I have no religious home...

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You back-pedaled ... your 'explanation' is in conflict with your original statement ... case remains open ...

The "collection plate" is much less "overt" than the preacher screaming at the top of his lungs for $46.

I hope Angnix finds a suitable religious community soon. And I hope she looks out for the shady ones.

If somebody asks to see her bank statements....head for the hills. And have a phone at the ready in case they block you from leaving (note: this is not likely to happen)

Collection plate: OK

Preacher screaming for money: Not OK

Last edited by kraftiekortie on 15 Jan 2020, 11:42 am, edited 1 time in total.

How many preachers do you know that literally scream for money? What are their names?

I've been in services where preachers actually literally scream for money---in the guise of "being in the Spirit", or some such thing.

They are expressing "the Passion of Jesus"---or some such thing. This preacher was "told by God" (I forgot the exact phraseology) that $46 would be an ideal amount to donate. And he delivered this message in a most vociferous and loud manner.

Most churches aren't like that. But there are churches which are just like that.

And how about those people in subways and buses who "spread the word of God" via screaming at the top of their lungs?

*shrug*

God never made an appearance during much needed times in my life. I’d ditch him for money in a heartbeat. Of course, I’m not very materialistic so that’s not saying a whole lot.

In "The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," James Joyce satirizes about "fire and brimstone" sorts of preachers.

God is omnipotent and omniscient....why would He need money?

If the church admits that donations go towards its upkeep, then I wouldn't mind.

The hubris of Man, trying to explain the nature of G-D.

Forgive them, Father...

I can never hope to "explain the nature of God."

Yes Krafty!

You made the mistake of...speaking in PLAIN ENGLISH!! !!

It's obvious that what you meant was "while the preacher is preaching and giving services he begs and pleads for money" as opposed to what most churches do which is to give services, and THEN quietly pass the collection plate around.

Since you made the mistake of speaking in plain English only 59,999 out of the 60 thousand members of Wrongplanet understood you. You forgot to dumb things down enough for that last member, Fnord, to understand. He is "special" you know.

But on the other hand...yes...places of worship do need to pass collection plates around. God may not need money, but places of worship do have landlords that do need money, and utility bills, etc.

The big issue I had that crushed my previous faith was evolution, the literalness of Noah's flood, etc... Being a zoology major, you can't look past that stuff...

I know I wouldn't be happy as a JW... Especially would miss birthdays and umm... If I needed a blood transfusion... Lol. Plus they are homophobic (I'm MOSTLY straight...)

I'm pretty darn liberal now, if I can find somewhere I would fit in with that mindset...

My husband was liberal (he tempted me into fornication he did )

I think I saw in a different thread something about some Methodists being a bit on the liberal side?

Personally, I wouldn't bother with JW. I just wouldn't. They are trained early on to be persuasive and to know scripture. The problem with that is that every thought they have is handed down from on high from Watchtower. They claim that their Bible is the result of scholarly work, but their sources are sketch if they're even known at all. With very few exceptions, current Bible translations come from a combination of manuscripts such as the Leningrad Codex, the Septuagint (or LXX for short), the Greek New Testament, and, to a lesser extent, the Vulgate. There's no need to rewrite the Bible, no need to assume that the meaning was lost in a chain of translations. What JW's do with the Bible is carefully reword it to reflect a unique, non-Trinitarian theology. They are hardly credible.


My wife and children are Southern Baptist. She and I teach in a Catholic school, and our kids attend same. Just the other day my oldest asked his religion teacher (in front of class) if transubstantiation is cannibalism. I had to sit down and talk with him about that, and then explained to his teacher that while we don't agree on some things, my children know that the religion classroom is not the place to practice Protestant apologetics. Teachers will ALWAYS have the upper hand in their classroom. There are right and wrong ways of challenging a teacher, and what he did was an example of what not to do. I make it my business to understand as much as I can about different religions and theology, and even about atheism and agnosticism. You're in a good place to discover scriptural and spiritual truth for yourself. Never let that go.


Trust me, you're not any crazier than anyone else. I've seen (no scare quotes needed) evidence, too. I was in a horrific car accident that flattened the car. I heard a voice tell me, slowly, calmly, to open the door and step out. I did. Suffered nothing but a few scratches, sore muscles, and a whole lot of nausea. If I'd stayed in that car, they'd have scraped me out to dispose of me. There's no REASON I should have survived that.

Skeptics will tell you that stories like mine aren't evidence. Yet these stories aren't isolated. The rejection of knowledge of God is predicated on the assumptions of the unbeliever. What happened to me, and what you've experienced, can't possibly have happened because those things can't possibly happen. Demands for evidence are followed by irrational rejection of evidence when it's provided on the grounds that evidence doesn't meet a very specific standard. God Himself could descend from the clouds, reveal Himself to you in incontrovertible terms, and you'd still find a way to deny who He is because you'd rather move some goalpost in order to maintain your worldview.

