Gods forgiveness is worthless.

[Drich]

Actually I do not believe you have asked that particular question before. Because as you will no doubt see i have no problem discussing what and why i believe as I do.

http://atheistforums.org/thread-15622.html
http://atheistforums.org/thread-13378.html


Because in said bible God makes some conditional promises and I took Him up on those promises and He delivered.

Please, I am begging you in earnest here, give me a straight forward answer to these simple questions.
http://atheistforums.org/search.php?acti...desc&uid=0
This is a link to just about every answer to every question I have been asked on this message board.

Anything else?

Evidence? Whilst you have been so obliging her as to give me relatively straight forward answers, things like personal experiences with the divine is necessarily first person. Whilst interesting, if not a little mainstream, they cannot be used as evidence, and so I can't believe it without merely taking your word that it happened, which would be no different than reading the bible and accepting it off the bat.

The Burden of proof is not on the believer to provide. God Himself undertakes this task Himself. We as believers are only to provide you with direction on where to find this evidence if you want to experience it for yourself.

Which is why I asked you what does evidence look like for you. Because even though I can not provide it, i know God can. But if your heart is hard and cold to not receiving anything your peers/science has not predigested for you, You will ignore any effort God himself will provide for you. (Just short of changing your mind for you)

Sorry if I seem to be ignoring your efforts, but I have done this dance so many times I was hoping that we could skip a couple of steps, and you still get the intended meaning.

[Question Mark]

Evidence? Whilst you have been so obliging her as to give me relatively straight forward answers, things like personal experiences with the divine is necessarily first person. Whilst interesting, if not a little mainstream, they cannot be used as evidence, and so I can't believe it without merely taking your word that it happened, which would be no different than reading the bible and accepting it off the bat.

The Burden of proof is not on the believer to provide. God Himself undertakes this task Himself. We as believers are only to provide you with direction on where to find this evidence if you want to experience it for yourself.

Which is why I asked you what does evidence look like for you. Because even though I can not provide it, i know God can. But if your heart is hard and cold to not receiving anything your peers/science has not predigested for you, You will ignore any effort God himself will provide for you. (Just short of changing your mind for you)

Sorry if I seem to be ignoring your efforts, but I have done this dance so many times I was hoping that we could skip a couple of steps, and you still get the intended meaning.

Okay to be fair to everyone then, if it's not the task of the believer, but of god himself to convince me that he exists, then the criteria of the evidence that would convince me differs slightly under certain considerations of god himself.

Consider this:

God has given himself (I assume) the task of making people believe in him. The established way that he does this is to do as you advised before, which is to A/S/K, at which point god will reveal himself in some way.
By what I can tell, (and correct me if I'm wrong here), but the ASK method is literally to send out an earnest plea to god to reveal himself to me, at which point he will, and therefore I will believe in him. Problem solved, I'm no longer an atheist.

My question then becomes this: What should I watch out for? Upon asking earnestly for him to reveal himself, what is it that he will/might do to make himself known to me?

I've asked before, honestly I have with earnest intention asked for god to make himself known, and to my mind it has not happened. What had I missed?

[Baalzebutt]

The Burden of proof is not on the believer to provide. God Himself undertakes this task Himself. We as believers are only to provide you with direction on where to find this evidence if you want to experience it for yourself.

Which is why I asked you what does evidence look like for you. Because even though I can not provide it, i know God can. But if your heart is hard and cold to not receiving anything your peers/science has not predigested for you, You will ignore any effort God himself will provide for you. (Just short of changing your mind for you)

Sorry if I seem to be ignoring your efforts, but I have done this dance so many times I was hoping that we could skip a couple of steps, and you still get the intended meaning.

By your own logic, I would have to have faith to be shown evidence.

The fact is that if god were indeed omniscient and omnipotent, he would know EXACTLY what it would take to convince me that he exists and then would provide that evidence regardless of the state of my heart, hard or soft.

