The Bible: Symbolic or Literal?

[MoNiCa4316]

How do you feel about the phrase "the Lord spoke to me"?

Hi
There are preachers who use this phrase just to promote their ministry or to get money. You really have to test them by their fruit.
But to me, 'the Lord spoke to me' doesn't mean that He used words or that He spoke audibly, it can just mean that He communicated something to me during prayer, etc. I've never heard His voice, although I think some people have (some of their testimonies are really honest, and the experience really changed their lives - good fruit, etc).

I want to comment on this whole discussion about 'hallucinations'. I've had times when I made things up in my head, or when I thought I heard someone call my name when they didn't, etc. But I've also had times when God communicated something to me. And these two things are nothing alike. This doesn't always happen, but sometimes I just know it's God - this goes beyond mere belief. Sometimes you can just recognize His voice, like the voice of a friend that you've heard before. He has mostly communicated to me using "feelings" (I'm not sure how to describe this), but if I were to hear His actual voice I think it would be obvious that it's the same Person speaking. Sometimes it's less clear, mostly when my mind is full of other thoughts that block out His 'little voice'.

"I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me— just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep"

"He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger's voice."

"I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you."

"But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you."

That's the truth.

God bless


monica

 

[MoNiCa4316]

That's nice.

However I have heard other voices that i thourohly imagined and they are very different.

I concur

 

[MoNiCa4316]

It makes more sense to believe that God is literally the universe as we know it.

This argument is potentially problematic when you think about creation.
Most scientists believe that the world has a beginning.
If you have a bunch of energy, in a million years it would still be a bunch of energy if no outside force is applied to it to make it organize itself. This is even true for the big bang. But if you agree that there's an outside 'force', then you're agreeing that there's something outside of creation....this sounds a lot like God!
I don't know that's how I look at it.

cheers

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Your religious too. How did your gods communicate with people?

Via nature. We ask for signs, and they are given.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

This argument is potentially problematic when you think about creation.
Most scientists believe that the world has a beginning.
If you have a bunch of energy, in a million years it would still be a bunch of energy if no outside force is applied to it to make it organize itself.

What about internal forces? Brownian motion, quantum fluctuations, uncertain momentum/position, etc?

This is even true for the big bang. But if you agree that there's an outside 'force', then you're agreeing that there's something outside of creation....this sounds a lot like God!

Surely God is a sentient being? Inanimate forces need not be self-aware to act.

 

[david_x]

Via nature. We ask for signs, and they are given.

And this somehow has better odds than those you place on prayer.

 

[MoNiCa4316]

Define 'answered'. Is this a voice booming from the sky saying 'Granted / Denied / Pending'? Or is it the consequence itself: if you pray for rain, and rain comes, does this count as answered?

If I prayed for an event to happen, it happened, even if it wasn't very likely (some things were not likely at all!). And if I prayed for guidance, etc, then sometimes God answered it by communicating with me (I tried to describe this in my previous post on this page). I've never heard a voice from the sky. The Holy Spirit is in us, not in the sky.

Enter me: I was a staunch Christian for eleven years, and none, none of my prayers 'came true' (once I prayed for my mother to be cured of a rather painful earache; three weeks later, it hadn't changed in the slightest. It took a specialist to drain excess fluid). Was I not 'faithful' enough?

Since I'm not God I can't answer your last question, but when you were a Christian have you ever prayed for forgiveness, etc? If you have, then you have answered prayers, cause God always answers that. I've had prayers that God answered 'no' to but the reason was revealed later...I had to wait, lol. It turned out that His will was better anyway. And sometimes my prayers are doubtful and aren't answered, but many are.

As they say, it is always darkest before dawn.

Not always...and when you're in darkness, you don't know dawn is coming. You just hope for that. How do you know that God isn't responsible for the 'dawn'?

So this is your justification for saying, 'Oh, if your prayer didn't 'work', then you were doubtful'. You have the audacity to dictate what people think?

I didn't make this up, I got it from the Bible. I have no idea how much you believed when you were a Christian, or how much you sought God. I just have my experience, which I've just described.

So why isn't the entire human populace Christian (or, at least, theistic)?

As far as I know, atheists don't faithfully pray, believing that God would answer them. Or they wouldn't be atheists. God answers people who faithfully pray in a way that they could understand.

During my eleven years of Christianity, I recieved no answer. I might as well have prayed to my cat for all the recognition I got.
No offence meant, of course. This is simply my experiance.

oki, I cant' comment on your experience...mine has been very different...I honestly don't know why.. Do you pray to any gods/goddesses now? Do you get any answers?

He sacrificed himself to himself so that he might appease himself enough to modify a law that he himself put in place. Does this sound a tad redundant?
I know this sounds off-topic, but your argument fails unless you can justify the self-sacrifice of God.

This only makes sense if you believe in the Trinity. Would you rather that He sacrificed one of His creations? He sacrificed Himself because He is perfect, and the only one who could defeat death. He is life, there is no death or darkness in Him. And His law never modified! That's why the sacrifice was needed in the first place, because He didn't want to lower His 'standard' or law.

I object to the implication of your wording: you seem to be saying that unbelievers go, 'Oh, I know the Judaeo-Christian God exists, but I choose to follow another path'.
Given that there is no evidence for your deity, the logical stance is one of nonbelief. To criticise people for making the most rational decision is... dumb.

No, that's not how it is. It doesn't matter what the reason, if the person is not a believer they can't be close to God. It's impossible. And everyone chooses what they believe, or don't believe.
"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."
Saint Augustine
It's like..God is saying: "if you choose to believe, you'll get the evidence you're looking for". And the unbeliever says: "I want evidence first". I don't think it generally works that way, because we're supposed to make a free choice. When I opened myself up to the possibility that there's God, I saw that He's there. Maybe there are unbelievers who have gotten evidence (like Thomas ), maybe that was God's plan for them. But people who want evidence first don't usually get it.

