Hello atheistforum

[Mister Agenda]

Final installment:

The barrier to sinning is how much you love God and trust in Him.

Hm. By that measure, it seems many Christians love God and trust in Him less than many nonChristians.

I try to avoid labels. I think stereotypes make you stereotypical. I love everyone, even the ones who hate me, even the ones who are outwardly despicable.

It's good to avoid painting with too broad a brush.

The church is apostate, and thus, it is looking more and more like the world every day.

I think the truly pious are always a minority in any religion. Most people are who they are at their core no matter the veneer of their beliefs.

You don't realize the spiritual nature of all things, especially beliefs. It's entirely possible for people to come to illegitimate conclusions about their own beliefs, because most people don't understand the nature of their own beliefs. You take that as evidence that they have no actual reason for their beliefs beyond some delusion they are experiencing. For those who do not know God, they are experiencing a delusion, but a carefully engineered delusion.

I'll give you my theory on it. God controls everything, and that includes access to truth. That knowing truth is actually a priviledge. Your particular access will determine who you meet and what experiences you will have, and what you take from those experiences. You will find an entire Universe of meaning there, and so you won't notice that your access is actually tightly controlled. What determines your access level is your openness to truth. Inherently, what keeps you closed to truth are positions you take which you rationalize as being intellectual but are actually predicated on things like: what you hate, what you lust for, what you lie about it, what you hide, your many sins, etc..all of your unreasonable emotionally laden baggage, guilt, and secret sins you carry around from life. The evil you have done compromises your ability to reason and know truth.

God is always giving you opportunities to attain a higher access level and get closer to the ultimate truth (that Jesus is Lord), opportunities which test your character and inherent fairness and balance towards truth. He gives you access to real truth, but if you reject it, you are conversely left with nothing but lies, and these seem as truth. You also have temptations, and the more you succumb to them, the more the deluded you become; the more you sin the less able you are to reason and attain to truth. Sin literally makes you a moron.

That's just a general thought, not meant to be theology. It actually supports your theory in some ways and explains confirmation bias, but not for any reason you speculate.

Sounds unfalsifiable in principle; which means there's no way to tell if it's really true or not through evidence and reason.

The evidence will come when you believe, and it will come, in my case, before I believed. The question is, where is it coming from. You think belief ends in the brain, but it is spiritual and extends into the spiritual realms. Regardless of what you're saying, the apostles had lunch with the resurrected Jesus on the beach, so either it's made up or they were with Him.

Or mistaken about Jesus being dead. Even Jesus wouldn't be in a position to know he'd only been in a coma. But made-up does sound more plausible than actually having lunch with someone who was really dead but got better.

I seem to be in a Catch 22. I won't believe in disembodied spirits and the supernatural without evidence for them; but I don't get the evidence unless I believe first. I won't convince myself for you, because I believe I'm fully capable of convincing myself that something false is true if I put down my rubbish filters first. If it makes you feel any better, my rubbish filters have also kept me from trying out Hare Krishna, Scientology, homeopathy, Wicca, and Mormonism from the inside.

PS: Apologies for messing up one of the quotes in my previous post, too much time has passed for me to fix it.