Tribute Thread For the Recently Raptured Faith

How many times Phat?With very few exceptions, people become believers in whatever faith they have because their parents and culture taught them to, usually from birth. As a child, you believe what you are told to believe. That's the only reason why you're a Christian and not, say, a Muslim.I was born and raised a Catholic and of course I believed all the stuff Catholics believe until I didn't. I stopped believing because I saw through the whole pile of twaddle in my early teens.Ringo's story may be similar or it may be like my kids who were not brought up as Christians (but not as atheists either) and have not become believers. It's quite simple. Well exactly. And more importantly you can say the same thing about Allah and all the other more obviously believed in gods. You didn't choose Christianity it was chosen for you.

It’s Christianity that has insisted on, and promoted, the idea of faith as something noble when everything we know suggests that it’s a desperately lousy way of determining what’s real and what isn’t. That’s as true of belief in Allah as it is Jesus. Or Zeus.But again that’s also a demonstrably awful method of determining what’s real and what isn’t. I have an overwhelming feeling that this week my lucky numbers will win the lottery. Does this feeling of mine tell us anything about what the winning lottery numbers will be? Why would we (or even you) trust your feelings to tell us anything about the actual existence of deities? The only difference is that my lottery predictions will be demonstrated to be wrong whilst your religious convictions have evolved to protect themselves from the inconvenience of reality by becoming explicitly unfalsifiable. It may come as a shock to you to discover that swathes of humanity rarely give Jesus a second thought. Your attitude to Zeus is directly comparable. Quite. With some possible basis on a historical character but essentially a fictional entity. Even the character of Long John Silver was based on a real person. All the best fictions are I guess... It really is.

Exactly.

Speak for yourself, Phat. This is sheer nonsense. I became a Christian after reading up on a lot of other religions, because I was persuaded it is the truth by many different arguments and experiences reported by believers. I also had lots of feelings BASED ON what I was learning from these sources but the feelings followed the persuasion. This has nothing to do with "suspending evidence" whatever on earth that could mean anyway.And as for evidence, there is such a thing as witness evidence and that is what the Bible is all about. Witnesses to miracles, witnesses to Christ's miracles, witnesses to His resurrection and ascension, visions of Heaven, witnesses to angelic beings, etc etc etc. I don't "suspend" such evidence, and it IS evidence, I believe it is true, I believe the people who wrote about it are telling the truth, and by believing that I grow in faith because it all works together each part supporting each other part.If you deny that then you have nothing left and I guess you would have to make it all up for yourself in that case, but it's all there, it IS evidence and God gave us this evidence specifically so we COULD believe the truth.If you want to go on insisting on your subjectivist point of view, please at least stop applying it to all believers. C. S. Lewis says he came "kicking and screaming" against belief. But he eventually gave in of course. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I have no problem with belief that the Bible is corroborated by witnesses. The argument is on whether it is, in fact, objective evidence. I have watched a lot of good arguments on why the Bible is reliable, Craig Parton being the most recent.Unlike you, however, I don't assume a conclusion (The Bible Is Inerrant) and then attempt to find the science to reconcile that. Your methods are ineffective teaching methods--particularly since you alone decide what is and is not evidence--and base your entire rationale on your knowledge and assumption that the Bible is inerrant. This is simply crazy.

Something confused here. Christian faith is said to be "the evidence of things not seen," meaning of course the things reported in the Bible that either can't be seen under normal conditions because they are invisible, or are not seen by the reader just because we weren't there, so must be believed, held by faith. There's nothing beyond that implied by biblical faith, no claim that it is a "way of determining what's real and what isn't." Faith is evidence of the particular things reported in the Bible. Perhaps it also applies to some invisible things outside the Bible too, but since the idea of faith itself as a way of knowing originated with the Bible (yes it did) I'm only going to claim its application to Biblical revelation.. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Phat, believe what you want, for whatever reason you think applies, I'm merely objecting to your including other believers in your idea of how we come to belief.The way you go on to characterize what I think is false and insulting, and I'm not going to try to answer it except to say I always try to represent what I know to be traditional Christian belief, NONE OF IT is my own EVER unless I specifically say it is. You are letting yourself be influenced by unbelievers.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Yes there is. Your post makes no sense to me whatsoever and seems contradictory. So faith is itself evidence? So are they believed on faith or are they evidenced? But that’s what evidence is - What we use to tell fact from fiction - No? I feel like we are talking different languages. How is faith evidence? You say faith is a way of knowing but also say that faith makes no claim to be a way of determining what’s real and what isn’t.How can a way of knowing NOT be a way of determining what’s real and what isn’t......?That’s like saying I know God exists based on faith but I make no claim on whether he is real or not because faith doesn’t tell me that.Huh?

