Welcome to Christianity 101
The questions you bring with you have been wondered about since Socrates.
Philosophers through the centuries have spent lifetimes fretting over paragraphs regarding questions in sub-branches of sub-chapters in ponderous tomes of impenetrable prose.
Because you are in more of a hurry than Socrates and the later thinkers were, let me save you a lot of time here. How much time? When you leave this page, you will have met the prerequisites for all the later pages.
You start with
Metaphysics/Ontology
a branch of Philosophy that deals with the nature of being and beings, existence, time and space, and causality
which overflows or "trickles down" to
Epistomology
the study of how things can be known, the nature of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope
which overflows or "trickles down" to
Ethics
the moral principles governing or influencing human conduct
Now, you are better organized than most of the historical philosophers you will soon be checking out.
The internet is replete with sites that will bury you under the paragraphs I mentioned. To save you from boredom, and myself from hundreds of hours of labor, I have spent ten hours to scout out for you some web folks who have spent hundreds of their hours to publish a plain-spoken summary of what those tons of ponderous tomes of impenetrable prose, representing millions of hours, contain.
In Hartford Connecticut, two bright undergraduates, Chris Marvin and Frank Sikernitsky, at the Trinity College Philosophy Department, set out on an uncompleted task to summarize all the primary philosophic thinkers. They got quite far.
They are aware Christ was not included in their roster before they left Trinity College to go on to professional employment. No problem, I'll be supplying that missing data.
My sensitive philosophical antenna can't detect any agenda by these two guys other than to convey a fair summary of what their subjects published.
Y O U R E T H I C S
Do you base your life on ethical standards you developed through your own experience? Did your family upbringing include meaningful religious inputs? Do any of your ethics come from that earlier exposure? Did anything rub off?
Do you look out and up? Or just within yourself, not believing in any higher divine power?
What is your opinion of the Bible? The Koran? The Talmud? Reincarnation and karma? Catholic infallible rules?
These “inspired” religious god's ethics clash:
… Allah
… YHWH Father God
… the Christian Trinity God
… the Pope
… the pantheism god in everybody and everything –
these gods clash. They have very different and conflicting ethics and characters.
Will a divine god with a strict set of ethical standards judge each of us soon on this one life? Or will all our souls have many future lives to learn and improve, heading for Nirvana perfection over billions more years with no en-route judgment?
Popes die and are in tombs. Mohammad died and is in a tomb. It is a historical fact that Jesus resurrected out of a tomb guarded by enemy soldiers. 40 days later he rose straight up into the sky saying he would return when humans on earth have wiped each other out with nukes, germs and manipulated weather.
Jesus asks for obedience to 10 Commandment Laws. Which Commandment do you think is not reasonable? Which one would be tough on you in a judgment based on it?
Do you really think fellow man is at the top of life’s totem pole?
Observe the human condition:
… Freedom of press vs religious dogma erupting in shouting, burning and boycotting!
… Jews walling themselves in after being inserted in 1948 into a terror-bombing Middle East!
… Genocides in Lebanon, Gaza, Darfur Sudan, Kenya, Nepal, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Bosnia, Algeria, Eritrea, China, Russia.
… Cars and stores burned in Paris by HaveNot immigrants!
Not much hope or enjoyment from this! So many have faith that there must be someone higher and better than what has evolved here all around the earth at our human level.
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