I Know That God Does Not Exist

I would guess that those who do it for a pretense are easily enough recognized by those who take it seriously, maybe in many cases even by unbelievers. We can't read the heart but we can judge how people talk and act over enough time to get a clear impression..

This is an old thread and I haven't followed the discussion but if all you've done is declare your opinion as you do above, one has to ask How do you know this? "Gods" have been known by experience all over the world back to antiquity. How do you know they are a "human invention?" I suppose I might have accepted that before I became a believer myself, but once I was a believer in the biblical God I understood all the "gods" according to its teachings, as real fallen angels who are followers of Satan, who became the "ruler of this world" at the Fall when he succeeded in deceiving our first parents.There are those who have actual experience of such entities, whose statements I suppose you just declare to be delusional because that's what you think without any evidence whatever. I've also had experience of demonic things, and heard stories from others with similar experiences. Why should I discount my own or theirs?You have no reason whatever for believing as you do -- just your own LACK of experience of such things. I guess Ayn Rand said so with the same lack of evidence and that's where you got your sense of certainty? "No evidence = irrational" -- OK, you have no evidence that what people describe as their own experiences is false, so your opinion is irrational. And unfair to other human beings.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

\I was talking about those who have actually experienced such beings. Unfortunately I don't know in the case of any of those you list what accounts there may be of such experiences. Dagon has a biblical passage about him, his statue at least, which twice fell down in a position of worship toward Jehovah, but nothing about anyone experiencing the god himself. But people do tell of their own personal encounters with "spiritual" beings and for those stories to be denied on the basis of your own prejudice that defines them as mere inventions, is what I'm saying is unfair to human beings. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Again, I was talking about personal EXPERIENCE of such beings. Yes I am "prepared to say" that many "deities" have an actual reality because I believe that many are actual demons, but I don't know in any particular case without more information.But I was talking about unfairness to those who claim such personal experiences, not saying anything about "followers of [my] deity." Following a "god" is different from knowing it's a real spiritual being.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm not familiar with Penn and Teller -- magicians? I assume they don't claim their magic is real? I'm talking about people who claim to have had REAL experiences of REAL spiritual entities and what's unfair is telling them their perceptions are false on the basis of your own prejudice that they simply HAVE to be merely human inventions.When I was reading up on religions and started having some "spiritual" experiences of my own, I was amazed to discover how many others had had such experiences and were willing to tell me about them simply because I told them about my own. All sorts of experiences of "another world" that most "rational" people haven't experienced and therefore deny.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Each account has to be judged on its own merits. As a baseline position I think it very likely that such encounters are with demons masquerading as beings from other parts of the universe. That's what I think most UFO phenomena really are. I was interested to discover that one researacher, Jacques Vallee, had done a study of UFO phenomena in the context of a study of folklore stories and concluded that the UFOs behave as the creatures of those stories behave. He isn't a Christian and doesn't think of them as demons but he does think of them as "spiritual" beings of some sort whose mission is deception. I think the irrational belief is that there is life in any other part of the universe myself, and that much of the phenomena reported as UFO-related are demonic. There may be some frauds and there may be plenty of misperceptions as well, but basically I think it likely we're talking demonic apparitions.There are other threads about UFOs where I've discussed this by the way.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I'm not sure what you would count as a positive word, Thugs. Not sure what you mean at all. I tend to think you think too highly of unbelievers' opinions but I can't change your mind about that. I would never reduce the Flood the way you do as if God had no good reason for it and as if the unbelievers' complaints about everything God does by way of judgment matter at all. I really don't know what you want to me to say that's positive, but I suppose this isn't it. Sorry.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Let me be even more emphatic if I can. You want something "positive" and I don't know what you mean by that, but all I have to say is that unbelievers absolutely do not have the ability to judge spiritual things. "They are spiritually discerned," as scripture says, and unbelievers do not have the spiritual sense to discern them.We acquire the spiritual sense by believing in the biblical revelation of Christ's salvation as the Messiah. Our spirit is "regenerated" when we believe, which is the same thing as being born again, meaning that the spiritual faculty in us that was lost at the Fall is regenerated. If that is not regenerated we simply cannot understand anything about spiritual things.So the way you keep taking seriously what unbelievers say about these things makes me cringe. I believe you are saved but you aren't acting from your spiritual sense for some reason since you take these fleshly opinions seriously. Before we were saved we didn't understand any of these things either.Do you know the scripture about the man whose breath is only "in his nostrils?" That means the person who is only flesh without a regerenated spirit, his breath is not the breath of the Holy Spirit but only of the flesh through his nostrils. He has the life of the flesh, the life of the body, the life of the first birth as a baby; he does not have the life of the spirit given by the Holy Spirit when we trust in Christ.Of course fleshly people object to God's judgments, and it's always God's judgments they object to. God killed whole tribes of people as judgment on their sins. The flesh hates that of course, but it's righteous judgment against sin. We are to learn from it that sin is a terrible offense that will be severely punished by the Moral Law. God wiped out the whole human race except for Noah and his family in the Flood, as judgment for the sins that had overtaken the whole planet. Read carefully the passages up to the Flood. Violence in the land etc.The fleshly person doesn't like the idea of being judged by God. Judgment hurts, it hurts us all, believers don't escapte it in this life either, but you have to believe it is deserved or you don't understand anything about the Bible at all, and unbelievers do not understand any of it. Taking ANYTHING they say about these things seriously is a big mistake, Phat.So maybe this isn't "positive" but it's the truth.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What I think is unfair is absolutely denying what people tell you about their experiences, telling them they're crazy as some here do, or that it's all their imagination and so on.It's not terribly polite I suppose to reinterpret their experiences but at least it isn't telling them outright that they can't recognize a real experience when they have it.Calling Christianity my 'personal mythology" is in fact extremely rude of you but I guess things have gone so bad in the West that nobody even recognizes how totally Christian it all used to be and what a sad situation we'd be in if it hadn't played such a large part in our history. But I understand: the West has gone to hell in a handbasket and it's getting worse every day. Yeah I guess it seems reasonable enough mathematically, but as long as we're predicting, I predict that Earth is it, and we're it, all the life there is in the whole shebang.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

