(July 15, 2014 at 1:41 am)whateverist Wrote: 1. How is the method by which you became a Christian reliable?
Discernment.
Quote:2. Apart from church dogma, how can you know what happens when we die?
I can't. Just because I cannot be sure of something does not make it untrue.
Quote:3. What if you and your silly bible are wrong and there is no heaven, hell or afterlife of any kind?
Then nothing . . . mark my words.
Now, what if I reverse this question? Will I get an honest response?
Quote:4. If you are God's unthinking lacky, how can you call yourself moral? Do you really think morality is simply a question of rule following?
Free will. I do not have to follow the laws of God. Only if I want to be moral.
Quote:5. Even if there is a God, you are obviously free to do what you want. The prisons are full of Christians. Do you or do you not believe God gave man free will?
I do.
Quote:6. If all you do is follow God's rules, how does your life have any meaning? What makes it your life?
Don't you follow the laws of the country (or at least most of them). This is akin to saying, "If you follow the rules of the road, how do you ever get to where you want to go?"
Quote:7. Where did that which you believe created the universe come from? (And if anything can always have existed, why not the universe and all its prior conditions?)
Where is the logic that a creator must follow the same rules as the created? By definition, the creator is greater, unless you esteem yourself on the same intellectual and moral level as a doodle.
Quote:8. What about miracles? Aside from the most ridiculous claims, wouldn't most of what technology makes possible today have seemed miraculous to the ancients? So what's the big deal?
This is like the opposite of the "God of the gaps" argument. To say that we don't know how it happened but God definitely didn't do it.
Quote:9. What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris? Do you read anything else but the bible?
Smart men, but they also seem very angry. Not sure what this has to do with being a Christian and why have to answer to it.
Quote:10. If there is but one God, then why does every society have a different religion? [Props to Jenny.]
This points out a very interesting fact. Every society has reached for that which they cannot explain and has done so most often through the spiritual. Every society seems to acknowledge that there is something beyond itself . . . that is until recently with atheism growing in the largely white middle class youth of the technological age. I guess having a computer makes people think that they are smarter than those who got us here.
TO answer the question, every society has a religion because humanity has always looked to the spiritual for those things which only the poets attempt to articulate.
". . . let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." -G. K. Chesterton