Hello atheistforum

[brotherlylove]

Well, it's been my experience that God is more than willing to provide that evidence. It doesn't seem like you ever got to know God personally in your Christian upbringing, that you weren't born again. Would say that is accurate?

Oh for fuck's sake! I'm not going to bother responding to the rest of your shit because you're refusing to listen to what anyone is saying, but I for one am getting sick of seeing this kind of crap. Do you realise how insulting it is that you're essentially telling people that they don't believe because they weren't doing it right?! Like you're the only person who ever got religion, so you're the only one who understands it properly?!

Get fucked. Seriously.

Scripture makes it pretty clear that not everyone who calls Jesus Lord is sincere about it:

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

Many people are raised in the religion by parents who are marginal Christians at best, and because of a lack of learning and hypocripsy on the part of the parents, they fall away. It's very common and happens all the time. In the same way, many people fall pray to "easy believism" and think that reciting the sinners prayer makes them a Christian, and when any real testing of their faith occurs, they fall away as well. God said His people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.

Whether you think it is insulting or not, it is simply true that the majority of those who fall away never understood how to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ in the first place.

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I don't doubt your experience. It's just that I don't doubt similar experiences reported by followers of other religions and note that it seems to be the believing that matters rather than what exactly is believed in.

You do doubt them though; you explain them away as delusion. I explain them as being either authentically from God or authentically not from God.

I know the idea that someone can come from where you are to where I am can be hard to wrap your head around. I would probably have thought the same thing if there was an internet to argue with atheists on when I was a Pentecostal. However, I was a Bible-believing, born-again soldier of Christ filled with the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in tongues. My devotion inspired to read the entire Bible. So I don't think your impression is accurate.

It isn't hard to wrap my mind around. I came from a secular background, remember? I've seen the world as you see it now. Neither do I dispute that someone who was born again could fall away, although it is far more rare. What I don't understand is how someone who claims to have loved God, sincerely and truly loved Him, could reject Him so easily. You had a lifetime of experiences which you threw away over your skepticism of the bible, when God had given you all of the evidence in the world to trust Him. That isn't love, I'm sorry to tell you.

Also, to note, speaking in tongues isn't direct evidence of being born again or having the Holy Spirit. That isn't biblical. There are however false spirits in the church that emulate these things. Check out "kundalini warning" on youtube sometime.

I really can't think of any positive changes in my life that I really need. Being Pentecostal became very disturbing due to cognitive dissonance, and made me a bit neurotic, but I've found rational skepticism and humanism very calming. I don't smoke, only drink socially and only enough to be polite, I'm sexually faithful, I tutor refugee children, I have a pretty good job, I even belong to a religious community (Unitarian Universalism). In fact the longer I've been an atheist, the better my life has gotten. I know correlation doesn't equal causation; but I think a lot of my problems were related to my strict religious upbringing, and as I become freer, my life gets better. For instance, I've gone from shyness and social awkwardness to being a community leader of sorts.

The devil can make secular life go very smoothly for you. He has no reason to attack you any longer.

If I did feel the need to change my life, I would research the scientific evidence on doing so and select an appropriate method that doesn't require me to accept doctrines contrary to reality. I care very much whether what I believe is true or not, so I can't just shop around for the belief that makes the bestest promises.

Just 50 years ago scientific evidence claimed that the Universe didn't have a beginning, something the secular world used to mock Christianity. Scientific evidence can be contrary to reality. I used to believe in an old age of the earth and evolution, but after investigating the actual evidence, I found those beliefs unjustified.

If I knew (or even thought) there was a God, I would be a theist. If I was a theist and knew Jesus really existed (I'm not a Jesus Myth guy, but I don't put the historicity of Jesus as nearly certain), was more than an apocalyptic preacher, was more than a prophet, and was actually God incarnate, I would be a Christian. I suppose God would be able to address my reservations, or perhaps erase them, if in contact with me.

It's good to hear that you are at least open to the truth. Many atheists would never admit this.

If Satan starts religions and people are born and raised in those religions, it seems rather disengenuous to put all the blame on the people for following the wrong religion. Doesn't it seem like you get an unfair advantage being in a culture where the correct religion is predominant and you don't have to break ties with your family or break the law to join it? That's far from a level playing field.

I don't blame people for what they believe. I was just as deceived as they were. Neither was I predisposed to accept Christianity; due to my beliefs, I was predisposed to reject Christianity. I explored many different religions, philosophies, and belief systems. It was only because of signs I had received that I decided to give Christianity a try.

I've rarely seen a sentence that needed to be said less.

Is this a favorite tactic of yours, I say it's not a conspiracy and you keep saying it is because that would be more convenient to your position?