But there's something even more important than that: Any time you base a belief on evidence, you are accepting the premise that anything, once believed on evidence, can also be DIS-believed on evidence. In other words, if you KNOW God exists and base your knowledge on evidence, you are compelled to believe the opposite (non-existence of God) based on that evidence. In truth, there's no faith or anti-faith that doesn't have SOME evidence to back it up. So are you prepared to bounce from religion to religion, to non-religion, to religion, over and over again just because someone says "Evidence suggests..."? I hope not. That's irrational and dangerous. God has revealed Himself to you. That is all you need to know. You already have all the evidence you need.

As far as being crazy goes--we're all a little bit crazy. The fall of man introduced brokenness into the world. Because of sin's role in our lives, our minds are corrupt and useless. So in order to make truth claims about anything, which we can't possibly know, we need access to someone who knows everything who can reveal truth to us. God is omniscient and reveals Himself to us. So it's not a matter of evidence, since our minds are corrupted by sin and we wouldn't know what we were looking at, anyway. It's a matter of knowing whether we can trust that the knowledge we do have comes from God and that God is trustworthy. The human mind is only rational if God chooses to restore the mind. If you desire a clear mind and believe God will heal you, God will. Only then can anything make logical sense.


If we assume that you believe in God, that God has revealed Himself to you, and that He has restored your mind, think logically. Based on those assumptions, then you already know there is only one God. If you're praying to God, it logically follows that you're praying to the right one. There's no other God to pray to.

If you mean how do you know whether to pray to Buddha, or Shiva, or Hecate, or Satan because your faith is a product of your upbringing, then consider whether it's logically possible that the faith you were raised in could actually be the right one. Just because your parents raised you a certain way or you had certain friends doesn't mean they were wrong, although when we are younger it's easy to think that our parents are wrong about everything. Your question is if you were raised in a Buddhist home, would you still have made the decision to follow Christ? Yes, you would. And I know that because you would still reach a point of questioning your faith and making the decision to stay where you were or follow someone else. You would have found that nothing makes sense without God and that Christ is still necessary for salvation.

But then that raises the question of whether that still holds if someone never hears the gospel. If you never knew about Jesus and were raised Buddhist or Hindu or whatever, would that still apply? Yes, it would. You'd still make the same decision because you'd reach a point at which God revealed Himself to you. What happens is that entire civilizations cannot be reached by missionaries and never come to faith. While it seems unfair that those who never heard the name of Jesus would be condemned, there's still the question of whether someone would have accepted Christ even if he had heard the gospel. It's not cool to imagine entire populations in our day in time being set apart for destruction. But it is a Biblical reality. Consider the death of John Allen Chau back in 2018, while trying to reach the Sentinelese. This is a group that has been violent towards all outsiders who've even had accidental contact with them. It's so ingrained into their society that no one there will be reached by the gospel in the foreseeable future. I believe Chau had noble intentions. But I firmly believe it is important to consider whether a people group SHOULD be reached at all and whether it is wise to put your life on the line for those who are unreachable.

[NOTE: This is not to say that true martyrs died in vain. That's not to ignore that Christians are persecuted for no other reason than we are Christians and our persecutors hate us and God. I just mean that knowingly hastening your own death is a waste of a life when you KNOW it was for nothing and for reasons beyond your control. Chau proved to the world what we already knew about what was said about the Jews when they were accused of killing God's prophets in ancient times. This is not a rational thing in our dispensation. Prophets were sent. Prophets were slain. People refused to listen. And because we already know that, it's best to leave them to their fate. Go out "two by two" as Jesus said, find those who will receive you. If they won't, shake the dust off your shoes.]

You are obviously not set apart for destruction, nor are you part of a society that is. So I think you know if you're praying to the right God and, indeed, you know that you ARE praying to the right God. There's only one.


How do you know when your mind is too open? When it's so open your head explodes. You should never, EVER be willing to accept anything and everything. It's ok with me if I'm accused of being closed-minded. The question of whether Jesus is Lord and Savior is settled. There's nothing left to discuss. So, no, I'm not open to other ideas to the contrary. I think part of the problem we face is that "open-mindedness" is supposed to be this great thing when what others expect of us is to accept their way of life when it's not what's best for us. People caught in sin and know better want approval for their deeds. For us as Christians, this isn't something we can accept or tolerate from ourselves. Sinners will not change before they want to, and only then on their own terms. So why should we be expected to change and "open our minds" when no one else will? That doesn't make logical sense. The only thing my mind is open to is that God is God.

