> Okay, I meant to return to this thread sooner,
>but I've been lazy. I agree with Dave: without
>any evidence recognizable to both parties, all
>you have is a bald assertion. Not the sort of
>thing I want to base my life on.

So you are saying that evidence of God should be evident to non-believers as well? I don't have to already believe in order to believe? Can you give me some examples of this evidence then, so I might examine it in my own way?

If you have evidence external to yourself and your feelings (and preferably the Bible--although if you're going to use the Bible to present evidence for God, at least don't start by asking me to assume that God inspired the Bible and it is therefore inerrant) that you can point to and make a case for the existence of God, then at *least* I can make a judgement for myself on that evidence. Even if I choose not to interpret it the same way you do, or even if I don't use the same tools you use and come to what you think is the wrong conclusion, I can *at least* look at the evidence for myself.

> The simplest answer to the question, "why
>should I believe the Bible?" is: "the events
>recorded in it actually happened."

I can get behind that idea. The problem is, there are a lot of events in the Bible that are quite unbelieveable to a modern person. Miracles were a lot easier to believe in before the scientific revolution of the last two to three hundred years. It's really hard to give evidence for something as fleeting as most miracles, at least before the age of the ubiquitous video camera (and even now, it'd be easier to manufacture a convincing miracle on film than to catpure a truly divine one.)

I understand the system of learning that has been described to me again and again in this thread. I understand it has to start with trust in God and work from there. My issue with it is how do I even begin to trust a God that seems to be working so hard to obscure himself from view? In all other human endeavors, trust isn't something blindly given. It's something earned. It may seem supremely arrogant to say that God has to earn my trust before I give it to him, but it seems completely backwards to me that before I can even *begin* to form a relationship with him, I have to have unquestioning trust. Sure, you can say "Yeah, but *if* God created you and *if* he's omnibenevolent and *if* he's this and *if* he's that, then you SHOULD trust him." But I can't *know* these things are true until *after* I have a relationship with God, so how am I justified in giving that trust in the first place so I can form that relationship?

Anyway, I think I'm getting off topic a bit. These are just some questions that have popped into my head since the last time I posted to this thread.


>Unfortunately, attempts to
> verify that claim are bound to leave a lot of
>people unsatisfied. Even though Scriptural
>records have been shown to be trustworthy as
>historical documents go, we can't verify
>*everything* using independent sources -- and
>even if we could, some of those events are so
>singular and incredible by nature, contrary to
>common experience, that even multiple witnesses
>would fail to convince many skeptics.

Right. But *are* there any third-party (meaning, outside of religious texts) sources of eye-witness accounts of any of the miracles of the Bible? If there are, that'd go a heck of a long way for me in convincing me that the Bible is something I should at least look at more closely.

> There's a whole raft of literature on the
>historical trustworthiness of the Bible that I'm
>not prepared to discuss at this time, though it
>would be worth researching sometime. Instead, I
>want to raise two other points:

And I don't doubt that at lot of the Bible is historically accurate. I know there are some points skeptics bring up when debating the Bible that offer up contradictions between the Bible and other "trustworthy" historical documents, but frankly that's not my area of interest so I'm not really prepared to discuss it either.

But of course, even if a history book by a secular historian showed much correlation with other historical records but also included things like prophecy and miracles and such, I'd definitely question that source as well. Just because parts of it jive with what we already know doesn't mean the parts that go against modern scientific knowledge are also true.

> To answer a question you raised, I don't hear
>voices in my head or get some kind of mystical
>pull or tingle that tells me God is
>communicating with me. I don't, in fact,
>experience any signs of God's presence that have
>analogs in common experience of the material
>world. The senses I rely on to guide me through
>the day don't seem to help in perceiving God.

So how do you know, with a certainty that's good enough for you to lead others down this same path, that God exists external to your own feelings and thoughts about him?

The issue that started this thread was that Grishny offered up his spiritual thoughts as Truth. My question is now and always has been, how do you arrive at this point where you can say that others ought to act in accordance to your beliefs when all of the evidence you have to support those beliefs are necessarly internal, subjective, and personal?

> * Second, I think that in large measure a
>person chooses what their experiences are like.
>A scholarly skeptic of Christianity is likely to
>hang out with like-minded people in academic
>circles, and what are the odds that in such an
>environment he'll just happen to develop the
>skills needed to experience God? Or even become
>open to the possibility? Not good. He's likely
>to continue developing habits that predispose
>him not merely against the subject matter
>itself, but against the methods of investigating
>it properly.

And I still don't understand how a God who apparently made us in his image chose to give us the supremely useful tool of rational and logical thought, which is our most useful tool when learning about ourselves and our environment, and then deny us the use of this on the simple matter of his existence? I'm not saying logic and reason *alone* should lead us to everything spiritual, but I *am* saying that logic and reason should unequivocably point us in the right diretion instead of the wrong one.

Of course, I know I'm not supposed to presume to understand God. But what *is* religion if not presuming to understand God, at least in some way??

> At any rate, I agree that religious beliefs
>should be challenged and not allowed to get off
>the hook with rote excuses. I want to hear a
>good reason why I should believe in
>reincarnation, or nirvana, or Joseph Smith's
>account of divine revelation, and so forth. A
>person has an obligation to find out and believe
>the truth -- although he is free to ignore it
>and believe something else that suits him
>better, it is wrong to do so.

Which is exactly why I don't understand the argument I've heard many times as to why God doesn't just make his existence plainly obvious with regularly scheduled miracles or something. Some people have told me that God respects our free will, so he leaves it up to us to choose to believe in him or not. But that's patently ridiculous. Only the very first step is belief in God. The rest of the steps are acceptance and belief in his teachings. However, it's that VERY FIRST step that is the hardest of all of them by an insanely huge margin. People could know with absolute certainty that God exists and *still* exercise their free will to do whatever they pleased rather than follow God's teachings. I'm sure that even if God routinely revealed himself and his nature to everyone, there would *still* be plenty of people going to hell just because they're either headstrong, stupid, insane, or just plain infinitely contrary. So what's the issue?

-- Dave