What to believe, crisis of faith

Can I go out a shoot a feral child whose raiding my chicken coop? If not why not? Is it that people recognise (and sciences investigations don't usurp that) that a person is a person irrespective of cognitive performance. Can science put a probe into someones brain and locate the part of them that knows that they are an "I am". No it can't. How can it even be tested?All cognitive (happy, sad, elated, in love etc) describes are the decorations that hang on the tree of "I am". They don't say anything about the tree itself.

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."

As arrogant as it sounds I'm afraid that's the case. But if someone did know that was the case then arrogant (and probably exclusive) it would sound. Not that that can be taken as evidence of course - it could be plain arrogance without any knowledge of truth. The reason I can be certain for myself is quite simple. Like Robin Rohin I was lucky to be a blank slate about things God. Zero information, no interest, no need of God (or so I thought). Then something happened (see first post). And it was only later that I found what had happened to match exactly with what the Bible says happens. When i say I know the truth I have to limit that by saying I don't know everything about the truth - but that God exists as described in the Bible is certain to me. Like if someone was to put a gun to my head and tell to say "God doesn't exist" then the last thought through my earthly head would be "Bang!!" I ain't a fanatic it just that I'm that sure. 100% - couldn't be surer. One thing is certain. You should absolutely not take my word for it. Or any others for that matter. If truth has anything of man attached to it then run like the clappers. The only way to know for sure is that it doesn't have man attached to it - otherwise error will be included.There is a way to 'find God'. It's not rocket scientistry either (otherwise only rocket scientists could find God ) There are a number of logical steps you could take which would patently have nothing to do with man but you know in your heart are perfectly valid ones. If they produced results then you would know, because you know that only God could produce them.A question for you: given that any idea we could have about God would pale into the laughable were we actually faced with him/it, can man do anything directly from within his own capability to find God?If the answer is 'nothing' then your on the right track...

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."

One of the Bible verses anti-holiday people use talks about God wanting the names of pagan gods forgotten.I don't know anyone who worships Easter/Oestre. And the majority of people who know that Easter is the name of an Egyptian fertility goddesss were told that by anti-holiday Christians (like I used to be). So, as far as I can tell, the only people spreading the memory and knowledge of the Egytian goddess of fertility are the people who refuse to celebrate Easter!I don't call it Easter, either, because it's one of the few original Christian holidays, celebrated from Christianity's earliest days. It seems important enough to me to focus on its tie to Passover and its celebration of the resurrection, even in its name, but trying to remind everyone of who Easter was seems counter-productive.

That's in the ballpark. I always felt that human beings are WAY too special a being to have so meaningless an origin and fate as atheism and evolution ascribe. Biblical religion agrees with me. But then IIRC some Asian religions also have a similar respect for the human soul as something special in creation. Buddhism teaches that being born human is a very high honor. {Edit: The Asian custom -- is it only Japanese? -- of bowing to another person when you meet, I understood to derive from a religious recognition of the high value of a human being. Maybe Ben knows about the origin of this.)This message has been edited by Faith, 09-19-2005 01:04 PM

Yes, such claims as an immortality which consists of living on in the minds of others being a better sort of immortality than the real thing strikes me as cant. For one thing it's not true that our memory will "live on." It will for a short while, perhaps--a very short while. For another thing, this "immortality" is not going to do us any good if we're dead.I even find it cant if someone claims that their purpose is to make the world a liitle better place than it was before they lived. I'm all for doing good deeds--I even do a few myself-- but actually, deep down, I'm rather selfish. I assumed everyone was. There is no reasonable basis for morality. All moral systems are ungrounded. If someone comes up with some moral dictum--say, that I ought to do such and such because it is good for the human race--I can reply, why should I care about the human race? If my short range actions hurt the human race but help me, why not help me? Then they will reply, "But you ought to care." Why should I? There's no end to that. Now there's an interesting idea. I had not thought of it like that before. Sometimes, Faith, you are rather brilliant.

I agree. Such sentiments always give me a case of existential nausea.And I see we agree about morality in general too. I could tell you'd see these things the same way I do -- or at least did.

One idea that I've tinkered with is that perhaps people have a moral faculty as one might have a mathematical faculty. And just as some people are better at mathematics than others, some people might be better at morals than others. One person's moral faculty might be coarse, another's very sensitive. It seems to me that we see this variation in people we have known. The reason for the coarsening might be due either to environment or heredity, just as bad schooling might help to "coarsen" one's mathematical faculty.This message has been edited by robinrohan, 09-19-2005 04:47 PM

Yes! Nice observations.As a fundy I understand the hereditary factor as a combination of our inborn individual uniqueness plus the fact that the Fall, whose effects we inherit, has acted in our individual ancestries in very different ways.

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Can science put a probe into someones brain and locate the part of them that knows that they are an "I am". No it can't. How can it even be tested?

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Science can and does, actually, study the self-aware part of human cognition.There are ways of testing if young children can differentiate between themselves and other people, and there seems to be a stage of development at which very young humans begin to realize that their minds are seperate from the minds of others around them.Autism is another very obvious example of when there is something wrong in the brain which renders autistic people unable to realize that other people have their own thoughts, points of view and plans, and have difficulty understanding others'attitudes and emotions.

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The reason I can be certain for myself is quite simple. Like Robin Rohin I was lucky to be a blank slate about things God. Zero information, no interest, no need of God (or so I thought).

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You never heard of Christmas or Easter, never even saw a church before, never realized that Christianity existed, nobody you ever knew or talked to or read or listened to or saw on the TV ever mentioned God, ever?...in IRELAND?You know, the country that has had religious conflict for generations?Come on, what kind of cock and bull story are you telling yourself?

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Then something happened (see first post). And it was only later that I found what had happened to match exactly with what the Bible says happens.

