Watch out for the new podcasts, Voices in your Head and What are you doing, Yahweh?

It's what I do, man.

Bit of a challenge because I haven't done this in a while. But, it is a maturing process and I've learned a lot.

Thanks

I haven't ventured onto these forums in a while. I'm so sorry I missed this. Poor fireproof has been hangin' here by himself for the most part. I love these discussions. Usually I'm frustrated by the way most Christians argue about their beliefs, but kudos to fireproof. And for what it's worth, after reading this entire thread, I don't think Dorkman was coming off as hostile or vitriolic at all. I'm amazed at the civility of the discussion. This truly is a great online community. Again I apologize for not being here more often.

I just want to expound on a few things that I saw discussed in this thread.

First is the idea of faith. As some here have expressed, faith is based on evidence. I don't believe in blind faith. The bible doesn't teach blind faith. God doesn't expect blind faith. God expects faith in His nature based on His past actions in your life. Faith is based on experience. That is why so many times in the bible, God asked his followers to make altars after an event in their life. That altar was to act as a reminder of His faithfulness. In fact the word faithful means that someone has a track record that can be counted on. I have experiences with God, not just lessons from a book. I have miracle stories from my life that I personally have experienced. Not many, not everyday, but significant ones that I have lived through. I don't discuss faith in a purely academic level, I discuss faith based on my actual life experiences.

The bible, in Hebrews 11:1, defines faith as "the evidence of things hoped for" and "the convictions of things not seen." The bible also defines, in Romans 10:17 where faith comes from: "hearing by the word of God" The Greek word for "word" in that passage is "rhema" and it refers to a living, spoken word as opposed to something inscribed or written down. More importantly, it says that faith cannot simply be conjured up on your own. It must originate from God as a promise. You then hold onto that promise based on your experience with God in your life. I liken this process to a ticketed event. Let's say I go online and purchase a ticket to see The Hobbit at an IMAX theater in LA. (I live in Bakersfield so I can't just go to the box office and buy it). I'm emailed a confirmation that shows my seat number. An e-ticket if you will. That ticket guarantees my seat. I don't have my seat yet, but I have faith that the seat will be there for me after I drive two hours to get there. I couldn't just create that ticket on my own. It had to come from the theater. I can't just type up my own ticket then expect the theater to honor that seat. The legitimate ticket from the theater is the substance I hold on to that allows me to expect my seat until I'm actually sitting in it. So many Christians misunderstand this process, they've been taught wrong. They think that they can print up their own ticket and demand that God honor their wishes. At that point, their prayers are just that, wishful thinking.

Ultimately, faith in God starts with experience. And faith based on experience cannot be shaken. You cannot break my faith because it is not some sort of academic understanding based on what others have told me, it's based on what I have experienced, what I have lived through, what God has done for me personally. You can argue confirmation bias all you want, but I act out on things before the confirmation happens. I claim what will happen before it does. I've lived it enough to count on it.

My experience has shown the bible to be true to me. I act out how it says and things happen as it says it should. It is as consistent as I am with it. I'm not perfect, I make mistakes, I sin and miss what God is trying to tell me all the time. But when I'm tacking right, when I'm following His word as I should, I hear him clearly and the decisions I make produce the outcomes promised.

I'm living through something right now that started a year ago. At the time, I knew what God spoke to me, and it was to take a step of faith and begin a whole life change for me and my family. At the time, I was having semi-regular lunch meetings with an atheist friend of mine and I told him what I was about to do. He thought I was crazy. A year later and we are now meeting for coffee on a weekly basis and he is watching me as what I told him would happen is happening in front of his eyes.

My life is my testimony. It is the evidence of God working. It is my evidence of the validity of the bible.

I've more to say but this will be enough for this post. Love you all.

pastormacman, your argument seems to be based on something very personal, subjective, that you feel internally, but cannot be shared with anyone else. Like a voice e.g. God spoke to me.

It's difficult for atheists to be persuaded by something that is beyond objective verification. If it makes you feel good than fine, but I can't see how a discussion / debate can arise from this line of argument. If person A says God told him to hate Gays, and she over there says God told her to love Gays, then how are we supposed to reconcile disparate claims made privately by personal revelation?

