Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Church is imploding

Way off the mark, as usual. Maybe you can't understand what is said, or don't want to understand because actually understanding the remark doesn't appeal to you.

If your concern is your pocketbook, you aint worshipping the Lord.

My money won’t support closet gay preachers was the meaning

I am very much in agreement there! Homosexuality is an abomination unto the Lord.

Prime example of why this week church were members of but no longer attend had biz mtg.Closet gay preacher was denied more funds for his whatever campaign for the 5 youth “which used to be 30-40”.He told head deacon “I could choke you to death right now” this ain’t no lie 😳😳The head treasurer resigned on the spot who is also the organist

I've been wondering lately if it could be something like Elon Musk's neurolink. If it becomes like he envisions it will make a human interface completely with the web. There would be no speed difference between human mind and digital information.

I envision if a human does such a thing, they won't really be human anymore. Once connected I think they could lose the ability to make a choice anymore. The choice would have been made when they decided to join the hive mind. Elon is blanketing the whole earth with satellites where everyone would be connected everywhere always.

If the definition of the Beast isn't an electronic god we created, that we become one with through a cybernetic connection implanted in the body, it at least could be.

Indeed - and too often.

I dont understand what it is you are asking Tyrone

You are certainly correct

Salvation, eternal life and reunion with familiy and friends in an afterlife is an attractive proposition, and the foundation of Pascals Wager.

I’ll take a wack at it from the 20,000 foot perspective, the macro-overview IMO. We have many unbelievers now in the seminaries, and thus the pastors who come from them. By unbelievers, I mean deniers of the scriptures as without error in the original autographs (all are versions today are very accurate without any differences in doctrine) and particularly deniers of the miraculous; for example, many deny the historicity of Genesis when most Hebrew experts agree the Hebrew of Genesis is of the historical genre, not poetry other any other type of literature. The evangelical church is filled with this apostasy. Don’t confuse the institutional church with the true church scattered throughout, and even outside the institutional church. Another problem is Biblical ignorance among those who profess to be Christians.

Thus, in regard to Genesis, many pastors/churches deny a six day creation of ch1, a literal Fall of ch 3, and a worldwide flood of ch 6, and on. These ch’s 1-11 contain the foundational orthodox Christian doctrines like why we need a savior; that sin begets death; of created male and female and the institution of marriage and the family. Thus the church has lost its “salt” and is informed by the culture rather than the other way around. Pastors don’t want to be unpopular or thought ant-intellectual.

Of course Biblical prophecy is another ignored genre of the Bible which includes many OT books and of course Revelation. These scriptures speak to a tribulation, a literal millennium, and Christ’s second coming. In His second coming, Christ does not come as a lamb slain from the foundations of the world, but as the Lion of Judah, in judgement and destruction of unbelievers. The eternal death of unbelievers does not make for an uplifting Sunday morning. This is an unpopular teaching to “itching ears” and most contemporary pastors won’t touch Revelation with Pinocchio’s nose.

The bias against the supernatural (the whole Bible is a supernatural book) is that a six day creation, the Fall, the worldwide flood, Jesus’ miracles, etc., is anti-intellectual, and unsophisticated now. Many pastors don’t believe in this literally or are themselves confused over it. When you read Genesis and don’t accept what it says how it says it, you’ve become the authority instead of God. No can do.

How did this happen to the seminaries, the theologians, and the pastors? As far as the confusion over eschatology (the end times) it goes back to Augustine, through the RCC, through the Reformation, and is largely unchanged to even today. Most churches hold to amillennialist eschatology.

As to denying the historicity of Genesis, many of todays problems in the church and the culture are the result. This goes all the way back to the Enlightenment, and then in the 19th century with Charles Lyle, the father of modern geology (even though he was trained as a lawyer) who wanted to have an alternative to the narrative of Moses in Genesis — meaning the origin of all things without a God as the creator. He greatly influenced the elites in Europe and Charles Darwin with whom he was acquainted.

C. Darwin’s “Origins” (Darwin was a disaffected, fallen Christian) is what’s called historical science — a belief in what he (and unbelievers) want to believe how the origin of all things came to be. Materialistic Evolution was/has never been observed, is not repeatable; is based on speculation and findings having to be qualified according to preconceptions. This even includes the radioisotope aging most take as “gospel”. All of this is in contrast to operational science, which is the hard science of the lab — the science of observation, experiment and the repeatability of findings.

I know many here believe in materialist evolution as fact. Indeed, it isn’t. It’s the default theory to explain of things without the God of the Bible. It’s been called Satan’s biggest lie yet. But it’s the same manner in which he tempted Eve — as to the six-day creation, “did God really say/mean that?”

Darwin of course influenced Marx, Hitler, and others, giving them an answer to the origins of all things again without a God one has to be accountable to.

In the 1800’s the early 1990’s to the present, the institutional church was bewildered and accepted this all as fact. It is not fact, it’s speculative theory based on the first presumption of “no God.”

In the Higher criticism movement (of scripture) in Europe of the late 1800’s into the 1900’s, and especially in Germany, theologians, in the context of evolution, denied all the miracles of the scriptures. It started and accelerated the decline of church in Europe but all these things affected the institutional church worldwide.

All of this weakened the church and it lost its moral authority; after all when you can’t take Genesis literally, what else could you deny from that point on? About anything you don’tlike, or seems distasteful. This is where the church is today. It’s why denominations dither weakly for decades over homosexuality, and other issues.

On the micro level, I agree with Dirtfarmer’s comments — you (I) are sinners. Unless we confess, repent of them, and then live in gratitude to God for what He’s done (a free gift) for us, we will pay the penalty of our sins ourselves. Eternally.

Contrary to that great theologian, Oprah Winfrey, we don’t each have our own truth. The only real truth is the eternal truth revealed in the scriptures. If you don’t have a church, pastor, and leadership that teaches those truths, you are wasting your time, and you should leave.

EDIT: I forgot another reason for the church’s fear of rebutting evolution at the beginning. Remember that the RCC put Galileo into a lifetime of house arrest for his heliocentric teaching that the sun is the center of our solar system, not the earth as was their belief (Ptolemaic system) from a misinterpretation of a text in Joshua wherein the “sun stood still”. There was great embarrassment over this and eventually they had to issue an apology.

The church remembered this and was loathe to be found on the wrong side of OBSERVABLE science. However materialistic evolution of molecules-to-men is/was not observable. Again, it’s historical science not operational science.

Do you believe the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago, there was a flood that covered all land on earth, that the earth we know was created in six 24 hour days (less than 10,000 years ago)?

As to dinosaurs. We have the bones.

There is only one reality; the universe as it is. Which does not conform to what we may happen to believe about it. What we find appealing or meaningful may have little or no bearing on how the world works.

The most recent studies show that the decline of Christianity in America is mainly due to people leaving Christianity and choosing to have no religious affiliation at all. They’re not converting to other religions, and they’re not becoming atheists (atheists remain in the single digits in America). It’s Christians deciding they are not Christians anymore, and they’re simply disaffiliating from the faith. They’re known as the “nones” and this group is…and has been…growing by leaps and bounds. And while a great many in this group still affirm God’s existence and even still pray, they do not wanna be connected to any religious identity or group. It’s often not really a great change in beliefs, but affiliations.

My apologies. I thought you were advocating treating unrepentant sinners as if their sins were not actually sins.

We are good Tyrone , Take Care

Ichibod

The Church is imploding, but not HIS church. Somebody just got some bad freaking news.