Faith is for the faithful. There are unbelievers: the miracles are and effort to convince them. But, you see, if the miracles are too good, it is just too easy to become faithful. The deity needs people with high-quality faith. If you get believers whose faith is flawed, as you would if you played it up too much, your efforts end up being counter-productive.
So you have to have the right kind of faith, in just the right amount?
Gotcha.
Doesn’t take much -
So, apparently having even a ‘little’ faith is very poweful - but no one actually has even that much.
I think that if there was a God that had the power to materially affect objects and that God chose to use his power by performing obscure parlor tricks rather than doing good on Earth…well, that’s not a God I want to associate with.
He answers your prayers. As The Onion headline says, he says “no.”
Perhaps you didn’t bribe him well enough. We know from the Bible that God takes bribes.
So, God didn’t make himself known to Abraham? To Moses? During the Exodus?
You realize the requirement for a virgin birth comes from a mistranslation by the writer of Matthew? There is no such requirement in the Messianic prophecies - then or now.
Do you realize that the belief that God cannot save people directly demeans god?
The Gospel writers, as has been said above, made up stuff to make it look like Jesus met the messianic prophecies. He did not, not even close.
A true Messiah would have lasted more than a week in the big city. If I were an alien and was asked who seemed to be more favored of god, Mohamed or Jesus, Mohamed would win every time.
The Gospel writers thought he was coming back soon. They were wrong.
I am quite aware of how Christians pull random passages out of the Prophets to justify themselves, and ignore the passages that clearly document what the Messiah would be and do. Pitiful, really.
Why does the source have to be an intelligent entity? Why does the source have to have anything to do with the God you believe in? If God made the universe for us, why wait 13 billion years or so for us to show up?
I know that Catholics don’t believe the Genesis story as being literal, but why wouldn’t god inspire something a bit closer to the truth?
If the universe were created by a deity, it seems more likely that the deity would be one for a distant world that is unimaginably old - and we just evolved accidentally in the universe created for his or her real people.
We can just hope the real god doesn’t want to clean up.
If, as has been suggested elsewhere, the deity is omnipotent, doing stuff is a bit of a challenge: in order to exert power, some other bit of power must be ceded. Hence, the deity must use its omniscient cunning to overcome its own omnipotence. Things may not be so straightforward for a superbeing.
The language of a deity is almost certainly different from the language of mortals. The anointed ones had to figure out how to express what they heard from the holy voice. Translation errors are inevitable, even in the very first draft. Later scribes had to adjust the holy writ in order for it to make sense in their language and culture. And subsequent translations had to make additional accomodations, ad infinitum.
oopsie …
Heck, based on the available evidence, anyone using the “fine tuning” argument should be told that the universe looks fine-tuned for the existence of cats, and that humans are just here to feed and care for cats.
Based on its reported behavior, one could easily conclude that the prime deity is in fact a cat. This leads to a belief system called “Catheism”.
A creator deity doesn’t have to be omniscient, so that problem doesn’t come up. But 12 billion years? He must sleep in most mornings.
Nah, just “it happened a long. long time ago” would do. The Hindus and Buddhists got that right at least.
Anyway, if you use that excuse, all that sin stuff must be misunderstandings also.
Your idea and my idea of the word ‘omnipotent’ apparently mean very different things. My idea of the word is that it means ‘omnipotent’.
It would have helped if the deity was sufficiently omnipotent as to be able to manage not to mumble.
So, you’re not following the word of God, you’re following the word of men, writing things that you know is incorrect, that they then ‘adjust’ depending on the whims of the day?
Hmmmmm.
I think I missed a part of this thread.
Did someone explain why we are suppose to accept the bible as proof of miracles yet we can’t evaluate the claims in the book for validity?
The whole thread seems to be focusing on what an existing believer views as credible, wasn’t the point to establish it was credible for us non-believers?
Perhaps cliff notes on what is allegory and what is infallible or some numerologist mapping?
Or is it a concept like the trinity where three beings are one, thus monotheistic and not polytheistic but hard to explain why?
As a non-theist I have no reason to doubt that believers believe, as they are…believers.
Better than your typical prophet, who interprets the word of God to mean the suckers ^h^h^h believers should send him money or else stop doing things he finds icky. Or both.
This guy doesn’t.
There is no gravity. The world sucks.
What if I believe Gravity is a fictitious force?
Am I to be burned at the stake or am I allowed to just start my own sect?
If it involves much more pain than say…a comfy chair I am uhhh…I am “asking for a friend”
Speaking as an atheist…
If I saw something amazing that no one could explain, you’d still have to convince me that it had a supernatural cause. Then convince me that the cause was instigated by a supernatural creature. Then convince me that there is only one such supernatural creature (or that you have correctly identified it amongst all the possible creatures) and you have accurately communicated with it to determine what it wants me to do. Then convince me that doing what this creature wants is the same thing as joining your religion. Do all that and maybe I’ll join your religion. Or maybe not.
Faith (belief) is non-rational. Believers do not arrive at their faith through careful thought. It is a feeling, often established through indoctrination from infancy (“suffer the children to come unto me,” the messiah is quoted as having said). You will simply not be convinced into believing, at least by facts. In much the same way, it is profoundly difficult to convince a believer to let go of that feeling, just as it is difficult to convince an addict to put down the needle.