Which is why I didn’t want to get into this discussion in the first place. I know my testimony of my experience is not sufficient to compel belief in others, and have said so from the outset. Mystical experiences are not provable by scientific means.
That’s a convenient definition. Where did you get it?
So you think the entire book of Revelation is most likely false too?
Forget whether it would compel others-you have yet to explain why this incident compelled you to identify it with any particular deity. Without seeing them, what caused you to think they were angels and not some other mystical entity, and what led you to believe that these entities came from the Biblical “God”? If this same incident had occurred if you were Indian, do you think you might attribute it to another cause and if so, why doesn’t this cause you to step back and say, “I really don’t know what happened here.”
It’s in the Book, I think.
Anything else! Any non-miraculous explanation, regardless of how unlikely it may seem, is more likely than a miraculous one. Disagree?
I didn’t think you were trying to persuade or convert your readers. But I am curious as to your bias towards Christianity when you have knowledge of quite a few similar belief systems. Or why not just credit your experience to a twinge in the parietal lobes?
Form Criticism of the OT is more than I want to get into right now. The origin narrative has been taken and shaped; there is a symmetry there that bespeaks conscious human design in the placement of the symbolic elements, hence an allegorical use of literary symbols to represent abstract truths that the redactor may have believed.
I mentioned them in connection with Troppus’s statement there were only a handful of eyewitnesses. Giving an apt scriptural reference in support of a position that arguably proceeds from other scriptures is relevant and appropriate: any evidence of the number of eyewitnesses necessarily comes from the NT itself.
You are trying to get people to accept a whole lot more than the claim that you heard a song. Why are you attaching so much specific theological baggage to your hearing a non-descriptive song?
Of course it does. It starts with Adam’s fall from grace. What’s your point?
Massive overthink, in my opinion. How well designed could it be with two different origins of the universe next to each other? It is a collection of stories, some more probable than others, and some contradicting others.
Let’s see, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, for starters, and centuries of theologians since.
And if it didn’t actually happen, what actual event caused Mankind’s fall from grace?
You mean like the Fox and the Grapes? Is God the fox? Who are the grapes? Scratch that. The inclusion of some hackneyed morality tales in a disjointed, rambling amalgamation of history, law, the ramblings of a few madmen, and heavily borrowed mythology does not an ordered masterpiece make.
You can’t prove David Copperfield can’t do real magic.
I think that the particular symbolism used in apocryphal literature of the period the book was written in allows for too many interpretations to pin it down to anything specific. There are a numbers of books just on the history of its interpretation. Only the strictest of fundamentalists take it literally.
So basically you just poke around in the Bible as a hobby, gratified when you stumble across something relevant to your experience and blasé when you discover improbabilities and contradictions?
I understand your skepticism, but how do you know the song you heard wasn’t sung by the angel Moroni?
I mentioned 500 people saw me fly by flapping my arms.
Signed statements by actual witnesses is better attestation than hearsay reports of witnesses. I would agree that even the Mormon reports are insufficient to warrant belief. They are just better than your Christians ones. But then again, why would they lie?
I’ve already agreed that if I was raised in India I would accept this in accordance with the prevalent faith. I really DON’T know what happened here. My thought was and is that since I had been presented with a personal epiphany that God exists, I should seriously explore the ramifications of that, and the most obvious place to start was the Christian church, since it’s the most prevalent. Through trial and consideration, I eventually came to the Presbyterians largely because they encourage discussions of comparative religion and how that relates to the Bible, and because their social religion platform is uniformly beneficial to humanity.