[ronedee]

As it says that you're a Catholic in your religious view bit there, I'm going to assume that your idea of a god is the one found int he bible.
As such, you describe god as the Einstein to our box of rocks in terms of intelligence. I would ask then, why it is that none of your gods plans, schemes, or ideas ever seem to work, or are at least unnecessarily and bafflingly convoluted when he is omniscient, and therefore has the gift of retrospect before events have even taken place.

Would you please give your thoughts on this matter?

Very obviously, I've described God in the simplest terms.

The thing is previously, that I've explained in some detail my views on God's plan. But no one here understands it in religious terms.

What is self evident to me, is not to you, or anyone that doesn't have the gift of Faith. And Faith is what our relationship with God is based on!

So, I feel that the only way to make some sense in the faithless mind is to appeal to things that they know. Which backfires a lot, because I get "correcting" scripture thrown back at me from unbelievers no-less!

You had an excellent question to Drich....about wanting to know how God is to reveal Himself to us. That is the best question I've heard from an Atheist!

The answer is: God reveals Himself in everything! The diference is....(and here I go again)..... in simple terms; the room being lit, or in darkness! God is there whether we see Him or not.

We need to reachout and turn the light on! Faith is again, the basis of our religion. God needs to prove nothing to us! He gave us LIFE! What we do with it is up to us!

I can't say, nor anyone how your path to Him will lead. But His promise is that IF you earnestly seek Him, you shall find Him.

In simple terms again.... sort of like our faith in Gravity. We know it's there. We can't see it, we don't really understand it, but we "know" it will hold us, and keeps us from flying away and being lost in space. And we accept that theory...even though we can't, don't or won't understand it!

So, we can trust without understanding some things! Why can't we trust the main thing...God? Because He he won't make our day nice? Sometimes Gravity makes us fall...and from high up! Do we blame it for falling and dying? No! We would laugh at someone doing that!

Just food for thought

---

By your own logic, I would have to have faith to be shown evidence.

The fact is that if god were indeed omniscient and omnipotent, he would know EXACTLY what it would take to convince me that he exists and then would provide that evidence regardless of the state of my heart, hard or soft.

"convince me" !

LOL! Couldn't God be asking the same from us? I mean really now...who is the God here? <<<< GOD!

[Baalzebutt]

"convince me" !

LOL! Couldn't God be asking the same from us? I mean really now...who is the God here? <<<< GOD!

I'm not the one making the assertion. I am using your definition of god (omnipotent, omniscient) and your own flawed logic (you have to have faith to get the evidence to have faith) to demonstrate (quite effectively, I might add) that belief in a god is an exercise in circular reasoning.

Would it surprise you to know that I was baptised at the age of 23 and was an active member of my church? I sought your god but noe evidence was forthcoming.

Oh, wait...I probably wasn't doing it right, huh? I wasn't seeking him properly. I wasn't a True Christian®.

[John V]

Personally, I would like to see a god that has restitution to the victim as a condition for forgiveness.

This would result in a lot of people who can never be forgiven, as there are many offenses for which restitution isn't possible. Bill can't, for instance, later repent and give one of his own nuts to Ted. Is that really what you would like to see?

[Ryantology]

Personally, I would like to see a god that has restitution to the victim as a condition for forgiveness.

This would result in a lot of people who can never be forgiven, as there are many offenses for which restitution isn't possible. Bill can't, for instance, later repent and give one of his own nuts to Ted. Is that really what you would like to see?

You mean to tell me that a God who shits out arbitrary rules like they were a contentious Taco Bell ingredient couldn't make up some rules for restitution beyond "eye for an eye"?

For an 'almighty' God he sure has a lot of limitations when it comes to imagination. Is it any wonder why we dismiss God as the mediocre invention of intellectually-stunted primates?

[Drich]

Okay to be fair to everyone then, if it's not the task of the believer, but of god himself to convince me that he exists, then the criteria of the evidence that would convince me differs slightly under certain considerations of god himself.

