will ever put a gun to your head and force you to believe. I’m shocked by how angry and hateful atheists get at their fellow pedes who bring up prayer or faith. You are acting exactly like liberals, going in to a post just to hate-reply. It’s sad. All we are doing is praying snd encouraging others to pray. If you don’t want to, that’s fine. There’s no need to harass those who want to. We are all on the same team here.
Where i used to work, a group of people got together by the flagpole every day at lunch. They didn’t demand anyone join them. They didn’t force the company to make prayer mandatory. They just got together and prayed, and everyone else moved on about their day.
There’s no need for the infighting. God bless
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I agree with a fair amount of what you say, but Catholicism's "sin" isn't saying that the Bible is real, not at all. It's that they took on pagan traditions and "laws of men" by the mandates of Constantine, and established a hierarchy of men as false intercessors between the laity and God. Both of which are strictly forbidden by God Himself. I know you don't believe so I don't blame you for trying to figure it out your own way, trust me I've been there. But it's not the "believing that it's real" part that does the damage.
I'd see science as more of a wedge issue, than completely going against the Bible. We could have had both, but as with the transgender debate today, "if you're not with us 100% then you're unenlightened/racist/dumb" is a fun tool for the devil to pick apart any sense of community with.
But at the same time as saying, science is compatible with the Bible, I'd say well-proven science. It's a leap of faith in and of itself to believe that even one single species developed and evolved over billions of years, when we haven't been shown proof outside of loss of genetic information. I also have trouble seeing how a complex "language" like DNA was coded by anything but an intelligent hand. How the organs of our bodies came to so perfectly mesh together. I don't see how our planet can be perfectly teeming with life of millions of different kinds, but nothing else has seemingly developed elsewhere that we can observe, in the same manner. We can debate the origins of the universe all we like, but at the end of the day neither of us have more proof than the other, outside of my belief that the Word of God is true.
Full disclosure, I'm a Messianic Jew (or Hebraic Christian, there really isn't much difference) so I believe in the OT commandments still being in force, outside of what cannot be enforced in the absence of the Temple or a set-apart nation like biblical Israel. It seems that the more of a hierarchy you build into a church, the more it naturally corrupts. Compulsory tithing isn't Biblical, outside of giving to the Levites who were commanded to own no land and live off said tithes as they tended to the Temple, and even less biblical is paying someone to absolve your sins for you, as many do in Catholicism. There should be no Pope. Jesus said Himself, call no one father or teacher, ie there should be no one above you in a congregation of believers. Elders in the general community by way of nature, yes. But give an opportunity for spiritual power over other men, and somebody will step up and seize it.
I'd say more but I'd have to come back later and do so! Busy day here, with Thanksgiving and everything.
Editing to say: we did have science and religion there side by side for a while. A majority of the Western world's greatest thinkers and scientists believed to some extent. The point in US history in which people stopped believing as a cultural norm/rule, was the point at which cultural Marxism began sinking its teeth into this country, and God was taken out of schools. Some may idealize the historical church a little too much, others may see nothing but the worst practitioners. But the church in the USA, planted by the pilgrims and then blossoming from the Great Awakening onwards, had been the greatest and most liberating version of it since those early centuries of Christendom post-Jesus. Because of that separation of state from church. The state could no longer compel one sect over another.
But then the state said "school is compulsory and controlled by the state", and then "you can't talk about God in schools," and..... We all know where Western civilization is now at.