Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Yay, I'm glad you made this!

To get things started, can you please share with us what you believe about the trinity? As in do you believe that the father, the son and the holy spirit are all part of the divine? And that the three are one?

And thanks again for this wonderful thread!

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Ah, the Trinity! Well then, we are in fact going to have to delve into quite a lot here to answer that question lol...

Okay, so the trinity is the idea that God exists in three persons, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. I both believe and don't believe in that. Which makes no sense without explanation.

First off, God is huge. God is a wild, varied, enormous gigantic, ridiculously impossible to comprehend thing. Calling God a being seems off sometimes even, because God is that effing large. God has many parts, and manifestations, and each of us only sees a tiny piece of that. Its like God is a shattered mirror that could reflect the Universe, and each of us only sees at most a handful of shards of it. God encompasses all things, and yet is also greater than them. I don't think its possible to understand God, not in any real sense, because of God's vastness. But that doesn't mean its not worth trying.

You know the old story of the five blind men who find an elephant? One grabs the trunk and says "an Elephant is long and snakelike!" one grabs a tusk and says, "Its hard and pointy" annother the foot, "its thick and round," annother touches the side of the beast, "its rough and sort of flat, like a wall" the last grabs the tail and says "its hairy and thin!"

None of them understands the whole thing, but by sharing we can understand more than we could on our own .

But I digress a tad!

So do I believe in the Trinity? No. Not as it is stated. I believe God manifests in far more than three ways. God is incarnate as the Father, and as the Holy Ghost, and as the Mother, and as a million other things.

Which well, I feel like I should save Jesus for a different post. He is kind of a big deal to :P

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Okay, I'll go second then.

Isn't he sort of the whole point of Christianity? I mean no Jesus, no Christianity since he is after all Christ. Aaaand I could say a lot here, but I'll let you cover this in your own way Malflick Looking forward to your answer.

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Yes, he is kind of the whole point lol. I was being snarky :P.

So, yes, Jesus is the core of my faith. But... Not exactly the way you'd think. I don't think Jesus was God, not in the way people say at least. The gospels are pretty clear that Jesus was an incarnation of Logos, the word of God, but when exactly did be become that?

Was he born that way, as the literal son of God?

Or was he CHOSEN to be that by God, like how David was a chosen "Son of God'.

I believe Jesus was chosen by God as the Messiah, after living a life good enough to be chosen as a Prophet. When he was bapitised by John, and the spirit came down upon him like a Dove, he became the Logos, more than a prophet, but the living mouthpiece for Logos, the word of God. Jesus was our savior, and was our redeemer, and all the stuff you usually hear, but he wasn't born that way.

‘I am going away and I am coming back to you.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I am going to the Father, for the Father is greater than I." (John 14:28)

(In this way you might compare my beliefs to that of Arius, but they aren't exactly the same, but its a good place to start.)

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Soooooooo, Virgin Birth?!

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Heeey Malflick! Nice post.
So there is one thing I can't understand in Christianity. -The "Either you fear God and serve him obediently, or go to hell" thing.

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

This is a really interesting thread Malflick! I'm glad you made it

To sort of piggyback off Gleb's post, obedience to God. While I was being raised a Christian this was often a point of confusion for me. I thought that the 10 commandments were the basis of what God wanted in people, though it seemed that sometimes primary figures in the Bible ignored them (i.e. Joshua and the battle of Jericho).

I'm curious of your opinion? Are the commandments guidelines or rules set in stone (no pun intended lol)? What is "obedience" to God?

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Thanks for the Q & A about Malflickism, Malflick
Now here's my question: What, for you, confirms your faith in God/Jesus? And what lead you away from the more intolerant interpretations of Christianity? You are a bit of an unusual Christian specimen, being all accepting and open minded and such.

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Lots of things to get through here, so I'll be going through in order !

I think the best way to answer this is something along the lines of "lol, nope."

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

I could probably ask a million questions but I've been reading a book series and the most prominent thing on my mind is the rapture. What are your beliefs? Do you believe that Jesus will eventually come to Earth and set up his kingdom after God rains down a series of judgements on humanity?

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

I guess I can't understand how people got that idea to begin with. God asks you to worship him/her, and love your fellow man. In fact, the greatest commandment of the faith is to love your neighbor as yourself. YHWH cares a lot more if you are being a jerk than if you worship him/her. (see, the Good Samaritan, which while over-cited, is over-cited for a REASON). While I think the path Jesus outlines is the best one to being a good person and getting to heaven (which, well, Heaven is yet annother large topic) I don't think its the only one. Jesus didn't seem to think so either, saying plenty of 'unclean' people were worthy of God's love.

