(August 11, 2016 at 9:35 am)mh.brewer Wrote:(August 11, 2016 at 9:05 am)SteveII Wrote: 1. Pew Research http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/ameri...landscape/
2. I see you moved from your original 'feeling' to changes in a person. Your examples could induce change in a person (for good or bad). Salvation as part of Christianity induces a specific set of large scale changes that are repeated over and over for millennium. Setting aside the catastrophic causes, how does education, science or medicine change a person in the way I was describing? More specifically, how do these things change a persons character so they exhibit things like love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and hope when none may have existed before? I still don't think you can identify one non-religious process that can produce similar results with any kind of predictable consistency. Therefore, the experience that does reliably produce these effects as well as the individual's intuition that their relationship with God is real is empirical evidence for the existence of God.
3. Impartiality has nothing to do with it. The effects of salvation as described in the NT and as experienced by a believer leaves a person in an objectively better (psychologically and sociologically) state than they were previously.
bold mine
1. You cherry picked the research by only including the evangelical christian data and ignoring the other data. Good for yooooouuuu. If you were confident in your position you would have included all of the data. Your still loosing.
2. You were the one who deviated from feeling to "change". So I took up the "change" that you appeared to want to discuss. Please provide proof for the bolded statement. And I notice you only discuss positive changes, no negative, that's not very honest. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2014/...istianity/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Christianity
3. Impartiality has everything to do with it. That's why people making judgements (in this instance you) are expected to be impartial (not you).
1. The descriptions of salvation that I have been using are most typically experienced in the evangelical church bucket rather than mainline protestant or catholic churches.
2a. If people consistently ascribe the change in their lives to God (intuitively believe the cause and effect relationship) why is that not evidence for the existence of God? Are you willing to say that human intuition is not a source of knowledge?
2b. What negatives are there in NT Christianity? All the list you have come up with are a result of institutional decisions and people's opinions. The only thing that makes a Christian a Christian are those things contained in the NT--so that is common denominator for all places and all times.
3. Impartiality is not required to examine the truth of something. That would be a ridiculous standard to achieve to make an observation.