An argument against Adam and Eve

[Anymouse]

My God has a great love for me, I see it in my life, experience it every day. He loves you too Cinjin whether you like it or not, your thoughts and disbelief about God changes nothing about his nature and it is His nature to love all of mankind.
As far as adding nothing new don't need to when it's the truth, truth can and does stand on it's own.

You are right; truth does normally stand on its own, except when it is suppressed. Propaganda works well that way.

Other than a book which its own adherents admit has been -ah- "mistranslated," you have no more proof the things you see in your life are the works of your God, chance, random individuals, my own gods, or anything else.

I could base a religion on any number of clearly fictional novels (wait, that's already been done, for example Robert A Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land"). That doesn't make the claims of those religious "proof" because they have a book (and Heinlein disavowed those folk at Green Egg anyway).

The one thing that many Christians desire to show is "they have proof." Of course, Thomas was rebuked for requiring it. Since, regardless of the particular flavour of Christianity, the basis of the Faithful is the Bible, the proof must be there. Not that it is a book (it is), nor that it is old (it is that too), but that it details facts.

There is no proof for that. There can never be proof for that. And in the moment someone were to demonstrate that all, or at least a substantial part, of the Bible were factual, it would cease in that instant being faith and religious belief, and become science.

The whole point of faith is believing without proof. No one alive to-day was around during Eden, or the Flood, or the parting of the Red Sea, or the life and times of Jesus; and not a shred of evidence exists for any of these events. Or ten thousand other events in the Old and New Testaments. What exists is summed up in the rebuke to Thomas: John 20:24-29.

Scepticism and proof are to be eschewed: blessed are those who believe without seeing, without proof. Trying to present "proof" on such a forum as this, or anyplace else, is a slap in the face to Jesus's lesson to Thomas.

There is a small problem with that, aside from the religious aspects: someone who will believe without proof, if not very careful, can be led to believe anything, couched in the right language and citing the right authority. For once you accept a single logical fallacy (knowledge without evidence), other logical fallacies (appeal to authority, non-sequituers, &c.) become that much easier, and your "God-given reason" becomes nothing more than the thing you trust least.

And, my understanding according to Christian doctrine, is that God created mankind. That would include mankind's reason. Nowhere in Genesis (or anywhere else) does it mention God's enemy having anything to do with the creation of humankind.

To deny your reason and logic is to deny the very gifts you claim come from your God. Would that not be the same as denying God himself?

(Of course, that is not an unpardonable sin, only denying the Holy Spirit, according to the NT, but that comes dangerously close.)

If you truly believe that humanity is meant to glorify God, why would trying to understand that creation of his through the tools he gave not do him that glory? I have never understood that part of Christianity, and I doubt I will ever have it satisfactorily explained.

James