The Tension of Faith

None of the writers of the New Testament are "anonymous," all are identified in many ways. And orthodox Christianity does not recognize any contradictions, sorry, they're all the failure of careless readers to make the accurate connections.

I'm talking about converts in the sense of free will choice.

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Each appearance was a one-time event, Percy, that didn't leave anything but witness evidence. You can't study something that leaves only witness evidence. At least according to you. If you took that evidence seriously you could indeed study it, but you don't.

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We don’t have to believe the alleged witness evidence (which is mostly second hand, at best) to study it.To point to just one major example, The author of Luke and Acts is determined to place the appearances (other than Paul’s vision) in and close to Jerusalem. The author of Matthew, on the other hand places his one appearance in Galilee, with no hints of any appearances elsewhere.Now, the author of Acts is not regarded as an eyewitness to those appearances and I know that you regard the author of Matthew as an eyewitness. How, then, can you possibly believe Acts on the subject ?

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I'm talking about converts in the sense of free will choice.

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So? Where is the evidence ? Have you even investigated the matter seriously ?

I don't doubt you have convinced yourself that that nonsense must be true. So you keep asserting yet never provide anything but more unsupported assertions from utter nutjobs.

So you keep claiming yet reality says you are wrong.The Bible is filled with contradictions, falsehood and absurdities and Christian Apologists have simply made shit up because they know it is what will sell.

She knew she was seeing an actual man, Percy, He was no apparition and she knew she wasn't dreaming. Recognizing Him is something else, having to do most likely with her complete inability to imagine Him still alive so simply assuming He was someone else, a gardener being the most likely guess in that setting. And she saw her mistake right away when He spoke anyway.But he was a real man in any case, which was perfectly clear to her, not even an apparition that one can tell is external and real and not a dream even if it isn't physical. Jesus was fully physical though changed. I've had a fair amount of experience as a matter of fact, most of it during the period when I was avidly studying religions and the occult before I became a Christian, including conversations with other people who had had such experiences, in other religions or just spontaneously. There is no confusing any kind of supernatural event, apparition or whatnot, with a purely mental event such as a dream.The apparition I saw was an impersonation of a mentally disturbed homeless man who had threatened me on the street one day. My best guess is that the man was demon possessed and it was a demonic impersonation that appeared in my room threatening me again. He disappeared in a flash when I invoked Jesus Christ. The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end.I did once have a frightening vivid dream I suddenly woke up from. I knew it was a dream, it was not an apparition, it was a dream of a threatening furious monster of some sort, but it was frightening to the point of my knees actually knocking together, which had never happened to me before. I stopped feeling frightened when I prayed. But there was no doubt this was a dream in my own mind, while the apparition was actually in the room with me. Yes and if you saw an apparition as I did you too would know it was real. The reason I think I had such experiences is that I was heavily involved in reading about religions and the occult, and even practicing some occultic oracles. That sort of thing will open a person to such experiences. I actually felt the atmosphere around me to be sort of electrically charged at times during that period. Believe me, well no don't bother since you would rather believe your own theories than anything any witness has to say, but I do know the difference between the real physical world and intrusions from some other world, and dreams and other phenomena my own mind produces. And I wasn't even doing drugs. And yours is a paragraph full of ignorant prejudice. Some are, but it's not how one becomes a Christian, though people may deceive themselves about that. You have to be born again to be a Christian, whether you grew up in it or converted later as I did. How certain you are of your absolutely unevidenced unexperienced purely theoretical prejudices, and you apparently even think you are a mind reader. People who know about all these things might as well not bother explaining any of it to you. It is at points like this when the futility of discussion here leads me to think it's over, and more than that to wish it was over, sometimes causing me to declare that it's over. But I'll not do that this time since who knows what nonsense I'll be called upon to answer next. Ah well. See, this discussion SHOULD be over. It should never have been started. Of course there are. But a careful, honest and literate study should reveal the huge differences. I won't hold my breath.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Sounds like something il Donald might say.You keep making such claims Faith yet just as in every other area you never produce any evidence or simply repeat dogma.What are those HUGE differences?FInstead, what we get are repetitions of totally unsupported assertions like the following.

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The apparition I saw was an impersonation of a mentally disturbed homeless man who had threatened me on the street one day. My best guess is that the man was demon possessed and it was a demonic impersonation that appeared in my room threatening me again. He disappeared in a flash when I invoked Jesus Christ. The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end.

