Mageth

Sorry to disappoint you, but I certainly don't know that God or anything like it exists.

Apparently, the agenda of those that believe in God is to come up with elaborate excuses as to why he's not made himself obvious to us, or failing that to simply assert that he has made himself so obvious but we unbelievers willingly ignore him.

Mageth

The first statement ("He has revealed Himself in Christ") is essentially saying the same thing as the second ("He has revealed Himself in the Bible") as the Bible is the only place that Christ is "revealed" to us.

The next statement ("there is no lack of information on what He expects us to do with our lives; it is clearly stated in the Bible") again appeals to the Bible.

So your argument boils down to "the Bible". Well, I've read the Bible, and am quite familiar with it. But I see no reason to elevate it above any other book of human musings. Further, the Bible has been used to support all sorts of notions about "God", all sorts of notions about what is or isn't required of us, and all sorts of notions about God's possible agendas. So you're appealing to your interpretation of the Bible.

While I find various human musings on certain aspects of God in the Bible, some fantastic tales with little or no historical support, and so on, that's all I find. I don't find "God" revealed to me in the Bible - simply various human musings and tall tales about a supposed God.

I don't find God in my heart. Neither do I find God in the Bible, or in "Christ" as described from the Bible (again, I find only quite human musings and tall tales, no more revealing than any non-biblical musings or tall tales). I certainly don't know God exists, as you assert I do.

Where exactly am I supposed to find this god? The only place I can see god is in the imaginations of humans.

G B Mayes

That is a true and well put statement. What makes their testimony more reputable than the many books that were rejected from the canon is multi-faceted. First, they all have apostolic authority. That is, they all were either directly written by or under the color of authority of one of the original twelve disciples or Paul. That this is so was accepted early on, in the first century, long before any formal church canonization. Formal canonization formally acknowleged those books and also served to protect the church from possible inclusion of heretical and non-apostolic works. Thus, all accepted books date back to the first century and are either directly eye-witness accounts or directly based on eye-witness accounts. That this is true is unquestioned by serious scholars, even non-believers. The idea that these books are randomly or arbitrarily picked, late-dated, or otherwise non representative of the apostle's work is something detractors throw out only to make themselves look either ignorant or disingenuous, akin to the statement that there was no Holocaust. Secondly, since they are early they could have easily been refuted early on if they were fabrications of the writer's imagination. No such thing occurred. That the authors wrote what they believed and saw has likewise never been seriously questioned. This is attested by the fact that virtually all of them, with the possible exception of John, died for their beliefs. That they died for their beliefs does not make them true, but shows that they "believed" them to be true. I am willing to accept that these honest men, who saw and touched the living Jesus, or to whom Christ appeared (Paul), saw rightly. For me, the event which seals it as true is the resurrection. That Christ would come, die, and conquer death was predicted by the Old Testament and attested by Jesus Himself. Before the cross He demonstrated who He was by signs and miracles. In His resurrection He proved who He was. After His resurrection He was seen by hundreds of people, not just a few. All this was reported early on by first hand witnesses who died for their beliefs and whose reported facts regarding the words and works of Christ were never seriously questioned in the first century, the time when many were alive who could refute them. That is good enough for me.

greyline

The latter part of this doesn't deal with God's agenda before mankind needed redeeming, or more precisely before Jesus came along.

What was God's original agenda? It seems to me, throughout the OT in particular, that God's agenda was to try and make people obey his whims, and he tried to achieve this by using bribes and threats. He valued obedience above everything - love, compassion, moral behavior, everything.

Atheos

... and every word of the Quran was written directly by Mohammad. Moreover, every word of the book of Mormon was dictated directly to Joseph Smith from the angel Moroni.

In the interest of brevity I'm not going to requote the entire set of baseless assertions you made. I'm just going to say that you said a lot of things, none of which give us any reason to believe that the Christian Bible is right and all the thousands of other religious texts available today are wrong. Begging the question by claiming that the bible says the apostles had authority to write and that the apostles wrote the bible (or portions of it) does absolutely nothing to distinguish this book from the Quran, the Hindu Vedas, the book of Mormon or any other religious text.

On the other hand, there is little reason to believe that any of the four anonymous documents commonly accepted as the "canonical gospels" were written by the individuals traditionally ascribed to them and a great deal of reason to be doubtful. There is also a great deal of non-conservative scholarship to that end. Similar scholarship is dubious that many of the epistles claiming to have been written by "Paul" were actually written by him.

Similarly, the four canonical gospels do not even claim to be written by anyone who had actually met anyone who had seen "Jesus". Realistic dating of the various books places them decades after the alleged events, and they contradict each other gratuitously.

There is absolutely no secular (non-biblical) evidence that Jesus ever existed. None. Period. Additionally, many things we can actually check on about the Jesus myths turn out to be questionable or patently false. For example, Jesus could not have been born during the reign of king Herod (as GMatt alleges) and during the governorship of Quirinius (as GLuke claims). Herod died 10 years before Quirinius became governor. If King Herod had killed all the male children 2 years and younger in the area there would have been some notation about it somewhere. There's little doubt that the Jewish historian Josephus would have written about it, as he chronicled a great deal of Herod's life and was eager to point out objectionable facets of Herod's life. But not one scrap of evidence points to that atrocity. It's as if it never happened, which it didn't.

It is a reasonable position to be skeptical about the bible. The bible makes a lot of extrordinary claims and offers absolutely no more reason to believe those claims than to believe that Odysseus fought a Cyclops just because Homer wrote about it. It is every bit as reasonable to be skeptical about your god as it is to be skeptical about Santa Claus. Every bit.

These absurdities have been dealt with about a gazillion times in these forums but statements like those made above simply point out the need for ongoing refutation.
Words fail me to describe the level of umbrage I take at this statement. I encourage you to re-read what you wrote here and ask yourself, "What possible motive might a scholar have for wanting to look ignorant or disingenuous?"