Jesus as Lord - why is this appealing to so many?

[SteveII]

1. That is a conclusion based on the assumption that there is no God. Your conclusion is not based on any  evidence related to GC's (or any other Christians's) experience. Can human experiences be relied on for truth? If you say yes, then your conclusion is just special pleading. If no, then you have all kinds of other metaphysical problems to work out. 

2. It's simply nonsense that there is no evidence. You might not think it sufficient for your personal threshold of proof, but it is just intellectually dishonest to say there is not any.  Along with personal experience (which is evidence), you have

2.1 The NT describes actual events including the miracles, life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
2.2 God works in people's lives today--changing people on the inside as well as the occurrence of miracles. It is easy to meet these people and hear their stories.  
2.3 The natural theology arguments (which are additional reasons to think that the above is true):
     a. God is the best explanation why anything at all exists.
     b. God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe.
     c. God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. 
     d. God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness.
     e. God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.

As always, belief in Christianity is based on a cumulative case of evidence. Each piece increases the probability that God exists. 

3. If you have come to a point of believing in God (of Christianity), that entails belief in certain truths about humans as well. We were created with a purpose, we have value, we have eternal souls, our sin separates us from God, God desires a relationship with us, and finally, that relationship will produce fundamental changes to our character for the good. Given these fundamental beliefs in the human condition, following God's moral precepts and allowing the relationship to guide your actions is the logical conclusion. To say it another way, there is no problem with the logic in a desire to make God the Lord of your life. You seem to think that the goal is to give up control, when in fact what you are doing is to change your heart so that your motives are more pure and you are open to opportunities/experiences that God has for you. 'Control' is the wrong word--or at least does not fully describe the process. 

4. Your analogy is a poor one. You, the maker of a robot, do not possess the qualities or characteristics worthy of worship. Christians don't worship God because he created them, they worship him because he is worthy of worship. The distinction is important. 

EDIT: left a sentence hanging from all the editing...deleted it.

1. Experiences alone are not sufficient for truth. After testing for biases, delusions, and hallucinations, they have some applicability for truth detection. Religious experiences are inevitably under the categories of delusions or hallucinations because they  are inherently untestable.

'Untestable' in no way even remotely implies "inevitably under the categories of delusions or hallucinations". That is really bad philosophy! There are tons of categories of things that are not testable. All human experiences/thoughts/emotions, logic, mathematical axioms, moral truths, aesthetics, philosophy. For crying out loud, science itself is governed by a philosophy of science--which itself is not 'testable'. Your claim that things have to to be testable to be true is itself not 'testable'. 

2. Would you claim there is evidence for the existence of Athena and Apollo? The Iliad gives testimony for both.

Do you think you have a parallel between ancient Greek Gods and the events surrounding Jesus in the first century? That is something a teenager might think is a good point. It is obvious from your responses that you don't even know much of anything about the thing you are sure is "not evidence". 

No, I do not consider the NT to be good evidence. It is no better than the Iliad, for example.

And so we continue... Did Homer see any of the events or talk to any of the characters? I'll answer for you. Homer was writing about something that oral tradition said happened 400 years earlier. Another question. Did Homer believe the events to have happened the way he related them? Yet another question. Were there any other people who wrote about the events of the Iliad at the time or shortly after the actual events to support Homer's version? 

No, I don't consider personal change to be evidence. We know full well that personal change can happen from a wide variety of opinions.

Not my point. It is the testimony of people as to the change and why. You would have to call them all liars or delusional. You don't have any philosophical or logical basis to do so. Your argument seems to be basically that God does not exists, he can't change people, therefore God does not exist. Good circular reasoning (also called question begging). You totally skipped over the mention of miracles. Are you sure you don't want to set up another question begging argument for that? 

No, those claims that God are the 'best explanation' are simply false. God cannot explain why anything exists at all, because the existence of God is assumed--i.e, not explained. The rest of the claims are equally BS.

Nope. Not even close. You logically need an uncaused cause for anything to exist. When you look around for available candidates that meet that description...hmm. See, God was not assumed, it is an inductive argument where the conclusion is a probabilistic one. Based on your response, I find it highly doubtful that you understand the other natural theology arguments (look at that, another example of inductive reasoning). 

Yes, if you are deluded into believing in a deity, that delusion spreads to the point you are willing to degrade yourself by slavery. That doens't make either delusion or slavery desirable.

And the robot analogy is spot on. Even if the creator is 'good' and 'awesome', that is nowhere close to being reason to 'worship' such a being.

Yeah--those were not responses to my points--you just restated yours. 

This post is more critical than usual because you think you know way more than you do about anything Christian. You really don't--you mischaracterize almost everything. You compound that error by criticizing the beliefs using really really bad logic. You are simply not good at this and your arguments are simple to pick apart. Just because the other atheists don't point it out, don't think you are making good points. Half of them reason as poorly as you do and the other half won't police their own ranks when it comes to religion. 

An intelligent person has two choices. 1) They can decide they do not need to know what the other side believes and why--and not ever engage them in a condescending, fallacy-ridden, critiques about things you know nothing about, or 2) they can be more respectful, ask more questions and have less opinions until they learn more. OR, you can keep doing what you are doing.