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The Lord has gifted me something amazing. I was previously wrong about the lord, our saviour. I'm loved and important. Is it normal that I think my dear lovely Lord is helping me even though I'm struggling and don't deserve help. Thank you, my lord. I will be sure to pray from now on.
OP, if this post is genuine, I am delighted to hear that I have a new brother or sister in the Lord.
IIN is not an ideal place to grow in your faith - I really encourage you to be part of other communities too, where there are fewer people making fun of you and trying to derail you while you're new and vulnerable and don't know enough about God to handle the arguments people will probably try and throw at you (and it is NOT cowardly to ignore them - I mean, would you call an atheist a coward if they did not spend their entire atheistic existence philosophically justifying their atheism to every user who picked a fight? No. On the contrary, you might wonder if they were a little troubled if they did. Arguing about religion tends to drain people. The peace and life that God promises his children come from enjoying God on his own terms with other people who love him, and I think you would benefit from investing more time in that.).
For now though, I am really glad you have met God in Christ. Please keep listening to him, and sharing with other Christians.
I think it's a pretty good place to grow in faith. Some of the discussions I've had on here have required me to find reasonings for things, increasing my knowledge of the truth.
For some people I guess it can be beneficial as one part of a balanced spiritual diet, but as a primary source of encouragement in the faith? I mean, even on a secular level I don't rely on this site to be my primary support network. My real life friends are as weird and as messed up as I am, but I know what their real names are and what their faces and voices are like, and they aren't going to say insulting or obscene things.
As for online debates... if the chief end of our life is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, then our faith doesn't depend on its opposition to atheism in order to exist. I think it's unhealthy then to primarily learn about God in relation to atheism, as if atheism were a prop we're leaning against. If we never debated an atheist in our lives we could still glorify God and enjoy him forever. I think it's most important to enjoy and learn about God for his own sake first, and for the sake of the world, second. I think that ideally, what we give the world would be the overflow of what God gives us when we find our place of peace in him and rest in it.
I presume you were already established in your faith before you started arguing for the faith online, and that what established you was time spent with God himself, and the Bible, and people and writers who love him. Faith is about love, and love is community, sacrifice, sonship, passion, and so many things, but love isn't about combat, even if combat is a means to an end, and that end can perhaps be one of love, if we want it to be.
One of the reasons I am wary of encouraging OP to make a site like IIN his/her 'base' to learn about God as a new Christian is a personal family-related experience. My brother thought that the whole point of Christian faith was just fighting off atheists, he never developed in his first love of God, and it got lost in the endless conflict he immersed himself in, to the exclusion of actual time spent enjoying and getting to know God. I wonder if he even knew the God he was fighting for, before he abandoned God. I am still hurting for my brother.
We probably don’t see eye to eye on god, but I wanted to say I completely agree with what you said about this site and debating in general. IIN isn’t an ideal place to do *anything* and “debating” about anything usually does more harm than good.
I really feel for you about your brother, I lost my sister because she kind of went in the exact opposite direction - she’s essentially cut off all contact with everybody in her life outside of the church people she sees 3-4 times a week because she thinks life is meaningless outside of serving god and all that matters is what happens after we die. She’s so lost in what may or may not happen in the future that she’s not doing anything in the present, just wasting her life away waiting for the rapture.
I'm really sorry about about the situation with your sister. When people are new to the Christian faith they are often full of fervour but they have no idea how to handle it maturely. I said/did/thought some embarrassing things as a new Christian too - like thinking that listening to classical music was a way of earning favour with God!! Re your sister, there's actually a Biblical indictment against wasting your time away and shunning family in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3 and 1 Timothy 5:8. The background to 2 Thessalonians, as I understand it, is that the people in that place just gave up on life because they were waiting for the Resurrection.
I hope your sister comes to her senses and allows God to help her enrich her relationships with family, rather than cut them off. I used to use God as a barrier between myself and my family when I became a Christian, a bit like your sister did. For as long as I could remember, my parents and brother had made me the family scapegoat and stooge, and had prevented me from developing a sense of self worth. They didn't respect my need to be my own person and have opinions of my own. They actively attacked my faith along with any other part of me that didn't 'conform' to their idea of the role I should play, and so I got used to using God as a protective barrier. My dad viciously attacked my brother's burgeoning faith and said some really heartless things, and I think that was part of what convinced my brother give it up.
If this is your sister's experience with your parents and/or you, I'm not saying she's right to use her faith to cut you off, but I can understand why she'd do it. In a quiet way, and together with consellors from my church, God is helping me to develop the self-control to think before responding to my parents so that I can keep the peace better as I spend time with them, while standing firm in who I am. I hope he helps her to do the same, in time.
It’s been over 20 years, so I don’t think she’s going to change. Our family agreed to have our dad’s memorial service at her church awhile ago so I had the “fortune” of meeting the people she goes to church with, and it’s pretty easy to see how she ended up thinking the way she does.
The ironic thing is, the entire extended family is full of devoutly religious, church going people - they’re just slightly different denominations and that’s enough to make her not want to be around them. I get what you mean about being the family scapegoat, for me it got to the point where I had to stop going to family gatherings completely until they agreed to stop asking me when I was going to start going to church. Even now I usually end up spending most of the time talking to the kids, they’re far less judgmental and condescending. You really realize that that’s all learned behavior, it’s not something kids are born with, and I do everything I can to stop them from becoming like their parents. Hopefully I can break the echo chamber a little bit.
My prayers are always something like "I dont know which religion is right. Theres too many to choose from. If you do exist and you hear this I try to be nice to people and do good stuff. Look after me if u can. I could use all the help i can get" and then finish it with "and jesus please forgive me for my sins. In jesus name I pray"
Thats how u pray right there. Even if I didnt choose the right religion im still saved boi
Jesus is so much more than a ticket out of hell. I know God loves it when people admit to him that they're vulnerable like you do in your prayers. As long as it's sincere, I think that that kind of prayer really pleases God more than some ostentatiously pious person mechanically reciting 'Our Father who Art in Heaven...' and not really meaning it.
You ARE important…to other human beings. You are loved, by other human beings. And no matter how much you struggle, everyone deserves help, from their fellow humans.
You can believe whatever you want about the higher powers and the afterlife, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of what you can actually see, hear, feel, and touch.