(February 27, 2013 at 2:39 pm)Drich Wrote:(February 27, 2013 at 8:40 am)Question Mark Wrote: Evidence? Whilst you have been so obliging her as to give me relatively straight forward answers, things like personal experiences with the divine is necessarily first person. Whilst interesting, if not a little mainstream, they cannot be used as evidence, and so I can't believe it without merely taking your word that it happened, which would be no different than reading the bible and accepting it off the bat.
The Burden of proof is not on the believer to provide. God Himself undertakes this task Himself. We as believers are only to provide you with direction on where to find this evidence if you want to experience it for yourself.
Which is why I asked you what does evidence look like for you. Because even though I can not provide it, i know God can. But if your heart is hard and cold to not receiving anything your peers/science has not predigested for you, You will ignore any effort God himself will provide for you. (Just short of changing your mind for you)
Sorry if I seem to be ignoring your efforts, but I have done this dance so many times I was hoping that we could skip a couple of steps, and you still get the intended meaning.
Okay to be fair to everyone then, if it's not the task of the believer, but of god himself to convince me that he exists, then the criteria of the evidence that would convince me differs slightly under certain considerations of god himself.
Consider this:
God has given himself (I assume) the task of making people believe in him. The established way that he does this is to do as you advised before, which is to A/S/K, at which point god will reveal himself in some way.
By what I can tell, (and correct me if I'm wrong here), but the ASK method is literally to send out an earnest plea to god to reveal himself to me, at which point he will, and therefore I will believe in him. Problem solved, I'm no longer an atheist.
My question then becomes this: What should I watch out for? Upon asking earnestly for him to reveal himself, what is it that he will/might do to make himself known to me?
I've asked before, honestly I have with earnest intention asked for god to make himself known, and to my mind it has not happened. What had I missed?
If you believe it, question it. If you question it, get an answer. If you have an answer, does that answer satisfy reality? Does it satisfy you? Probably not. For no one else will agree with you, not really.
