As requested, what I believe

[toothycat]

I believe there is a God.

I believe the Bible is a tool that has the purpose of pointing us towards God. This includes describing who God is, how to get in touch, and why one might want to; and also the kinds of things he has done for people and wanted from people in the past who did and who did not, and the kinds of things he has promised people in the past, and the kinds of things he promises us.
The people trying to read the Bible as an absolute set of rules for life, the people treating it as cyphertext and trying to decrypt it, the people trying to read every single bit literally... are missing the point.

I believe that in order to call oneself Christian, it is both necessary and sufficient to accept Jesus as God, place one's trust in him and strive to do his will, to the best of one's knowledge and ability. The placing of one's trust in God in particular is faith.

I believe the way one comes to a faith in God - to knowing God - to trusting God - is not a logical position that one can arrive at through intellectual discourse. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast." - Ephesians 2:8-9.
This personal revelation is something that happens to each individual internally, and is not transferrable; it is something that God gives you when you call out for it through repentful prayer. "For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened." - Matthew 7:8
This is not to say that any spoken request for faith will automatically be granted as though from some mystical vending machine. The atheist who puts God to some form of double-blind test, then turns around to his Christian friends and says, "Hey, I did everything you said - went through all the motions - but nothing happened! You lied to me. Matthew 7:8 is a lie" - as I once did! - that person is missing the point. The seeking out, turning away from one's denials, calling for God - it must be meant; must come from inside; it is not what you say, but what you mean that will be given to you.

I call myself a Christian; I place my trust in God. This means that when, by some convoluted - or direct - theological intellectual reasoning someone points out to me that something Christians believe about God or something the Bible says about God or something I might opine about God leads to self-contradiction, or to an evil God, or a God that does not agree with the world as we see it just by looking around us, or some other flawed and unacceptable thing, this says to me not that Christianity is wrong and my faith unfounded but that my understanding is flawed. Participating in theological debates, I feel a bit like the popular image of the Zen monk surrounded by students trying to catch him out might; by the very act of opening one's mouth to start on some intricate disproof of God, one demonstrates one has already missed the point. cathedral_life was trying to show this to me years ago, I think. Faith in God is a function of trust, not one of mathematical proof. God cannot be pinned down with words. Mu and three pounds of flax to you all.

I realise this is a somewhat closed-minded and intellectually unsatisfying position. The truth is that for many of the intellectual problems with Christianity that I had as an atheist, before I became Christian, I still have no answers. Instead, I feel able to trust that for those questions that are not based on false assumptions, answers exist, and perhaps one day will be revealed.

Edit: some readers may not realise this, but this journal is actually shared by MoonShadow and SunKitten; beliefs, however, might not be. The above is MoonShadow's braindump, as requested by several people over the last few days; this earlier post was SunKitten's.

Comments

[toothycat]

Presumably if you started hallucinating you'd go to see a doctor and get medication for it, you wouldn't say "No, there really are little blue smurfs that walk around with us".

Well, it depends. If I saw little blue smurfs, and I was the only one to see little blue smurfs, and it bothered me, I'd go to a doctor.

But if lots of people I trust and admire seriously told me over and over that they saw little blue smurfs, and that seeing little blue smurfs was a good thing, and I learned that people had been seeing little blue smurfs for thousands of years, and they told me that little blue smurfs actually really did exist; well, I might be dubious until I saw some; but people told me that if I called out for the little blue smurfs to come out and really meant what I said, I'd see them - and, after just humoring them for a while to no effect, one day I did really mean it, and I started seeing smurfs like everyone around me was - why would I go to a doctor?

And if then someone came along, and was where I had been at the humouring and doubting stage, what could I say to them but "call out and see for yourself"?