Beliefs!
We have been a born again Christian for most of our life!
We were saved in the First Baptist Church of Vienna, Illinois in the late spring of 1961 and baptized there a month or so later in the baptismal that lay hidden under the choir area. We can remember the full dunk that we got as we trusted our soul and our life to the old pastor who had done this feat so many times before in his long ministry. We had sat in the pew with our parents and listened to the many sermons that had made us feel as if that we should join this congregation in an almost complete way. We had felt a great guilt that we had not joined before and it was a complete transformation when we finally came forward with the aid of a friend. We would later learn that so many of our contemporaries were undergoing the same sort of trial by fire in their own churches and were resisting just as much as we were until they could resist no more.
Even after our salvation, we sometimes wondered if it was the real thing, mainly because we had to have a friend urge us along to do the dead. This experience still seems vivid to us today, over fifty years after it occurred.
We had been raised in a Christian household where our parents had both accepted Christ as their personal savior many years before. My mother was from a devout household where her father, my grandfather, could not read or write but could quote the King James Bible from a memory that had spend a lifetime listening to others read it to him until he had it committed to complete memory. My father had been known as the toughest man in the township where he lived and had taken a deep fall for my mother at around the age of twenty three. Dad drank and ran around but when he discovered my mother, he was a changed man. He never discussed with me about his salvation experience nor, for that matter, did my mother. But they were proud when their younger son accepted the Lord.
It has been an interesting childhood for me as my mother tried to reconcile for me the seemingly conflicted teachings of the Bible with the new and rising theory of evolution which seemed to place the creation story in some doubt. We can remember her telling us that God works in his own way and in his own time and that both stories could easily coexist with each other. We remember discussing at length with her the seven days and her telling us that, in God’s eyes, a day could last for a very long time.
Now, when we see new and expanded knowledge that states that there might be as many as one trillion galaxies such as our own Milky Way in the universe, we only see the great handiwork of a God who has come to mean so much more to us as we have grown in our knowledge and our faith. The key to the whole thing for us is that we have paid attention and we have learned and grown as the years have passed by in a life that has been very interesting to us. It has also become more and more frustrating to us as we have seen other so called born again Christians take a different path from the one that we have followed. These souls have become science deniers on a grand scale, teaching their children in their private, isolated environments of their Christian schools and their home taught worlds that every word in the Christian Bible is to be taken literally even though that document has been translated and retranslated so many times over the two thousand years since it was written that we can not count the number of times that it has been done. Many centuries ago, the world experienced an enlightenment that included discovering that the world was not flat and that the sun does not revolve around the earth but this new breed of Christian would have us believe that there is no evolution and that there is also no climate problem even though the evidence to the contrary is almost overwhelming.
We were in Florida in 1967 at an old Spanish fort where we saw beds that accommodated soldiers whose average height was about five feet tall. And we have watched in amazement as women have entered the sports arena with heights that we never saw just fifty years ago when there was little or no female sports movement in this nation or this world at all. In our own household we have a cat who is going to be nineteen years old next May when at the time of her birth, the average cat only lived to be about seven years old. The point of all of this is that evolutionary advances have been made inside of our own lifetimes involving many species beside our own. Even though a loving God has given us the curiosity to explore and to learn there are those among his faithful who have retreated back to a time that we are not reluctant to state approaches the late medieval period when a crazy Catholic pontiff decreed that many would be tortured to death in the name of something called the Inquisition. It was one of the most shameful periods of world history and was done in the name of Jesus Christ and carried out by the so called faithful and their leaders. And this current crop of the so called religious souls claim that the Christ also talks to them and tells them that what they so want to believe is true. And, as we enter this critical week of our nation and our worlds history, they are more than willing to bring down the worlds economy and create untold suffering to accomplish what their perverse, bastardized, self serving belief set tells them to do as preached to them from so many of the pulpits and Sunday school classes of the land by often portly pastors who have also mistakenly taught them that not only is Christianity equated to prosperity, but, also, that, in point of fact, God owes them a good living and that they should ask him constantly for that even though Jesus Christ pointedly said that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of the needle that for a rich man to acquire heaven.
And they wonder why so many are turning away from the Christ who simply gave them the commission to go out and to tell all the world about his wonderful teachings and healing among the outcasts and the poor and the sick.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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