ringo writes:
And yet your fruit doesn't show any sign of His presence.
My "fruit" needs no defending from me.
Uh, I do not see where ringo had said that. If you are replying to a different message of his, then shouldn't you cite it so that we could all have proper context?
This is the closest thing in ringo's
Message 307, to which you replied, that I can find:
ringo writes:
Phat writes:
You don't expect any obligation from God to leave objective evidence unless he planned on blessing everybody with the same gift.
Why would the "gift" be given to certain people and not to others? Why would the gift be given mostly to people whose relatives and neighbours had been given the same gift? Why would it be a gift at all and not just standard equipment?
It appears to me that you two are talking about the
Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5. My understanding is that those qualities cannot be earned nor learned, but rather come to a Christian naturally.
That is a doctrine that keeps coming up in deconversion stories by those who had been raised in the faith. Especially when they were entering religious adulthood (normally early teens which is marked by Confirmation, Bar/Bath Mitzvah, whatever the various flavors of Protestants use, etc), they begin to think seriously about their religion and also (especially among Protestants of the more extreme types) begin to worry about their own salvation status. One of the self tests they would use for being saved would be the Fruit of the Holy Spirit and they would interpret not having those automatic qualities as a sign that they are
not actually saved. Of course, that would cause them great anxiety, which would be one of the factors leading them to deconversion.
Now, in the sense of the
Matthew 7:20 Test which I have frequently cited here to deaf ears,
you would be the fruit of your religion, such that if you turn out to be wicked (as far too many "true Christians" prove to be) then that is proof that your religion is wicked and false and should be cut down and thrown into the fire. Jesus didn't leave any wiggle room in that test.
But we're still lacking context for your "reply".
I can toot my own horn and write my own resume all day, but I'll let others defend me.
Why would they? A recurrent theme among "true Christians" is that you are all completely on your own, that it's just between you and God and everybody else is required to butt out completely. I've had fundamentalists insist to me that that is the case.
Let's start by turning that around. You claim that the job of a human is to help others.
Not really, but it is to everyone's benefit. We rely on others for the survival of our family and of us, just as others rely on us. That is why we form societies, to ensure mutual survival. It can be difficult to see that in urban settings with decent climates, but in rural settings and harsher climate that mutual dependency becomes more apparent -- eg, when I was stationed in North Dakota, everybody would immediately come to the aid of a stranger in the winter, because next time that stranger could very well be themselves.
Of course, we don't reason all that out all the time, but rather we respond almost instinctively like it's been bred into us. When it has been. Our ability to feel empathy for others is a trait that has been bred into us over millions of years as we were becoming a social species. Those social groups whose members lacking empathy died out, whereas those groups with empathy survived and then thrived. Helping others is a win-win-win strategy (the third win going to the society).
God is irrelevant to you. So how do you rate your own fruit as we start 2020?
We're all doing what we can. Having gods to judge us or no gods at all makes not difference.
Edited by dwise1, : first paragraph: where, not what
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