I'm starting to doubt my lack of belief

Post Reply New Topic

Unless you're of any faith that isn't Christian...then faith comes by hearing some other word instead.

Not the faith in God of the Bible. Only Jesus is the way to salvation.

But it says merely "faith" and faith, at large, applies to much, much more than simply Christianity.

So you believe. But there is not an iota of objective empirical evidence to support your belief. It is the same as a child's belief in Santa Clause or the Tooth Fairy. No one knows if God, god or the gods exist or not. No gods have been seen of late. We have telescopes of all kinds that can see back nearly thirteen billion light years. Not a sign of god. Not a whisker. Not a trace. Nowhere, nohow.

Even miracles, like the parting of the Sea of Reeds can be accounted for by purely natural processes. We don't need God, god or the gods to understand the world.



ruveyn

Oooooh, I see what you're talking about.

But you gotta keep it in context. Paul is writing this letter to the Christians in Rome. If you hear the word of Christ, it will lead to faith in Christ. Paul isn't talking about other religions here. It's a specific thing. I'm not likely to learn about the God of the Bible or the plan of salvation by reading from the Mahayana Sutras.

Thanks for all your responses, you've been very helpful.

The empirical evidence isn't really dissuading me. I think I need to base my decision on faith, not logic, and faith tells me there's more than the physical world.

I will talk to my dad about this soon.

I'm one of the minority of Christians that does not believe in hell. Though I'm told I should believe in hell. I just can't imagine God being that cruel. And I don't buy that Hell is a choice people make. It IS a punishment, plain and simple.

Nope, many Christians do the same prooftext that I did. In fact, I'm sure I picked up that text and its usage from a Christian arguing the doctrine of "Total Depravity", in which the use of the quote is really not so alien to my own.


No, it doesn't have anything to do with that. Instead it has more to do with the heart not being fully trustworthy, not with the head being divorced. Your own "contextualization" does not really change the point I was getting at, as "I, the Lord, examine the mind, I test the heart to give to each according to his way, according to what his actions deserve", still suggests that the heart can be wrong and that God(which most evangelicals read as scripture) is the source to be trusted. Which goes entirely back into everything I was saying.

You know that thing I said in the thread on evolution: "Ok, but saying a person is "taking quotes out of context" still isn't a way to combat any use of a scripture in a way you dislike". That applies here as well, and I think a lot of conservative Christians have problems with this, because an interpretation can still be reasonable and say something/imply something that they dislike. It might not be fully correct at the end of the day, but the person's problem isn't "taking quotes out of context". (I know, you're taking the Bible out of context is often conservative talk for "I don't like your interpretation", but that's still dishonest)


Yeah, y'know if I was arguing "man's depravity" instead of trashing the Christian religion based upon that verse, I am pretty sure you wouldn't be attacking me for "picking verses out of context".


Wait? That's idolators? I thought that was conservative Christians, cuz y'know, if a shoe fits, then well... the shoe fits.

That being said, you do realize that your use of scripture is entirely without relevance don't you? I mean, I invoked the scripture I did to show that Christian beliefs would surely piss off gina-ghettoprincess, which I think everyone would admit that the Bible is a proper authority capable of showing a person that. Your using a scripture to argue that people who don't believe scripture are evil.... which, y'know has a lot less relevance, unless you believe I could rationally start quoting the Koran to argue that Christians are mistaken.


AngelRho, you seem to be a fideist. The problem with this belief is that you obviously could be wrong. (After all, there are many fanatics of other religions) But your own beliefs could never let you recognize that unless something really hit you hard enough to doubt. Because of this, despite the fact that I am sure you have good intentions and probably aren't a horrible person to deal with, you still represent some of the worst elements of conservative Christianity.

1 Corinthians 1:18-31 addresses the difference between human wisdom and God's wisdom through the power of his Word.

I think near-death experiences are very convincing because most people who have them describe them as extremely vivid, and thus, not what one would expect from a hallucination, and because they remain so adamantly convinced that the experience was real and not a hallucination. I would think that if they really could be written off as hallucinations, more atheists and agnostics who have a NDE would be convinced of this, but I've yet to hear a single case where this has happened. Instead, most NDE'ers are convinced that the experience was real, that God exists, and that the afterlife exists, regardless of how they felt before the NDE. So they may not be proof of an afterlife, but for me, they remain convincing evidence.

Well, spiritual experiences and conversion experiences are often described the same way, but I've heard of people deconverting after having them.

I don't think that these are convincing evidence though. I don't know what one should expect from a hallucination, but vivid hallucinations are described as happening as a result of taking certain drugs. So, clearly this is in the brain's capability, since all drugs do is alter the working of the mechanism, but they can't grant totally new powers.

