As I’ve said before, I’m not here to tell you what you believe is wrong. I suppose we all “see the world we WANT to see”. You see it your way I see it mine.
I wouldn’t go as far as saying though that my explanation of my experience with God has been “easily explained”.
Which is exactly my point. You don’t know me. Our relationship is remote and tenuous. We’re communicating, but we have never met, so we have no direct knowledge of each other.
The same goes for you and God. You have never seen God, you have never seen Jesus, and you have never heard a physical voice speaking to you from the sky.
You say you have built a relationship with God: how? Do you see visions? Have you seen miracles performed? Have you seen the dead resurrected?
To repeat: the only concrete evidence you have for the validity of your religion are the words of the Bible and your own highly subjective interior experiences. That is not external knowledge; it is faith.
What makes your faith more legitimate than, say, a houngan’s belief in the loa? Devotees of Santeria and Vodunsay that their gods Chango, Dhamballa, Papa Legba, and Madame Erzulie actually visit their believers and perform miracles.
They, too, know their gods exist, and they, at least, have concrete evidence to support that belief.
How about a Muslim’s faith that God had no son, and that Jesus was only a prophet, albeit a major one? They, too, have a holy book and strong interior affirmation that their faith is real. What makes your religion true and theirs untrue?
Suppose there is a supernatural Creator. Suppose that this Creator is very powerful and knowledgable.
I fully expect that the Creator will understand why I am the way I am. I fully expect that the Creator will be very enlightened - much more so than the most enlightened human beings - and judge people on their characters, not on whether they get on their knees and grovel.
Such a Creator will be vastly different from the Christian god.
You mixed up a few things. As a matter of fact, you comitted the fallacy of Equivocation:
We know how the gravity works, as in we know the way gravity operates with some very detailed mathematical model.
We don’t know what the underlying mechanism of gravity is. We don’t know what causes it.
As far as I can tell, you mixed up these two by using “how” in more than one way.
No, Nightime could just say that things falling to earth are just part of the dream.
The things that cinch an external reality for me are the Jonestowns and Heavens Gate, and my own death. Why should my mind generate a world in which a bunch of crazies kill themselves en masse*? Why should my mind create a world in which I myself, wonderful me in all my glory, will utimately disappear?
I think that to say that we ever can’t understand the workings of this mind and that the fact that we don’t understand it doesn’t prove anything is simply to abandon the argument.
[Captain Amazing**, while I appreciate your insight and understand what your saying, the truth is I do celebrate both Christian and Jewish Holidays, I attend temple and church (though church more regulary). I have attended sader’s at a local church that are held especially for Jewish “believers”. I can’t see how I can be expected to abandon my race because I believe a different religion than that race believes.
I cannot understand how one can say what another knows. While I respect your views gobear and enjoy reading your posts, it just confuses me how you can tell me that you know more than I do, what I believe and know to be true. 
You didn’t answer my earlier point.
Previously you believed that ‘Everything around me’ was proof of Judaism. Thus Jesus was not the son of God.
Now, without any new evidence, you believe devoutly that Jesus is the son of God.
What changed your mind?
Perhaps you could also give details of what it is you see that convinces you that your particular God exists.
Next, evolution is based, like everything scientific, on evidence. We have fossils, gene research, experience of breeding animals etc.
Have a look at :
The Big Bang (I do hope you don’t think the Big Bang and evolution are related :eek: ) is also a theory based on evidence. Ask an astronomer. Here’s one:
www.badastronomy.com
So let’s sum up.
You believe in one particular version of a religion based on:
Many other religious believers disagree with you, based on:
By contrast, scientists have masses of physical evidence, which leads them to evolution and the Big Bang.
They constantly seek more evidence to check and refine their knowledge.
I don’t think he’s so much different than that. He knows everything about you, he made you the way you are. He knows why you don’t believe. He’s a loving God, whether you believe that or not, and his mercy is more than the human mind can understand. He doesn’t want anyone on their knees and “groveling”. He wants to love you and have you love him back whether you understand his ways or not, he’s not asking that you do. Actually he says we won’t understand, but we are to trust that he does know what he’s doing and in the end we will know why.
I don’t recall saying I believe “everything around me was proof of Judaism”. What I said was
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by dreamer *
**Evolution on the other hand, has many missing pieces and no proof of anything, but to believe it also requires an “extremely simple” degree of proof. **
Dreamer,
Evolution has more FACTS going for it, than you can dream about. Ever wondered why the bottom layers of fossils (the oldest) show the most simple life forms? Why not anything complex such as a mammal, reptile, amphibian in say, the Cambrian period? Did you know that before the pre-Cambrian explosion they now have traces of microoranisms in rocks that are coming in with an age of 3.5 billion years using radioactive dating? If life occurred as depicted in Genesis, wouldn’t the rock layers be capable of showing all the same life forms in all layers young and old?
