Why Belief?

Wow, the guy can't say a thing about his own experience without you dogging his every move and telling him he's wrong -- about his own experience yet. According to you, he is a Christian because his culture is Christian and you are adamant about that. Nothing he says counts for anything.He's right, it is very easy not to notice anything Christian in this culture, although it may be so obvious to you. I can say that I too had just about no sense at all of anything Christian in my environment before I became a believer. Yes, there were quite a few Christian churches in my town too, but I was only inside them when community events were held there and their Christian meaning hardly crossed my mind. After childhood I never went to a church service except to a Unitarian service once in a while because that was the thing to do among us "intellectual" types. I don't remember anything about it. I think it was pretty boring and irrelevant. In my case, however, I was in a trendy little town on the West Coast where there was every other kind of religion in evidence more than in most American towns, all the Eastern stuff, the New Age stuff. However, I only noticed those because I had friends who were involved in them, which I found irritating and depressing since in those days I was an atheist and considered all religion to be irrational and weird.

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Wow, the guy can't say a thing about his own experience without you dogging his every move and telling him he's wrong -- about his own experience yet.

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The largest determinant of what religion a person will identify with is the religion of his or her parents and local community in which he or she was raised.

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This is simply a fact.

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If it were not true, then we should see much less regional pattern and much less consistency over time of what religion people are.

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Yes, so nobody can say one thing about his/her own experience without being told that he's lying if his experience doesn't conform to the statistics.

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According to you, he is a Christian because his culture is Christian and you are adamant about that. Nothing he says counts for anything.

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To say one is not influenced AT ALL by the culture one is raised in WRT what religion one chooses among the thousands in existence is silly. It is particularly silly as it looks like he was born and raised in Texas. Last I checked, Texas is in the Bible Belt.

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I see. You know all about him. He knows nothing. And of course he's lying if he doesn't immediately agree with your statistical way of understanding everything.

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He's right, it is very easy not to notice anything Christian in this culture, although it may be so obvious to you.

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Does the business you work in close for Ramadan? Do you have a cleric calling you to prayers five times a day from the minaret in the center of town? Do you see the Buddhists providing food for the monks at the Temple near where you were raised?

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Complete irrelevance. The point is that if a person tells you he became a Christian completely independent of the culture the not-only-polite but reasonable thing to do is believe him.

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I can say that I too had just about no sense at all of anything Christian in my environment before I became a believer. Yes, there were quite a few Christian churches in my town too, but I was only inside them when community events were held there and their Christian meaning hardly crossed my mind.

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But were you inside Jewish Temples, Mosques, Hindu Temples, Shinto shrines, or Buddhist temples just as much as the Churches?

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I'm sure your reasoning makes sense to you but it's bogus. The people I hung out with were "progressives" who disdained Christianity as so many at EvC do. One of my friends was raised in a Jewish atheist family and went through a pseudo-Christian cult before settling into a New Age spirituality. One was raised Southern Baptist and is now a Buddhist priestess. Two raised nominally Christian lived in a Hindu ashram for many years. All those raised Christian that I can think of otherwise went through some New Agey kind of spirituality and settled into atheism. Also, do you know how many Baptists there are in China now? Let's put it this way: statistics lie about the things that really matter.

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After childhood I never went to a church service except to a Unitarian service once in a while because that was the thing to do among us "intellectual" types. I don't remember anything about it. I think it was pretty boring and irrelevant. In my case, however, I was in a trendy little town on the West Coast where there was every other kind of religion in evidence more than in most American towns, all the Eastern stuff, the New Age stuff. However, I only noticed those because I had friends who were involved in them, which I found irritating and depressing since in those days I was an atheist and considered all religion to be irrational and weird.

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So, Christianity is, indeed, very dominant in our culture and these Eastern religions are considered "wierd" or "trendy"?

