Jib's usually mild mannered.

Unless he got frustrated he would never imply you're an idiot.

But that's the temperament on here. Everyone thinks "emotions" and "rational" aren't related but they are.

So both the theists and the atheists are prone to accuse the other side of irrational emoting in their thinking.

But it's impossible for humans not to be emotional. They are a part of our cognitive make-up. Without emotions your brain can't even have a memory.

He does?

He probably does.

But he does that to get people to line up on the truth. Isn't God's Truth the ultimate truth and doesn't it connect to people's inner being?

We're made in the image of God.

Substitute Jesus Christ for Heraclitus in the wikiquote below:

"For Heraclitus logos provided the link between rational discourse and the world's rational structure."

In John 1:1 Jesus Christ is described as the Logos.

While the prophets were prophesying about the coming of Jesus the ancient Greeks were getting ready for him in their thinking (philosophy). Do you think it's an accident that a lot of the early Church started with the ancient Greeks? Or was God trying to line up His thinking with a group ready to handle it?

(Heraclitus lived approximately 500 years before Christ.)

You are aware that the Catholic church went to some pains to point out that the definition of logos that Christians use is totally different to the definition Heraclitus used, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

Well doesn't God have to start some where?

Isn't man's nature just like God's? Always trying to refine things.

The Catholic Church didn't reject Heraclitus' definition they refined it.

No you are just plain wrong. Read your own links. Logos has many meanings in Greek e.g. "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason" etc. This is similar to how the English word "light" has many meanings "a light dessert", "a light weight", "a flash light", " a light touch" etc.

Heraclitus used the word in the sense of "reason". The gospel of John (not the Catholic church) used the Greek word "Logos" in the sense of "word". This wasn't to reference Heraclitus, it was just because, like most of the New Testament, the Gospel of John was written in Greek.

God can merge anything He wants.

We're the ones with the overly analytical minds that break everything into small pieces then can't fit them back together again in patterns that make sense.

lol Splendour, the way you argue (not to mention what you argue) is pretty ****ed up

What type of response were you looking for?

There might be. The Muslim faith is not a monolithic block in the same way that the Christian faith is not a monolithic block. I just wanted to be clear that the particular statement is the thing where we have reached different conclusions.

The divinity of Jesus follows from experiences, but not directly. It's not as if I believe that Jesus is theologically divine because I've had some experience that tells me so.

Of course.

I think the attribution of arrogance is more a matter of characterization than reality.

On the one hand, you grant me the ability to openly admit that I'm possibly wrong in my evaluation. On the other hand, you accuse me of arrogance. I don't think your line is consistent. Your argument is close to Groggy's argument. Because there are other ideas out there, I should think that my idea is somehow wrong automatically wrong (the asymmetry argument you posited). That fact of reality does nothing to my position or theirs.

You seem to be placing excessive emphasis on the "figuring it out" part. As in somehow the belief in Christianity is primarily the result of formal argumentation and cognitive analysis. There are two sides to this. The experience AND the analysis.

In the abstract, I do not know what "Muslims" as a broad category of persons experience, and I do not know how they connect with those experiences through analysis. It's a black box. All you're showing me is a conclusion that is different from mine, and I'm confirming that it's a conclusion that's different from mine. It's like you hand me a slip of paper that says "Jesus is not the Son of God" and ask me if I agree with it. I don't know where the paper came from, and I don't know what process led to developing that conclusion.

Could God have inspired Lao Tse in Ancient China?

Lao Tse:
Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions.

Didn't John say that the Word became flesh (action)? John 1:1

Maybe Taoism was the first Christianity?

Tao: "that in virtue of which all things happen or exist."

Isn't God the virtue of which all things happen or exist?

What do you currently believe about the Christian God?

I'm unsure of the sense of "expect" that you're using. Do you mean as an active expectation (non-Christians have not read the Bible and will actively refuse to read it) or is it more of a passive expectation (given a non-Christian, one anticipates that this person would not have read the Bible)?

If you do not realize you're driving towards a cliff, does that prevent you from falling off the cliff? (By the way, there's a common conversation here that I'm not going to pursue, which is "What happens to those who have never had the chance to hear the gospel?" It's an interesting question, but not a direction I am going to follow this time.)

