The New Testament teaches that divorce and polygamy were temporary concessions of the Mosaic Law. By referencing the creation of Eve, Jesus implies that monogamy was the divine intention from the beginning. Islam allowing for polygamy is a regression from Christianity.
I'm not making any claims about what is true or not: only about what is taught by orthodox Christianity.
I haven't read any of your posts that weren't addressed to me.
Baha'u'llah is not the only person in history to have claimed divinity. I see no reason to take his claims any more seriously...
That's what I'm rejecting as untrue. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are essentially the same religion split by a political dispute. Traditional mainstream Protestantism largely affirms all the same points about Christ as Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Differences exist but my point is that the notion...
Mainstream Christianity teaches that when you die you are separated from your physical body and summoned to face judgment before God. Those who have repented of their sins and have died in the grace of God will be sent to Heaven (or Purgatory according to Catholicism) and those who have died...
Matthew 16:18. This passage is interpreted as a promise by Christ that the visible Church will be preserved until the Second Coming. This is not to say the Church will be free from trials and tribulations but that the Church and the Christianity it teaches will never be (at least entirely)...
Strictly speaking, I consider apostolic succession to be a requirement for a true church. (Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy). Which is something I've been alluding to this whole thread. The ancient faith is still being kept by all the aforementioned communions. God seems to...
@1213 I don't find lists of decontextualized Bible verses to be a compelling form of argumentation. My point is that the historic faith is not as obscured by division as some critics of Christianity contend.
I don't want to be totally dismissive as I have sympathies for the OP. I'm not entirely above having such thoughts myself from time to time. But as @Shadow Wolf said, wallowing in self-pity is among the worst things you can do if you want to be attractive to others. Self-pity becomes...
Firstly, sex without a meaningful relationship won't make you feel any less lonely in the long run. Secondly, if you're weighing the value of your life based on how much sex you're getting then you're setting yourself up to be miserable.
I'm not sexuality active but I don't find my life not...
Fragmentation is an inevitability when there is no teaching authority empowered to make definitive rulings on faith and morals. That Protestantism has fragmented into countless denominations is a valid argument against it. It fails as an argument against Christianity itself though.
What spurred this thread was a comment by a user in another thread created by a JW. The claim is that Christians can't agree on anything therefore Christianity must be bogus. I reject this premise. Historical Christian orthodoxy is fairly well defined across most of the mainstream traditions...
I agree with you on the first point. Human sin being what it is. I disagree on the second. I would not be a Christian if I believed Jesus were but the merely human leader of a first century Jewish sect.
Both Scripture and the Nicene Creed state that there is only one Church. That this Church has splintered is an unfortunate reality. A reality that I think is beyond human power to fix at this point.
A common sentiment I see here is the notion that Christianity is hopelessly divided in its teachings. That there are "thousands" of sects all of which teach mutually exclusive things. To be sure, the divisions are a scandal, but I think these divisions are often overstated. There is a historical...
I don't think horror as a genre is immoral per se. But I think it's questionable if we find ourselves taking pleasure in the depiction of evil: especially preternatural evil.
I have a casual interest in paleontology (the study of ancient life). I am often reading or consuming media about animals that have been extinct for millions of years. We know of animals such as Anomalocaris and Hallucigenia which existed hundreds of millions of years ago during the Cambrian...
It has nothing to do with the existence of translations. Muslims believe that the Qur'an was dictated verbatim by Gabriel to Muhammad and that this dictation has been preserved in its Arabic original to this present day. The Bible by contrast does not make such a claim. It may claim to be...