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Kindly read my last sentence again. You seem to have missed the "all" in "all religion." And yes, Eastern religions were indeed very trendy at the time.Nobody is denying that Christianity is dominant in our culture, more or less still though dying fast, but you are missing the point that it is very possible to grow up in this once-Christian culture and it have zero impact. It's simply a meaningless cultural backdrop with no more religious influence than all the McDonalds and KFCs in every town. Really becoming a Christian is a very big thing that has nothing to do with culture. It is not something you choose. it is something that happens to you. If you would like to understand it at all, you should listen to those who have been through it. But of course if you just prefer sounding erudite without knowing a thing, keep going with the statistics.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-06-2005 10:20 AMThis message has been edited by Faith, 05-06-2005 10:25 AM

And P.S., concerning my own experience, it was not easy to become a Christian because of my circle of "progressive" friends. I put off facing the fact myself that that's the direction I was headed in for quite some time because of the disdain people around me felt for Christianity in particular. Any other religion would have been acceptable. I was arriving at my belief strictly through reading books on religion. A couple of friends gave me books arguing in favor of Gnosticism and universalism to try to steer me away from where they feared I was headed, but I'd already read most of that stuff by that point on my own. And this was way before I even set foot inside a church. Psychologically it was something like how I suppose it would be if you, say, or Percy, or some others here, were to begin thinking maybe fundamentalist/evangelical Bible-believing Christianity is right after all.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-06-2005 10:36 AM

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Why do you believe in your religion? I'm not asking for proof that it is true, but I'm curious as to what started you believing, for instance, that the Bible is actually the word of God.

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Sure, faith is what sustains the belief. But what was the root of the belief itself?

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Since I've already started to say something about this to schrafinator above, I might as well make it official. The root of my belief was simply believing it's the truth. I was persuaded by many books I read that the Bible really is the word of the one and only God, but it took a while to get there.I came to this belief from total atheism that disdained all religions. One day I simply believed what I read in a couple of books by Hindu gurus where they were saying, each from a different Hindu school, that God is real and something they had experienced personally. That set me on a quest to find God.What God was I had no clear idea. I wasn't really attracted to the Hindu methods though I did read further in them for a while. I had some idea that God is "Universal Mind" that came off my reading in Hinduism, which is not a bad working model. I'm sure my idea of God as a Person was conditioned from my churchgoing as a child but otherwise I wasn't at all attracted to Christianity at first. I assumed all religions worshiped the same God and it was just a matter of finding what appealed to me most, not a matter of truth.But eventually I had to realize that it WAS a matter of truth as there were too many contradictions between the various relgions. Eventually I ran into the Problem of Evil -- how can God exist and evil also? As I turned from the Eastern religions and various cultic and occultic writings to Christianity I began to find satisfying answers to that question. And the answer to that question makes clear why humanity needs a Savior.

How right you are. I feel exactly the same way. I cringe when I see I have a reply. In fact I finally turned off the notification feature and just check for any replies when I'm up for it. Glad to be of help. I say fly those colors, don't give in. Wish we could all get together and form a viable front to really deal with some of the strategies on the other side here. No point in being a moderator though, that's as good as capitulating to the opposition.

Since I know exactly what he means, I will answer too, in no particular order of importance:1) It's nothing but a hostile smug way of telling you your views are a bunch of bullpucky, even your own personal experience in this case, which you'd think a person would respect, but no, not here. Not only is it not respected but the Inquisitor is not called on the nasty tactic but rewarded for it while its poor victim is subjected to even more criticism if he objects at all, and finally subjected to discipline or even suspended by the Grand Inquisitor for having the natural reaction which is *RAGE* at such impudent, intrusive, schizophrenogenic and even inhumane mistreatment.2) You did it with your question just now. It's like talking to a Martian who can't comprehend the most trivial fact about human existence, which would be a fun challenge if you really WERE a Martian, but when it's a human being it has the effect of a nearly indescribable discouragement in the possibility of communication and an appalling hopelessness about the human race. Since your opposition doesn't do it to you I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about.3) It is false and produces false information, but is treated as the road to truth. It passes for "science" here. It isn't science. It's mere incivility. If the questions at least had some merit, so that answering them would really clarify something important, that would be quite acceptable, and maybe, oh, 5% of the time that's the case, but for the most part here they are merely a form of rude oneupmanship, or a nasty initiation rite, or the sergeant's command that you clean 500 toilets with a toothbrush, which is sure a surprising turn of events when you started out thinking you were here for gentlemanly debate.4) It's like a medieval torture chamber.5, 6, 7) I'm sure there are other ways to say what's wrong with it but I can't think of them, so this is reserved for those when I do.

