WWSD

Originally posted by Billy Graham is cool

Shall Christ appear personally to each? Shall he coerce each into heaven by fiat or would he request the involvement of your will to gather evidence to counter your doubt? The latter is what Christ really did for Thomas.

I don't see why this is a problem.
It doesn't seem like coercion to simply show up and discuss faith with me.
Of course I would be very open to discussion of the subject and I would be more than free to use my will to decide which option is the best for me.

What concerns me is that I am being asked to believe in something that really hasn't got a lot of evidence besides some text which is far too self inclusive to convince me.

Furthermore, I'm being asked to believe in something by a supposed representatvie of that something, who cannot say conclusively that they have a monopoly on truth. Essentially, your argument is the same as a Muslim apologist's. Both of you claim truth to the complete exclusion of the other. Neither of you can demnstrate beyond your holy texts that there is anything at all to believe in.

Besides, the threat of hell, whatever you might think of hell as being, seems a bit like coercion to me. Really, the options are clear, believe and recieve a reward, or do not, and recieve punishment.


In our analogy, Indiana Jones did just that except that he did so after he crossed, after the intial exhibition of faith. Remember? Faith validated by empiricism, Not empiricism pre-validating faith.

Except I said that I, given the situation, would have tossed something into the chasm to test for other options besides blindly stepping into what seemed like nothing. I would have discovered a simple explaination that did not require any faith at all. There was a bridge there, I tossed a rock into the chasm, I discovered the bridge. For me it isn't a matter of pre-validating faith by empiricism, its a matter of finding an explaination for a situation that doens't require the involvement of a supernatural being and tha requires no faith at all.


You cannot measure history with the methodology of science. Doing so is like trying to weigh a chicken with a yardstick. When evaluating textual authenticity and historical events you are a juror, not a lab tech. Consequently, you arrive at confidence, not certainty. Personally, I am 95% confident with 5% doubt in what I believe which is more than sufficient to trust and follow.

Indeed, but you are asking me to believe in something that supposedly exists now based on old texts. I have the same problem when someone wants me to verify the existence of DNA based on old texts. However, and this is key, I can demonstrate its existence now based purely upon the means available to me. I can't do so with your diety.
Your diety only exists in old texts which are in competition with other old texts, all of which claim truth. If I read all of them, and arrive at a confidence of 95% for each, where does that leave me?
At the moment, if I were to be basing my faith upon which text I felt most confident about, I'd be a Muslim.
So you see, I can't rely on the texts alone.


I'd add here that the oft-alleged lack of "solid evidence" (well, oft-alleged at iidb at least) for the validity of the Gospels was found to be an erroneous preconception by Simon Greenleaf, (among countless other scholars), a former skeptic himself, principle founder of Harvard Law and prodiguous formulator on evidentiary law itself. Beyond merely his analysis, the evidence goes much deeper and leads to greater confidence when friendly testimony, rather than hostile testimony, is sought out.

I don't know anything about the above.


You demand completely objective testimony? It doesn't exist. There are only degrees of hostility and friendliness over such a polarizing issue as the divinity of Jesus Christ. Disagree?

Nope, I certainly agree that all human testimony is not completely objective. In fact, that is yet another problem with faith. You may make a claim about truth based on your experience with it, while someone else makes a contradictory claim of truth based on thier experience of it. And when it comes to faith, there are no testimonies besides personal experience.


Objecitivity in man does not exist for any such polarizing issue, else what is the purpose of jury selection? Would you return a verdict based solely upon the opening arguments of the prosecutor? Of course not, which begs, what friendly testimony for Christ have you examined?

What friendlier testimony should there be besides the bible? You have to understand that I never read anything else regarding the bible before I lost faith. I didn't have time to spend reading apologist's or atheist's works on Xtianity. I read the bible. If there is a better work regarding the nature of god, I would be inclined to think less of the bible than I already do as the bible is either or divine origin or at least divenly inspired.

There were many issues that I had with xtiantiy, and they were/are insoluble. Even the explainations of xtians didn't resolve them. I found them lacking in many ways and finally tried to find the answers in the bible, where the problems originated.

The final straw was science, which doesn't care the least bit about being friendly or unfriendly to anything at all.


As important as the evidence you choose to analyze is how you interpret the evidence.

I interpret the evidence based on Occam's razor. Given the evidence at hand, I feel the probability for the existence of any diety is so small as to be negligible. One would think that a diety would want to make its existence as easy to verify as the existence of many things in this world that I verify daily.

Who you are is an amalgam of all the decisions you've ever made, shaping and molding both your character and personality. Who you are is largely your own making which leads to the issue of personal culpability over rejecting the Gospel. Who you are determines how you analyze data, which is why interpretations on things may vary as wildly as the personalities of one man to the next. I'd speak more to this all but it gets into the problems with atheistic epistemology and is probably out of scope for our discussion here.