I knew you weren't sincere.

That's the game a lot of atheists play on here.

They pretend to be openminded then they get personally offensive after the exchange of one or two posts.

I already gave you a book name. Geisler holds an M.A. in philosophy and has been doing Apologetics for something like 50 years.

Of course, you'd prefer taking on the thinking of a smaller lamb like me. Most people do on here.

lol, that's exactly what I think about religious scriptures.

When you say this, why do you care what type of response the person was looking for? Most people who ask questions genuinely aren't leading somewhere with it. They are jst asking the question because they don't know the answer. Maybe I'm wrong and most people ask rhetorical questions all the time. I don't (unless it's obvious). I tend to ask questions to find things out.

When you say the above, it looks like a) you're already decided to the answer you're about to give, i.e. the question above is rhetorical (you're going to disagree or disagree dependent on the person and irrespective of the context), or b) you are going to agree with the person or disagree with the person depending on the person, not depending on the context. But surely what matters is the question itself, not who you are arguing with. Unless you don't think there is absolute truth about the nature of reality. But I would imagine you do.

But anyway, the question above is a strange question to ask.

Firstly I'm 99% sure that it doesn't exist. If it does, it is an ominblah, immoral God who allows suffering and does things which seemingly contradict it's omniblah, or makes the omniblah it apparently has make no sense. (Why create imperfect humans? Why allow suffering? Why want people to worship him?)


Most non-Christians have not read the Bible. Do Christians expect non-Xtians who have not been forced to read the Bible to read the Bible, and believe in Jesus and God etc? If so, why do they think this?

The non-relation between our beliefs and absolute truth has nothing to do with my question about hell.

Actually, this is more relevant to my question about hell. I guess I can split it up. Do Xtians believe

1) Those non-Xtians who have not read the Bible due to not knowing about it's existence are going to hell?
2) What about people ( a) Xtians, b) non-Xtians) who have read a few pages but thought nothing of it and cba with the rest (i.e. most ppl)?

Okay, I will try to read some of the passage.

But I was being sincere. Don't tell me what I was or was not.

But again, you are twisting things. My outburst was not in ignorance because you had a good point. It was because of the way you structure your posts in a completely abstract, meaningless way. You tend to write three sentences and they don't seem to draw any strong conclusions, points, etc.

It is like saying:

Science might not be 100% accurate and yet 90% of the world believe in it.

But so what? Who cares? What's your point? <--- that is what I tend to think at the end of your posts.

To try to see what the expectations are. Was there an expectation that there would be an audible voice? Was there an expectation of tangible experience?

Most of the time I pray, I don't get either. But I don't think I get "disconnected."

I think you think there's a level of confrontation that doesn't actually exist. The question was explorative. I would like to know more about his experience of prayer.

It may appear strange, but it's not really strange. It's possible that you've not had many conversations about the practice of prayer. Or maybe you have, and they've never included that question. I do not know what your experiences are.

These are fair questions, and they rest primarily on the purely cognitive side of the equation. I do not believe that approaching God starts from there. As I've noted before, it requires both experiential (personal -- not abstracted) AND cognitive aspects.

For example, an important element of coming to faith is some level of conviction of sin. And that conviction is more than mere mental assent.

I'm confused. You claim that most non-Christians have not read the Bible. And then you ask me whether I expect that non-Christians have read the Bible. It makes no sense to expect that they've done the thing that you're saying that they haven't done.




I think it's on point. The belief is that the cliff is there, and unawareness of the cliff doesn't change things.

As noted, I'm not going to pursue this direction. I'll just leave you with a very short summary of my beliefs on the matter, and you can argue with whomever you want about the details.

* Do you absolutely NEED to know who Jesus is? No. Then what do you absolutely need?
* You do need to assent to the idea that God is perfect and man is not.
* You need to assent that human effort is insufficient.
* You need to assent that God is the one who provides the means to restoration.
* So why Jesus? Jesus is the fullest expression of what the above entails (and the actual act that completes it).

