(Part 2) Best products from r/AskAChristian

Im in a similar boat as you. I am a Christian with PTSD.

I would like to say I have never heard some of the things you have mentioned. But I have. I haven’t really seen the demonic application part but the whole: “God doesn’t put anything in your path you can’t handle” I have seen that far too often.

So I got medical help, and psychological help, in the form of counseling and prescription medicines, I also reached out to my local church. So my thought process was I wanted to quit havjng the night terrors and at some of the oddest times having those surges of adrenaline. I wouldn’t even call it a flashback. Certain smells or sounds that just seem too familiar.

Counseling was good because for me there are things I would say in that room I wont say anywhere else. And the pastoral counseling helped with my resultant alcoholism that came from the trauma.

But on the spiritual front. I think Ecclesiastes 7:12 Psalm 62:8. I know a song that helped me was the Psalm 46 Song by Shane and Shane

Check out "Psalm 46 (Lord of Hosts)" by Shane & Shane on Amazon Music. https://music.amazon.com/albums/B016R8O2HK?do=play&trackAsin=B016R8O3PG&ref=dm_sh_JsFM8HeZyXNz3RZySqFYAE4Oy

My comfort comes from knowing that my Fortress is God, and that also the age is coming and is presently arriving when swords are hammered into plows.

But that didn’t come over night. And I don’t think I really believed it at first, until one day I woke up and then I could let go of what happened to me and my friends, but not forgetting; all the while holding onto God.

I think that the simple reason that God doesn't do that is because it would result in all of us going straight to hell.

Human beings are inherently selfish. If God were to show up and manifest himself as some powerful being, then human beings would only worship him so that they could gain his power and favor for themselves. This is the antithesis of the self-giving love that God wants us to have.

When the time finally came for us to choose to embrace that self-giving love or embrace our own selfishness- seeing God's powerfirsthand would make it MORE difficult to do the former.

For more on this I would recommend: http://www.inspiringphilosophy.org/project/why-there-is-no-proof-of-god/

Or if you want a good book on the subject from an academic perspective: https://www.amazon.com/Divine-Hiddenness-Essays-Daniel-Howard-Snyder/dp/0521006104

There's a great book for that! It's all about how Adam and Eve kept falling for Satan's tricks and the lessons God taught them.

The bible helps because it expresses the expectations of God with man as well as the faithfulness of God. Knowing the qualities of God as well as the expected qualities of man sets the basis of how to discern and judge any and all interactions.

> You need to show that the catholic god belief is actually somehow proven by history .

I was an extreme skeptic, so it took me over 10 years to sort out the history. That included reading dozens of books, and listening to hundreds of hours of debates and podcasts. If you are truly interested and are half as skeptical as me, I would recommend starting with the following :

This is a good overview: Why we're catholic by Trent Horn: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1683570243

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization: https://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Church-Built-Western-Civilization/dp/1596983280 .

That said, there are a million reasons why people choose not to believe, even with all the evidence in the world in front of their face. God made each person with free will, so no one can "give" you a conclusion. You have to weigh the evidence for yourself. As a convert, I would also point out that knowing God is also as much of a matter of the heart. If you have vice in your heart (self-entitlement, lust, envy, gluttony, etc), you won't be able to connect with God. Also, if you are more interested in the trappings of the world ( luxuries, entertainment, hedonism), that will bias you away from recognizing God.

> the gospels for example are rife with markers of myth as opposed to actual history.

The reason why some myths match the Christian story is because all of humanity comes from the same place (the Ark). Those myths actually help confirm that Christianity is true. If everyone really evolved in different areas, then they would have wildly different stories and ways of being. Instead, people from around the world have the very same sense of where we came from and where things are going.

> And I absolutely reject Kalam, the Ontological Argument and whatever else is probably on that list of arguments as they all require assertions to which you haven’t sufficient evidence to make.

I used to reject them too. No offense, but you have to look at them a lot more carefully. That took me years. They all add up and compliment each other. At the very bottom of reality is an eternal infinite mind. By definition, this also makes existence rational because there is a rational mind. Atheism/materialism/naturalism is literally non-sense by it's own definition.

Without God (an eternal all-knowing mind), there can be no such thing as objective truth, facts, or ethics. Otherwise, all knowledge is temporary and subjective.

I read a book by clinical psychologist Dr. Sue Johnson where she talks about attachment theory. Basically (IIRC) the idea is that humans are wired to need companionship and monogamy is the best source of the deep emotional bonds that humans need. (This is the book btw, if you're interested)

Incest is almost universally looked down on because of the negative effects it has on offspring. Humans need genetic diversity to protect us from disease and to avoid genetic defects. Incest is bad because the parents aren't genetically diverse enough. It is possible that God forbade the Israelites from incest for this reason.

In a Christian marriage, divorce is only allowed in certain situations. In Christianity, marriage is meant to be permanent.

Subjective morality, aka. man-made morality, does change. As cultures change, the values of the culture change with it. Objective morality is different. Objective morality comes from God, the moral entity. This morality does not change.

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To answer your questions: I think monogamy is the way to do it, I'm against incest, and with the exception of certain situations, I am against divorce. Morality means more to me than a changing cultural ideal; morality is part of what God is. To be good is to be more like God, to be evil is to be unlike God.

Others have stated that you shouldn't start with the OT, opting to go for the gospels/NT books instead. While that's fine, just know that much of what is in those books draws on or is pulling symbolism/reference from OT books.


