Its human centered because you can't separate the human from any set of laws. Even you can't separate your humanity from your thinking and reasoning. You talk of the Bible as if it can somehow, through no demonstration of reasonable means, can talk for God. It takes some very creative and convoluted thinking to maintain the idea that the Bible is a God generated book.

Even when people claim they are following the Bible, they have no option but to follow their own interpretation of the Bible. This is, in practice, a human solution. So everybody's views are completely human centered. To claim otherwise is to claim a special understanding of God's mind, which is blasphemous by your own book.

I am responding here and in the new topic labeled "Post-Christianity"

I think most people would prefer we move this dialog to there.

That's certainly an upgrade, but essentially you have to come to an agreement with God or you're dead. And you have to come to an agreement possessing a depraved mind in a world, through no choice of your own, created you with a tendency to desire wrong things. And you have to accept this situation as something given to you by a God who is just.

And you then have to figure out how to explain this to all the people in the world and convince them of the same illogical mess using a book that takes an advanced understanding of various written languages, ancient cultures, apologetics, and conflicting moral systems.

And if you include Ellen White you add a whole other layer of culture, interpretation, apologetics, and mythical story telling to the set of requirements. And after all this, you still have to present the solution to all of life's problems as something so simple a child could accept it.

One simply has to look at all the various debates within Christianity itself to understand that no one really knows what it takes to be saved because its a metaphorical solution that is debated literally and in some cases enforced literally.

I'm responding to this on the Topic within the Town Hall titled "Post-Christianity"

I think most would appreciate it if we moved our dialog there.

A very interesting comment.

I might rephrase to say: 85% of pastors report that their biggest problem is pastoral staff members who are not sexually active to the level that I desire them to be!

I'm inclined to agree.

oG

The first problem I see with these statistics is that they seem to only focus on North America. If we are going to talk about Christianity we must consider it on a world-wide and historical scale. Most Protestants, including most Adventists, would not consider the mid-evil Catholic church which killed the martyrs an example of Biblical Christianity. I think Dave was referring to the martyrs, not the papists, as the Christians.

Secondly, I would be interested in seeing the internal statistics of the study. How many participated in their study? Which denominations were included? Had all the pastors graduated from a seminary? Was being a pastor their vocation or avocation? Were they ordained? Was there a difference in response between pastors of different ages, denominations or geographical locations? Without the internals of a study, the surface statistics may be quite misleading.

I'm pretty sure, Gregory, that we all realize the reference is to obstinate elders etc. At least that is what I have observed as a mere lay-man. Maybe if they were more active in the way you mention they would not be so obstinate! hmmm... it just occurs to me that some of us here are rather obstinate ourselves!! Abstinence leads to stubbornness

Obstinate! I did not think of that.

I thought the author might (?) have meant absent, but that did not make a lot of sense. So, I simply did not know what was meant.

You must not have to deal with obstinate elders and deacons!

I wanted to let everyone know that I responded to this with a misunderstanding of Redwood's intent. I was mistaken.

Redwood emailed me privately to apologize and I wanted to publicly let him and everyone know that I apologize for my mistake as well.

I appreciate the honesty and grace that Redwood demonstrates.