(October 8, 2016 at 3:40 pm)Huggy74 Wrote:(October 8, 2016 at 10:11 am)Emjay Wrote: No, that wasn't what I assumed if you read my question properly. I asked, assuming (well hoping really... for your sake) that it wasn't the case that you put blind faith in everything, what was your criteria for deciding which claims to apply blind faith to in life? You've here said you only have that sort faith in God... fair enough... but the question was how did you arrive at that decision? To place blind faith in that particular claim over any other? I mean, if the definition of blind faith is that it is based on no evidence, then something else must make you choose to apply blind faith to one claim over another, in this case the god claim.
In my case I can't really say it's "blind faith", I've seen evidence, works should follow faith; faith without works is dead.
1 Corinthians 2:4-5 Wrote:And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.1 Corinthians 14:23-25 Wrote:If therefore the whole church be come together into one place, and all speak with tongues, and there come in those that are unlearned, or unbelievers, will they not say that ye are mad? But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth.
What Paul is saying here is, speaking in tongues is fine and all, but it's craziness to the unbeliever, BUT if they prophesy and reveal the secrets of the heart, then the power of God is undeniable.
For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. - Hebrews 4:12
I posted this video a while back, of a woman who had the experience Paul was speaking of:
Now you may choose to just dismiss her testimony out of hand, but the thing is, something like 1700 sermons from William Branham were recorded and this woman's testimony is corroborated by and audio recording from June 13, 1968.
I made video clip from another recording which is a little longer in which he sort of explains how faith works, make sure you turn on the subtitles because due to his 7th grade education his grammar isn't the best, and the audio quality isn't very good either.
Okay, well thanks for those videos... they were interesting to watch. As for my take on them, there are two things to consider. The first is the woman and her claimed vision of the circles at her feet. That is one thing that would never act as evidence of god for me; anything that can be attributed to the workings of the mind. So whether she was lying or actually had that experience makes no difference to me, because the mind is a very powerful thing. My dad claims to have had a vision, and I don't doubt that he did, but I don't attribute it to god but to the power of the mind. Even if I had a vision, my first port of call would be to explain it in psychological terms rather than supernatural terms. This also goes for any type of healing that can be attributed to the mind... the placebo effect is one example of that... you expect to get better so you do get better, even if someone replaces your medicine with sugar pills.
The second thing to consider is William Branham's knowledge about his audience who he claims are strangers. I can't deny that that's powerful stuff at face value but only at face value. If you can think back to a time before you even considered the idea of God... at that point if you were confronted with something that either had a magical explanation or some other explanation, the rational thing to do, based on what you knew of the world up to that point (ie no magic) would be to look for an earthly explanation before a magical one, and to treat an earthly explanation however unlikely as ultimately much more plausible than a magical explanation. So as you think now, you may think I'm clutching at straws to think it's an elaborate deception... but the real clutching at straws is to prefer a magical explanation over an earthly one when you have experience of the earthly but no experience of the magical. Anyway, back to Branham... he claimed that all his audience were strangers, and throughout saying stuff like 'I'm a stranger to you?, raise your hand, you name is xyz spelt xyz these are your ailments xyz', and that in itself sets alarm bells ringing; that's exactly the same thing that magicians do on stage when they go out of their way to reassure the audience that everything's on the up and up... right before they perform their trick. He actually swore in God's name that the people were strangers so looking at earthly explanations only, he could either be a Christian, either playing pedantic word games to make him feel like he wasn't lying or have some rationalisation in his head that it was for some greater good and god was okay with it, or he could be a non-Christian who was deliberately lying. And just looking him up on Google it turns out that there was a lot of controversy about him, calling him a false prophet etc and that he was heavily into the occult and contradicting the Bible. So with that in mind, I think the most likely explanation is that he was indeed not a Christian... to a believer he'd be a 'false prophet', but to everyone else, just a liar.
