Helpmabob

I have a way: choose the right and truthful one. What is your way? Reject them all I think.You prefer to be told what to think. I prefer to discern for myself – it is so much more satisfying. The prophecies can be personally verified spiritually. Personal verification is the best and most trustworthy way. Countless Christians have personally and independently verified these aspects of the Bible.

Here is yet another example: "This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time," declares the LORD. "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. [Jeremiah 31:33]. Prophecy is not about telling the future for entertainment purposes or for showing how clever God is. But it does give the Bible an air of authority and authenticity lacking in ‘other gospels’ that you have mentioned.

Thank you Johnny for highlighting this prophetic fulfilment in Jesus. The Father promised that He would come among his people and so He did. What a blessing when we remember that all God’s promises are prophetic!

Evaluate each situation in the sight of fixed and certain moral laws. The decisions might go either way depending on extenuating circumstances, but the moral laws never change.

I’m glad that we agree that they can be verified and biblical prophecy therefore passes muster.

Gullwind

If extenuating circumstances are allowed, then there are no absolutes. That's the definition of absolute - one way, no others.

Basically, what you are saying is that X is the way it is, unless for various reasons it's not. How is this not subjective?

aa5874

I hope you realise that your statement is regarded as blasphemy by billions of believers in God. And these believers also have faith in the God of Abraham. They have died for their God and will continue to die for their God. They believe they will go to Paradise, if they fulfill the will of God.

These billions of believers claim whoever propagates that God had a Son, must suffer the wrath of God as an infidel. It is the will of God that these blasphemers be punished for their false teachings, according to certain believers of God.

When will your Gods sort out these major issues with the other Gods, amicably?

spin

When you, Helpmabob, don't have the means to know what the right and truthful one? You don't, do you? If you do, how do you separate your "knowledge" from our schizophrenic's?

I don't think you have any reason to make such a claim. You would be talking rubbish.

I've been trying to get you to elucidate on this for several posts. How do you discern that is sufficiently different from our schizophrenic's discernment?

Ahh, internal verification! You can't separate yourself from our schizophrenic. I have consistently put forward the notion that you can't really know anything unless you can objectively verify it. "[I]nternal verification" is no verification at all.

So, you justify the Hindu finding the Hindu scriptures true and the muslims finding muslim scriptures true.

What has this "prophecy" to do with you? You are not of the house of Israel. You are just a cuckoo in the Jewish nest.

Oh, so you are belatedly trying to compete with the other religions now. Good for you. You'll need to do so a little more seriously though. There are too many muslims in muslim countries and too many hindus in hindu lands. You live in a christian country and I can only expect you, going on averages for believers, to be a christian.

You haven't entered into the basic problem of how you know your religious concepts. You can get ideas from books, but the books that are accessible depend on which country you are in, be it christian or muslim or whatever, but ideas are no necessary reflection of the cosmos. "[I]nternal verification" is what the schizophrenic uses to deal with the world.

If a scientist publish findings, yet doesn't provide means of reproducing those findings in an observable manner, no-one can reproduce the findings meaningfully, so the findings have no value. Our interactions with the world require us to verify that world. Doing so based simply on your own experience doesn't provide a sufficient basis to know anything about the world. It is seeing others doing the same things, not individually (and thus susceptible to being waylaid by the "internal verification" of the schizophrenic), but in easily observed experiments -- eg I can watch you make the experiment and watch you control the variables. It is then that you have knowledge. We are always forming opinions of the world, but it is only in their objective verification that we get past opinions.


spin

Doug Shaver

Either that is the lamest joke of the year, or you're more clueless than I thought.

Helpmabob

Doesn’t a judge send one man to prison for life and sets another free for the same crime? The same law is being used, but the circumstances dictate that a different sentence is appropriate.Aren’t all our views and opinions subjective to some extent? But our subjective views do not alter the moral laws, which remain fixed.

Why do I have to justify the beliefs of others. I don’t ask you to justify the viewpoint of those who have a slightly different version of atheism to you. I know it’s between aa5874 and God.

Allegorically speaking, I am like a branch grafted into the vine. God’s law is written on my heart. It neatly confirms the prophetical writings.

I absolutely agree with this – as far as it relates to the world. My faith, and the verification of some prophecy, is in things that are not of this world and uses a different verification process. It’s different. It’s not the same – incomparable and asymmetric.

spin

Sorry, Helpmabob, you've failed to show that you are different from the schizophrenic I've been comparing your approach with. You are just as certain as he is and with just as much information.

True wily schizophrenic talk. Yes, the world is that way, but this is different!!

Still no evidence to show for the claims you make.

You are a christian apparently because you were put into a christian believing situation in a christian country (and as I point out in all probability if you were born in a muslim country you'd be a muslim now -- no, you say, you couldn't be a christian ultimately for a chance of birth).

You espouse the same confusion about prophecies that most non-scholarly christians do. It's a prophecy so it must be correct. Of course belief makes it correct. You can look at the dozens of happy christians in threads like this one about prophecy who show a total lack of ability to defend the prophecies as meaningfully being fullfilled. It's sad really.

Despite the fact that you have no rational means of reaching your positions, you hold them anyway, putting yourself on the par of a schizophrenic. You use the time honored escape clause, man's intellect can't fathom god, which is just an admission that you don't know what you're talking about -- you just believe and that's that. Sounds like stonewalling, doesn't it?

Should I give up on you, Helpmabob?


spin

Johnny Skeptic

If I could predict the future, would you worship me? Of course not. There is no necessary correlation that can be made between the ability to predict the future and good character. God does not have good character, so decent people have no choice but to reject him. My word, even Attila the Hun would not have killed some of his most devout and faithful followers. God kills babies and innocent animals. God makes people blind, deaf, and dumb, reference Exodus 4:11. He punishes people for sins that their ancestors committed. He refuses to reveal himself to some people who would accept him if they knew that he (supposedly) exists. That is not loving and fair.