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Yes, so nobody can say one thing about his/her own experience without being told that he's lying if his experience doesn't conform to the statistics.
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Please show me where I said that Jackal was lying. It is much more likely for a person to be simply wrong or mistaken about something like this rather than to be actively lying.

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I withdraw the statement. I just don't think anybody's personal experience should be challenged as a lie OR as a mistake, since nobody else can make such judgments about your personal experience on such brief acquaintance.Especially when you point to external facts in one's environment and assume an influence that has been denied and that you can't prove.It's like somebody's saying they have no experience of pizza so pizza has played no part in their food likes and dislikes, but you answer Oh but there are many pizza places in every town and pizza ads all over the TV, so OBVIOUSLY your likes and dislikes have been influenced by pizza. That's simply a logical fallacy but you have been continuing to insist on it.

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That is why I have been asking about his particular experinences with other religions in the culture in which he was raised.

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His EXPERIENCE might start to have some relevance -- MIGHT, it depends -- but he has DENIED any relevant experience. Your first claim was that the mere EXISTENCE of Christian churches and events and symbols in the culture PROVED such experience, proved his being influenced by them to his ultimate choice. It doesn't float.

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I mean, if know about Christmas and Easter and Noah's Ark, you attended weddings and events in Christian churches, ever saw any televangelists on television at any time, etc. then it means you were exposed to Christianity.

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Only as a cultural backdrop as I said, which doesn't mean a thing to many people as far as what Christianity really is about, just stories, and meant little to me before I read my way to belief. You are assuming the influence of objective entities on the subjective experience of individuals. You cannot construct an influence on somebody else's mind out of your own observation of opportunities for there potentially to have been such an influence.As could be inferred from one of my posts in this thread, I am the ONLY one of a number of friends and acquaintances from my past who went on to become a Christian in this Christian culture. That includes my own family, none of whom are Christians despite church attendance as children, although I finally got my brother interested enough to attend a church just in the last few years.You can't explain why one friend of mine became a Buddhist by its prevalence in her culture -- if anything her childhood experience was more saturated with Christianity than mine was as she grew up in the deep South while I grew up in the West. Also, I'd have to say the influences on me were very anti-Christian from my teenage years on, same as for her, and I visited her Buddhist meditation session once, and many cultic and occultic practices, and read in many religions and yet ended up Christian without ever going to church.Your assertion about the source of a given individual's ultimate religious belief is unsubstantiated.All you have is statistics, and you don't even break them down to indicate which "Christians" really ARE Christians and which are just cultural Christians who really don't believe anything pertaining to the faith, or who drag themselves to church to please family perhaps but don't really get it -- and in fact believe anything BUT what is taught there -- none of which is being a Christian by the orthodox meaning of the term.You need much more refined criteria for an accurate idea about these things, and certainly when it comes to individuals' statements of the influences on their own convictions, your notions mean nothing.

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I will repeat that I am completely open to the idea that he really wasn't exposed to any Christianity AT ALL growing up in the Bible Belt. I find it highly unlikely that this is the case.
That is why I have been asking about his particular experinences with other religions in the culture in which he was raised.

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You have to define your terms better. You are contenting yourself with extremely broad terminology that you are subjectively defining. What do you mean by being "exposed" to Christianity? He answered honestly that he was not personally INFLUENCED toward Christian belief by any Christian exposure in his life. The same is true for me. Your pointing to all the cultural expressions of Christianity in the environment is meaningless in relation to an individual's belief.

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He's right, it is very easy not to notice anything Christian in this culture, although it may be so obvious to you.
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Does the business you work in close for Ramadan? Do you have a cleric calling you to prayers five times a day from the minaret in the center of town? Do you see the Buddhists providing food for the monks at the Temple near where you were raised?

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No, but neither did my friend who became a Buddhist or those who lived in a Hindu ashram or those who followed various occultic practices or those who became atheists. And how do you account for my atheism for the majority of my life with all this Christian influence you are now saying influenced my current beliefs? It's been there all the time and I didn't get any more cultural exposure to it in the couple of years I was searching for God than before.I'm going to skip some restatements of your same contention because I'll just be restating my own ad nauseum in response.

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I am afraid you didn't really answer the question.

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I am unclear on if you were raised in a very religiously diverse community or if you chose to seek out such people later in life.

