Chuck:
You have talked about people abandoning their faith in a couple of
posts. This might be a good time to open up a discussion about the true
meaning of faith. I suppose faith is another thing that can occur along
a continuum, but it seems to me a person's faith is *extremely*
conditional and weak if the interpretation of a story out of the Bible
can actually cause him/her to stop believing in God. My definition of
faith involves a belief system that CANNOT be broken by - well -
literally anything. So if I lose a child, my faith in God cannot
dwindle. If I am forced into a concentration camp during WWII, my faith
in God cannot dwindle. If I study biology and change my mind about a
previous belief in a Bible story, my previous belief in God cannot
dwindle. There seems to me something wrong about equating belief in God
with belief in the Bible. The Bible is not God. It is a book. God
does not survive in that box. He survives, in fact, outside that box.
Lucy
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