I believe in YHWH. I believe that Jesus is the Son of the Living God. I believe that he is not the second head of the trinity. I believe in the destruction (by fire/non existent anymoooore) of non-believers, and not an eternal hell.
Okay, so you have your own version of the Bible. Some things are taken literally (the trinity is not in the Bible) and yet you are still cherry-picking (hell is not eternal). There is the "lake of burning sulfur" where the devil and the false prophet (a human) are thrown, and "they will be tormented day and night,
for ever and ever"- Rev 20:10- so this hell
is eternal, and there is a human in it. You could argue that the "lake of fire" mentioned in Rev 20:15 is not the "lake of burning sulfur", but there is still an eternal hell, with at least one non-believer in it.
Question: Why do you believe in YHWH and not, for example, El Eljon or El Shaddai, who are other Gods of the Bible? Many Christians don't know that when the Bible says "Elohim" it's not referring to YHWH. What makes YHWH so much better than El Eljon or El Shaddai?
- do you consider yourself xian?
Don't know what this is.
- if not, how would you describe your belief?
Unsure, I go to many churches. Trying to find more like me. That may sound arrogant. Church going folk are hypocritical. I am searching for true followers of Jesus' words.
The letter "X" was first used by Christians to shorten Christ, after the Greek letter "Chi" which looks like our X. Xmas=Christmas so xian=Christian
Sounds what you are looking for is a good cult. While some here think that all churches are cults, only in a real cult will you find people so brainwashed that they are not hypocritical (where their action represent their twisted beliefs), and even then, there will still be hypocrites because there is not one true version of your Bible. Every Christian church cherry picks what they think is literal and what is figurative (as you did above with the non-eternal hell).
- do you subscribe to any particular denomination?
No, but raised Catholic. Do not judge me by this, I have purged myself from Catholicism.
- are you a biblical literalist?
Yes and no, but mainly yes.
Man does not live off of bread and water alone, but every word that proceedeth out of God's mouth.
Micah 6:6-9 is closer to me.
Micah 6:6-9 does not answer the question of biblical literalism. Micah 6:6-7 just talk about offering sacrifices, from rams to oil to your child, as a forgiveness of sin. Verse 8 tells you that you need to act justly, love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. Verse 9 has nothing to do with any of the others. Nothing about how to see if a verse is literal or not.
- were you raised with these beliefs or did you come to them later in life?
See above. Continued learning as I got older (came closer to the truth).
And what is "the truth" to you? How do you know you have the "right" interpretation of the Bible? How do you know what you think is figurative (eternal hell) and what is literal? When Jesus said that you have to hate your family to love God, *of course* he didn't mean hate, he meant ___. Except some people think it literally means "hate" since Jesus often dissed his own family (calling the believers his family, rather than his blood family) and tells people to leave their families like in Matt 8:22/Luke 9:60, Jesus tells a man whose father just died to not bury his father and comfort his family, but to leave everything and follow him. In Luke 9:62, Jesus tells a man that he can't go back to say goodbye to his family or else he is not fit "for service in the kingdom of God". So, if Jesus would rather have a man's family think he has gone missing or dead instead of the man being able to tell his family not only where he was going, but he could have told his family the "good news" of Jesus as well. Or, how in Luke 12:49-53 how Jesus says that he didn't come to bring peace, but division, pitting family members against one another.
- if the latter, how did you come to them?
Reading and obeying.
- understanding that I have been religious and then came to believe it was all a load of rubbish, explain to me why I should believe what you believe.
I did something very odd when reading the Gospels. I obeyed his words, truly from the heart. And guess what, it actually works.
I too, at one time, obeyed the Bible as close to literal as I could get, all day every day for years. I truly believed in God, everything, heart and soul. In the middle of that time, I had a mental breakdown and became severely depressed and suicidal. I even had a verse in the Bible telling me suicide was a forgivable sin (the only unforgivable sin being cursing the Holy Spirit), so I could somehow kill myself and still go to heaven. No matter how hard I tried to keep it, I lost hope. This is all while I was still a devout believer, by the way.
- how do you know your religious ideas are correct?
One word that you all lack, Hope.
1. You are assuming here. I now have hope in my life, something I have only found as a non-believer since the onset of my illness. I don't get hope from God, I get it from trying to make the best out of what I've got.
2. If hope is the only way you know your ideas are correct, I feel sorry for you. I can hope all I want that there is a fluffy pink unicorn out there just for me, but that doesn't make it correct or real. I'm a person of facts. There is no evidence for the bible out there besides itself and other propaganda. There are no remains in the desert of Moses and the people he led out of Egypt. There are no signs that a large Jewish population resided in Egypt at the time of Moses. I spoke above about the "one, true God of the Bible" and how that's a lie. There are more than one God in the Bible, they have different names given to them by the people who wrote that part of the Bible. If your book can't even agree on if there is one God or many, don't you think that would be a HUGE stumbling block for someone with faith?
