Hardly of Comfort
Saint said:
But faith without fact is meaningless
In truth, sir, faith without fact is
faith. The nature of faith is belief without assurance.
if the Gospels are unreliable source of materials about "the man" Jesus (not God ),
eternal life and forgiveness of sin are only joke.
That's certainly one way of looking at it, and I know plenty who would agree with you. But in reality,
if we believe God exists as described in a holy text,
then we must also accept the possibility that the truth is buried within.
The problem with literalism is that it is often both desperate and myopic. Over the centuries, Christian scholars and philosophers have contradicted one another, contradicted themselves, and contradicted what is written in the Bible, yet for some reason people still treat the Biblical faith as if it is timeless and unchanging. That is to say, by the time we get to
saints arguing about the question of evil in a blind horse, there is a problem.
I believe it was St. Ignatius Loyola who posited that "the sacrifice of the intellect is that in which God most delights", which despite apt mockery in more recent times, simply refers to trust without knowledge. And in a way, history has demonstrated the problem; many of the contradictions, oversimplifications, distortions, and exploitations of scripture over the years have come about because Christian advocates were scrabbling after short-term answers and immediate gratification.
We might point to modern politics as an example. To the one, Christian opponents of abortion will remind that God blesses every conception and birth. To the other, there is the gay fray—civil rights for homosexuals—in which Christians argue that being gay is not natural. Of course, there is Minnesota State Rep. Steve Simon (DFL), who asked the obvious question:
If God doesn't like homosexuals, why does he keep making them?
It's kind of a silly question, but only because we keep running around in these bizarre circles. The anti-abortionists give the authority of creation and birth to God; the heterosupremacists would rather disregard that proposition. It worked better when they could get away with the idea that homosexuality was a mere choice, but now that the point doesn't work anymore, we see the dangers of short-term gratification. Certes, it makes sense to remind of God's omniscience and authority in the abortion battle, but it's a harder principle to accept when one wants to punish or abolish homosexuality.
In history, this process has played out repeatedly. Irenaeus of Lyon, Tertullian, even the whole Council at Nicea. Various pronouncements from diverse figures prominent in Christian history have certainly stood in contrast to one another, but the original expressions often intended to settle a specific and limited point.
All these years later, the Christian faith new adherents enter is a product of such conflicts. What many would describe as American "evangelical" or "fundamental" Christianity has no real Biblical foundation, as it is largely a collection convenient theological perspectives neurotically designed for self-empowerment in non- or un-Christian ways.
While it's not
just the American evangelical Protestants, they serve as an excellent example. One raised to hold certain faith will find only questions and complications when they undertake their own independent, responsible study of the Bible instead of simply swallowing the rhetorical pabulum served from the pulpit. So many Christians in my society have given their hearts and minds over to
a lie; the Jesus they are told to accept is a dangerous distortion of Scripture.
Your lifetime does not reach so far back as to have witnessed the original acts described in the Bible. The Christian faith you first encountered in your life was, necessarily, considerably different from the idyllic Christianity so many describe and history seems to have overlooked insofar as it is generally absent from the record.
A Christian will die like an animal too............
I know it's hardly of comfort, but Christians are human, and humans are animals.
The thing is that God knows what is in a person's heart, so if one's reason for faith is to earn a reward, He will see that greed.
But, yes, humans, like all animals, die.