My Beliefs- GDR

Oh, that's ok then, he's just responsible for our disasters and calamities.
I rather suspect that GDR may disagree with that too; generally, he thinks God is a decent bloke. Apart from murdering people with his disasters and calamities I suppose?

Disasters and calamities are God's judgments for sins and crimes. A decent bloke does not allow crimes to go unpunished. Today's idea of a "decent bloke" seems to be to abolish the death penalty, not make a big deal out of pedophile priests, and so on. That's not a decent bloke, that's a guy who doesn't mind letting evils in the other sense run rampant in society.

Sorry Faith but that is just another example of how vile and evil the god you try to market is.The god you try to market is worthy only of contempt or derision and must be opposed by any honest moral entity.Disasters and calamities are not discreet and effect both the sinner and the innocent, the criminal and the blameless. For disasters and calamities to be God's judgments for sins and crimes the god must be ignorant, immoral, without empathy, evil, inept and incapable of reasonable action.

Actually they don't corroborate each other. There are several things they actually disagree on. Sure there are a number of commonalities that would have come from the same sources but they are clearly drawn from a variety of sources.Acts is actually just a continuation of the Gospel of Luke. I said most of the NT. Mark would have been written while eye-witnesses were still alive as well as all of Paul's Epistles. The rest of it is uncertain and actually Faith does make a good point that they do appear to be written prior to the destruction of 70AD.However the writings exist and it is evidence. By faith we accept or reject the writings as we can't know the truth in the empirical sense.

It is your belief that sentience has evolved from non-intelligent elements. If the potential didn’t exist in those initial cells then how did sentience become part of the evolutionary process?

The belief in God, or even in the possibility of God has to come first. No God- no resurrection. If there is a God then resurrection becomes a possibility to be considered. It isn’t circular at all.

This shows the tortuous reasoning you have to use in order to shoehorn reality into your beliefs and preconceived ideas. Also, the dishonesty of your arguments. Earlier you stated that since the bible is a collection of different "books", they can be used to corroborate each other. Maybe you just don't know what the word means. And we have no idea who wrote them. Another assertion with no evidence. Not really modern scholarship shows otherwise. Mark probably dates from approx 70CE. This is still 40 years post supposed crucifixion. 40 years with absolutely nothing. After 40 years it would just be stories about stories. Mark was probably written in Rome to a Roman audience. So 40+ years and 1500 of miles from site of the stories. Yeah sure. Find me some evidence, not tradition. But what is it evidence for? For the historical existence of Jesus and a resurrection it is thin gruel. For people believing a story it is evidence. So why are you arguing with me? We both agree that the only thing that justifies your beliefs on this is faith and faith alone.

Exactly. You have to have a god before it's even worth considering the resurection.So, for some reason you chose the Christian God - why was that? There are so many to choose from but only one - afaik - relies on the resurrection for confirmation.Did you research all possible gods, choose one and THEN accept the resurection?

I can settle for that. So, when you say we can either accept it or reject it, you can see why many do reject it. Because it's not conclusive. This sounds like mystical nonsense.Emotions are chemicals in your body that you experience. Morality is nothing more than a set of guidelines that is group specific - what's moral to you might not be seen as moral by someone from another country. And we don't know what consciouness is yet, so we can't speak either way with any assurance. But here again you put the cart before the horse because you know of no such thing as a non-material world. Whatever these things are they quite obviously exist in reality. Well clearly it had the potential to do so since we're all here. When chemicals react it has the potential to do A LOT of things. Again even IF god did it, chemistry and evolution are clearly the way he did it.Everything looks to play out naturally. The only reason you assume a creator had a hand in it is because you start with the premise that god exists - cart before the horse, begging the question - instead of waiting for conclusive evidence, which you agree doesn't exist.It's like with the unicorns - the only reasonable position is to start with the premise that they don't exist. That evidence would need to be conclusive, right? You wouldn't accept as evidence only stories written about unicorns, right? That's not an answer to the question I asked. I asked you NOTHING about why anything exists.You admit that we can observe natural forces, and obviously we don't observe any god guiding anything. So by your own words the only objective evidence is natural forces.Why they are here is what plays out in the world of theoretical physics - the nerdiest of the nerds work there. I'm not going to pretend I fully grasp String Theory or multiuniverse and m-theory, but, I will say from the words of the experts that they have pretty good math to back up their theories. So we may yet know why the laws of physics and reality exist.But again, this has nothing to do with my question about objective evidence. So no evidence outside of the Bible. It then remains non conclusive as far as evidence goes.- Oni

