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your question kinda answers itself.

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when the vision was gone, the Spirit remained........

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ORIGINAL: CommonSense549

Ignoring most of your post, seeing as the majority of it meandered off the point of discussion here, I'll focus on this one bit you offered:

Claiming ....... doesn't prove anything at all. ..... So don't think that you "know" anything for sure, because there's absolutely nothing to suggest that what you believe is any more correct than the things that people outside of Christianity believe.

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this seems to be the bottom line, the end of the road, if you had faith, you would get proof

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this seems to be the bottom line, the end of the road, if you had faith, you would get proof

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but instead you speculate about things that thru a lack of experience, you do not have the first clue about.

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ORIGINAL: DestinysChild

Here's a debate for everyone (note that I am just presenting this argument to the floor):

There is a sort of abyss of an argument that I've never seen an intellectual Atheist really slam dunk on a believer in any singular absolute faith.

The statement is: "What if the Bible is true? Then you'll burn in hell and I won't."

The immediate argument, and the most common one, is to always present a counter-example along the lines of: "What if Muslims are right? Or Hindus? You would be wrong in your belief and you would go to hell if Muslims are right. So how do you choose Christianity? There are a million different people out there with a million different beliefs. What makes yours right?"

This sounds like a solid response. And a logical person can take it and make sense of it. Since there are so many religions, you have to choose the right one based on some accurate criteria.

However, for the Christian, their original question is still unanswered, or debunked. They still "could" be right.

In fact, they can just say "Yes, Muslims are possibly right, so are Hindus. But I know Christianity is. How do you know it isn't?"

There seems to be a large answer to this question.

You have to outline what you are gaining and what the other person is losing. I think that this is attempted to be communicated, but fails to do so. If the purpose of life is exploration, then limiting one's ability to explore by asserting something to be true even though it is improbable is counter-productive.

So, I think the first answer that one must get out of a Christian is the acknowledgement that given that there are a million different beliefs out there, that from a purely statistical standpoint regardless of whether Christianity is true or not, it is improbable that if you pick one religion out of a million you will find the one that is the truth. The odds are 1/1000000.

Most likely, they will agree.

From there, you may have to address certain things the Christian will put forward as historical or scientific facts that make it more likely that the bible is true. Arguing these can be hard or difficult, but in the end there is at least as much historical accuracy to the bible as there is grave innacuracy. The existence of dinosaurs, common DNA, the age of the world, transitional creatures in the evolutionary chain, etc. This should not be presented to prove that Christianity is wrong, just to counter the idea that it is more likely to be true than any other of the million beliefs out there. A chrisitan is unliekly to argue that a belief that is highly scientifically innacurate is more probably true from a statistical standpoint than one that is scientifically sound.

So, at this point both you and the Christian have reached a point where you both agree that Christianity, whether it is true or not, is statistically improbable.

At this point, all you say then is: "In the universe, all we have is probability to determine truth since nothing is ever definite. Since Christianity is improbable, it is unreasonable to subscribe to it as truth if we use probability to determine other decisions and beliefs in our lives."

In other words, if we avoid fire because we believe it will burn us, this is acting in consistency with probability. If we eat because we are hungry it is because we conclude that food will probably make the hunger go away. If we do a hundred different things each day that are in accordance with probability, we certainly prove that we subscribe to the law of probability. Therefore, the reason behind why we choose to believe improbable things is because of some bias or interference that we are not aware of, that either makes it probable to us or makes us want to believe it is probable.

Unless you can provide me with the something in your mind that makes it probable to you, it must remain improbable to me, based on the information shared previously. Further, if you cannot provide that information to me, you probably don't have access to it yourself. If this is the case, you should ask yourself why you believe it is the truth, given that you can't explain why you think so.

In the end, this is the conclusive step form:

1) Prove that Christianity is as improbable as Islam
2) Prove that we all subscribe to probability
3) Request the information that makes Christianity probable.
4) Christianity remains improbable.
=) Proof that the Christian is acting unreasonably in their beliefs.

My answer is God Is

B B

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my God will reveal Himself to you through His Son Jesus the Christ, and all that is needed is that you pray and ask Him for yourself. Then, no words of mine will be needed to "prove" what you will know for yourself".

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ORIGINAL: CommonSense549

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this seems to be the bottom line, the end of the road, if you had faith, you would get proof

No, I wouldn't. If I had faith in Christ, I would very well be given some kind of proof of Christ. If I had faith in Hinduism, I would very well be given proof of Hinduism. If I had faith in Islam, I would very well be given proof of Islam.

I'm afraid to say that your argument that Christianity is the truth is a false one. This 'truth' that you say I would get if I had faith can't be trusted.

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God does exist....
Matthew 1:21 And she will forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus. for He will save His people from their sins.

Matthew 10:40 He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me.

Matthew 16:24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.

Matthew 21:22 And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive. This includes salvation.

Matthew 24:5 For many will come in My name, saying, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many. vs.30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

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I could go on and on with passages.

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In my own opinion I rather believe this to be true and believe in Him then to take that chance of not believing it to be true and find out that I was wrong because then it is too late.

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ORIGINAL: CommonSense549

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God does exist....
Matthew 1:21 And she will forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus. for He will save His people from their sins.

