Let's hear how he revealed himself to you. I bet in advance that you aren't willing to do it, mostly because of how incredibly flimsy and silly it is as a supernatural claim. In fact, it's probably nothing but some human emotions at a key time. As if human emotions = supernatural visits. But I'm perfectly willing to be convinced otherwise, and I believe the doctrine demands that one give the justification for their belief, especially when requested. I'm willing to be wrong, I'm willing to hear the conversion reason, I'm willing to grant respect. Describe the supernatural experience/revelation, please.

Is he not willing to tell us what the supernatural revelation was? Was it a sad emotion turned happy, was it a tragedy barely averted, was it some kind of special unveiling of the truth of the universe directly to him? Or did he run away because BS walks?

These claims of direct revelation from god are just stone cold fanciful internal narratives, that is, they are a story one is telling themselves. Nothing else. And that is why no one since Paul is willing to open their mouth when questioned as to the way in which that revelation from god happened to them.

Even if what you experienced were a direct revelation, what evidence is there that it was a direct revelation from the Christian God vs Buddha, Krishna, Zeus or one of the many other Gods people have worshipped? I suspect you only believe it was the Christian version because of your prior cultural and social indoctrination. Had you been born in India, for example, and lived your life there, upon having the same experience, you would probably conclude it came from Krishna (or one of the other gods from the Hindu pantheon). You only think it was the Christian version because of a prior predisposition to believe in that particular deity.

All mortal beings will leave you.

If not by the click of their heels, but then by the passage of time, through death.

The only being that will never leave you is God.

All mortal beings will leave you.

If not by the click of their heels, but then by the passage of time, through death.

The only being that will never leave you is the Flying Spaghetti Monster. No wait, maybe it’s Zeus. No Krishna.

Anyway, there is about as much evidence for my version of this as there is for yours — none whatsoever

The soul is hidden from the human individual but man decides whether or not his soul exists. If man doesn’t affirm his hidden soul, then it might as well be nonexistent. What good is it to gain the world but forfeit your soul?

The idea of service is further proof of God.

People are happy when they are bringing up their children or when they are helping to make the world a better place in some kind of a way.

Why does it make you happy if you give a homeless person a loaf of bread?

When people start over valuing consumption through things like money, houses, yachts, gourmet food etc it just becomes an unfulfilled bottomless pit.

The devil lures man with shiny things.

People can feel good about being altruistic, hence God must exist??? A giant non-sequitor, isn’t it? Altruistic behavior has explanations that have nothing to do with the supernatural, and obviously such behavior, even if only explainable by the existence of a deity, certainly does not prove that it is specifically the Christian God that exists. The Flying Spaghetti Monster has threatened to smite me with his noodly appendage if I don’t give food to the homeless person. I’m happy to not be so smitten, hence giving food to the homeless guy makes me happy. Just as valud an explanation as yours, and with an equal amount of supporting evidence (none at all)

Or is he the being that was never there, created wholly by the imagination of man, thousands of times over no less, this last as a proof that man creates god. If one wants to say their god is different in this respect, it seems they and we might require some scintilla of evidence other than the existence of the doctrine/story (as with all the others). The only reasonable way to not throw out one's chosen god on this principle is to recognize that ALL the gods and religions are attempts and snippets of the real story. But that's the very thing they tend to rule out in their market share strat. Huxley's "perennial philosophy" is not irrational; "My god is real and your's isn't" is irrational.

Fwiw if god was so powerful as those claim he is , I don’t think he would ressemble at all to a human being incredibly weak and insignificant , compare to him .

The idea that we cease to exist after we die has been defeated once and 4 all:

Darwin's theory of evolution stating that we were created through science and the big bang without God can co exist with God being from the future.
We became like God if we make it to heaven because we too can then live forever....This just means God is the smartest and nicest man from the future.

And our ancestors exist as genes within us, and they see the world through us.
And God exists from the future.
The ultimate battle between being able to live forever but then dying and from living forever through technology never ends. Amen.
Imagine describing quantum computing code to a person in 500 BC. The rate at which we will develop as a species is going to be way way faster then in previous centuries.

There's no reason to deny the existence of the after life when we can look to the future for our faith. Looking to the future denies nothing existing after death denies that theory it's proofs, and it makes many more people nicer.

And we exist now as evidence of the afterlife.

Lollll . I'm obviously just practicing theology. Just made up stuff obviously.

They told magic stories in magic believing times, and this was their metaphysics. To get ensnarled in such a religion is meaningful and even helpful in terms of being in a tribe ... but that isn't to be mistaken for actual metaphysics. "Yeah, it's a magic story, it's a myth. In our tribe we find much to recommend it and so we band together around it" ... IS rational. Swallowing the magic claims under the religified term "miracle" is not rational or feasible, as history has proven out.

And so "I believe in these magic stories from thousands of years ago" becomes an unfortunate replacement for a reality-based spirituality.