Even further, subjective alteration isn't a really good argument. The human brain is screwed up. If you've seen how they can be taken apart, then I would see no reason to trust something that could easily be an error report.

More like an eclectic. I recognize role of logic and reason in perceiving God and drawing conclusions about application of scripture to day-to-day life. I don't read this book or that book or follow any one theologian. I'm sure there's some great stuff out there by some great thinker who happened to be a Christian, but I don't find it relevant to my own experience. The Bible alone is enough, and an independent study of it and discernment of truth based on it is the single best way to understand it. True, I do rely on people with more experience than I do, because I get the idea not very many people are really concerned with the lives and cultures at the time of the writing, and those who are familiar with such things are a good source of understand contextual information. A lot of things get misread that way.

I also recognize that, while cosmological and ontological arguments in favor of God are great, reasonable arguments, they only seem to show that there is a god or creator of some sort. That's fine if you choose to go that route, but for me personally it isn't enough. It's not enough because the heart and mind are fundamentally flawed due to sinful nature, and no human understanding on its own can possibly understand God. If the mind is flawed, so is its logic/reason.

I say start with the only thing that DOES make sense, which is that the God of the Bible does exist. With FEW (I'm only aware of one_ exceptions) the text of Bible doesn't change from one translation to another. From there you can begin to make sense of everything else.

You do realize that eclecticism and fideism aren't competing categories, don't you?


And this is why I consider you a fideist. That being said, if man's mind is so bad, then how can you trust it to tell you that there is a God? After all, any knowledge or belief you have about God would have to be a result of your mind, and if your mind is so bad that it can't recognize this essential trait about reality, then how can you trust it on this matter at all to begin with? It could easily be that there is a different theological structure to reality, and that Loki is tricking your mind into seeing the Christian God as the most reasonable answer. And if that's a real possibility, then how can any conclusion you come to be taken seriously by yourself even? Even further, how can moral reward or blame come from a decision that can't result of any virtue, but rather an arbitrary whim? Because if human understanding cannot lead to God, then the question of belief is never one decided by virtue at all.


That's funny, I'd think it the opposite. I mean, there is nothing intuitive about a being that we must call "perfectly good" who could save people from their misery with a snap of the fingers, but doesn't. (we've gone through this, and your reasoning was BS, as you seem to recognize that a morally imperfect being who can only help at great cost is not a proper comparison to a morally perfect being who can solve everything at no cost) I mean, heck, if the problem was that our brains were flawed, then why not solve that problem first, so that way we can solve the rest without worry? How come, if this is a matter of sin, human flaws tend to often just be absurd? Even further, if this is the "only thing that makes sense", how come it making sense seems to correlate more with upbringing than anything else? After all, most Christian people I've met grew up in Christian homes, but if this is a universal sense-making thing, rather than brainwashing, then you should expect a more egalitarian population distribution.

I mean, from everything I've seen, Christianity is a big pile of logical gerrymandering kept afloat by the slavish devotion of its brainwashed victims, not something that really makes sense of the world at all. In fact, I would actually say that Christianity really is incompatible with a lot of things that we've discovered, and that it has reached the point where tries to continue even using deceit. I mean, here's a simple question though: If God makes sense of everything that exists, then what thing could come to exist that would falsify God? I mean, to explain something properly, one has to avoid a situation where the explanation could explain every state of affairs, and you know that my question isn't even an abstract cosmological question either, because that's not important to you as you've already said. So, what is actually being explained to you better through this that some other theory of the world couldn't do a better job at?

Following your brains doesn't make you happier though.



How about the jewish?



Evidence Please?



someone had to say that

well, I would think that most likely asking this question in this place would not be much of a good idea after all, as you said, everyone here would be baised towards their own positions, and well, I don't know, I could guess that you might be going through something in your life that makes you wonder about these things and apparently the fear of hell, but that would be a guess of mine, I understand the emotional and psychological need for few people about believing in something that gives them hope and the like, or even fear, I only could say that you would have to make that decision for yourself and what it seems to honestly work best for you and not anybody else's. However it is still possible to get some tips here that might be helpful, what AG said seems to be very helpful in that regard, about considering other spiritual beliefs besides one single religion and one single denomination, it seems to be a good way to start, I do agree that a belief without a hell seems to be a better belief, but the choice of which faith or belief to follow is still yours, you do have the freedom and the right to do so after all, and whatever you see it works better for you I could only hope that that would be satisfactory.

Last edited by greenblue on 27 May 2010, 11:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Oh goodness, Fnord has been gone a long time.