If you would like an easier experience with the OT, I would highly recommend reading them in the Jewish Study Bible. It has fantastic commentary made up of scholars, rabbinic essays, archeological data, etc. It really brings the text to life in a way that is not possible with just a casual reading of the text.

What do you mean by Darwinian Evolution?

Most people are sold on evolution based gradual model; where things like the human eye - which are very complex - can evolve if there are many, many tiny steps over millions and millions of years. . Not just tiny improvements all the time, but twists, turns, dead-ends and etc. Richard Dawkins book Climbing Mount Improbable Gives a great overview of this how the seemingly design of living things really isn't.

And it was only those "Crazy Christian Creationists" talked about gaps in the fossil record. They didn't know what they were talking about.....until 1972.

That's when Niles Eldridge and Stephen J Gould were tracing the evolution of trilobites and lands snails; most of the fossil record showed no change through millions of years of strata. That's right, most species are stable for millions of years and then change so rapidly that we rarely if ever see it in the fossil record. see Punctuated Equilibrium

What happens in Punctuated Equilibrium, you see, is that a small sub-population of a species will evolve; gain such an advantage they will take over, the main population dies, and is fossilized thus making it appear that there was no transitions. But.... there is no fossil evidence for it as the theory admits.

So which Darwinian Evolutionary theory are you speaking about when you ask about having secular scientific arguments against them?

Gradualistic evolution isn't supported by the fossil record and neither is Punctuated Equilibrium.

I suggest reading the Great Controversy book to further understand this topic. It can be downloaded for free from Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004TRFAJQ/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title

Except there are better ones out there.

When I say Aslan's scholarship isn't there, the issue is he uses flawed scholarship and presents it as fact. Some of this scholarship has actively been discredited, others are widely criticized for methodological issues (using circular logic to back up their conclusions), and is very contentious on some fundamental problems. Aslan makes a lot of claims as if they're truth but which cannot be proven because we lack the evidence to make such conclusions.

I'll be upfront on my bias here: Aslan relies on 19th century German scholarship and the Jesus Seminar and I simply think these sources of the historical Jesus are not sound. I contend that the streams of scholarship he relies upon tends to present speculation as fact (and a lot of the speculation has been treated as fact). The Jesus Seminar in particular is roundly criticized for using circular logic to make conclusions. I think these critiques are fair and do suggest that the conclusions of the wider Jesus Seminar should be handled as suspect. I believe archeological evidence disproves assumptions made by the Jesus Seminar when it comes to aging texts. This matters because the Jesus Seminar went through texts and voted on each one's authenticity based on their unproven assumptions -- deeming passages inauthentic (and thus later additions) based on criteria that were unproven and perhaps even disproven.

Aslan is a bad starting point because he uses questionable scholarship, doesn't question it, and then presents this "historical" portrait of Jesus based on his reading of this scholarship. Scholarship which archeological evidence actively contradicts at times.

I haven't read this book, but I've read some of his articles, and E.P. Sanders is commonly seen as a good starting point who makes good use of archeological evidence to draw conclusions.

N.T. Wright and Marcus Borg co-author a book which goes through various aspects of the search for the historical Jesus. Wright and Borg are friends (and I think went to school together? They both had the same mentor, anyhow) but have very different views. Wright is highly critical of the Jesus Seminar, Borg was part of the Jesus Seminar but is also a bit of an outlier due to his more mystical understanding.

The point is that there's much better starting points. I think any of the links I've provided are good ones. But Aslan simply because if Aslan is your jumping off point, you're mostly going to get scholarship that he agreed with to make his point.

Outside sources help confirm that - if you wish to explore this idea more I really recommend the book The Case for Christ

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310350034/ref=cm_sw_r_em_apa_i_lCZTDbDCV0B3B

I recently saw a recommendation about "The Story Of Christianity" by Justo Gonzalez.
Here are links to Amazon for volume 1 and volume 2.

You might also look at The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of The Christian Church.

I have not looked at either of those myself, so I can't really vouch for them.
I suspect they would cover the information you're interested in, but I can't say for sure.


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Edit to add: There's also a video set, one of the "Great Courses" offered by The Teaching Company (TTC),
titled "History Of Christian Theology".

The theology actually existed *prior to Scripture as we know it

This is a pretty good book that's available in the public domain (if you live in the US) that really taps into the belief systems of our earliest Church ancestry

https://www.amazon.com/Universalism-Prevailing-Doctrine-Christian-Hundred/dp/B008NOMYCW

I feel like we need to address this by the actual facts and details of the resurrection accounts and their corroborating historical texts, as it’s easy to lose the actual magnitude of any given piece of evidence when we analogize. For instance one of the corroborating texts mentions the darkening of the sky the gospels claimed occurred during the crucifixion and explains it as an eclipse. Not exactly equivalent to a neighbor witnessing the reactions of potential witnesses.

On that note I’d like to refer you to Cold Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace(as its been a while since I’ve gone over it all) where he goes over things like the reliability of the gospels as a reference, the corroborating texts, and the various explanations for the lack of a body, all bearing in mind the standards we hold for investigating crimes from decades ago.

https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Case-Christianity-Homicide-Detective-Investigates/dp/1434704696/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539290737&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=Cold+case+christianity&dpPl=1&dpID=513jwtjLlNL&ref=plSrch

I responded directly to what you said. It seems more likely to me that you just don't know what you are talking about.

I strongly recommend that you check out Ed Feser's "Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science". If nothing else, it may help you develop the conceptual precision to speak intelligibly.