Who am I? I am a product of my memory, my DNA, and my current situation. Nothing else.

I am a determinist and therefore don't believe in free will as most people define it. In a theological sense, I think the concept of free will is even more ridiculous. An omnipotent being would know ever decision that I would make before I was even created. Any free will in that system lies with the creator, who could easily nudge the path at some point, even before I was born, to help me along towards retaining faith.

If you want to discuss presuppositionalism, I would direct you to some other members of the forum, as I'm not that well read on the subject nor am I that interested in it. It seems rather like going round and round to me. I simply want evidence for claims that I can verify for myself.

Which brings me to another point. If an omnipotent diety cannot present evidence for its existence in such a way as to convince each person based solely on thier presuppositions / predispositions, what kind of a diety is that? Not one I'm inclined to believe in.l

Autonemesis

Why shouldn't he? He's a freakin' god. It's no skin off his nose at all, what with time and space not being issues of any concern - to a god. What, is Christ too busy receiving adoration to bother time-warping back and forth showing himself to his pets, er, creations? Why, he's the fucking Creator-with-Capital-C, for Pete's sake. He can be in a zillion places and times all at once, can't he? And it costs him nothing to do it, with that omnipotence thing, he got game, am I right?

Free Thinkr

I hear this all the time. But do you really practice this in your daily life? I wonder if you fill up the bathtub and get in without checking it first. Perhaps you swig your coffee without ever checking to see if it has cooled sufficiently. You ignore your gass guage and "have faith" it will make it to wherever you're going.

If you truly believe in faith validating empiricism, you'll fall of many cliffs.

Cross Examiner

DMB,
When I first came here I held to a strict FIFO policy (first objection in gets the first response) with line-by-line analysis/contention. However, I've come to realize that theists at iidb.org are greatly outnumbered by the skeptics who would question them, which I affectionately call the GuF (Gang-up Factor). Conversely, at sites like TheologyOnline.com and such, the inverse is true. For example, including your response here, I have three others who specifically objected to my last post and would probably like a response as well. I wish I had the time for you all. Thus as a Christian theist at the premiere atheist/skeptic hotspot I have to guard my time and be picky in what I respond to. Rarely anymore do I deconstruct/analyze line-by-line the posts that I do even get to.

I learned quickly to never let a discussion deteriorate into an argument. Arguments are counter-productive. At best, they stroke the ego of the winner and injure the pride of the loser. Even when I "win", I lose. Taking a cue from Paul the Apostle, who debated the polytheistic Athenian philosophers of Mars Hill, I now simply proclaim Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected, and what this means, and to leave the arguing over tangents and minutia to those who care to do so. Thus, as soon as a discussion becomes an argument, I leave. I left the thread you linked to because I foresaw an argument. However, since you seem to personally care that I address your response, and have been polite all the time, I will gladly oblige and respond here and also there. So, I'm not purposely being impolite... sorry for the speech, had to get all that off my chest. To your comments:

Blind faith? 95% confidence is hardly blind faith. Putting my eggs in the basket of the 5% doubt that I have would be blind faith. Need greater specifics? I wish there was the resources to discuss them all. However, as a microcosm of the greater issue of the life and divinity of Christ, I'd be willing to explore any of the issues below with you while others may only watch; we could head over to the one-on-one section or the Biblical Criticism forum etc:

-the Resurrection
-the archaeological record
-the historicity of the Gospel(s)
-the Jesus of faith vs. the Jesus of history
-how did Jesus view himself?
-Messianic requirements

This is a short list of interesting things. Feel free to add more if you have an idea or want narrow one of the above down to some more specific question; in any case, just let me know. All of which reminds me that Demigawd wanted to do the same with me here as well.

Touché.

Or that Jesus anticipated that skeptics throughout history would demand a personal audience before believing...how many demands like this have I read today alone?

And then you ask for the same. If he tried? It's not a matter of effort for an omnipotent omnipresent. I think you may be missing the point.

That's because they aim to please.

If revelation for none, would there be the Bible for all?

I understand that is how you see Christianity. I might add that if the Bible is true, then such is a dangerous delusion to be under. We can go round and round over generalities, as exemplified above; please put forth your desired topic of choice and we can all see then if the Christian worldview is rational or not in that one microcosm. If it is, then it may be in all others? Your move friend

Regards,
BGiC

Asha'man

Very nice, No Quarter. I'm gonna have to use your analogy sometime (with your permission, of course). :notworthy

Majody

Me too! would you mind if i put that in my uJournal? It's very interesting.

AndresDeLaHoz

That's what we did. We gathered evidence. And guess what? There was pretty much none.

SignOfTheCross

In a technical sence yes, I refuse to accept Leprechauns exist.