Can you give me an example of a particular tangible benefit that you can ask God for and expect to receive? If you use receiving enough food to eat as an example, I will tell you that God has allowed millions of Christians to die slow and painful deaths from starvation.

Humans quite naturally place great emphasis upon good health, having enough food to eat, and being protected from natural disasters. ANY being who provided these necessities of life would be greatly appreciated, but believe it or not, many Christians claim that is would be counterproductive if God ensured that everyone had good health, had enough food to eat, and was protected from natural disasters, and yet no Christian EVER asks God for poor health, to not have enough food to eat, and to be killed by a natural disaster. The simple truth is that Christian doctors are trying to prevent and cure ALL diseases, and whenever a prevention or a cure for a disease is discovered, ALL Christians rejoice. Many Christian organizations feed as many hungry people as they can, but no amount of human effort could ever feed all of the hungry people in the world. No Christian would object if a way was discovered to prevent hurricanes.

I am not saying that the world should be perfect. Humans need a certain amount of obstacles and challenges to overcome, but no human needs to be injured or killed by a hurricane in order to have good character and be a benefit to society. A world of limited obstacles and challenges would be much better for mankind than the world that we live in today. I am only interested in loving a God who has MY best interests at heart, not HIS OWN best interests. No loving Christian father would treat his child like God treats humans.

Many skeptics are kind, loving, generous, forgiving people, some of whom would risk their lives to save your life, some skeptic police officers for example. It would be out of character for them to reject a loving God, or a loving human being. It is a shame that since you falsely perceive that your own eternal comfort is at stake you must endorse God's plan to unmercifully send a lot of decent people to hell for all of eternity with no opportunity for parole. The largest colonial empire in history by far under a single religion was conquered by Christian nations by means of persecution, murder, and theft of property, and yet you have the audacity to criticize skeptics. If you had lived during the colonial era, like most Christians, you would probably have endorsed colonization, in which case you would go hell because the Bible says that unconfessed murderers will go to hell. No Christian living today is any less culpable than he would have been if he had lived during any other era. You are merely lucky that you live in a more civilized era, so please do not give yourself too much credit for not endorsing colonization, slavery, and the subjugation of women. During the time of Jesus, a time when most Christians endorsed slavery, some Sophists and Stoics opposed it? Will you please tell us how those Sophists and Stoics were more enlightened than most Christians were? In addition, will you please tell us how King Hammurabi was able to come up with his Hammurabi's Code thousands of years before Christ. Hammurabi's Code was quite remarkable for that time period, a time period when Jews were killing their own people for working on the Sabbath Day, and for cursing at their parents. After Jesus supposedly rose from the dead, many Jews living in distant locations were not aware that he rose from the dead, and what he taught. They were still killing their own people for working on the Sabbath Day, and for cursing at their parents. Obviously, God was not in the least bit concerned with telling those Jews that it was no longer acceptable for them to kill their own people for working on the Sabbath Day, and for cursing at their parents.

If God does not exist, it is to be expected that the only available benefits that anyone could ask God for and expect to receive would be subjective spiritual/emotional benefits, and that tangible benefits would be distributed ENTIRELY at random according to the laws of physics without any regard whatsoever for a person's worldview. There are not any good reasons for anyone to believe otherwise. Today, millions of Christians disagree as to what constitutes a miracle healing. Why do you assume that is was any different back then. If God does exist, at best, he is bi-polar and mentally incompetent. If any man did what God frequently does, he would be sent to a mental institution, or to prison.

Matthew 24:14 says "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come." That has already happened, but where is Jesus? When another hundred years pass, Jesus will still not have returned to earth. What will Christians say then? Since God has allowed hundreds of millions to die without hearing the Gospel message, what difference could it possibly make to him whether or not the Gospel message is preached in all nations?

How does God benefit from refusing to clearly reveal himself to everyone? How does mankind benefit from God's refusal to clearly reveal himself to everyone? Are you going to tell us that if Jesus returned to earth and performed miracles all over the world that not even one single person would become a Christian who was not previously convinced.

jakejonesiv

Ahem, you are mixing metaphors here. Romans 11 refers to grafting braches onto an Olive tree. You are getting the vine stuff from John 15:5, which has nothing to do with grafting.


All 613 mizvot?

Really? Do you even know the three commandments concerning prophecy? In case you can't read them from your heart (in which case what is the use of them being there?) , see Deuteronomy 18:15-22 .
Since Jesus spoke many things that have not come true, why do you worship him?

I am not sure I understand. Do you mean that your faith cannot be verified? All you have to do is move a mountain (Matt. 17:20, 21:21; 1 Cor. 13:2). In order to move a mountain, all you need is a tiny bit of faith like that of a mustard seed. That's about the least amount of faith you can have and still be called yourself a Christian.

Gullwind

The law used by the judge is not an absolute, nor it it claimed to be such. Human law allows for mitigating circumstances. How can an absolute depend on circumstance?

Besides which, law is not equivalent to morality. Many things are moral, but not enforced by law.

Fixed according to who? In a culture where nudity is not taboo, those "fixed moral laws" are fixed in a different place than they are here. Their moral laws are different.

There are some behaviors that are recognized as being harmful to the society as a whole, such as murder, rape and so on. These are "universal" in the sense that a culture who allows them doesn't last too long. I see no reason to think that these "laws" were passed down supernaturally, and given the varying morality observed around the world, I don't see how you can claim that they are universal.

With regard to the slavery question, you said that it depended on circumstances. I am rather curious as to what circumstances you think slavery would be justified?