Have you Read Luke 11 yet?
5-6 Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose one of you went to your friend’s house very late at night and said to him, ‘A friend of mine has come into town to visit me. But I have nothing for him to eat. Please give me three loaves of bread.’ 7 Your friend inside the house answers, ‘Go away! Don’t bother me! The door is already locked. My children and I are in bed. I cannot get up and give you the bread now.’ 8 I tell you, maybe friendship is not enough to make him get up to give you the bread. But he will surely get up to give you what you need if you continue to ask. 9 So I tell you, continue to ask, and God will give to you. Continue to search, and you will find. Continue to knock, and the door will open for you. 10 Yes, whoever continues to ask will receive. Whoever continues to look will find. And whoever continues to knock will have the door opened for them. 11 Do any of you have a son? What would you do if your son asked you for a fish? Would any father give him a snake? 12 Or, if he asked for an egg, would you give him a scorpion? Of course not! 13 Even you who are bad know how to give good things to your children. So surely your heavenly Father knows how to give the Holy Spirit to the people who ask him.”

To be Given the Gift of the Holy Spirit is to be Given a little piece of God to indewell with in you.

So you are to Ask, Seek, And Knock for God to come and live with in you/your heart.

Consider this:

God has given himself (I assume) the task of making people believe in him. The established way that he does this is to do as you advised before, which is to A/S/K, at which point god will reveal himself in some way.

Through the indewelling of the Holy Spirit. Yes.

By what I can tell, (and correct me if I'm wrong here), but the ASK method is literally to send out an earnest plea to god to reveal himself to me, at which point he will, and therefore I will believe in him. Problem solved, I'm no longer an atheist.

Actually it is two fold. It is to make one humble himself before God, and to have the person seeking God to ready himself to receive God.

My question then becomes this: What should I watch out for? Upon asking earnestly for him to reveal himself, what is it that he will/might do to make himself known to me?

Our first contact with God the holy Spirit usally comes in the way of sin identification. In that God will show you the sins in your life that are preventing you from having a full on relationship with Him. Once you have identified these sins you keep close to your heart, you must repent from them. If you are faithful to this awareness of sin, and learn to turn from these sins and repent of them, then the Manifestation of the Holy Spirit comes in the way of Spiritual fruit. These fruit are identified in Gal 5:22 But the fruit that the Spirit produces in a person’s life is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these kinds of things. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their sinful self. They have given up their old selfish feelings and the evil things they wanted to do. 25 We get our new life from the Spirit, so we should follow the Spirit. 26 We must not feel proud and boast about ourselves. We must not cause trouble for each other or be jealous of each other.

Once we Bear fruit of the Spirit we can expect to receive Spiritual gifts. The List of Spiritual gifts and how to use them, can be found throughout the Book of 1 Cor, but a condensed list/concept is found in 1Cor 12 (the whole Chapter)
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?sea...ersion=ERV

It is through these Gifts that we see hear and interact with God on a daily basis. there are alot of those who pretend to possess these gifts, but seldom use them outside of self glorification. Once you establish a true legitmate relationship with God, then it is all but impossiable to live for self.

I've asked before, honestly I have with earnest intention asked for god to make himself known, and to my mind it has not happened. What had I missed?

If you did not read Luke 11, take time to read it now. If you have you will notice Asking will only yeild an answer. Answers in of themselves are meaningless with out a context to apply them (which is where seeking comes in) and an on going relationship to help maintain what God has shown you. (Which is what the knocking/God opening the door to you, is all about.)

One of the other members here openly admitted to me that he felt the presents of God, but a short time later dismissed it as some sort of a trivial mind trick. I suggested that He asked and was given what he asked for, but because he did not seek or knock what he asked for could not support everything he needed to build a real relationship. my point being Asking is important but we must also remember to seek and continually knock even after we get what we initially asked and sought after has been given to us.

---

The Burden of proof is not on the believer to provide. God Himself undertakes this task Himself. We as believers are only to provide you with direction on where to find this evidence if you want to experience it for yourself.

