Is christianity, or religion in general, a belief of convinience?

you want concrete facts on religion ???Lay some foundations, build a church and start preaching them. If you can find them. Determining the facts is a subjective process which results in believing your opinion to be fact,thus I hold my speculations to be truth but only to me.I think>> I feel>> I know>>I'm rightThe truth is not set in stone or in concrete. It is you and in you and God will judge the relative merits of your personal truth.A true religious/spiritual person that has a personal relationship with God the creative force can arrive at the house of God by any number of paths.I would put it to you that these 'enlightened' people of all faiths share a homogeneity in thought and action regardless of having known of the existence of Christ. The proof being reflected in their actions and interactions with others not by their knowledge of the definitions/interpretations of scriptures.Christ didn't come for those who know God he came for those who didn't and showed "the way" by the truth of his life. I've already stated how I interpret his claims to being "the way" and he didn't say he was the ONLY way, that is christian dogma againI don't know what happens in the afterlife only the dead do and they're not telling but in the scenario you postulated i believe the Dalai lama would recognise God in Christ as Christ would recognize the Dalai lama as a man of God if that is what the Dalai lama "really" is.I agree totally with the one spirit, one "absolute" truth, one way but that "absolute" defies categorisation in linguistic terms such as Lao tsu stated, by naming it means it is not "absolute" but your personal truth...I also believe in one love, Jah love and no manmade institution especially the christian church has a monopoly on the one spirit, truth or loveI truly believe it is that simple, the rest is unneccessary complication. Occams razor - Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"Imagine a tribe in the deepest jungle practising the tenets of the golden rule in harmony with nature and a missionary turns up touting "the way" yet he engaged in paedophilia, sodomy and violence...Who would get to heaven in the christian sense ???accept nothing as fact
question everything
determine your own truth
define your own realityBE YOUR OWN MESSIAHIt's what Jesus did

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If you were a creationist, imagine how unsure you would feel about existence, the blessings in your life and the lives of others, the human condition, the HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of people who don't get to eat every day, many of which are children, the countless numbers of people each day who die from easily preventable diseases, Terrorism, slavery, child labor, rape, pestulance, famine, trust me, christianity does not provide any comfort.

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Um, what about the promise of heaven?...the promise of justice meted out by God in the afterlife to wrongdoers and the eternal bliss awarded to the righteous?That isn't comforting? Why not?

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Now think about this, evolutionists use science as the easy way out, in plain english or whatever language, they just read something, see something, and accept it.

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I think you are projecting.Last time I checked, Biologists (scientists in general) actually do their work by examining physical evidence found in nature, then constructing logical explanations of why the evidence appears as it does. If you want to say that the written reports of this activity
constitute "reading something and accepting it", I suppose that, technically, that is true.Don't you think that it is actually the religious fundamentalists who read the Bible and then simply "accept it"? They don't look at any physical evidence, they do not develop any hypotheses, nor do they devise tests and predictions for their hypothese to see if they are correct. They just have faith.

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They bring about all these seemingly unbreakable arguements about evolution,

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They are all quite "breakable". They just haven't been "broken."

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when really it doesn't provide a single solid grounds for a creationist to convert other than more faith that we shall overcome adversity as people never mind a common philosophical/religious/spiritual/metaphysical vision.

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Um, tell me, do you similarly doubt the Germ Theory of Disease, or the Theory of a Heliocentric Solar System, or the Atomic Theory of Matter?If not, why?

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Creationists come up to evolutionists with scripture and explainations for why we have DNA or the shapes of bird's beaks, we jump to our own system of failsafe ideas of how DNA came to be and why penguins can't fly.

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Please, show me where Deoxyribonucleic Acid is mentioned in scripture
and I will immediately convert to your religion.

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Both sides are completely sure about what they believe as being true,

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Nope, not true.There is a fundamental tenet of scientific inquiry called "tentativity". It means that we can never be 100%, completely sure of the correctness of any scientific finding, because we are only human and cannot possibly think of all possible explanations for a given phenomena. It means that when new information comes along, we will always be able to alter and improve our theiries to reflect our greater understanding.By contrast, religious dogma is unchanging and not influenced by evidence in nature, so it need never change as a result of new findings.