Can you point out where I said that? If you can't, can you examine your thoughts to determine why it is you believe I did?

You made implications that the gospels were invented narratives designed to control people. That is what I would call a conspiracy.

Was Matthias a witness to the Resurrection? And was Judas not an Apostle? It's just a nit, it's equally impressive if 10 of the 12 original apostles died for their belief in the resurrection, plus Matthias. I don't doubt that if the Church tradition of their martyrdom is correct, that they sincerely believed in some sort of Resurrection. Did they personally witness it? The earliest copy of the earliest Gospel (Mark), is missing the last twelve verses describing the Resurrection scene. There is evidence that many early Christians regarded the Resurrection as a spiritual one.

According to scripture, Matthias was there from the beginning, and was one of the people who travelled around with Jesus and saw His miracles. It is likely that He also saw the resurrected Jesus. At least two of the gospels were written by direct witnesses, and the other two were written by people who had access to the testimony of direct witnesses. If you want to say the resurrection wasn't literal, you would have to say they made it up. If they made it up, they certainly wouldn't have died for it.

An example in modern history is the Rastafarian religion, which regarded Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia, as the resurrected Christ and incarnation of God. When Selassie died, Rastas either believed he had actually gone into seclusion and will return to vanquish all evil; or that his death was a spiritual ascension and Selassie is now omnipresent in the universe.

There are plenty of examples of how people will retain their religious faith in the face of the objects of their worship not being as divine as they were supposed to be. Many redouble their faith, seeing it as a virtue to believe despite contrary evidence. No conspiracy is needed, just a strong desire to believe.

The testimony states the apostles did not expect a resurrection, despite Jesus telling them about it many times. They were hunkered down in Jerusalem, living in fear of the jewish authorities. The movement would have died then and there, if not for the total convinction of the apostles that Christ had risen. Witness the transformation of their personalities between the record of the gospels and Acts. Before the Holy Spirit came, they had a weak knowledge and were mainly bumbling and ignorant. Afterwards, they became bold, couragous, and possessing a superior knowledge of the scripture and the teachings of Christ. Again, you either have to say they made it up, or something happened there that you can't just explain away.

Not at all. I'm saying they didn't see Jesus rise from the dead, or if they did, they were mistaken (revived from a coma, wounds weren't fatal). I don't doubt their sincerity, I doubt their skepticism. I somewhat doubt the martyrdom accounts, as verification outside the Christian community is hard to come by, but I don't find them terribly implausible.

Were they also mistaken about all of the miracles? Do you think they just imagined Jesus feeding 5000 people with a few loaves of bread, for instance? You basically have to say it is all made up, but then you have explain why they would die for what they knew was a lie.

Maybe there were. And maybe some of them documented that Jesus was actually the son of a Roman citizen. You can maybe anything.

Of course the documentation is incomplete. However it makes no sense to base our conclusions on what we don't have.

Neither does it make any sense to use the lack of documentation as a point of skepticism when it is actually remarkable how much documentation we do have.

You're pretty much supplying the 'didn't believe' side of the argument on your own. People 200 years ago, let alone 2000, couldn't be relied upon to accurately determine death. History is full of horror stories of people accidentally buried alive. The Bible itself reports that the Romans were concerned the disciples would try to steal the body of Jesus. Paul is supposed to have met Jesus on the way to Damascus, but only as a vision. Maybe the disciples only had a vision, too. It would certainly explain why all the dead people walking around Jerusalem didn't make 'the news'. The point is, there are multiple alternative possibilities to Jesus actually resurrecting that still don't require the disciples to believe it was a lie.

If Jesus didn't die, how did He get out of the tomb? One person having a vision, that's fine. Dozens (hundreds) of people walking, talking, touching, interacting, and sitting around a campfire eating fish with a vision isn't exactly plausible.

Possibly. The difference is that I would be applying the one I am using correctly. Different dating methods are more or less accurate for dating different things and those differences and the reasons for them are well-understood by the people who use them professionally and whose only interest is determining the correct age of what their measuring.

That's what you assume, but do you understand how radiometric dating works? You probably don't understand how many assumptions are inherent in those dating methods. Scientists will use the methods to cross verify eachother but they are still based on the same faulty (and unprovable) assumptions. You also probably don't realize that these dating methods give ranges of dates, and scientists simply pick and choose from these date ranges and discard the "anomalous" results. This is the opposite of science, that you interpret the evidence by the conclusion you wish to reach. We also know that when we have used these dating methods on things we do know the ages of, they always give extremely faulty results. If we can't trust these results for things we know the ages of, how can we trust them for things we don't know the ages of?

