Hey there, thanks for the welcoming. 
The initial experience was when I was looking at a landscape..it was a large vista which had mountains in the back, a river next to the mountains, a field before that with many trees and lush green grass everywhere, and there were birds and there was a gentle breeze..and as I was standing there admiring it, everything suddenly came into perfect focus..meaning, there was no background or foreground to the scene..I could see everything with the same sharpness and clarity at the same time..it was an impossible perspective, but it also went beyond that..as there was this lushness of life, and also love just radiating from all of this..as if it were all alive..and it was personal..I could feel there was personality in it. It brought me to a place of complete peace and harmony, to the point where I was glowing the whole rest of the day from it.
This is what initially clued me in that there is more going on than appearances would indicate. That was just the beginning though. I really started to learn that there was no such thing as coincidence.
Let me ask you..what initially brought you to believe there was a higher power, and what led you to dismiss that belief?
The initial experience was when I was looking at a landscape..it was a large vista which had mountains in the back, a river next to the mountains, a field before that with many trees and lush green grass everywhere, and there were birds and there was a gentle breeze..and as I was standing there admiring it, everything suddenly came into perfect focus..meaning, there was no background or foreground to the scene..I could see everything with the same sharpness and clarity at the same time..it was an impossible perspective, but it also went beyond that..as there was this lushness of life, and also love just radiating from all of this..as if it were all alive..and it was personal..I could feel there was personality in it. It brought me to a place of complete peace and harmony, to the point where I was glowing the whole rest of the day from it. This is what initially clued me in that there is more going on than appearances would indicate. That was just the beginning though. I really started to learn that there was no such thing as coincidence.
Let me ask you..what initially brought you to believe there was a higher power, and what led you to dismiss that belief?
(September 17, 2011 at 1:04 am)Justtristo Wrote: Welcome to the atheist forums
(September 16, 2011 at 9:24 pm)lucent Wrote: The one belief system I had always rejected was Christianity. I did not believe for a moment that Jesus even existed. However, though I would argue strongly against it, I really didn't know anything about Christianity.
I received revelation that I needed to investigate it, and when I finally got to it, I found it was about the God I already knew. God had shown me beforehand that He is a triune God, and that He has a Messiah..ie, someone whose job it was to save the world. So the bible was confirmed true to me before I had ever read it.
What kind of revelation did you receive if I am curious. If it just a gut feeling of some sort, I would very wary of making such big decisions on the basis of gut feelings. Believe me I have made some awful decisions based on just mere gut feelings.
I have always been non-religious, however until a few years ago believed in a higher power or maybe god. However at most I believed Jesus Christ was based on a historical character. However I believed a lot of the events in the gospels did not happen.
Precisely because figures of the period whose writings have survived such as Tacitus, Seneca, Suetonius, and especially Philo and Josephus would have written pages upon pages about the events portrayed in the gospels if they had happened.
Right now given the lack of hard evidence concerning the existence of a historical character whom the Jesus of the Gospels would be based on. I am agnostic towards the actually existence of such a character. Even if such a character existed he cannot have been more than a very marginal figure, because even if the say what Josephus wrote about him was authentic, it only at most a passing remark.