I'm also an egoist. You'll find that people often base their worth on what others think. They demand approval for their deeds. As an egoist, I don't care what anyone else thinks about me. I don't need anyone's approval to do what I want. I just act. One of the biggest problems of victim classes is their approval-seeking. It's hypocritical because they are unwilling to understand or tolerate people who disagree with them. They perceive them to be bullies and tormentors when those people, like myself, really just don't care. I, on the other hand, enjoy winning and feel no shame about it.

You are also going to discover that there are many, many nominal Christians who are really just useless people. They preach all day long about serving others, being good, sacrificing, etc., and don't say one word about personal renewal. The spirit must be fed every bit as much as the mind. If you are to believe them, then you must be completely selfless and giving. If that is true, then it is a sin to eat your supper because there's at least one person out there who is going hungry. And you must live completely without food until each and every person in the whole world has bread to eat. If you follow this to its logical extreme, that means nobody should ever eat or do anything to take care of themselves. And they should give preference to those they don't know rather than taking care of those they love. If everyone cares for everyone else, you would think that you'd have something to eat because someone gave you food. But that also means you are still taking something for yourself. So the idea of Christian altruism is a false gospel that leads to death. I suspect some of the conflicts you feel with going to any church at all is rooted somewhat in altruistic leanings. I could be wrong, but I think we often go to church and leave feeling that something just isn't right. I think that feeling is caused when self-haters do their worst to get us to join them in their misery. Jesus didn't teach us to hate ourselves. To "deny yourself" simply means to examine your values, to abandon your "old self" of being an oppressed victim, to take up your cross and follow Jesus to death? No...Jesus carried His cross to victory over sin and death. So while I know I will endure mockery, hardship, and many other things because I'm unusual and have firm convictions, I know my path leads to victory. Whenever negativity issues forth from the pulpit, I just switch off. I don't even hear it anymore. Given a choice, I prefer churches that teach positivity and messages of affirmation and encouragement.

At the other extreme is prosperity gospel. God is God. He is not a genie in a bottle that I can rub any time I want to manipulate a deity into granting my wishes. You cannot simply name what you want and it appear. That is contrary to objective reality. It defies God's character and nature along with natural law. You have to take responsibility for yourself and act creatively to bring things into existence. If your church is heavy on the guilt and shame or it's more New Age, blab-it-and-grab-it, you may be the victim of a scam. The Catholic church in particular is hard and heavy on the guilt. I'm not going to tell you NOT to be a part of the Catholic church. I'm only going to tell you to make yourself aware of the dogma and be careful in your thinking. I have a lot of respect for my Catholic friends and Catholic WPers. But there are some distinctly Catholic teachings you should carefully consider.

On Catholicism, my wife and I both get a lot of pressure to join the Catholic church. We're good friends with all the priests in the area and enjoy seeing our bishop from time to time. The pressure is because they all know we spend a lot of time studying the Bible, not simply just reading it. We know more about the Bible than our religion teachers. Catholics are not normally encouraged to spend much time with the Bible. I have an interest in apologetics, so of course I'm well versed in it. My wife was until recently a Sunday School teacher and also helped with children's choir, etc. She's followed me to worship leader conferences, etc., so...yeah, we know a lot! They are also impressed by how closely we actually live our lives according to the Bible, whereas many Catholics embrace a lower moral standard. We've been told we're more Catholic than Catholic people. So I feel like converting to Catholicism would be a waste of time. On the positive side, I've been impressed with many of our Catholic friends in that they mostly follow the Charismatic movement. They recognize the need for forgiveness while emphasizing positive messages such as spiritual gifts. These are good, kind, and generous people like myself and my family. It's a way of life that doesn't require daily reminders of your guilt and shame. I still think they are a bit "mystical" and misguided, but they are easy people to get along with. There are many priests and Baptist pastors who are all about guilt and suffering, and that kind of message is foreign to me now.

Yeah, they certainly encourage homophobia and focus on that topic a lot, and they don’t believe in evolution, so they probably wouldn’t be a good fit for you. I’m probably “mostly” straight, too.

I was publicly disciplined for fornication (with a man who became my husband). Fun times. (It is sort of funny now because it’s so absurd, but it was traumatic then, especially since I had a devastating year. B&$@%#+s!!)

People don’t need religion that makes them feel bad about themselves. A lot of us are too good at that as it is.

You could continue to try other churches (or nonChristian places of worship you’d like to check out) in your area. Sometimes it’s easier to discretely come and go without being noticed in a larger crowd if that’s a concern for you.

Going to the woods soon, thx for the insight