(December 3, 2011 at 4:36 pm)Elihu Wrote: 1) I don't believe in voices in my head
2) My belief is not based on a mystical experience
3) A complex question requires a complex answer
One reason I believe in the Christian God is the same reason that an intelligent atheist is an atheist. The evidence I have found, when gathered and accumulated, points in that direction. Below is a very brief list to begin with.
Preface: The number of reasons any one person accepts a particular view is normally extraordinarily long and includes thoughts, experiences, etc. Obviously I cannot present all of those even in one book, let a lone a board post. Please keep this in mind as you evaluate what follows. These are not, by themselves, any sort of proof. Only tiny pieces in a much, much bigger puzzle.
1) While you may not agree with the Bible's description of the fall, man's sinfulness, etc. It sure does make perfect sense out of the screwed up world we live in. (Obviously this fact does not make it true, only sensible)
2) Regardless of how you believe man came about, no animals exhibit the moral or spiritual tendencies present in man. An ape does not worship the sun. In fact, an ape worships nothing at all. The idea of worship has never crossed its mind. Nor has the fact that slaughtering its fellow ape might be wrong.
You don't believe in voices in your head? Yet you believe in a book written by people who believed in voices in their head?
By the way, of course apes don't worship the sun, they are not evolved enough to form a complex language where they could actually ask that question - then just make up an answer because they don't know the answer and instruct the question asker to worship the sun.
You are currently experiencing a lucky and very brief window of awareness, sandwiched in between two periods of timeless and utter nothingness. So why not make the most of it, and stop wasting your life away trying to convince other people that there is something else? The reality is obvious.