Which is why I asked you what does evidence look like for you. Because even though I can not provide it, i know God can. But if your heart is hard and cold to not receiving anything your peers/science has not predigested for you, You will ignore any effort God himself will provide for you. (Just short of changing your mind for you)

Sorry if I seem to be ignoring your efforts, but I have done this dance so many times I was hoping that we could skip a couple of steps, and you still get the intended meaning.

By your own logic, I would have to have faith to be shown evidence.

The fact is that if god were indeed omniscient and omnipotent, he would know EXACTLY what it would take to convince me that he exists and then would provide that evidence regardless of the state of my heart, hard or soft.

Indeed, and that is what is offered if you can only humble yourself before him and A/S/K as you have been instructed.

[John V]

You mean to tell me that a God who shits out arbitrary rules like they were a contentious Taco Bell ingredient couldn't make up some rules for restitution beyond "eye for an eye"?

You mean to tell me that you atheists would accept such rules as reasonable? Whatever the restitution, you guys would just bitch that it really doesn't make up for the lost nut.

[Question Mark]

As it says that you're a Catholic in your religious view bit there, I'm going to assume that your idea of a god is the one found int he bible.
As such, you describe god as the Einstein to our box of rocks in terms of intelligence. I would ask then, why it is that none of your gods plans, schemes, or ideas ever seem to work, or are at least unnecessarily and bafflingly convoluted when he is omniscient, and therefore has the gift of retrospect before events have even taken place.

Would you please give your thoughts on this matter?

Very obviously, I've described God in the simplest terms.

The thing is previously, that I've explained in some detail my views on God's plan. But no one here understands it in religious terms.

What is self evident to me, is not to you, or anyone that doesn't have the gift of Faith. And Faith is what our relationship with God is based on!

So, I feel that the only way to make some sense in the faithless mind is to appeal to things that they know. Which backfires a lot, because I get "correcting" scripture thrown back at me from unbelievers no-less!

You had an excellent question to Drich....about wanting to know how God is to reveal Himself to us. That is the best question I've heard from an Atheist!

The answer is: God reveals Himself in everything! The diference is....(and here I go again)..... in simple terms; the room being lit, or in darkness! God is there whether we see Him or not.

We need to reachout and turn the light on! Faith is again, the basis of our religion. God needs to prove nothing to us! He gave us LIFE! What we do with it is up to us!

I can't say, nor anyone how your path to Him will lead. But His promise is that IF you earnestly seek Him, you shall find Him.

In simple terms again.... sort of like our faith in Gravity. We know it's there. We can't see it, we don't really understand it, but we "know" it will hold us, and keeps us from flying away and being lost in space. And we accept that theory...even though we can't, don't or won't understand it!

So, we can trust without understanding some things! Why can't we trust the main thing...God? Because He he won't make our day nice? Sometimes Gravity makes us fall...and from high up! Do we blame it for falling and dying? No! We would laugh at someone doing that!

Just food for thought

We know gravity is there because we can test gravity. I can pick something up, and every single time I drop it, it'll fall. I do not take it on faith that each and every day gravity will be there, I have reasonable expectations based on past occurrences that gravity will be present. The same with the sun rising every morning. I take nothing on faith, because faith is not a pathway to truth. Faith is a means by which one can believe in something without evidence.
And you just admitted that. "God needs to prove nothing to us! He gave us LIFE!", yet no evidence is forthcoming, because your god is exempt from needing it. That's disgustingly ingenuous, and a clever way to deceive people.

For instance, some years back when I had started college, there was a fellow on my campus who had a box, which he said contained a goldfish that could swim in air as well as water, and which was invisible and intangible, so no one could see or touch it. He said that god had given him the fish, and had created the box to contain it. It had the number 777 carved on the front beneath a silver lock to keep the fish inside.
Do you believe Justin had an invisible, intangible, air-swimming goldfish that god gave him?

---

Okay to be fair to everyone then, if it's not the task of the believer, but of god himself to convince me that he exists, then the criteria of the evidence that would convince me differs slightly under certain considerations of god himself.