Last edited by avatar (2013-12-31 19:05:18)

To be fair, the Muslim god is technically the same god as the Christian god and the Jewish god. "People of the Book," and so forth.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (sauce be upon Him) told me in my dream that His Noodleness is the one true deity and all others are false idols.

Which, if you're an outsider like me, seems ridiculous because Judaism, Christianity and Islam are far more alike than they are different.   They would be, since they're all inter-related.   And really, moderate practitioners of all of the above DO realize that.    It's why they can and do co-exist most of the time, because they are able to see that there's not that much difference other than dress codes.

Fun Fact:  If you're going to do business in the Middle East and there's a chance you'll be exposed to risk of kidnapping by fundamentalist loonbats, some companies will actually give you an orientation about what to do if it happens.  Basically it's "So You're a Hostage, Now What?" I haven't had the pleasure myself, but a colleague has - and here's the 101 version.

He was issued a little pocket Bible and was told to always carry it with him.  If kidnapped, he was to read from it and pray a lot, and even to resist a bit if the kidnappers tried to take the Bible away. 

Why not a Koran?  Because unless you really have studied the Koran and can follow all the rituals, you're not going to pass as a Muslim.   But even the most fundie Muslim recognizes that Christianity may not be the True Religion... but it's pretty close.

What you don't want to be is a heretic with no faith at all.  That, your kidnappers will not like one damn bit.

To go back to the original analogy, most reasonable people can accept that you like Ledger's Joker more than Nicholson, even if they disagree.  But break into that conversation with a hearty "Who cares, Batman is bullshit anyway" and they will all hate you.

...You believe that Muslims are mythical? Well, I can't say I have a pre-loaded response for that one.

As long as you only count the hits and ignore the misses.

I don't assume this at all. You understand it's possible to believe you are wrong without thinking you're doing it deliberately?

Great stuff happens to everyone. Shitty stuff happens to everyone. You choose to frame them respectively as God's will/your failure. I'm sure whatever is happening in your life is awesome and you anticipated it in advance and it happened and that's great.

But if you anticipated it and it didn't happen -- as I'm sure has also happened in your life -- you wouldn't be using it as an example right now. You'd have written it off as you failing to understand God's plan and chalk it up as a point against yourself, not against the idea that God has anything to do with any of it.

I'm not the one who has made up my mind. According to your posts, you've pre-determined that anything good that happens is to God's credit and anything bad that happens is your own failure, and so anything that happens will reinforce that.

If good things ALWAYS happened to you when "God told you" they would exactly as you believed you were told they would, without fail, that would be quite a bit of evidence in your favor. But based on what you've vaguely stated here, it seems to succeed/fail on about the same ratio as it would without God entering the equation.

What I've stated here is a point of falsifiability -- or at least a path -- against my stance. If the above were true, I would have to seriously consider that my stance is wrong. Can you offer the same?

Now you're arguing with a straw man. Don't give me the preprogrammed talking points responding to what you think an atheist believes -- try asking me instead.

Last edited by Dorkman (2013-12-31 19:55:15)

I agree that personal experiences are not usually a good way of arguing the existence of God, and are not always even a great personal reason to believe in a particular God. Of course it does depend on the experience, as Jesus performed miracles so that people would believe in Him; but sometimes in our lives those events are not as blatant as walking on water, and sometimes (make that "all the time") people make errors in their interpretations of events. To me, they are great things that we can use to lift up God's name and give thanks, but stories like that tend not to hold water in a serious debate over hard evidence.

That's pretty crappy of God, IMO. At one point he went way out of his way to show himself to people to get them to believe and performed miracles right in their faces. Why was that good enough for them but I'm supposed to take a book's word for it? I think if he cares that much I deserve at LEAST as much evidence as he was willing to provide then -- and note that providing that evidence explicitly did not infringe on free will or faith.

The Mormons have been backing away from that for awhile. In fact, they're backing away from their own holy books. It's interesting, because with the Later Day Saints we're witnessing how religions grow and evolve first hand. The most recent changes, apparently, have been to say all the beliefs no longer accepted by the church were first started by the second prophet, Brigham Young, even the ones obviously preached by Joseph Smith. Soon the offending parts may be removed from the Book of Mormon. In another hundred years, who knows what Mormonism will look like?

Regardless of whether it's "enough" or not, you can't deny that God gave (allegedly) far more evidence to a bunch of illiterate first-century Palestinians.