Matthew 10:40 He who receives you receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me.

Matthew 16:24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, "If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.

Matthew 21:22 And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive. This includes salvation.

Matthew 24:5 For many will come in My name, saying, 'I am the Christ,' and will deceive many. vs.30 Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

Those passages don't prove anything. How do you know that someone didn't just completely make them up without basing them on any real events whatsoever?

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I could go on and on with passages.

And so could I. For every passage from the bible you can show me, I could show you a passage from the Koran (the scriptures from Islam) or a passage from the Bhagavad Gita (the scriptures from Hinduism).

Quite frankly though, I don't really care how many passages you show me, because you would be wasting your time. Every single one of those passages could've been fictionalized, which means that not a single one of them proves a thing.

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In my own opinion I rather believe this to be true and believe in Him then to take that chance of not believing it to be true and find out that I was wrong because then it is too late.

And what if it weren't true? What if Hinduism is true? What if Islam is true? You're still taking a chance with believing in Christianity, and unfortunately there is still very much a 'what if' here, regardless of whether the Christians on this forum choose to accept it or not. This thread has simply just kept on reinforcing the simple fact that Christians don't know and can't prove anything for sure, and that means that the 'what if' is still very much a reality.

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Have you ever thought that the Koran passages or the Bhagavad Gita could be wrong?

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From what I have been reading here it almost sounds like you really don't want to believe the truth you just want to debate and try to prove you are right and everyone else who is trying to tell you the truth is wrong.

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I don't have to keep going around trying to find what is "right" in another religion because Jesus has given me a true peace about who He is.

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ORIGINAL: CommonSense549

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Have you ever thought that the Koran passages or the Bhagavad Gita could be wrong?

Oh, sure. I, unlike most of the people on this forum, am completely aware of the fact that no one can ever truly know anything for sure. So that means that I'm completely open to the possibility that any passage I read could be right or wrong.

I have a question for you, though: Have you ever thought that the Christian passages could be wrong?

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From what I have been reading here it almost sounds like you really don't want to believe the truth you just want to debate and try to prove you are right and everyone else who is trying to tell you the truth is wrong.

No. You've completely misread my intentions. I'm not trying to prove I'm right. I'm saying that no one can know the truth. Period. No one knows for sure what happens after we die.

It's not my fault if the Christians here want to claim that they know the truth for sure when no one can ever truly know anything. It's certainly not my fault if the Christians here aren't even willing to listen to what I say. And I can't be the one to blame here if all of you just want to prove that what you believe (but don't know, naturally) is right, instead of listening to reason.

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I don't have to keep going around trying to find what is "right" in another religion because Jesus has given me a true peace about who He is.

Maybe has, maybe he hasn't. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you aren't deluded enough to honestly think that you know Jesus's existence for sure, though

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ORIGINAL: CommonSense549


I am completely aware of the fact that no one can ever truly know anything for sure.

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Now this raises a thorny dilemma for any honest seeker of truth: how does one maintain genuine confidence in one’s knowledge claims in light of unanswered questions? Specifically, how do we continue to affirm faith in God when our knowledge project is still incomplete? Space prohibits a detailed exploration of this question, but it needs to be noted that skepticism is not a viable option. Time and sheer human frailty conspire to disabuse us of any temptation to demand exhaustive knowledge of a subject before reaching firm conclusions about it. Yet we must have real knowledge regarding a whole host of things to live through a single day. Moreover, the thoroughgoing skeptic cannot logically sustain skepticism since he or she must claim to know that one cannot know, which is self-refuting. The best we can do is to weigh the evidence available to us and then follow it wherever it leads.

Sadly, many of the reasons cited for rejecting God are usually motivated by tendentiously rigid criteria for knowledge selectively applied to the scriptures. For example, in spite of the thousands of early manuscripts that attest to the historical veracity of the New Testament documents, some still reject the Bible on the ground that the process that led to its preservation was not inerrant. Such a stringent requirement goes against our usual methods of acquiring historical knowledge and reveals the true disposition of our hearts. Not only has the original text of the New Testament been preserved in the ancient, hand-copied manuscripts, it can also be reconstructed almost in its entirety from quotations by the early Church Fathers.2

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CS, why are you here on this forum?

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In short, CS, I think that some of the questions you have asked are reasonable, and so far no one (that I have read here) has given you a good reason to take them seriously. I need to read your questions a little more carefully, as well as all the responses to you specifically, and I'll take a stab at giving you some better answers to your questions.

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ORIGINAL: CommonSense549

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CS, why are you here on this forum?

Why are you out in the world promoting your belief as fact when it clearly isn't?

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ORIGINAL: Narcil

A few posts here have tried to make the case that you "just need to believe and have faith" first, and once you do that the truth of it will become apparent to you. This approach is remarkably similar to the claim that Mormon's make, just pray for God to reveal the truth of Mormonism to you and He will give you a "burning in the bosom," yet I suspect that most of the Christians on this site scoff that Mormon claim.

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dctalkgirl:
Well, CS I've tried to explain things the best way I know how. I understand your point and hopefully someone here can explain all this better than me.

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ORIGINAL: CommonSense549

Here's another idea I'm trying to wrap my mind around. Why do christians believe that everyone is given an obvious choice between heaven and hell when that isn't the case at all?