I didn't microquote, but I tried to address the substantive portions of your post nonetheless Is it? I mean sure it is a truism that we cannot know exactly how anybody outside ourselves (and even then it is questionable) thinks or feels about things whether they are muslims or christians. But we can certainly look at what people say, how they describe things, elements of psychology, and the like and try to come up with a picture of how people are forming opinions and what experiences they are having. It is not entirely a black box.

I have never had one of these experiences, however, I have not seen anything to believe that there is a meaningful difference between the experiences had by christians and by muslims. I have not seen anything to believe there is a meaningful difference in how christians and muslims react to these experiences, the importance they put to them in their faith, and, until it gets scripturally dependent, the types of arguments they use for the existence of their specific deity. So we have an enormous symmetry between these two massive groups that, from the outside, makes it appear incredibly similar.

And yet, there is a startling asymmetry. These superficially similar experiences and similar reasoning (as we would expect from similar humans) lead people to directly contradictory claims about the divinity of jesus such that one side is categorically incorrect. Why? I think this tension between the apparent symmetry leading to this gross asymmetry owes and explanation and should be at least pause for considerable thought to someone in either of these two camps.

Now I have a resolution. I think they are both wrong in their conclusions, I think that people choose religions based on the culture that they are a part of and interpret things through this lens. There are range of psychological reasons why such things are done, and so on and so forth. This view completely resolves the above tension and finds the jesus question to be an irrelevant detail. Do you have a resolution?

I have a similar resolution on the political analogy which we can go into but it isn't really for this forum. Let me just say I don't think the aparrant divide between republicans and democrats is either as large or as significant as one might think.

Could you give an example of something you get from prayer, and why do you feel it's from God? It's entirely possible I'm experiencing what you're experiencing, but am not attributing it to a deity.

What is God here? The christian god? If so, then the problem remains that people who are unaware of Christianity cannot possibly realize that the Christian God is the means of restoration. Even if it is a weak deistic god concept, your list is pretty restrictive such that I think most people who have never heard of christianity and believed some other religion would not think all three of those conditions.

I certainly don't think any of them. Sad day for me.

No one can prove (or even disprove) the existence of God.
I myself am also a nonbeliever. I went to church (Catholic, Baptist, and Lutheran) as a child. Sung the Jesus Loves me yes He does bit, memorized parts of the bible like a good christian should, and only when I became older did I start questioning it.

The more educated I became the less I believed in Religion and ultimately in the existence in God (any God). Maybe God exists in the universe from which our universe sprouted from (see Universe Bubble Theory) or if you believe in string theory then there is a Universe where a God actually does exists but in our universe we either believe or don't believe.

Lets give an example of how someone could convert from a total nonbeliever to a believer and become a born again christian. A sudden death experience where you see the light. I watched you die in front of my eyes (and I have been in that situation many times as a physician) but you were revived miraculously. A friend who was born and raised in another part of the world and was brought up as a Muslim but became a nonbeliever when he grew up. He also has a near death experience saw the light, and now he prays 5 times a day.

Now what? That doesn't prove that there is a god to me. To them it is real. They saw it. As a scientist though all I can say for sure is that something occurred at the time in the brains agonizing moment before death that changed their brains chemical make up. It opened a gate that was not there before. New axons (nerve endings) connected, possibly only minutely as a result of damage that occurred. It cannot be measured because we do not have that technology available to do (and might ever have it).

Environmental phenomena has occurred through out the history of mankind and at the time it could not be explained.There is a basic need (a burning desire) to know why we exist. We do not have the capability, the technology, or the know how to prove it. To me, God and all religions are just fail safe mechanisms within the chemical make up of the brain. Something environmental occurs in a religious persons' brain that turns on the switch or opens that gate to where you become a true believe in a higher entity. If that switch doesn't get turned on then you will never be able to understand the meaning of God!

A great example that I can give you is the Amish People. They have been raised to believe from the time that they born. It is an environmental insult (might not be the best wording, lol) to their brain. Most of them will remain religious as a result of the switch being turned on when they were young.

