Will The Real God Please Stand Up?

True, though I maintain that he found me. There is no reason to think that any other candidate qualifies...largely because the One Who has a Son named Jesus is the only One who is able to relate. I don't see the spaghetti monster banging on the door to my soul. Because life does not follow some mathematical averaging formula always. Not subjectively. You have experienced things that affect your belief and value system that I never experienced. And visa-versa. That's what we are debating. Which are fiction and which are not. I have shown an example of how well-known mythos advocate Richard Carrier was challenged on his not so obvious logic. What seems obvious is often anything but. I'm not waiting around for an easy answer, if that's what you mean. I'm just challenging why some of you think that the facts are all in.

And GDR, any any of you other believers in your own personal variety of Christianity.Can you please answer the question of why you have to live/be born in a Christian country/to Christian parents to be able to 'know' the 'One'?

Why do you keep saying that? There are something like 33 million to 67 million Christians in China according to diferent estimates, and it's growing all the time, even though the government keeps coming up with ways to persecute them. South KIorea is reputed to have the biggest Christian church in existence, a million I think. As far as I know they are not persecuted, but North Koreans are who dare to convert. There is an Asian tribe that totally converted to Christianity many years ago and all live as Christians, can't remember their name. There are lots of Christians in India too, and the Hindus have recently stepped up their persecutions there, beatings, rapes. Muslims also convert to Chrsitianity and suffrer tremendous persecution as a result. I don't know the numbers in those cases. Sudan has lots of Christians, many of them fled to the US under Muslim persecution some decades ago.And certainly there are plenty of converts to other religions in the Christian west, mostly to the eastern religions Buddhism and Hinduism, but also some to Islam.Christianity originally spread in Europe and then to the US, a fact of history. It had also spread through the Middle East but Islam forced most to convert. But the Great Commission Jesus gave us to take the gospel into all the world has been seriously underway for centuries. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What effort have you made to relate to the others? You keep asking me that about your God. Why don't you answer your own question about the other ones? Facts are not subjective. We're not saying the facts are all in. It's just the opposite. There aren't enough facts to draw the conclusions that you cling to.

Because it's a total accident of birth whether you beliefe in Jesus, Buddah, Mohammed, turtles, ancestors or whatever. An accident Faith. And the children of those converts will believe in Jesus. The rest will believe in some other god or none mostlty dependent on what their parents believe. It's purely random.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Is that supposed to mean something to me?

Why is the Real One the Christian One?Well, it isn't like any of the others. It's based on historical accounts written by many authors over about fifteen hundred years that go back to the Creation of the universe.Its accounts include direct dealings with God, explain the nature of God, show human beings both trying and failing to obey Him, explains why we're in the mess we're in and how God has planned a solution to the mess from the very beginning.It contains accounts of miracles and prophecies straight from the mouth of God Himself.It offers us a Savior from the punishment we deserve for our transgressions against God's commandments, a Savior who is God Himself incarnate in human flesh, who because He shares in our human nature is able to die in our place to pay for our sins. He also taught while He was on this Earth a philosophy of life that is regarded as nothing short of sublime even by many unbelievers.No other religion has anything even remotely like this.Does all that make it true? Not based on anything I could say, but I do believe that its authenticity is palpable to an honest reader.

Of course they have. Every religion says exactly the same. The one thing they all have in common is that pretty much all believers were born into societies that believed the same thing. No one ever spontaneously becomes a Mormon, or a Jew, or a Muslim. Your religion is pretty much what you are born into. It's as random or as predictable as that.

No other religion is even remotely like biblical Christianity.

I'd agree with you that most of them are more plausible than your version.

Judeism and Islam are very like Christianity. So is Mormonism.
But lots of religions are also very different to Christianity. So what? What you believe is overwhelmingly likely to be what your parents believe.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Judaism is, but only because they have the same Old Testament Bible, otherwise what they believe is not the same at all. Islam, no, nothing at all like Christianity, or Mormonism either. My parents didn't believe much of anything that I knew of. They sent their children to church because they thought it was a good thing but they just about never went themselves and neither of them ever uttered a word that showed they believed anything like I've come to believe. When I first believed in the reality of God -- in my mid forties after about thirty years of considering myself an atheist -- I thought I was going to be a Hindu or a Buddhist. It took a lot of reading, and a lot of overcoming my own prejudices against Christianity to finally embrace it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

There are commonalities between them all. But again, so what? The fact that Christianity has differences from other religions is not an argument that it's 'the one true religion'. So you're parents were Christians and taught you Christianity. Sort of my point. The rest is irrelevant. Had you been born to poor parents in a remote part of the Atlas mountains you would have been a Muslim.

Of course you can rewrite my autobiography to suit yourself, and your idea of "commonalities" between the religions is groundless. Christianity is unique in the ways I said it is.