Have you Read Luke 11 yet?
5-6 Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose one of you went to your friend’s house very late at night and said to him, ‘A friend of mine has come into town to visit me. But I have nothing for him to eat. Please give me three loaves of bread.’ 7 Your friend inside the house answers, ‘Go away! Don’t bother me! The door is already locked. My children and I are in bed. I cannot get up and give you the bread now.’ 8 I tell you, maybe friendship is not enough to make him get up to give you the bread. But he will surely get up to give you what you need if you continue to ask. 9 So I tell you, continue to ask, and God will give to you. Continue to search, and you will find. Continue to knock, and the door will open for you. 10 Yes, whoever continues to ask will receive. Whoever continues to look will find. And whoever continues to knock will have the door opened for them. 11 Do any of you have a son? What would you do if your son asked you for a fish? Would any father give him a snake? 12 Or, if he asked for an egg, would you give him a scorpion? Of course not! 13 Even you who are bad know how to give good things to your children. So surely your heavenly Father knows how to give the Holy Spirit to the people who ask him.”

To be Given the Gift of the Holy Spirit is to be Given a little piece of God to indewell with in you.

So you are to Ask, Seek, And Knock for God to come and live with in you/your heart.

Consider this:

God has given himself (I assume) the task of making people believe in him. The established way that he does this is to do as you advised before, which is to A/S/K, at which point god will reveal himself in some way.

Through the indewelling of the Holy Spirit. Yes.

By what I can tell, (and correct me if I'm wrong here), but the ASK method is literally to send out an earnest plea to god to reveal himself to me, at which point he will, and therefore I will believe in him. Problem solved, I'm no longer an atheist.

Actually it is two fold. It is to make one humble himself before God, and to have the person seeking God to ready himself to receive God.

My question then becomes this: What should I watch out for? Upon asking earnestly for him to reveal himself, what is it that he will/might do to make himself known to me?

Our first contact with God the holy Spirit usally comes in the way of sin identification. In that God will show you the sins in your life that are preventing you from having a full on relationship with Him. Once you have identified these sins you keep close to your heart, you must repent from them. If you are faithful to this awareness of sin, and learn to turn from these sins and repent of them, then the Manifestation of the Holy Spirit comes in the way of Spiritual fruit. These fruit are identified in Gal 5:22 But the fruit that the Spirit produces in a person’s life is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these kinds of things. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified their sinful self. They have given up their old selfish feelings and the evil things they wanted to do. 25 We get our new life from the Spirit, so we should follow the Spirit. 26 We must not feel proud and boast about ourselves. We must not cause trouble for each other or be jealous of each other.

Once we Bear fruit of the Spirit we can expect to receive Spiritual gifts. The List of Spiritual gifts and how to use them, can be found throughout the Book of 1 Cor, but a condensed list/concept is found in 1Cor 12 (the whole Chapter)
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?sea...ersion=ERV

It is through these Gifts that we see hear and interact with God on a daily basis. there are alot of those who pretend to possess these gifts, but seldom use them outside of self glorification. Once you establish a true legitmate relationship with God, then it is all but impossiable to live for self.

I've asked before, honestly I have with earnest intention asked for god to make himself known, and to my mind it has not happened. What had I missed?

If you did not read Luke 11, take time to read it now. If you have you will notice Asking will only yeild an answer. Answers in of themselves are meaningless with out a context to apply them (which is where seeking comes in) and an on going relationship to help maintain what God has shown you. (Which is what the knocking/God opening the door to you, is all about.)

One of the other members here openly admitted to me that he felt the presents of God, but a short time later dismissed it as some sort of a trivial mind trick. I suggested that He asked and was given what he asked for, but because he did not seek or knock what he asked for could not support everything he needed to build a real relationship. my point being Asking is important but we must also remember to seek and continually knock even after we get what we initially asked and sought after has been given to us.

I might need your help here again. I've read that story before, yes, in fact I went over it again not two minutes ago because of another conversation I'm having on this thread.

I know what a sin is, but knowing what sin is, it seems to me that I have to believe in god first before I can begin to believe that sin exists too, sin being trespasses against god. How do I go about accepting that sin exists before I believe in a god?