Religions are often born from actual environmental phenomena (like the Ice bridge given way in the middle east or a huge Tsunami in the western U.S.). that people could not understand. As a result of the evolution of the ability to reason in our brain, we could not explain what had occurred. Switches went on because it was a fail safe mechanism and it eased the worry of the unknown!

The story of the great floods were told for hundreds of years. Of course, as human nature is, we change it and make it even more horrific and menacing, but man continued to evolve and his brain became even bigger. We became even more intelligent. We started writing on walls and eventually paper and ink, and the rest of it is history my friends.

Civilizations increased the spread of these stories and lo and behold, we have similar accounts of environmental insults that happened thousand of years ago. Still, those who "believe" will not be able to reason in the real sense that you and I do. That switch has been turned on and it will remain turned on until they die.

So, to end this thread, I suggest that you go to the nearest electrical outlet (220 is better than 110). Remove the outlet plate with a standard screwdriver and remove the outlet. Now Grab the white wire with your left hand and the black wire with your right. For a better religious experience I recommend that you are standing in a tub full of water. Oh, and, Good Luck. Now do you believe?

Sorry to hijack this dude. I just had to.

Scott

I often don't "get" tangible things from prayer. No voices; no visions. I sometimes "get" intangibles. The process of taking time to slow down and choose to actively pursue things that I value (such as expressing concern for issues that my friends may be facing), giving space for the opportunity to listen. Then there are semi-tangibles in the time after the prayer (renewed focus, particular insights or whatever as I begin back into other things).

For example, I had a student come to my office yesterday who is trying to transfer and was wondering about her placement. She's concerned because she's not that good at math and doesn't want to fail, but the level of stress she was exhibiting seemed larger than just this. It's not like I stopped the conversation with her in order to pray about it, but as I feel compassion for her I become more "open" to "hear" what she's saying and the "prayer" for her begins. (Again, "semi-tangible" -- it's nebulous, but it's a part of the experience of the conversation.)

I won't go into the details of the conversation (nothing in particular happened except for me walking her through some thoughts and helping her to focus). But afterwards, I then continued in a short time of prayer as I decompressed the conversation, seeking for any bits of wisdom to be gained from the experience, and praying for her as she continues down this formal process of tranferring and in her personal life as she's apparently bogged down with some emotional hurts from her past.

I think it's somewhat erroneous to treat "prayer" as a particularly discrete act. While we have discrete forms of prayer, it's not as if the extent of the effects of prayer are restricted to those discrete times. Even if you make a prayer of supplication (ask for stuff), there's not a sense in which you expect the stuff to happen/appear/whatever before you close the prayer time.

It's possible.

You may want to go to the library and pick up a book called "The Celebration of Discipline" by Richard Foster and read the chapter on prayer. It might stand as at least a starting framework for discussing prayer.

When you talk to a friend, you are talking to both the conceptualization of your friend that exists in your mind (this provides the framework for how you decide to interact) and you're talking to your actual friend.

In the Christian view of God, God simply is God. It doesn't matter if you think he's Allah, or the universe, or whatever. However that point of contact is made, that's where things begin. This does not mean that I think that Allah is the same as God, or that I think pantheism is true. It just means that when you start a relationship, you usually don't really know the other. It starts somewhere, then over time that understanding is increased, and preconceived notions and ideas give way to the reality of the other.

I'm not a universalist, so I recognize that many will not be saved. But I want to go back through those basic points for you again, and flesh it out a bit.

---

Most people are willing to assent to the idea that there is some type of "goodness" out there in the universe.

And that there's a lot of "badness" that people do. And most people recognize that they do a lot of "bad" despite their recognition that it's better to do "good" (and their efforts to do so).

And this is where paths diverge. What to do with this situation? Since we recognize brokenness exists, can it be fixed? Is it even worth fixing? Where do we begin?

The way you've been approaching the conversation, I think you're taking a very narrow approach. And I think a lot of it is because you're starting with a very narrow conception of who God is and how he might operate.

Another way of saying this is that you don't need to have a theologically perfect conception of God in order to begin interacting with God.

A lot of people think I'm an old white guy because of how I post and what they know of my background (mathematician). It suprises a lot of people to discover that I'm a early-30s Asian. Yet their errors of conception are not a boundary to conversation.