Quote:Abraham didn't ask..and yet wad asked to kill his own son.
The point of the story as far I know was that God isn't like the other pagan gods who occasionally demanded human sacrifice. He didn't kill him after all. Prophets are individuals chosen by God to bring his message to his chosen people.
Quote:Moses didn't ask, and yet got a few stone tablets with writing on them.
Again he was a prophet. He may have had to carve the tablets himself, they would have been given to him in vision or something.
Quote:If we accept god does such things, then why settle for crapy confirmation bias and self delusions?
He won't have done it in quite the dramatic way the Bible describes. But the Torah/Bible is a revelation to humanity from God overall, it's "God breathed" and all that business.
Quote:If the evidence is there, then god is doing a bang up job hiding it from us.
Did it lose its ability to write on stone tablets?
When it says God used his finger to carve the tablets it was (according to my annotated Bible here) referring to the Holy Spirit of God. I'm sure there were some tablets those were kept in the Ark of the Covenant they carried around with them.
Yes people have direct contact with God through the Holy Spirit. I'd argue that atheists have the exact same contact, certainly as they seem to place great importance on morality and they share the same awe at the universe.
Quote:There he goes with the morality thing again...
People had morals before JC came into the picture.
There's your evidence for God/the Holy Spirit then. What more do you want?
Quote: Christianity is the one that adopted pre-existing morals.
Are you sure it didn't just reveal the Moral Law that had always been present? Seems like you're recognizing something as beyond human culture and opinion to me.
Quote: Awe at the universe... research: China, 6th century BC.
I didn't say it was exclusive to Christianity/the West it's a universal trait for all humanity in all eras of history. It all comes from God of course.
Quote: That's the thing...you don't grow indoctrinated into atheism. You grow immersed in the culture of the country where you live... in the western world, this culture had been greatly influenced by Christianity and, more recently, by science, technology and economics.
So, the most common path is one where you learn about the god of the bible or the Qur'an, the adults tell you it's true and tout live happy with that information... Until you grow, think a bit, and go either the atheist way, or become like you.
Yes but the religion of the culture you live in can still be the best one and the religion of your own culture can still be the one that contains the most truth. So you're lucky to have had a head start in it. Bear in mind of course that atheism is only something that is popular as a philosophy/worldview in the Western nations, it's not popular in Africa or South America. So your atheism can just as easily be an accident of where you were born. But you think it's true anyway and you think you have good reasons for believing it. So it's very much the same thing really.
Quote:Typically(from what I have observed in this forum - not a good source for stats, I know), the people who become atheist have a more analytical mind, while the ones who become theists tend to be more emotional.Then you're not in this group of people.
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You can use both parts of your mind equally. you can deduce the existence of God on a purely rational/scientific basis, it's called deism. To believe in say the Bible or Christ you need to add some faith but it can be a "Reasonable Faith".
Rather than a blind faith. So what you have here is the best of both worlds.
[quote]I wasn't any more indoctrinated into anything than you were. Unless you had the chained in a basement treatment. But you seem to be able to speak English so I assume you weren't.
Quote:You're from a western culture hence you find Christianity as the "truth". Had you been born in the middle east, you'd probably claim Islam to be the truth...same for India, Indonesia, south America, and anywhere on this planet...you tend to embrace the local mythology.
You're from a Western secularized culture so you think atheism/naturalism is true. What works for me works for you. We both have same the secular background anyway it seems I'm the one being more independent of my upbringing.
Quote:Christianity has no evidence.
Not scientific evidence no. God is a good foundation for what we understand through science we have a rationally understandable, intricate and perfectly balanced universe right here. There is kind of a God involved in Christianity if you think about it. It's the kind of thing you may see occasionally mentioned.
Quote:Here's a bit of it: in the years or decades after this alleged resurrection, Jerusalem remained a Jew city.most of the people there remained Jews, or Romans. It was only elsewhere that people came to believe such tales about JC, as three resurrection, turning water to wine, walking on water, etc.
The Jews didn't really accept Jesus as their Messiah but that does actually fulfill the Biblical prophecy where the Messiah would be rejected by his own people and bring God to the Gentiles. Interesting.
Quote:Then Muslims walked into the city and turned it into a Muslim center.
Christianity has always been a minority in the place where the man actually came back to life!! How's that possible, unless there's no evidence for such occurrence and, even at the time when it supposedly happened, there was no evidence for it?
What matters is the first followers of Christ can be traced to the historical time and place and the resurrection account wasn't a later addition to the story but was there from the very start. But like yourself the Jews who hadn't experienced these events would have been skeptical as it didn't fit with the traditional Jewish faith, it was much too strange. Also the first Christians believed in what had happened so strongly they were prepared to suffer persecution and die for it. Saint Paul was originally a bounty hunter of Christians called Saul but certainly something happened to him to make him very radically change his mind.