But if you are healed, and you fear getting sick, your fear will cause your sickness to come to pass. In the book of Job, in chapter 2 or 3, Job said, my worst fears have come to pass. God was trying to use Job's situation to show us not to fear when we have a covenant with Him or else we will give satan power over our lives. All through out the book of Job, we see Job blaming God for something the devil did. And that still wholes true today as we label tornadoes and hurricanes as acts of God. (Let me know if you want exact bible scripture for this, I'll look it up for you)

Moses: This scripture confused me also, because I am thinking why would God on purpose hardens Pharoah's heart. But then I got an understanding and I realize something now about the power of God that was on Moses. This power is referred to in the bible as the anointing(the burden removing yoke destroying power of God). Because God is Holy, his presence does one of two things. It can draw you closer to Him causing you to repent, or it can drive you away from Him filling you with more hurt and anger towards Him. In Pharoah's case, the presence of God on Moses caused his heart to harden towards God and God's people. So in this sense, it really wasn't God on purpose hardening pharoah's heart but because Pharoah was so full of evil, the presence of God's Holiness caused his heart to harden.


>>(Mcbadfeet wrote)So from jump I always thought tyhat Christianity was kind of foolish. As a child reading Greek myths I couldn't see how they were any more fake than the Bible stories. And just growing up with nationalist tendencies it's real easy to dismiss Christianity on basis of the way Europeans have used it to fuck minds. Still in the past 5 years or so I have come to realize that Christianity is not an evil. Partly do to some of the first real conversations that I had with cats on the topic when I was at Morehouse. I see it as just another religion. But it's the only one I know of seeking to convert the globe.>>

Yeah, I can actually understand why you don't see the bible as being different from greek myth. I actually think there is some truth to greek myths. I believe that a lot of people back then saw something that was real but the way they explained it seems phony to us today. Check this out though, just something to think about. In Genesis chapter 6, the bible says the Sons of God came down and had sex with women. In the book of Jude, these Sons of God were later to be interpreted angels. Angels who came down and had sex with human women. The result of this union were mighty men. Giants that the bible calls Nephilim. According to greek myth, there were men on the planet who had superhuman strength and were considered to be the sons of the gods. If you think about it, for people who existed back then, if they saw angels coming down from heaven and having sex with human women, what would they have called these angels, being ignorant of who these beings truly were? They would have called them gods, lower case "g." And then the children of this perverted union, the bible says there were mighty men. I wonder if this event that happened before the flood fueled a lot of the characters we know of today from greek legends.

But the above examples are just really me showing you how, like you, I heard a lot of crazy stuff in the bible that created more questions than answers. But once I emcountered people who were actually living the life, not the religious life of talking the talk but not walking the walk, but true people who could actually hear from God and show you scripture after scripture of why certain things happened that didn't make sense, I now have understanding. So my hope mcbadfeet is that you could ask me some questions you've always had about the bible and let me show you in the bible the answers to those questions. Like for instance, where in the bible does it say that God created man higher than the angels when religion has been teaching for the last 2000 years that we are beneath the angels? Or where in the bible does it say that God's presence hardens some people's heart when it drew others closer to Him? So hopefully we can have some discussions along those lines. If not, I still love you and I pray that the true God of this universe show Himself to you in a way that you cannot deny that He is real and more real than the words on this screen and the computer monitor you are looking at. May you have the peace of Jesus, and be blessed.