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My childhood was spent in a very small town with three Christian churches. I went to one of them. As a teenager I lived in a large city where my friends were academically ambitious and anti-religion, and we influenced each other in those directions. Later my university friends and I shared this same basic mental set, plus our common culture and a university community experience together, but some of them moved on to various nonChristian religions and that plus other life experiences caused us to drift apart, as I stayed an atheist and only began exploring religions myself years later.

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Nobody is denying that Christianity is dominant in our culture,
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Thank you.
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....more or less still though dying fast, but you are missing the point that it is very possible to grow up in this once-Christian culture
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Huh, "once Christian"?
It is the most Christian nation on the planet.

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Most of it is just the empty cultural shell any more. Christianity is dying daily in this country. So many of the anti-Christian opinions expressed on this website are a symptom of its decline.

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...and it have zero impact. It's simply a meaningless cultural backdrop with no more religious influence than all the McDonalds and KFCs in every town.
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Oh, then you believe it has a HUGE impact on our culture, just as fast food chains have had a large impact on our culture.

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These chains have affected almost every aspect of our lives, in fundamental ways that many people are not really aware of, and the influence starts at a very young age.

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That may be so as a generalization but have NOTHING to do with a person's personally choosing to eat at McDonald's or not, which was my point.

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Really becoming a Christian is a very big thing that has nothing to do with culture.
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If that was true, wouldn't we see less of a trend for Christian communities to stay Christian, and Hindu communities to stay Hindu, and so forth, if it had nothing to do with culture?

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Maybe the clearest way to say this is that you have the influence reversed. Christians made Christian culture but the culture doesn't make Christians. Christian culture is the expression of those who have genuinely become Christians, but the culture itself does NOT make people into Christians. It just doesn't work that way.

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It is not something you choose. it is something that happens to you.
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Then why doesn't it "happen to" any of those Buddhists or Hindus who weren't raised in a Christian culture?

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Who says it doesn't? Christianity is growing extremely fast in China for instance:

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Why do we see the pattern of religious distribution that we do, Faith.
Explain how culture has nothing to do with that.

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Again you have the direction of influence reversed. Culture is the creation of Christians, it doesn't create Christians. You are using statistics to answer an individual claim about personal experience and that doesn't fly.

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I keep asking many questions which you don't answer.

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Well I hope I have finally done so.This post really should be stripped down quite a bit to make it easier to wade through, but that's more work than I'm up to after writing so much already. Sorry.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-10-2005 11:28 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 05-11-2005 02:30 AM

Right, and if you happen to live next door to a McDonald's that makes you a Big Mac right? If this society is so influentially Christian, all around us, and is according to you the reason I became a Christian, how do you explain your resistance to it Mr. Frog? Or my resistance for most of my life, or my old friends' and family's resistance to this day? Did you luckily grow up without any Christian influence? Funny, seems to me you've told us the opposite. This whole attempt to explain personal conviction on the basis of external environment is logically hogwash.{EDIT: You have to understand what PARTICULAR influences there were in a person's life, you cannot understand any personal conviction by just looking at the broad statistically described surroundings.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-11-2005 05:03 PM

I didn't say anything so stupid as that a person wouldn't know who Ronald McDonald was or what pizza is, we're talking about PERSONAL CONVICTIONS AND BELIEFS AND I made an analogy to likes and dislikes as well. I'm sure all of us know which churches are in our neighborhood but that doesn't make any of us Christians.

The question is how, given the logic here, you EVER escaped Chrsitianity considering how much of it is in this culture.

Yes, it changed mine as a matter of fact, or actually, to be exact, some "liberal progressive" high school teachers and friends changed it. Not that there was a lot to change. I'd been sent to church all my childhood but it wasn't hard to give it up when presented with "intellectuals" who ridiculed it. From that point until my midforties I was a committed atheist, even a somewhat aggressive one.The point is you cannot judge ANY PERSONAL CONVICTION by mere statistics. That's logical idiocy. You have to KNOW WHAT THE PARTICULAR INFLUENCES ON A PERSON WERE.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-11-2005 05:17 PM

No I wouldn't. I'd have to know you better or interview you to find out about what influenced your feelings.

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How do you know that the man and the van in your mums story are the man and the van involved in the killings?

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That's a valid question.

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How do you know that the prayer stopped the van?

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If the man and the van WERE involved in the killings then the van's stopping is a VERY good indication that it was answer to prayer.