- To refuse to consider or grant; deny.

6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. Hos 4

Peace,
SOTC

DMB

Thank you BGic for responding. Your distinction between discussing and arguing is interesting. It is not a distinction that most of us who come here bother about. To me your intention to discuss without arguing spells "preaching". I can understand your far from ignoble motives in doing so, but it isn't what II is really about.

The major point I made in the post in the other thread to which I referred you was the likelihood that your conviction that Jesus is truly the true god is based on your cultural background. You have more or less confirmed this with your list of things you'd be interested in discussing:
In the other thread you had implied that your rejection of the message of Muhammad was based on your conviction that Jesus had been resurrected. So it looks as though you never really approached faiths other than xianity with an open mind. I had a look at your Simon Greenleaf link. He is another who approached the possibility of other religions with a bias towards xianity, the one he was most familiar with.

I am not one of those who claim that there was no historical Jesus: I don't know. Before even beginning to look at any of the questions you're offering to discuss, one has to ask: what about the OT? It is the major part of the bible, after all. What do you seriously think of the picture it presents of your god?

For a good many atheists, of whom I am one, we have first to be convinced of the existence of any god(s) before we start to look at the possibility that someone who appeared to be human was really in some sense divine.

When I was a teenager in the 1950s, I subscribed to a set of pamphlets entitled The Truth about the Catholic Church. You received one leaflet a week on a specific topic and if you had any questions you could write and ask a jesuit about it and he would reply.

The first one was on the existence of god. I was very keen to know what the explanation would be, and was disappointed when I simply saw the standard arguments (such as Paley's watch) that I had already found unsatisfactory. But never mind. I would write at length to the jesuit and ask for help with my difficulties. I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to receive essentially a reiteration of the same set of arguments. After that the leaflets continued to come week by week, but I no longer avidly devoured them. I had hoped to be sufficiently convinced of the probability of god to be able to build on it as a basis for understanding the rest. Now I imagine you are not too fond of the catholic church, but Paley, after all wasn't a catholic. The arguments for EoG don't seem to change much.

I am a lot older now and have lost a lot of my youthful enthusiasm for exploring religion as a possible truth. I am very interested in religion as an anthropological and psychological phenomenon. I do not totally discount the possibility that a god or gods may exist, but so far it looks more and more to me as though this is merely human wishful thinking. I am not very interested in discussing the details of Jesus such as the resurrection.

We had a thread about this recently where it was mostly expounded by Magus. I imagine you would have done a better job. I have yet to find a satisfactory explanation of what resurrection of a dead person really means. It sounds good in the "with one bound he was free" mode, but it is fraught with practical difficulties.

Then there is the doctrine of salvation. Again, this is very difficult for a non-xian to swallow. We keep on going round and round on the implications of a lot of these topics.

I am on holiday at the moment and have had a bit more time than usual to join in these discussions, but my husband is coming back tonight and will hog the internet (quite legitimately, I may add, because he needs it for business), so I will not be able to visit quite as much as I have done in the past week.

There are plenty of other infidels who would like to discuss these matters and you can certainly start threads on them if you wish. But I think you have to be prepared to argue. We have most of us heard the preaching message many times and it doesn't get very far. After a while it seems insubstantial and irritating. But presentation of evidence is quite another thing. Please do as much of that as you are able.

Whispers

It may help some of you to know that in my understanding, you are looked upon by God according to the revelation you have experienced. The more you become aware of Jesus, his life and teaching, the more you are committed to accepting the freely offered hand or rejecting it.

The tribesmen in Papua New guinea for eg, may have no experience of revelation and will be looked upon in this light. If you study the historical account of Jesus and evidence, and then study the Gospels, and then reject the freely offered hand, it is your own decision and the consequences are of your own doing. It will be your judgment that effects you and not Gods. You judged the evidence, and either rejected it or simply discounted it as myth.

This is how I see it. ...

We are God made. We have been given the gift of free-will. God allows us to choose eternal life or death. He gives us that simple choice. He has left evidence for this and sent Jesus so that we may come into direct relationship with him.

Some of you are choosing not to take that step of faith, because of a lack of evidence. There has to be a step of faith, and when you take it and ask to know God in complete sincerity, then he will be revealed to you.

What are you afraid of? Looking for him, and then actually finding him?

QUOTE---I've always wondered why a loving god requires threats of eternal damnation against his "own image" to be believed in. Well, first off, why does god require himself to be believed. What does god gain by people believing in him? What does god lose by people not believing in him?

God created the world and the people. He offers a gentle hand to lead us all to eternal life at his side. He gave you the CHOICE to believe in him or not. Its your choice, not his.

I believe that Hell is not a place with fire, the way that some see it. I am of the impression it is the dak torment of the soul when permanently seperated from God.