(July 17, 2015 at 2:02 am)SamS Wrote: Has there ever been a Christian argument, or something a Christian said, that made you, for even a split second, question whether your current atheistic stance is right?
Even if the argument turned out to be completely fabricated or disprovable, did it at the very least draw you closer to believing the Bible is God's Word and all that such a belief entails?
If not, has there ever been an argument that you didn't know how to answer, or that surprised you against your expectations?
Not looking for "All Christian arguments are idiotic" replies. This is an honest question.
The thing is, no argument for any god is ever enough.
To actually show that something exists, you must *surprise, surprise* show it.
An argument doesn't show the god... only attempts to reason the god into existence, often relying on faulty old writings as if they attest to reality (e.g. the bible).
(July 17, 2015 at 4:37 am)SamS Wrote:Ah.. that warm fuzzy feeling of a prophecy fulfilled.(July 17, 2015 at 3:02 am)Rhythm Wrote: How about you, has there ever been something [insert competing religion here] said that made you doubt your "current theistic stance"?
No other religion has ever made me ever doubt Christianity. I view Judaism as incomplete Christianity; ending with the Old Testament is just a huge cliffhanger because so many of the prophecies stated in it are fulfilled by Jesus Christ (Deuteronomy 18:15, as one example). OT ends with promises of great things to come, yet for Judeo-believers, never will. Islam is a corrupted extension of Christianity, whose denial of fundamental Christian doctrine (Resurrection, Christ's Deity, etc) leave the same OT prophecies unfulfilled and therefore incomplete ("pierce my hands and feet" in Psalm 22:16, yet Muslims don't even think Jesus was crucified).
A prophecy from ~500BC, fulfilled in around 1AD, or so the text written around 100AD says.
(July 17, 2015 at 4:37 am)SamS Wrote: What about Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age spirituality? They may have had an appeal when I was agnostic, but they don't affect me anymore partly because the Bible frequently criticizes all other gods. Even the 10 plagues were largely an attack on Egypt's false gods (Numbers 33:4). It denounces those who worship "wooden and metal statues and idols", which can do nothing for us.This bit is troubling...
If there was ever only one god and it showed up quite often (if we are to accept the OT, as you seem to be doing when you refer to its prophecies and these plagues), what on Earth possessed people to manufacture other gods?!
Did those other gods present themselves? Clearly impossible, right?
So all those other gods were manufactured for some very human-centric purpose... which? Power over other people? Money? Population behavior control?
Can't the same apply to christianity? And, hence, all gods are equally man-made and equally created for some human-centric purpose...?
On the other hand, if we take archeology's word, people were worshiping some of those other gods well before the god of the OT stepped into the mind of any human... And that renders Yahweh just another man-made god in the sequence of man-made gods from the middle-east.
At best, some other god is the real one. The original one. The one that people first worshiped - should be the one people had first contact with.
However, archeology suggests that initial worshiping was of the shamanistic kind, where the "spirit world" was visited by the shaman through a trance... and we now know how unreliable that is, given all the ways we can manipulate a brain with chemicals and drugs.
So... nothing remains... well, if we really really want to have a god, the deistic god remains. The ultimate creator god that stands at the gap in knowledge about the origin of the Universe... but does nothing else within the Universe itself, so why worship it?
(July 17, 2015 at 4:37 am)SamS Wrote: Seriously, to Christians, the Bible is the best proof of itself. Want physical evidence of God? Have a Bible, it is both the claim and the proof of the claim. May seem absolutely stupid, but the age of OT compared to the NT, how one reveals every little secret of the other (especially if you study it), makes the entire thing completely believable. If we only had the NT, I wouldn't believe it either.
That's one of the reasons tons of people believe it and remain believing in it... but it's not the core reason that makes people believe in the first place... indoctrination takes that piece of the cake.
Self-attesting accounts in the story don't mean that the story itself is grounded on reality.
Or else, Harry Potter could be real; Gandalf could be real; Superman could be real; Darth Vader could be real (if we ignore Episodes I, II and III
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