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That is not evidence of anything but that you are telling a story. It is not evidence it ever happened or it being possible or of demons or of the Power of invoking Jesus or anything else.The Bible stories are the same.They are evidence of people repeating stories, they are anonymous regardless of your Clubs dogma, at best hearsay and most often contradictory and evolving just like folk tales.A great example is the Great Commission and the tale of Paul's encounter which both show ever sign of classic folk tales and legends.

I think you were pretty much done when you said to PaulK, "I have nothing else to offer you." You've gone into your parrot mode of repeating baseless assertions. More baseless assertions mixed in with baseless personal accusations. Let's just leave the personal out of this and discuss the evidence you have. Which you've already admitted doesn't exist. PaulK isn't using accusations as argument. He's noting that "blustering and bullying" is "neither honest nor productive." He's prodding you to get off your insult merry-go-round and actually engage in discussion that is more than mere baseless assertion or even simply made up. I don't know whether any good statistics exist on this, but Why Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing religious group from the Pew Research Center contains some interesting information. By 2050 or so Muslims will likely outnumber Christians because of a higher fertility rate. But even more interesting is what it has to say about conversion rates:

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Meanwhile, religious switching — which is expected to hinder the growth Christians by an estimated 72 million between 2015 and 2060 — is not expected to have a negative net impact on Muslim population growth.

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In other words, at present and going forward Christianity has a net negative conversion rate and Islam does not. Except that according to the Pew Research Center Christianity is gaining converts at a slower rate than Islam. So is the converse true, that winning a debate at EvC is evidence that you're wrong? Don't you usually declare yourself the winner in most debates here? Following your logic, once you've declared yourself the winner that means you're wrong. In other words, we've just been treated to more Faith nonsense, especially since in reality judgment lies in the hands of onlookers, not participants. "A demon-run superstitious nightmare" seems just as descriptive of Christianity as what came before. You know, I bet the Romans echoed much the same sentiments as you: "Boy, those Greeks, what a superstitious nightmare of a religion they had - we're so much ahead of them what with Jupiter and the rest."--Percy

Yes I keep making claims. Christianity is not built on the kind of evidence you are all insisting on here although as I've said I consider its witness evidence to be quite sufficient, and it has lots more of that than any other religion has.Huge differences include the fact that it's mostly history intended to demonstrate the reality and character of God.You will not find that in any other religion. And you certainly won't find the very human accounts given there, that do not whitewash the character of the people but honestly report on their achievements and failures, the people in both Testaments.The histories were written by many people over many centuries too, continuing the accounts of God's doings in the world in different cultural contexts and historical eras. I don't know how many witnesses Buddha had, but we know Mohammed was the sole author of the Koran, the whole thing was based on his own experience with "Gabriel" and his own bad readings of the Bible. The Bible requires two or three witnesses to establish any case, and the Bible itself gives us many more than two. One single man who gets the Bible all wrong and produces a bunch of instructions from the moon god Allah is not exactly a trustworthy witness beyond any of the attempts you all are making to discredit the good witnesses that wrote the Bible\.The Bible describes many miracles that only God could do, that are described in context sometimes with much detail, and reasons given for them, as one would expect for something real, and all of them for the purpose of demonstrating the character of God Himself, which is the main purpose of the Bible, and of course His plan to save us from sin and Satan's rule.You came up with two unlikely miracles, and you suggest no context whatever for the split moon, why it happened or anything to validate it. Far as you go it seems like a perfectly gratuitous meaningless event. The cobra to shield Buddha is interesting in contrast to the miracles Jesus did which were done BY Him and not for Him, miracles He did out of compassion or kindness for others. Did Buddha do any miracles? Did Mohammed? Did they die to save you from your sins?All in all the Bible teaches us about God Himself, enough to learn to love and worship Him, enough to learn what His laws are, how He judges people and nations, what righteousness is, how we fall so short of it which is why we would all go to Hell if He hadn't sent us Jesus to save us from that.The Bible is also notable for its prophecies that begin back in the Garden of Eden with the promise of sending a Redeemer to save us, through the woman, who would crush the head of the serpent, who is later revealed to be Satan. The interwoven historical and prophetic complexities of the biblical revelation over many centuries are enough to distinguish it from the other religions.And Christianity did just about singlehandedly transform western civilization from a motley bunch of violent pagan tribal cultures with their pagan tribal religions to a civilization that formulated its laws for the general good of humanity because of the goodness of God that it taught. The Bible is presented to be believed. Repent and believe, we are told. The message of the Bible is to be preached, preached in all the world.It has nothing in common with myths and legends but of course that's a matter of personal judgment so all I can say is that anyone who thinks it does has warped ability to judge such things.There is just NO comparison with other religions. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Actually, no. The Romans were quite happy to copy the Greeks, or any other culture for that matter, if they had something they wanted. Jupiter was their name for Zeus, and all the other Greek gods had their Roman counterparts. They had no problem with Greek religion. But they DID have a problem with Christianity since Christians would not bow down to any of their many gods, only the one God of the Hebrew scriptures.But I believe you are right that this discussion has been over for some time. The problem is that I keep being drawn to answer further enormities you all post here long after it's over by any reasonable \measure.ABE: The context of the growth of the religions I've had in mind is the early years when they spread out, Christianity predominantly by the preaching of missionaries, through its inherent appeal, Islam by the sword, and others probably just by cultural accommodation in their own part of the world. By now the anti-Chrsitian forces have been hammering so long at the only true religion they've succeeded in convincing people of all the lies about it that are promoted here. But the Church has been deteriorating as well under this onslaught and lost much of its moral and intellectual power, And meanwhile Islam keeps growing because of its high birth rate. The main point I was making was that Christianity is inherently appealing, and it is, in its early years it spread rapidly by preaching alone across the Middle East and Europe. Now the world is sliding back into the paganism Christianity supplanted, much of Europe has given up the religion that made it great. The Antichrist is on the ascendant. 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.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Again, that is simply another unsupported assertion and quite frankly, utterly misrepresents and perverts what is actually written in the Bible stories. And you continue making silly unsupported and quite frankly, false assertions. There is not a single so called miracle in the Bible that is any different than the miracles found in every other religion despite your claims. There you go spotting dogma yet again. Frankly the common sales pitch of Jesus dying to save me from my sins just makes God look stupid and Jesus' life a total waste. And yet you have never been able to actually support even a single prophesy as being fulfilled. Sorry but Biblical Prophecy in Christianity seems simply a con game or fantasy; pretty worthless.Faith, what you are presenting are just dogma, misrepresentation, perversions of Jesus message and not a single example of how Christianity is different than any other religion.Where are the HUGE differences?