So it's easier to fake it. Now you understand. I would guess not. But this had nothing to do with the question. Flying is hard for me to do without some kind of machinery. But if you're Superman doing it then not so much. Yeah I can create an entity that can do anything too. That's pure speculation on your part. You couldn't possibly know those details. I'm sorry, did Paul actually see the real Jesus or did he claim to see Jesus on the way to Demascus?So you have Paul who says "Oh yeah he appeared to me" which is not evidenced, and 500 people who believed him. And you're saying that's hard to fake? No empirical proof for the non existence of god? That's silly. How do you provide proof for something that has no objective evidence for it's existence? How do you disprove there are no unicorns? You don't. There is no evidence for unicorns therefore it is reasonable to conclude unicrons don't exist.Without conclusive evidence for god, starting with the premise that there is a god and from that concluding the resurrection is possible is putting the cart before the horse. In the face of your reasoning being a fallacy, saying you're satisfied with it is baffling to me.- Oni

Maybe you should read up a little on evolution.
There was a time when there was no intelligent life, now there is. Ergo, intelligent life evolved from non-intelligent precursors.In order for you to argue this could not have happened you must show another way. In other words you need to provide evidence of this out side agency. Argument from Incredulity is just another one of your many logical fallacies.

I only have a minute but I just can't let this pass. The God you worship then is no different than the god that the fundamentalist Muslims worship. It is a vengeful God that demands absolute obedience, or he'll bring suffering to the good and evil alike. The only difference between your Christianity and the beliefs of the Pharisees that Jesus riled against is that you have changed one set of laws for another. It is so different than the God whose Word we see incarnate in Jesus Christ.

Do we have any record of people dying within a few hours without even having their legs broken?The story of the crucifixion, as written, is unconvincing. Even with your embellishments, it's only barely plausible. Logic certainly does not "dictate" that the story is true.

According to the Bible, God's attempts to prevent evil from running rampant in society have been a dismal failure. The flood accomplished nothing; it took five minutes for evil to run rampant again. Confounding the languages at Babel accomplished nothing; it took five minutes for multilingual evil to run rampant again. The Assyrians and Babylonians could trample Israel under their feet time and time again and still evil ran rampant in society.How may times does the plan have to fail before you and your God can see that it isn't working?

Amazing. So many here consider it "vile and evil" that sin be punished, apparently believing that liars, thieves, adulterers, murderers, rapists, torturers, should be free from punishment. Remarkable.Or there's this other view put forth by Ringo that the punishment hasn't worked anyway, the Flood and the rest of it, which just makes me wonder how he knows that, since things might be hundreds of times worse than they are if those punishments hadn't occurred, so depraved is the human race since the Fall. I'd also add that as long as the human race is fighting God's judgments instead of making them the basis for our own laws things are going to get even worse as time goes on.And now GDR can't seem to notice that Jesus Christ was sent by this very same God who is required by His own righteousness to punish sin, and sent to PAY for the sins we all commit if we'll only turn from those sins and trust in Him. If we were not all sinners deserving of punishment there would have been no need for Christ to die for us. Does nobody here have any sense at all of how GUILTY we all are for all the wrongs we commit every day, and how much we DESERVE to be punished for those wrongs, and therefore how wonderful it is that God has provided a way for us to be forgiven for those wrongs by the death of His Son?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.