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until they start to really really critically think about it. There is a weakness to both creationism and evolutionism.

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I think the problem is only with Creationism, because there is no critical thinking done.The scientific method is the definition of "critical thinking", and the ToE is a scientific theory just like any other.

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Please, show me where Deoxyribonucleic Acid is mentioned in scripture and I will immediately convert to your religion.

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too funny

Phatboy asks: That question has already been answered. The Dalai Lama recognizes the unique character of God within all beings.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

My point is this:
Premise: Jesus is the only way to God. Reason? Bible says so, as does orthodox Christian Belief.
Refutation: Critics lambast Christian thought as narrow and exclusivist.
Premise: Jesus is God incarnate.
If so, the Dalai cannot relate to God without Jesus. My point is that IF Jesus is who He says He is,(which I believe, and which is the cornerstone of Christian belief) Then the Dalai will meet Jesus at some point. It is not enough that the Dalai has his own mystical god consciousness along with Jesus. This is a false premise. The true premise is that the Dalai will have an opportunity to accept Jesus for who He is, as will you, as will I. It is not narrow to declare One way to God if everyone has the opportunity to be drawn to this way and accept or reject it. To put it another way, how can any thinking person even want to reject it unless it is the very spirit of self deification within them disguised as freethinking??

In my opinion, Mike....NO. It is much more logical that a Creator has eternally existed rather than eternal creation UNLESS you lean towards a pantheistic quantum physics view of things in which case Steven Hawking may have a new rival ego on the horizon!

Is Jesus God?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

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Is Jesus God?

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Yes!This message has been edited by Mike_King, 08-09-2004 05:28 PM

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Mike King writes:
In layman's terms, instead of assuming that an eternal creator created the universe, isn't it far more logical to just assume that the universe itself is eternal in the first place?

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In my opinion, Mike....NO. It is much more logical that a Creator has eternally existed rather than eternal creation UNLESS you lean towards a pantheistic quantum physics view of things in which case Steven Hawking may have a new rival ego on the horizon!

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I did not write that, that was Sleeping Dragon.. Ask him!I believe the creator of the universe is eternal.

Well? Sleeping Dragon, do you have any comments on the matter?

To Phatboy:In regards to your position, allow me the liberty of providing you with a contesting theory:1) An eternal creator that possesses personality and "will", existing in another temporal/spatial dimension but possesses no physical form in ours, through sheer power (don't ask me what this "power" is, it's just...power) generated our physical universe and dimension into existence. This being then, through all stages of human history, continued to communicate with and influence the lives of human beings, demanding their worship and servitude as the price for entrance into an unknown plane of existence called "heaven" after they die, where their "soul" will be incorporated into this great being's will.vs.2) Physical substances from dimension X, constituting of matter and energy, was sucked into a temporal/spatial "rip" in the fabric of that alternate dimension (possibly due to gravity like black holes?). These substances were compressed by gravity and "drained" out to another such "rip" in our own dimension, where compressed matter and energy then literally exploded into existence on our temporal/spatial plane due to pressure differences.In the above theory, matter and energy has always existed, but have simply moved from one dimension to another. Dimensions, on the other hand, either existed eternally or were brought into being by the matter/energy explosion that is now so affectionately called the Big Bang.Note: I am in no way suggesting that my theory is the "truth", or that it contains anything even remotely associated with the "truth". Yet I hope you can see that my explanation, with enough rigging in the Physics departments, would be so much more credible/logical than your God-with-personality theory.For one thing, my theory has clear predictions and can be falsified/modified with the discovery of new data. Yours cannot.Patiently awaiting your reply.(Note: due to workloads, I would only be able to address a maximum of one (1X) post per day. Sorry for the belated reply.)

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"Respect is like money, it can only be earned. When it is given, it becomes pittance"