When there was an explosion of life during the Cambrian period, it included many life forms such as shellfish, worms, sponges and the like, but still there wasn’t a single amphibian, bird, reptile, insect or mammal that can be found in this period. **Think about this a great deal. ** If you really want to send the evolution world on its back, go out and find any of these types in any of these rock layers. The beauty of the “theory of evolution” is, each day when new fossils are discovered, literally there are millions of conceivable discoveries that could disprove evolution. Quite the contrary happens each day.
John
dreamer wrote:
Okay, I have to ask:
It sounds like you probably believe that all species (“kinds”) on Earth were created separately, and that the theory of Common Descent is therefore wrong.
Do you also believe in a “young Earth,” i.e. an Earth that is only a few thousand years old (instead of millions or billions of years old)?
Dreamer, you have discounted what most intelligent people (including christians) take as fact. That IS telling me that what I believe is wrong.
There may be a god, and there may actually be a christian god. But if that is the case, I don’t want to know him. I don’t see him as a loving being. He is secretive, deceiving, and a bigot. He has put men in positions of leadership and allowed them to commit horrible acts on children (all in the name of god). He excludes gays from his utopia. He has allowed flood and famine to destroy the lives of countless people. The list of “ungodly” acts is endless! Please tell me how I can possibly think that attributing the realities of our world to this superbeing is a good thing.
How do you know, Dreamer? You say, “God said it,” but actually, someone reported that God said it. Then you read it, so you (and other Christian witnesses) are what are called tertiary sources.
So, is “God” merely an Urban Legend of the not-so-urban type?
Perhaps I’m not being clear; I have no quarrel at all with your beliefs. My point is that you keep using the word “know” in error. You beleive strongly that God exists; you have every confidence that God exists, you are absolutely sure that God exists, but you cannot know god exists. St. Paul himself wrote, “What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror; then we shall see face-to-face. What I know now is only partial; then it will be complete–as complete as God’s knowledge of me.” (I Cor. 13:12, Good News version).
If you are honest, you can only say that you are assured of God’s presence in your life. But you won’t know until you are in Heaven and see God for the first time.
The definition of “know” is - to perceive directly, have understanding or direct cognition (the act or process of knowing), to recognize the nature of, to be acquainted or familiar with, and to be aware of the truth of.
Squish, people say things about religion all the time. Do I believe what everyone says? No way. There’s never going to be any evidence I can give you that proves that I personally know God to be true. I accept that most of you think I’m full of it, and that’s okay. Really, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t claim to be any kind of religious “know it all”. But I do have a genuine care for mankind. I’m just as confused about life sometimes as some of you and I don’t have any answers that will satisfy all of your questions. But I do know what I know, and no one will ever take that away from me. I believe that you all know what you know as well and I’m not here to tell you that you don’t.
EchoKitty, I don’t believe evolution is the way it all went down, that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that you think that’s the way it happened. I’m not telling you there’s no way you could know that to be true. When you say I "discounted what most intelligent people believe to be true (whatever that means), that’s not what I’ve said. I said I don’t believe it to be true. Do you understand what I’m saying or not?
So your saying then that since St.Paul only knew God to bepartially real, he still didn’t know for sure?
Rest assured God’s presence is real in my life. (Assurance meaning “certainty”) ;). I am only being honest here gobear, and I know one way or the other you don’t believe me when I say I know God is real. It doesn’t really matter though, since I’m the one believing it and you aern’t. If you know I’m wrong then shouldn’t you be happy that you know that?
dreamer, though you still haven’t responded to my question (which is quite alright) I look at the discussion in this thread, and in summary it appears to me to be something like this:
dreamer: “Why is it so hard to believe in God?”
Poster A: “Because I cannot prove the he does or does not exist and here are the reasons why…(insert gratuitous reasoning here)…So dreamer, why do you find it so easy to believe in God?”
dreamer: "I know God, therefore I believe.
Poster A: :smack:
How do you fight ignorance when one person is debating using evidence/reason and the other is using fantasy and/or blind faith?
I’d have to say that even if God himself came to me with ID in hand and said, “Hi there LC, I’m God.” My first comment to him would most likely be, “That’s great, but who made you?”
So if you died and went to Heaven and God said Linear Crack, I will answer every question you have but first you must choose to believe in me and my word, or choose not to believe. Would you then, because you still don’t have your answers, chose not to believe?
And btw I apologize for not responding to your earlier question.
“Promise to believe everything I say, and I’ll tell you anything you want.”
dreamer, would you accept that offer from anybody else?