Truly I'm not just defending Christianity because it's my religion. I believe that objectively it is the one true and only religion, the only one that presents the one true God, is based on historical realities and written by men guided by God. I saw its superiority early on in my study of religions and was drawn to it. I happened to be interested enough to continue reading about it over the years, so I learned a lot that just kept building on that.It reveals among other things that all the other religions are man-made with the help of the fallen angels who have ruled this planet since the Fall of Adam and Eve. Jesus calls Satan "the prince of this world" because he won the right to rule us at that time. His mission as Savior was to defeat Satan which He did at the cross, saving from his clutches all who will believe in Him. "To save us all from Satan's power" says the Christmas carol that starts out telling merry gentlemen not to dismay because Christ has come. Another says "The Lord is come, let Earth receive her King" and says His salvation extends "far as the curse (the Fall) is found. Another says "Long lay the world in sin and error pining till He appeared and the soul knew its worth." I love that line, there is nothing about the worth of the human soul in other religions. "A thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious Day." You will get nothing remotely like this in any other religion.Other religions simply aren't true, only Christianity is given to us by God Himself. Jesus is "the way, the truth and the life, and no-one comes to the Father except by Him." And at the risk of offending people who insist the religions must all be valid paths to God, or that theirs is right and Christianity is wrong, all I can say is that the others will not save you but Christ can and will if you wish Him to.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Dogma, by the way, is simply codified Truth. I think it was Chesterton who wrote about the importance of dogma.

Each freezing of a water droplet into ice is a one-time event, but they're all the same thing, just as all of Jesus' appearances after his resurrection were all the same thing. Miracles are not one time events. Appearances of the Virgin Mary are particularly common. As has been explained, eyewitness evidence is the worst and most unreliable form of evidence. Research tells us this is so. DNA evidence freeing prisoners convicted by eyewitness testimony happens frequently, and is a real world demonstration of the unreliability of eyewitness reports. Research also shows that people, in the absence of other evidence, do no better than chance at telling when someone's testimony is at odds with what really happened. Plus the Bible eyewitness information is hearsay information written by credulous believers. Thought my post was to GDR you're more than welcome to step in, but in that case I asked you first, plus I don't believe in miracles and so have no miracles to choose from. Pick something that's a miracle to you. Please, no Virgin Mary sightings.--Percy