There were many dissident Christian churches outside the RCC during those years, such as the Waldensians and Albigensians and others, which in some cases hid out in places like valleys high in the Alps. They were persecuted by the RCC of course. I've many times posted the information that over 600 years the RCC murdered some 50 million true Christians, along with a few million Jews and others. When the Protestant Reformation came along they recognized these earlier persecuted churches as precursor Protestants. There were of course some true Christians within the RCC, usually priests because they were the only ones who got to read the Bible and know the truth. The Refomers were after all mostly priests who got to read the Bible and that's how they came to realize the RCC was a pagan superstition and not true Christianity, and it was the Bible that showed them that the papacy was the Antichrist. Anyway yes it was the dominant "church" in Christianity for a millennium, but also yes, it was largely a pagan counterfeit. Reading history is often better than visiting Europe if you want to understand it all. Germany has retained much of its Catholicism of course. Hitler was a Catholic and the pope in his day supported him and was the main provider of escape for the Nazis after the war. And some of the lands lost to Protestantism were reclaimed by the RCC too, such as Poland, which was for a while Protestant.I could go on but so what? You'll believe whatever you want to believe and since you grew up Catholic that's where your sympathies lie even if you have rejected it. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes you're right of course, I forget you've said you loathe the Catholic Church, so there has to be another reason why you're wrong about their place in history.

Yes if you want to you can just call it reality, because of course it is reality, and what's the point of objecting to reality? But when it is interpreted in terms of biblical revelation then people do object to it when instead of calling it reality we call it God's doing, and biblically most disasters can be attributed to some form of God's judgment for sin. It's one of the most common complaints here at EvC, perhaps THE most common, to consider God some kind of monster because of the calamities of what we otherwise know to be mere reality.GDR for instance rejects the annihilation of some people in the OT because he refuses to think of God as that kind of "evil" being, who would commit what he calls "genocide." But of course genocide is murder, and judgment is justice. Others reject the whole religion because of such accounts.So my point is that it takes spiritual discernment to understand such events as judgment for sin so that we can learn from them. Not exactly sure what you are trying to say except that you seem to want to contradict my point. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What you call "actual history" would be what? Catholic apologestics perhaps? I've read, and heard, plenty of actual history which I doubt you have a clue about."Without it," by which I guessx you mean the RCC, ,my "sect" by which I guess you mean Protestantism? wouldn't even exist? What an utterly silly thing to say. Protestantism was the result of Catholic priests reading the Bible and realizing that what the RCC taught was false. These Reformers took a huge portion of Europe out of the hands of the RCC. Whole nations became Protestant. People began to read the Bible and paganism waned. What "history" are you referring to?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You do know, of course, that what you say here is exactly what I was referring to as the "fleshly" inability to understand the things of the spirit, in the case I was describing God's judgments for sin, and you are showing quite nicely that just as I said you don't LIKE that idea. So what else is new?

Something that calls itself a history? Obviously what you mean is what YOU prefer to call a history, not what calls itself a history. It's really sad that you dismiss actual historical truth as "religion." You have no idea swhat you are talking about, but you do exemplify the sad state of things these days. The Reformers for instance wrote actual history. ACTUAL history. Many other Protestants also wrote actual history. But I suppose you refuse to accept what they write as history?.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.