Heck, YHWH gave Claudis Procula a vision that killing Jesus would go badly for her hubby Pilate, and she was a Pagan.

Hellfire and damnation is a fine tool for shucking more people into conversion I guess, so thats probably where it came from. But I could care less. I do think there is a 'bad place' for super bad people, but if you asked me if it was a permanent place or temporary, or who goes there, I can only shrug, for I don't know the answers. Its not my business really.

Christianity is not one religion, its over 38,000ish, and there are A LOT of us who abhor the idea of the "serve god obediently or go to hell" thing.

Asking questions, and thinking are key to to my belief. (I like to remind people that Jesus kept among his disciples Thomas, who doubted and questioned.)

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Other than the belief in God, what beliefs of your religion are similar to 'common' Christianity?

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

Lets talk about Covenants! One problem I've noticed with the way Christians learn about Christianity in a modern context is that the context of the Bible, and its stories, is usually totally brushed off. The Bible is supposed to be totally self contained, and you're expected to understand it by being shown bits of it piecemeal as you are supposed to understand them.

God gives us Covenants, which are binding agreements between God and his/her people. These Covenants give us rules to live by, and God's expectation of what he/she expects, and what will happen if we fail.

Its where people get mixed up on the cause/effect relation of actions and their consequences in the Bible. When God makes a Covenant with his people to give them a nation, and they break it, he lets other people take their nation away. The thing is, that was a part of that one Covenant, it doesn't apply to every nation, or every Covenant. The 10 commandments were not even the whole of the law then, there was a whole slew of laws (Leviticus) and plenty of people you were allowed to kill under those laws. Thankfully, we don't use those anymore.... Though there are plenty of Christians who think we should (cries).

Also, a lot of the Bible is Jewish cultural history and mythology.

When Jesus was asked about the law, he summed it up with the Golden rule and loving God, and said that was everything. That was the basis of the final covenant, the one we use now .

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What confirms it? I think the term around these parts is "Unverified Personal Gnosis"? (I may be wrong) and no, I don't think I'm a special snowflake. While its personal, and not anyone's business but my own, I will say that the experience was a humbling one, but in a good way, and brief.

I think my belief in God led me away from it, actually. The less I decided to rely on what people told me Christianity was, and the more I read the Bible, researched, and prayed, the more I found that I couldn't believe in God and believe what they were telling me about God, because it seemed like a totally different deity than the YHWH I was familiar with.

Kind of like if you were having this conversation:
Person 1: "Man I love Tigers!"
Person 2: "I love Tigers to!"
P1: "Don't you love how they are made of cast iron, and coated in peanut butter?"
P2: "No... That.... Doesn't sound like a Tiger to me."
P1: "Oh come on! Everyone know that about Tigers, they have three wheels, fly, and poop jello."
P2: "I.... What?"

In my experience there are a lot of Christians who are open minded and loving, we are in fact a much larger group than we are given credit for. The thing is, we are too often too quiet. We are content to keep our religion our own business, and so we go unnoticed most of the time.

We should really do something about that.

- - - Updated - - -

I'll keep this bit simple: the rapture isn't in the Bible, and is based of a pretty recent and loosey-goosey interpretation of a translation of a single passage of text.

I think Revelations is about the Roman Empire rather than the end of the world anyways, but that could be a looooooong discussion. Revelations is a complicated book.

But do I think we will reach the Kingdom of Heaven someday? Will Jesus return? Yep. Though what that means is up for interpretation. Jesus being an incarnation of the word of the Lord (note in Revelations how he has a sword for a tongue? His words are his weapons , not actual weapons. ) So, if we are all not jerks to each other, and treat each other like we want to be treated, than... Yeah, kingdom of Heaven and Jesus, the word of the Lord, his/her voice on the earth, being back on earth would basically have happened.

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There is a huge problem with this question, in that it assumes there is a common Christianity. There are certainly large broad groups that make up the religion: Catholicism, Orthodox, Protestantism (and other smaller groups!) ... And within those groups are huge divides that make it ridiculous to try to decide what is common.

But there are something I'm fairly certain I have in common with the majority of Christians:
-Jesus as the key Prophet/Holy person
-Jesus dying on the cross for us
-the Bible as my Holy Book
-YHWH
-Apostles, the ministry of the church being given to us people.

So yeah, hard to answer that.

Re: My Patented Weird Christianity, by Malflick, a Q&A

And how is your religion different?