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Author | Topic: Will The Real God Please Stand Up? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
This idea that we make up God is obviously just a fiction atheists like to believe, it has nothing to do with the reality of how believers come to belief or live our beliefs. I didn't believe in God for most of my life, for the thirty or so years between age fifteen and age forty-five. I'd gone to church as a child and believed in a general way but without any real conviction or knowledge so I easily lost it when confronted with my supposedly more enlightened sophisticated friends in the big city high school I started attending at fifteen.
When I came to believe in my forties, entirely through reading books about religion, it was with the overwhelming sense of a Reality I couldn't possibly have imagined existing before. This sense of an objective real God came from reading dozens of books by believers. They didn't make Him up, I didn't make Him up. I'd spent thirty years assuming such a God didn't and couldn't exist because I had no idea why the people who believed believed. I couldn't dream up any reasons for Him to exist before I simply KNEW He exists. I wasn't looking for Him, but just as Christian theology says, it is very clear to me that He found me and not the other way around. He showed me that He is real, He did it all. God is always described by believers as objective reality so it takes a lot of denial of simple human experience to accuse believers of making Him up. Of course you'll just assume I made it all up in my own mind anyway no matter what I tell you about my own experience. So I just wanted to butt in to say that much and you can and will just carry on with your own false beliefs. Cheers. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I believe the evidence supports all that, yes. But that's an entirely different order of things than belief in God.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Every form of knowledge involves fallible humans, so I guess we shouldn't believe anyone about anything, just hole up in a cave. Certainly you should because you believe in the fallible human work of science.
I never used the word "perfectly" but I found believers all agreeing on the basics based on the Bible which we all accept as God's own personal communication to us. I've presented the proofs of the young earth many times and now I've presented yet another on the Evolution - we have the Fossils thread. .
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
What I mean is that believers in orthodox traditional historical Christianity that goes back to the apostles and is best formulated in the Reformers of the sixteenth century and carried through all the orthodox churches today, agree on the basics of the orthodox traditional historical Christian faith. I also read a lot of heretical writings on my journey to Christianity and learned to reject them as I learned to recognize the truth. For instance, I read Athanasius whose love for truth shines in his work, who trounced the heresies of his day.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Just as I said to dwise it's remarkable how you can accuse me of being caught in a loop of unverifiable suppositions and forget that it must mean that you are too, and with that the possibility of any knowledge at all goes down the drain and I certainly don't have to take anything you say seriously.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Can you please answer the question of why you have to live/be born in a Christian country/to Christian parents to be able to 'know' the 'One'? Why do you keep saying that? There are something like 33 million to 67 million Christians in China according to diferent estimates, and it's growing all the time, even though the government keeps coming up with ways to persecute them. South KIorea is reputed to have the biggest Christian church in existence, a million I think. As far as I know they are not persecuted, but North Koreans are who dare to convert. There is an Asian tribe that totally converted to Christianity many years ago and all live as Christians, can't remember their name. There are lots of Christians in India too, and the Hindus have recently stepped up their persecutions there, beatings, rapes. Muslims also convert to Chrsitianity and suffrer tremendous persecution as a result. I don't know the numbers in those cases. Sudan has lots of Christians, many of them fled to the US under Muslim persecution some decades ago. And certainly there are plenty of converts to other religions in the Christian west, mostly to the eastern religions Buddhism and Hinduism, but also some to Islam. Christianity originally spread in Europe and then to the US, a fact of history. It had also spread through the Middle East but Islam forced most to convert. But the Great Commission Jesus gave us to take the gospel into all the world has been seriously underway for centuries. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Rev 7:9
After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands;
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Why is the Real One the Christian One?
Well, it isn't like any of the others. It's based on historical accounts written by many authors over about fifteen hundred years that go back to the Creation of the universe. Its accounts include direct dealings with God, explain the nature of God, show human beings both trying and failing to obey Him, explains why we're in the mess we're in and how God has planned a solution to the mess from the very beginning. It contains accounts of miracles and prophecies straight from the mouth of God Himself. It offers us a Savior from the punishment we deserve for our transgressions against God's commandments, a Savior who is God Himself incarnate in human flesh, who because He shares in our human nature is able to die in our place to pay for our sins. He also taught while He was on this Earth a philosophy of life that is regarded as nothing short of sublime even by many unbelievers. No other religion has anything even remotely like this. Does all that make it true? Not based on anything I could say, but I do believe that its authenticity is palpable to an honest reader.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
No other religion is even remotely like biblical Christianity.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Judaism and Islam are very like Christianity. So is Mormonism. Judaism is, but only because they have the same Old Testament Bible, otherwise what they believe is not the same at all. Islam, no, nothing at all like Christianity, or Mormonism either.
But lots of religions are also very different to Christianity. So what? What you believe is overwhelmingly likely to be what your parents believe. My parents didn't believe much of anything that I knew of. They sent their children to church because they thought it was a good thing but they just about never went themselves and neither of them ever uttered a word that showed they believed anything like I've come to believe. When I first believed in the reality of God -- in my mid forties after about thirty years of considering myself an atheist -- I thought I was going to be a Hindu or a Buddhist. It took a lot of reading, and a lot of overcoming my own prejudices against Christianity to finally embrace it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Of course you can rewrite my autobiography to suit yourself, and your idea of "commonalities" between the religions is groundless. Christianity is unique in the ways I said it is.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I made a point of showing that my parents were not Christians, because they did not believe anything Christians are supposed to believe. They were raised more or less in a Christian society but if you judge by their beliefs they were simply heathens. THAT's the part of my autobiography you rewrote. Or A part.
GDR's beliefs go back no more than maybe 150 years to the "liberal" theologians. True Christianity goes back two millennia and though it was lost through the period when the Roman church dominated there were still always true believers and the Reformation recovered the truth that had been buried. You said your experience of being raised Christian included the idea that all you have to do to be saved is just sort of "do your best" or something like that? That's at least a "liberal" point of view, an apostate church point of view. Anglicanism is well known for its deviation from the truth, so perhaps that was your church experience? And Islam doesn't honor Jesus. Reducing God to a mere prophet is certainly not honoring Him. As I spellect it out Christianity is fundame4ntally essentially different from all other religions, not just different gby a few "points Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Sorry, Christianity is not just what people who know zip about it think it is.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Sorry, you have no idea what is involved in becoming a Christian and that's what I'm trying to talk about. Being born in a Christian culture dores not make anyone a Christian. Sorry. Learn something. Thre is reason to believe that perhaps the majority of people in "Christian" churches are not Christians. I know you are talking about Christian as opposed to other religions, but that misses the essential point involved in being a Christian so I'm not letting you get away with it. Converts to Chrsitanity in other cultures are very likely to be truer Christians than anyone born in a "Christian" culture who even goes to church. And anyway the idea that there is much of anything left of Christianity in the cultures of the west is false anyway.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1472 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
What you think doesn't matter to me but it does bother me that your nonsense could mislead others.
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