You are entirely mistaken about the genetics not showing a branching pattern. It's more like a bush than a tree, but it definitely branches and is structured in nested hierarchies, as predicted by the theory of biological evolution. And if you postulate a designer, we are entitled to make inferences about that designer based on the designs, which indicates wastefulness (perhaps 99.9% of all species that ever existed are extinct); a limited imagination and budget (the reason human designers use the same design basics is that they have to build on previous work and it takes a lot of effort to come up with novel ways of doing things, they have to husband their resources and not come up with new techniques for each individual project); and clearly there was a committee involved, the members of which did not always agree on direction, varied in competence, and at least one of which really liked beetles.

The tree has no representation in reality, first of all. It comes entirely from the imagination of evolutionary biologists. Second, your ideas about phylogeny are not accurate. Yes, there is the appearance of nested hierarchies, and there also many non-nested patterns. The theory of evolution has to be able to explain both occurrances, and it cannot. Consider this quote from a Science article called "Is it time to uproot the tree of life?"

A year ago, biologists looking over newly sequenced genomes from more than a dozen microorganisms thought these data might support the accepted plot lines of life's early history. But what they saw confounded them. Comparisons of the genomes then available not only didn't clarify the picture of how life's major groupings evolved, they confused it. And now, with an additional eight microbial sequences in hand, the situation has gotten even more confusing . . . Many evolutionary biologists had thought they could roughly see the beginnings of life's three kingdoms . . . When full DNA sequences opened the way to comparing other kinds of genes, researchers expected that they would simply add detail to this tree. But "nothing could be further from the truth," says Claire Fraser, head of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland. Instead, the comparisons have yielded many versions of the tree of life that differ from the rRNA tree and conflict with each other as well . .

The findings are not as universal as you have claimed, in fact they are the opposite. As far as your critiques go, how would you know what is wasteful and what isn't? Again, you are going on your presumption of deep time. You believe a comet killed the dinosaurs, whereas I believe a flood wiped them out, as well as all the other creatures you attribute to the various extinction events. You say God is not novel; that is kind of a joke when you examine the incredible diversity in the world, but why should He reinvent the wheel? Why would He have ten different versions of pumping blood throughout the body when one does the job? It is a question of efficiency and also durability, versatility, and utility. It is all a marvel. All in all, the whole of nature works together seamlessly, so I don't see where you are getting a committee from.

Again, part of the miracle of science is that it has led us to value following the evidence to a conclusion, rather than starting with the conclusion and searching for evidence to support it. The latter is profoundly untrustworthy. And this is part of the tragedy of fundamentalism: it leads otherwise intelligent people to distrust science and scientists. And, unlike the case with the disciples dying for their sincere beliefs in the Resurrection while being factually mistaken about it or understanding it differently from modern fundamentalists; it actually would take a vast conspiracy such that only a tiny percentage of scientists who happen to be religious fundamentalists find the young earth theory that happens to fit their religion more plausible than the old earth theory that the vast majority of their colleagues accept and for which they could get a Nobel Prize if it could be successfully overturned. In science, you are rewarded for proving theories wrong, and the bigger the theory, the bigger the reward for disproving it.

I have nothing against science at all, just bad science. What you don't understand is that when it comes to evolutionary theory and dating methodology, it is exactly what you have accused "fundamentalists" of. The conclusion is assumed and anything which disputes that conclusion is dismissed. I hope you don't mind but I am going to recycle a reply I made to someone else regarding the skepticism towards a conspiracy:

I like this quotation by Max Planck:

A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Maxwell Planck

The conspiracy is human nature. Many scientists are atheists, especially the elites who control the peer reviews and the funding, and atheists rather like the idea that they can explain away special creation with evolution. It gives them great comfort to have that alternative and it isn't something they are going to give up very easily. They even admit it:

I do not want to believe in God, therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation arising to evolution

George Wald - Harvard Professor
Nobel Laureate

the worlds brightest minds building on years of research and millions in lab equipment and computers can not make non living matter produce living matter

evolution became a scientific religion; almost all scientists have accepted it and many are prepared to bend their observations to fit in with it.

H S Lipso
Physics professor

we take the side of evolutionary science because we have a prior commitment to materialism. it is not that the methods..of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation..on the contrary..we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

richard lewontin

harvard professor of zoology and biology

If I were you, these quotations would disturb me. They prove that not all scientists are the open-minded champions of reason that you believe they are, and that even if they had evidence that contradicted the prevailing theories, they wouldn't consider it. Science isn't interested in a young earth; in fact it is running away from it and screaming. Simply put, a young earth means the bible is true, and as you have just seen, they don't want it to be true.