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What about someone who tells me that they never heard of Buddhism before, but then something happens to them, and when they go read the tenets of Buddhism, the thing that happened to them matched exactly with what the tenets of Buddhism predicted?Why are they wrong and you right?

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When i say I know the truth I have to limit that by saying I don't know everything about the truth - but that God exists as described in the Bible is certain to me.

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What about all of the other people who say that the gods exist as described in the bhagavad gita?They are just as sure as you are, they have also had profound things happen to them, and they may be even more sure than you are.Why are they wrong and you right?

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Like if someone was to put a gun to my head and tell to say "God doesn't exist" then the last thought through my earthly head would be "Bang!!" I ain't a fanatic it just that I'm that sure. 100% - couldn't be surer.

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The people who drank the Kool-Ade were even more sure than that.So were the Heaven's Gate people, and so are all of the suicide bombers of various religions.If we are to use willingness to die for their beliefs as a judge of the correctness of that belief, then they sure seem much more correct than you are.So far, you have not provided one bit of reason for me to believe you over anyone else proclaiming they have "The Truth."You are no differnt from people who are 100% sure that the aliens speak to them through their fillings.

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One thing is certain. You should absolutely not take my word for it. Or any others for that matter. If truth has anything of man attached to it then run like the clappers. The only way to know for sure is that it doesn't have man attached to it - otherwise error will be included.

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So, how did you ever learn about Christianity if it wasn't through men? Men wrote the Bible, didn't they, and preach it to people?

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A question for you: given that any idea we could have about God would pale into the laughable were we actually faced with him/it, can man do anything directly from within his own capability to find God?

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If the answer is 'nothing' then your on the right track...

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There are a thousand religions with millions of adherents, many of which sound exactly as you do. Perfect surety.You can't all be right, so how does one choose?

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That's in the ballpark. I always felt that human beings are WAY too special a being to have so meaningless an origin and fate as atheism and evolution ascribe.

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But that's just your own self-centeredness, vanity and lack of humility influencing your choice of belief.The lack of feeling the most important came first and you didn't like that, so instead of accepting that you aren't the center of the universe (being the most influential species on the planet isn't special enough for you, apparently), you embrace a religion in which your ego is constantly stroked.Forgive me, but that sounds incredibly narcissistic and childish.

I've never understood your way of thinking about this. It just makes no sense to me at all, never has. My way of thinking about it seems simply objective. We ARE special creatures, we are amazing creatures, and it is such a WASTE to think of us as fertilizer for the cemetery grass. But we can agree to disagree.

Let me put that in a different perspective for you, if I may.If we pose the question why we are amazing creatures, the usual - and rather easy - answer from religion is that we were made and meant that way. But there is another possible answer, and it involves thinking about who is amazed.Are we amazing creatures to anyone else but ourselves? The answer is no. Never have other creatures stepped forward and exclaimed: "What amazing creatures humans are!" We are only amazing creatures to ourselves. And the reason we are amazing to ourselves is that we are amazable.We are not the only amazing creatures. Platypuses are amazing creatures too. They are unique in several ways. But no one in his right mind would suppose that a platypus itself is ever amazed by its own uniqueness. That's because it doesn't have the capacity to be amazed.But we do. We are amazable and that is why we are amazing creatures - to ourselves.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 20-Sep-2005 01:27 PM

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We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

Forgive the example but it does illustrate. Does the fact that a person is told about the birds and the bees, that they see the family dog give birth to puppies, that they see the sexual organs described in detail in their school science books in any way prepare them for the experience of an orgasm?Is there anyway for a person who has had such an experience to convey to a person who hasn't what it's like?Ireland is not any near as religious as you think it is. I went to church about 6 times in my life, the mass tells you approx zero about God, there was no talk of God at home or in any of my friends homes. Sure I'd heard of the Bible and some guy who hung on a cross for our sins and that a piece of bread was supposed to be his body. Heaven for good people, hell for bad people maybe. None of it bears any resemblance to the Gospel though, nor could it be said to have prepared me for an encounter with God. Quite the contrary in fact. I'd listen to what they have to say. From what I gather from a buddhist friend however it appears buddhism doesn't predict anything particularily. You follow the tenets of buddhism to reach enlightenment and should get sub-benefits on the way.One of the 'experiences' I had was the sudden arrival and never to depart feeling of peace. Out of the blue without doing anything to get it I now knew everything was alright. Somehow, whatever worries I had carried up to that point, although still there, fell into insignificance compared to the relief this peace gave. Later I read about "peace which surpasses all understanding" and like a key in a lock the two matched together. From whence this peace? From God.And no, I wasn't under the influence of drugs at the time I'm not familiar with the Kool-Ade cult but in the other cases your talking suicide. Someone putting a gun against my head and pulling the trigger isn't suicide.At the end of the day Schraf, it's up to you to decide. Ask any Christian here and they'll tell you the same thing: they can no more prove God to you than they could an orgasm. The only person who can prove God to you is God.Asking him to do so is as good a place as any to start - although it would make sense to bear in mind what it is your asking and consider how you might go about asking for evidence.God bless...Ian

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Romans 10:9-10: " if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved....."

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I just couldn't find a reasonable basis for it. How does one CARE about an evolutionarily useful adaptation? Loving and protecting your child because you are programmed to love your child? Yuck. Blech. Sucks the breath right out of the lungs to think like that. Shrivels the heart. How do people manage to make a LIFE out of such ideas?

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Those things are LIFE, not something we make out of ideas. They are things that most people think about. I just love my child, I don't worry about why.Existence is what it is no matter what ideas, stories, or explanations we come up with to explain or justify it to ourselves.Even if the explanations or reasonings of science AND religion have it all wrong, life continues anyway.

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"The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which lasts forever." --Anatole France