The death of Owen Gingerich, astronomer, is marked in the NY Times today. I am not very familiar with his work but I love his primary position that religion and science are not incompatible. What is incompatible with reality, in his view and mine, is stupid anti-science magic stories and myths of ignorant, superstitious peoples. The bigger picture, that something is at the bottom of the glass, is the great mystery, unsolved, one might add, by the murderous witch and homosexual smiters of a supposedly omniscient god of love. So in keeping with an open mind about the mystery, instead of spewing/believing dogma, I'm going to listen to a bunch of his lectures and probably read a couple of his books, including "God's Universe" and "God's Planet." He apparently came out of the Mennonite religion, then superseded it in his ideas about the universe, while maintaining a respect for certain kinds of religion.

But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.

James 1:3–4

Yes

Billions of people worship me. Lord of the Universe. Traditional Gods are morons and only sycophants follow them!

Yes I believe in God. The science is fallible and hardly believable to show the earth is as old as they say it is. The data is based on a metric of infinity, however, infinity can't be measured so the data is broken into a basic-calculus use of limits to infinity, and that data is pretty poor. Carbon as a whole is very poorly understood element, and that is just the beginning of why I think some of the science is laughable.


The empirical data for the supernatural is poor as well, but historicity of Jesus along with the gospels is the data that sways my decision as well as what searching for my own truth has done for me.

Everything humans do is fallible, including both science and religion. Humans are fallible so consequently any method we have for acquiring knowledge will be as well. The difference is that scientists recognize that science is fallible, and guess who it is that corrects scientific mistakes. It is scientists who do so. In fact, the pinnacle of achievement in science lies in proving that a previously accepted scientific theory was wrong and replacing it with a new paradigm. All of the well known scientists have done precisely this.

I’m mot sure what your blathering about a “metric of infinity” is supposed to mean, but there is no infinity measured in any branch of science. Infinity is not an inherently contradictory concept, though, since a consistent mathematical system of infinities has been developed (yes there is more than one infinity, some are larger than others. It all makes sense if you learn the math). However calculus is expressly NOT based on infinity. It is in fact the mathematics of exploring the possibility of infinitismally small or infinitely large quantities without actually having to use such quantities. The real basis of calculus is the limit. This represents a quantity obtained by evaluating a function at a point x+h, where h is some arbitrarily small, but nonzero number. If the function yields a value that differs from a given value L by no more than some arbitrarily small number k, then we call L the limit of the function at the point x.

A real example can help. Suppose we have the function (x^2-1)/(x-1) and we want to find the limit at x=1. We cannot plug in the value 1 for x in the formula given since that would result in dividing by zero. We can however evaluate f(x+h) for increasingly small values of h. If we use h=0.01, we get 2.01. If we use h=0.0001 we get 2.0001. Using h=0.000001 gives 2.000001 and so on. It should be clear that we can make the formula value as close to 2 as we like by making h as small as we like. From algebra, we know that the result is equal to 1+x+h. For x=1 this gives 2+h, so we have proven that we can make the formula as close to 2 as we want by making h smaller. Thus the limit at x=1 of this function is 2. Notice that at no point have we actually used any infinite quantity, whether infinitely small or large.

Finally, I think you probably should educate yourself better on radioactive dating methods. There are possible errors in such methods and there is uncertainty (as in any measurement), but the mechanism of radioactive decay is well understood and it is well known that this mechanism has not changed over time (based on observations of astronomical bodies located millions of light years away, for example). IÂ’m not sure why you think carbon is not well understood, or in fact even relevant for determination of the age of the earth. C-14 dating cannot be used for dating items more than a few tens of thousands of years old. ItÂ’s half life is too short and there would be no detectable C-14 left after that time. New C-14 is created by reactions of atmospheric CO2 with cosmic rays. Living creatures breath this in and incorporate it into their bodies. When they die, they stop adding C-14 so the current abundance of C-14 in a once living sample can indeed give indication of how long ago the organism died, but that has nothing to do with the age of the earth. ItÂ’s certainly useful in archeology and palwontology, though.

ok, cool.

I don't like the person that I've become.

Let's pray for positivity, absence of pride and confidence in God's plan.

Amen.

So you don’t become complacent, pray also for greatness. Pray with entitlement to honor your soul.

We have learned self-judgment and self-abuse and have projected it into the religion (sinful nature), lacked parental love and projected it into the religion (ideal ever present perfect love father), lacked a reason to believe it was actually true so put faith in the religion. It’s deviously ingenious. A non-skeptic willing to take the magic claims of thousands of years ago at face value, is all-in with it. I mean, what's wrong with magic claims of thousands of years ago? THAT'S WHAT THE DOCTRINE IS. But all you have to do is believe.

Yahweh, Allah, Odin, Zeus, Loki, Amun, Horus, Apollo, Mithra and hundreds of others from cultures all through time and across the globe are projections of the god archetype, and not reality. Another way of saying that is the god idea/template is systematically incorporated by cultures into myths, then taken to be literal. That's religion.