There are scientists out there working on these things, and because of the prejudice of the scientific community, which I have just demonstrated, they are mostly ostrasized, prevented from having gainful employment, denied access to resources and facilities, and locked out of the process.

Now I don't have a problem supposing Mesopotamia experienced floods that someone who survived it might think covered the whole world. The physics alone of covering the earth with liquid water preclude it from serious consideration. Now if you want to think there was a global flood and God took care of the evidence with his omnipotence because he is cagey like that, just like he 'must have' made the light from galaxies billions of light years away already in transit when he created the universe less than ten thousand years ago so we could wonder how we're seeing light that would have taken billions of years to get here when creation was practially yesterday. That's really okay with me if you keep it a matter of private faith. I believe strongly in freedom of thought, and by extension, freedom of religion. What you believe is your business as long as you play fair when it comes to convincing people to join you. But you and people like you keep cheapening both science and your faith by trying to make science subordinate to faith and faith something that needs backup from science.

Your skepticism of anything that contradicts the conventional wisdom of the day cheapens the spirit of inquiry that science is supposed to be built upon. What we're dealing with are a number of sacred cows which are so intergreted into the secular mind that you couldn't seperate them without extensive surgery. There are several good theories which can explain distant starlight, and what you apparently don't realize is that you have your own light travel time problem as well, because the big bang theory doesn't explain why we are seeing light from billions of light years away. The uniform temperature of the CMB is a huge problem for big bang cosmology, and the reason cosmic inflation was invented; it is simply a fudge factor.

To an extent, I appreciate efforts to undermine established science in the arena designed for it: universities, laboratories, field research, scientific journals, and so forth. If you've got something real, bring it. That's how science advances. As long as it doesn't get into pre-college tax-supported classrooms that other people's children are trying to learn in and the batty little publications that creationists set up so they can say they've been published in a 'scientific' journal don't fool too many people into thinking they're doing real science,

Creation scientists are real scientists, so please don't trot out the tired old atheist line here. Many of them are highly credentialed and have made many significant discoveries, as well as being published in peer reviewed journals. I find that atheists will believe any ridiculous theory that scientists come up with, (like something coming from nothing for instance) but the idea that the Universe could be intelligently designed, and that this is something that could be investigated is somehow quackary. It is real science to investigate intelligent design, especially, in the case of the information in DNA, that it is a much better explanation of the facts.

I don't mind. People are entitled to their beliefs. They are not, however, entitled to an unopposed campaign to promote their creationism (struck down), creation science (struck down), intelligent design (struck down) or whatever new name for the same old thing they try next to fool people into buying that 'this time it's really science, not just a new suit for our religious beliefs so we can get them taught in government public schools, this time for really, truly!'

Substitute struck down for shut out and it'll be more accurate. Did you know that public education was started in this country by the "Old Deluder Satan Act" which instituted the scriptures as our primary means of education? The only reason we do not teach the bible in school any longer is because this country has become more secular and secular people hate religion. It has nothing to do with science or not science, it has to do with a worldview and an agenda. There is nothing in science ruling out a Creator, there is simply bigotry towards the idea.

I can respect someone I disagree with playing under the same rules, even if I lose. I can't respect the tactic of sneaking an agenda in to gain access to other people's children in order to find a way around the rules. I don't believe the Jesus described in the Gospels would be positively impressed with it either. The life you live should be enough testimony for anyone who knows you. Being above reproach is the one thing you can do that is both most likely to draw people to your beliefs and least likely to compromise your integrity as a Christian. I suggest that you can do a lot more to promote your religion if spend your time persuading your fellow Christians to successfully live up to very high moral standards. It's not the atheists emptying the churches. Christians have way more power to drive their children out of the churches than we have to persuade them that belief in God isn't justified. However, I don't think you'll find more fertile ground there than you will among we skeptics.

I don't expressly disagree with you here; I have met many atheists who claim that hypocripsy by Christians is the main reason why they don't believe Jesus is God. There are many out there who are ruining Christs reputation, and this is mainly because the church, in times where there is little persecution, becomes completely apostate. It's the "easy believism" I have been talking about, where anyone who recites the sinners prayer is now a Christian. They are the ones who go to church on Sunday and live like hell the rest of the week and act just like the world does.

They are unregenerate but the world can't tell the difference. You're a Christian if you say you are. What has happened in America is that the church fell asleep during the 60s and is now waking up too late. The country moved on without the church, and now the church is struggling to stay relevent in the culture, at least in the national discourse portrayed in the media. The reality is 80 percent of everyone is Christian in this country, however, how many of them are actually saved is impossible to say.