Reply #15: It's makes very sad reading, because she is turning many truths

[Joe Chi Minh]

of Christianity into a surreal and pernicious, Stephen King-type dreamscape of half-truths and delusions.

It should be acknowledged though that, when we find our way back to the faith, after a shipwreck, often because we want to explore why we should believe, before we eventually find ourselves again, and our faith becomes stronger than it might have been otherwise, it can take a long time for our faith to achieve a normal kind of equilibrium. One of the worst thing for a "fundie" to do, although apparently it is a defining characteristic, is to close their minds, in the fond belief that they know and understand the length and breadth the heights and depths of the faith and what God wants to teach them. The worst of course is when they make a travesty of the teachings of Christ and the whole burden of scripture by imagining that wealth is a sign of God's blessing and approval.

My wife and I often say, "See you shortly, God willing", when we go out, but there's an element of gallows humour in it too. You know the saying, If you want to make God laugh, tell him what you're going to do tomorrow

Another one I like is, "If God spares me." A priest we know told us about a woman parishioner of his who always said that, having suffered a whole series of family losses in a short space of time.

But the thing is, while I recognise the essentially evangelical nature of our faith, I don't see formal belief as anything like the be all and end all. Quite the contrary. In one of the New Testament Epistles, we are told that the devil believes and trembles. The one purpose of the law and the prophets is to teach self-denying love. Without it, nothing is of value at all.

Christ often held up the goodness of an individual Samaritan, a heathen, as examples of this "docility", this teachableness, this humility, in which love can take root and flourish; contrasting it with the hard, know-all, theocratic imperiousness of the scribes and Pharisees, the respectable religious establishment, who thought it had to be a conscious credence of various formal, religious tenets. In a word, God is a much more "laid back" dude than he usually allowed the Israelites in Moses day to realise.

"To the innocent, all things are innocent", and "Love God and do what you like" may be sayings that could lead to serious misunderstandings, but they nevertheless express a very deep truth. Love comes first, it is the Alpha and the Omega.

Against those precepts, unfortunately should be viewed one of the worst and most dangerous sins, that of presumption. Taking those sayings too literally. Spiritual truth is a fathomless well of paradoxes.

The great benefit of Christian belief, to my way of thinking is what it can do for us as individuals, and no less as a society. But as you point out, it's futile and even counter-productive to continually evangelise individuals, the more so, the more unsolicited and insistent.

Pray for your sister, and God willing, in time, she'll come round to a more balanced way of thinking.