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See? prayer really does change things for the better.

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Tell that to the poor souls whose loved ones jumped from the Twin Towers, or who were taken hostage and killed in Iraq, or who were blown up in Inneskillen. Did their prayers change things for the better?

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I'm sure there's some excuse though, there always is. These horrific, heartbreaking tragedies are all forgotten when a prayer happens to be part of a coincidence.

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Prayers are always answered, the answer might not be the one you wanted but they are all answered. Bit poinltess really don't you think since there is no way to prove that a prayer was answered or not?

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How do you know any of the above are Specter's point of view? You seem to be going on and on about a preoccupation of your own. And what's wrong with the idea that sometimes God doesn't answer our prayers anyway? There are certainly times that when He does it's pretty dramatic, as in the case of a murderer's stopping the van as he did -- IF indeed he was that known murderer.

I suppose but that's true for everybody and irrelevant to this particular point. In this case we're talking about two specific situations, involving our conscious knowledge of how we arrived at belief, and in my case and Jackal125's, we KNOW that the Christian culture around us had NO influence on us because we paid no meaningful attention to it, had no interest in it, did not pursue any of it, did not even know people involved in it.I really don't think you are following the points being made here. You are raising a question that has already been amply answered.

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Despite the fact that you state in message 90 that you began "simply believing it's (Bible?) the truth" and you looked at other religions, perhaps the childhood experience with the Christian church influenced your decision to follow Christ. Couldn't that be considered as a possibility?

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Well, I had the idea of God as a personal God from that early experience, but at the beginning of my later seeking of God I assumed that was the idea of God that all religions have, so there was nothing specifically Christian about it at that point. All I could remember from the Bible was the last line of the Lord's Prayer about the power and the glory, and the line about fearing no evil in the valley of death from the 23rd psalm, which was very helpful during a scary period when I was involved in the occult.Far more influential was the fact that I have already described at length, that I had all the prejudices against Christianity that I find at EvC, and it is not easy to take it at all seriously from that frame of reference. Accepting Jerry Falwell as anywhere in the same universe with me, which was one of the last barriers I had to surmount, was the biggest philosophical hurdle imaginable considering where I started from. And again, I also had NO Christian friends but only friends who shared the same anti-Christian prejudices and tried to dissuade me when they saw me moving in that direction -- except for one, my Jewish best friend from high school who had been through a Christian-flavored cult as well as sundry New Age experiences -- far from Biblical Christianity in any case.In general, to make your case, you have to answer why my childhood churchgoing wasn't influential for the majority of my life, why it was so easy to give up as a teenager, why so many give up their childhood churchgoing and do without Christ for the entire rest of their lives and die atheists or in some other belief system, why some go on to deep involvement in other religions despite their being raised in this same Christian culture, as I have abundantly discussed here already, if you think there's such power in those childhood experiences.

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What about Proverbs 22:6--Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it?

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But I DID turn from it, for about thirty years of my life, and I can hardly be said to have been "trained" in anything, was merely sent to church with my siblings while our parents hardly ever set foot inside the building, and otherwise applied no Biblical precepts to their childraising.

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I'm sure that your church talks about planting seeds that may bear fruit later (in regards to evangelism). Perhaps those seeds were planted in you when you were a young child. You seem to deny that possibility by saying the your late teens and early twenties were devoid of or had a multiplicity of religeous influences.

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Those seeds were planted in almost EVERYBODY I grew up with, more deeply than in me, and NOBODY but I became a Christian -- after thirty years of committed atheism yet.

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Do you really think that you had no Christian influence in your life before you came to your latest understanding of the truth? None? Your own testamony seems to refute this. Did you even consider that this was an influence on you?

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You are not following the discussion here. Schrafinator pointed out all the EXTERNAL Christian STUFF in American environment as if that all by itself should explain why anybody becomes a Christian in America regardless of personal experience to the contrary. She insists on this against all the ways we IGNORED it, hardly noticed it, had no interest in it. This is not the same thing as saying that there was NO childhood influence ULTIMATELY. When I started out seeking God I thought HINDUISM had the truth. Some of my friends were following Hindu gurus, one was a serious practitioner of Buddhism and still is. This is not the same thing as saying that there was NO childhood Christian influence, but THEY had the SAME or even MORE Christian influence. Why do you TOTALIZE this? I haven't totalized it, in fact I could discuss ways my early experience did figure in my later understanding, but in this discussion I'm merely arguing with this silly idea that living in a Christian culture automatically predisposes one to being a Christian -- the evidence is against it.