I agree it's hard to make sense of the idea of faith as evidence but that is what the Bible says and I understand it to mean that we actually learn things about the invisible worlds through faith in what the Bible says about them. They are realities that we cannot see but can know and think about by having faith in their reality as given in the Bible.Another part of the statement is "faith is the substance of things hoped for" which means we can have knowledge of God's promises to us in some really substantial way through believing in them without any more evidence than the word of God.And all I meant otherwise was that you seem to be saying it's claimed that faith is some kind of way of understanding all kinds of things other than "things unseen" as described in the Bible, but that is taking the idea too far, way out of its intended context. By faith I believe in God, by faith I believe in an afterlife, by faith I believe in angels, by faith I believe that I'm saved to eternal life by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, things I've never seen and about which I have no way of knowing anything except by believe the Biblical reports. by faith I can learn a lot about all these things I've never seen and can only take as reality because God says so. Hebrews 11 gives a list of people in the Bible whose faith worked wonders in their lives.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.

I am saying that having faith in things demonstrably doesn’t work as a method of determining what’s real. I gave the example of lottery numbers but this entire thread is about your conclusion that the rapture was going to happen in a certain time period. You were proven to be wrong about that.When people make falsifiable conclusions based on faith they are repeatedly demonstrated to be wrong more often than not.So why would we expect faith to allow us to draw correct conclusions about things unseen? Based on the track record of faith as evidence those conclusions are almost certainly going to be wrong.

But our understanding might not be too bad. If "by the time the gospels were written" means sometime between 100 and 150 AD then I think most Christian converts were gentiles. See, for example, The failure of the Christian mission to the Jews:

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Throughout the first century the total number of Jews in the Christian movement probably never exceeded 1000 and by the end of the century the Christian church was largely Gentile.

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Why do you think this is something we know? But isn't there a great deal of non-Jewish material in the Gospels? Like for instance all the parts where Jesus introduces non-Jewish theology? I think I cover whether they lied or not or "got it wrong or not" where I say "lied or was mistaken or made things up." I don't think we disagree that which of those are in play in any given passage is a good question. How do you know you're right as you decide which is the case for each passage? However it happened, a new religious movement formed, something not unique to Christianity. All religions had their formative stages. For those invested in the new religion, how can you say there was "no motivation to keep the Jesus message going," particularly for those emerging as leaders. If Paul of Tarsus was a Jew, then it cannot be true that no Jew believed that the messiah would die on a cross. Maybe Paul was the origin of the Jesus story, maybe not. How would you know? Maybe it had some other Jewish or non-Jewish origin. Martyrs are kind of handy for incipient movements. And again, did the Jesus story originate with Paul, or with someone else, or perhaps was borrowed from some now forgotten religious community? Ask yourself how you know this, and then ask yourself how you're defining the quality of life, materially or spiritually?--Percy

That's pretty strong evidence against, isn't it? I'd say Faith's failures in this thread in predicting the rapture and declaring that lying to the Holy Spirit is a capital offense are pretty good evidences against her beliefs. (I'll declare something again to the Holy Spirit: that I've turned over all my worldly possessions to the church (of which this laptop is one, and obviously I still have it). Gee, I'm still here.) When working toward establishing what is likely true and what is not, skepticism is one very helpful tool for insuring an unbroken chain of evidence and rationale.--Percy

For things that are true, the more strict the requirements of evidence the more likely true that something is shown to be. "Brain disorder" might not be the right label, but aren't both gambling and religion built upon hope for a better tomorrow?--Percy

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Ask yourself how you know this, and then ask yourself how you're defining the quality of life, materially or spiritually?

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This thread spun out of a discussion of the story of Ananias and Sapphira. Where people were selling their property and giving the money to the disciples (Acts 4 34-35)Does anyone think that would have happened if the disciples just gave up ?

Jesus's talk of destruction of the temple is very strong evidence that the passage was written after the destruction of the temple. Also (this is more for Faith and her inerrancy stance), his statement that "Not one stone here will be left on another" is erroneous, since many stones were obviously left one upon another, for instance the Wailing Wall that was part of the Second Temple, see Second Temple Archeology for more examples. Again, how handy to have a martyr, especially one who defeated death, rose to heaven to sit by God.--Percy