jmullaney - Jesus never did comes to me. People came to me and told me that Jesus existed. Since, these were respected adults including my mother, I believed them. When I got old enough to doubt what my mother tells me, I began to try to examine my beliefs. I looked at the people around me and saw that there were good people and bad people and that what church they belonged to didn’t seem to have any correlation to whether they were good or bad. I continued to go to church mostly out of habit. Then I was called to the priesthood, or so they said. For the next two months I rarely left the house, I stayed in my room alone. Mom would only let me fast for one day but I managed to do it for 3.
One of my favorite scriptures in the bible is the one that Joseph Smith came across when searching for inspiration. Regardless of what you think of Smith, this is a new testament verse and should be respected by any Christian. I can’t remember the exact chapter and verse (maybe John III? or was it James? It’s been a long time since I’ve opened the Bible.) but it goes like this, “If any of ye lack wisdom, let him ask of it.” It goes on to say that God grants wisdom to those who ask in sincerity. I asked. I wanted so desperately to know if I should accept the call to the priesthood. No answer came, nothing, I felt less than when I would talk to my dead grandfather with whom I could at least imagine his voice answering. Not even a inner feeling of his existence like JAG described. My faith evaporated. I studied further, I prayed further. The more I studied the more atheistic I became. I stopped praying. But I still studied. Now I am a Reductive Materialist and the more I learn the more I think I have chosen the right path. Whether it’s studying scripture or fiction or scientific texts, it all leads me to believe I am right about this.
Scientists can make predicitons mased upon they’re knowledge of astronomy. The accuracy of these predictions in enough for me to believe they are right about things like the roundness of the earth. They make predictions like exact time and dates of eclipses by calculating the movement of celestial objects. I have heard religious types make predictions but generally their accuracy is poor or their predictions are too vague to be verifiable (or they make contradictory predictions and then claim that the one that turned out right was inspired by God). What exactly would faith do for me? Oh yeah, I could summon pizza rolls. There’s an eye roller for you.
What Dixiechiq was saying is that there are examples of people who have abandoned their posessions who have not found God. Many, many Buddhist monks do this and have been doing it for centuries. I have known two people who have given up all their posessions to become a monk. One of them only gave up contact with all friends and relations for two years and now is back in contact with me, but is still a monk, still has no posessions, and lives a very simple life in a temple. The other is in India in a Buddhist Temple and I have no way of contacting him short of going to India and touring the Temples. I think that, if he had discovered Christianity, he would have left the temple and contacted his parents by now, it’s been 6 years. I think he would have contacted ME, we were roommates for 10 years.
New scientific theories are generally scoffed at and much testing is done before they are accepted. Various scientific organizations an journals have a reputation to uphold. If they publish something controversial that was not sufficiently tested, they lose that reputation and later scientists become uninterested in what they publish in the future. They can’t do this and stay in business. They have a strong motivation to maintain their integrity. Religions, OTOH, have no such motivation since much of what they say can not be tested. The test you propose says nothing of good testing practices like control subjects. Even if Gaudere were to decide to go through with your test and she DID find God, I still would want a pretty detailed edescription from her as to how it occurred before I would be willing to try. And, if I didn’t know and respect her already, it still wouldn’t be enough.
For scientific facts like the structure of the solar system, I have done quite a lot of tests as I studied astronomy for a while at Johns Hopkins. I have looked through powerful telescopes that reveal the planets as disks and made calculations based on their locations in the sky over a long period to calculate their orbits. You can use scientific hypothesises (hypothesi?) to predict other things about the universe that can be tested in turn. The accuracy of those predictions then further enforces the accuracy of the original hypothesis. When scientists so frequently succeed in making accurate predicitions, they build my trust in them. When Christian continue to disregard the studues of respected scientist, I lose respect for the Christians. I don’t see any value in performing your test jmullaney. The worth of a soul to me is zero. The cost (according to you) of finding mine is everything I own. I’ll just continue as I have.