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Can you see why Shraf and Crash have doubts that there were no influences on Jackel25?

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No. What he said was completely reasonable adn believable and I consider their "doubts" impertinent, rude and false. In his case IIRC he didn't even go to church as a child.

This is degenerating into bickering again and in any case it's off topic. This is my last post on the subject. Again, you are dictating what a person takes INTO HIMSELF and MAKES PART OF HIS WORLDVIEW based on nothing but your own impressions of what COULD BE taken in. Information isn't belief, childhood experience isn't conviction. Jackal125 didn't even mention any church experience whatever and in my case its effect was as I have said, just about nil. The amount of time I spent thinking about God as a child is no more and in fact probably less, than I spent thinking about what I learned in school. OF COURSE I REMEMBER STUFF LIKE THAT. WE'RE TALKING ABOUT WHAT MAKES UP A PERSON'S CONVICTIONS, NOT ROTE STUFF REMEMBERED FROM CHILDHOOD.You are way out of line. I've answered all your questions and you are just badgering me. I've never made any such claims. That's false Christianity that tries to lure people based on worldly fulfillment. Sometimes things get worse when you believe. Go talk to somebody else about that stuff, not me. For me it's always been a matter of what's true. I NEVER lived by it as a child, that's the whole point. It was just a rote thing my parents put me through, pleasant enough, but with little impact. They didn't live it and neither did I. Sure I learned some stuff but if it doesn't become part of your life it's meaningless and that's what both Jackal125 and I are talking about. You guys keep insisting that something you know nothing about had personal meaning to people you don't even know, who have denied it over and over and over. What would a 6 year old's belief amount to anyway? I suppose I believed some of it but it hardly amounted to genuine belief of the sort that really makes a Christian, just on the level of believing in Santa Claus, that goes away with time. Christian belief has to be lived. I certainly didn't live it. What gives you the right to be so rude as to claim you know anything about somebody else against what they tell you? I don't get it. I withdrew that idea in Message 102 and you've committed maybe ten of my pet peeves in this post, so consider it even. One of mine is people who have the arrogance to challenge other people's personal experience. I do believe that calling such personal statements wrong is out of order, to "debate" it is out of order, even if you know the person well, but certainly if you don't, and on the basis of nothing you know about the person himself but on mere general cultural observations of your own it becomes ludicrous in the extreme.And you have ignored MANY MANY points I have made in order to badger me over and over and over about something I have DENIED over and over and over. Give it up.

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It does seem unlikely that if someone watches any news program or reads newspaper or any news magazine would not know that the belief of Christians is that Christ died and rose again to save us from hell.

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You'll have to ask Jackal but I can assure you that simple message never got through to me and I have no idea where I might have heard it, I simply don't remember hearing it. There was even a street preacher I passed many times over a few years and I thought he was an amusing character but I don't remember a word he said. I felt sorry for the guy because he attracted some pretty mean hecklers but I didn't hang out to listen. You have to take my word for that.You can't put BELIEFS, PHILOSOPHICAL IDEAS, CONVICTIONS into a person's head just because they're out there in the environment for some to pick up if they are inclined to do so. I wasn't so inclined. But you guys keep committing this logical fallacy of stuffing people's heads with things they know never made a dent on them.

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The thing we don't know about Jackel25 is if he did participate in society in any way. Again I think that declaring this as an influence for him to "believe" is pushing the envelope quite a bit

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You are simply continuing to make up your own scenarios without regard to anything a person has to say for himself. He answered the question more than once and you and others here just refuse even to try to figure out the context in which he made it, insisting on imposing your own notions and rather aggressively too.

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As I have said, more likely it is: More christians = more opportunity to interact.

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THE FACT IS THAT SUCH INTERACTIONS AND CERTAINLY ANY TRANSFER OF BELIEF ON ACCOUNT OF ANY THAT EXISTED HAVE BEEN DENIED. LIVE WITH IT.OK I'm just repeating myself and so are you.This message has been edited by Faith, 05-12-2005 08:47 PM