We believe to our fullest of our understandings. EX. Just because I dont believe in a part of Christianity it does not make me less than those who do believe because they understand it fully.
Show me someone who “understand(s) it fully” and I’ll show you someone who does not have a traditional understanding of the faith.
No one understands everything fully. Faith is the belief in something unseen or not completely comprehended.
Some here think they are better because the “have the answers” , do they really?
No, they don’t. No one does.
I have been looking for 16 years( looking , praying and reading ) for a answer.
May God grant you wisdom in your search and peace on your journey. It will never end, after all.
If it is a sin to not understand it correctly or reject it because (in ones eyes) their is no evidence to base it on.
It is not a sin to not understand something fully. As for “evidence”, remember above all else Jesus’ discussion with Thomas as recorded in John 20:29
Jesus said to him, "Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed."
You cannot be forced to believe in anything. You cannot be forced to have faith. But to say that you can consciously maintain a
disbelief in a central doctrine of the faith, and then turn around and tell others that they are no more faithful than you by virtue of their faith in those things in which you yourself disbelieve…well, hopefully you can see the problem I have with this line of reasoning.
who is sam777 or anyone here to cast a stone?
I won’t speak for sam777, but I will speak for me, and here is my reasoning: First thing first, it should be recognized that the casting of a stone, in this context, is used to illustrate a CHRISTIAN principle as given to us by our Savior, which may or may not have a parallel in Islam. I do not know of any comparable event in the Qur’an or the accompanying moral lesson that such an event (if it is there) would teach the Muslim reader. Perhaps one of our Muslim friends can enlighten us with some passages from the Qur’an or authentic Hadith that show a parallel teaching.
Second thing: The casting of the stones was, of course, the traditional
punishment for adultery under Mosaic law. What Sam made was a
judgment that Islam requires belief in ____, just as we could say that Christianity requires belief in the divinity of Jesus. I do not know or want to suppose the truth of Sam’s assertion. I do know that belief in Hadith (at least in certain authenticated Hadith) is traditional to Islam, as “Quran-Only” Muslims are a minority within the whole. Whether or not they would be considered “real” Muslims is up to the individual’s interpretation of what is necessary to be “real”. That doesn’t, however, mean that Sam777 cast a stone (punished severely) Planten on account of the latter’s disbelief in Hadith. It would be like if I told a Protestant that they do not have the fullness of truth due to their lack of Apostolic succession and tradition. It’s true, so I’ll say it, but that’s where it ends. Only certain Islamic societies is this, shall we say, “difference of opinion” among believers solved with violence or intimidation. That’s wrong, but that’s not what Sam did, as far as I can tell.
How would you rather have it? Everyone can be free to believe or disbelieve in whatever they want just because no one fully understands the faith? No one has to meet any minimum standard of what they do/do not accept in their understanding of the faith? I’m trying understand the implications of what you saying, and I must say that I don’t like them. When I joined the Catholic Church, I did so after accepting the
objective standard by which the Catholic Church views the world: venial and mortal sins, saints and heretics…all of those things. None of them were part of my previous faith tradition, which was all subjectivism within the confines of a general “Christianness” that was not sustained by any tradition, as we cycled from pastor to pastor, trying to find one that made people the least uncomfortable. This is the danger of subjectiveness that says that no one is to ever be corrected!
I’m not going back to that, ever. Even if I were to stop being Catholic for some reason (God help me that this never happens), I will continue to believe that there are defined parameters of what is acceptable and what is not (as I believed before I became Catholic, or else I literally would not be here). Whatever it is that you reject about Christian belief may be rationalized within your own mind by saying that you didn’t understand it well enough to accept it without reservations, but that opens another question: When
will you understand it? Can you know? Will you understand it well enough to accept it after 18 years of study…20 years…50 years? Will you even
accept it once you understand it (in other words, is the key to accepting a religious calling complete intellectual understanding and comfort in the first place? I don’t believe it is)? I submit that there are some things that I (and you, and everyone) will never understand because they are simply beyond human understanding. You can continue to reject those things, but this is your own choice, and it has an effect on your faith whether or not you are comfortable with other people noticing it or not (though, yes, in other circumstances it would probably not be pointed out publically).
Notice how not one of our Muslim posters has jumped to Planten’s defense when he tells us to forget the Hadith…this is the difference between those with an orthodox understanding and Planten! You don’t even need to be a Muslim to see that.
are telling us Christians to love our enemies, and not hit, to hurt or be mean in anyway, it only teaches us to love someone.
Planten is a heretic even by Muslim standards, since he practices the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam…mainstream Muslims do not recognize Ahmadiyya as Muslims.