There is a difference between rejection and seeing no reason to believe. Do you reject the wisdom of Gautama Buddha, or do you not believe said wisdom?

I don't reject Buddha's wisdom, I think some things he said were wise, even though I disagree with much of his philosophy. But 'wisdom' is sort of a subjective thing for us humans. Christianity talks about an event: the Resurrection. You either believe it, or you don't.

Of course we can. Ever heard of Aleph-nought?

Is it something mathematical? sorry I don't know about that. But to put it simply, do you really believe that your mind or my mind can ever hold an infinite amount of knowledge?

Explain. 'Infinite' has many meanings, and since I am a mathematician and physicist, I comprehend more than most (not to toot my own trumpet, but still...).

That's cool that you're a mathematician! I'm definitely not, lol though I wish I were, sometimes. When I say that God is infinite, I mean something like: He is outside of creation and time (since time is part of creation), and has no beginning and no end...He sees everything and knows everything, and is perfect in wisdom, love, power, etc. Maybe 'infinite' isn't the best word for it.... maybe 'absolute' or one of Plato's 'first things' that we can't describe or comprehend? It still remains that the human mind can't grasp all of that, because we are in time and are bound by space, experience, etc.

Of course he does. Quantum mechanics is nonsense, yet he Created it.

Oki thankfully I know a little about quantum mechanics (not much though). I don't think it's nonsense, because if something looks random to us, it doesn't mean that it is. Maybe we're just not seeing the big picture.

Indeed.
So is disbelief part of God's plan? Because the fact of the matter is that those born in Islamic countries are very unlikely to convert to Christianity. Why, then, would God place some people in such unfair conditions (with respect to the afterlife) compared to, say, the Bible Belt of Middle-America?

Personally, I believe that those who have never heard the gospel would get a chance to accept/reject it after death. Anyway, Christ told His disciples to tell everyone about Him, which they are still doing today. As I said before, sometimes He uses people to help establish His Kingdom.

Eve was tricked by one of God's creations. This does not equate to the totality of humanity turning away from God.

We're getting into theology here, aaagh.... oki:
Rom. 5:12, "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned"
Here's how I see it: at first, Adam and Eve were sinless, and were made to live and never die. They were united with God. (edit) They were tempted, and chose evil, and sin entered the world...they began to die...and their children were born with that knowledge of evil also, and were able to commit sins, and died...and we're born the same way, and we sin too. But if we want to, we can be saved and live forever.

I'm not miserable.

Compared to the garden of Eden, I think we're all quite miserable. God made the world to be a better place than it is. That's what I was saying.

What?! Nonsense. There cannot be an entity who is simultaneously omnibenevolent and omnipotent in our reality, given that such an entity has done nothing to aleviate suffering. It has nothing to do with what we want; is it do with what said entity won't.

I dont really see what you're saying here or how this applies to my original comment....God makes a perfect world where we can be perfectly happy, and we reject it, and so He dies to give it back to us. How is this 'doing nothing'?

We die because our cells have a built-in lifespan of ~70 years.

And why is that? No scientist has answered that question. No scientist has been able to conquer death. I'd say that our bodies changed with the fall, due to separation from God, the source of life. Someday, we'll have immortal bodies again (hence: eternal life and Resurrection in the Bible).

The words attributed to him contradict reality: if he wants us to be happy, and happiness only lies with him, he would force us to be with him. Is this morally wrong? No, becuase we would be happy. Indeed, given the nature of omnipotence, we needn't be aware of such force.
Sadly, this is evidently not the case. Ergo, an omnimax entity cannot exist.

A loving being would not force anyone to be happy, He made us free. That is more loving. And it's so easy to come to Him! He did everything necessary to make this possible, all we have to do is to agree, and it's done. He gave us a choice and is offering us a free gift..we are enslaved by sin and He wants to make us free from that, and happy. I think that's so much more loving than having a colony of ants.

Why did he die for us in exactly the same manner as 'heathen' deities in adjacent cultures?

CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien had this idea that other religions are sort of like 'prophesies' of the real event. I think it's a neat idea. It's like God was trying to prepare the world for Him.

Nonsense. I want happiness. I want the world to be happy. I so, so badly want absolute and unending happiness for every entity across all the universes.
That it hasn't happened is direct proof that an omnimax entity does not exist.

I think you're still not getting what I'm trying to say. I know that everyone wants happiness! The reason "it hasn't happened" is because the human race has rejected the only true source of happiness and began making up their own: like money, pleasure, etc. He's trying to give it to us, and we're rejecting it. People want happiness but are not willing to sacrifice their pride. This is theology, I'm not just making it up.

The arrogance of calling us prideful.

We're all born prideful. That's our human nature. I'm prideful too. I don't want to be though, and I'm trying to get rid of that to be closer to God.

I knocked for eleven years. One beings to think that noone is home after such a long time.

Let me ask you this question: what sort of answer were you looking for? Maybe God is just different than what you were expecting.

 

[MoNiCa4316]

Via nature. We ask for signs, and they are given.

How do you know its' the gods and not coincidence? I'm just asking you your own question

 

[MoNiCa4316]

What about internal forces? Brownian motion, quantum fluctuations, uncertain momentum/position, etc?

These forces are true for our world today, but were they true for a bunch of energy before the Big Bang (assuming it happened), which according to Stephen Hawking didn't even have electrons?

Surely God is a sentient being? Inanimate forces need not be self-aware to act.

But the 'first thing that ever happened' could not have happened by cause and effect, so why would these forces "decide" to act in one moment and not in another? Something had to make them act; again you have an 'outside' force which needed to be sentient to decide to act at all. We're talking about the first event ever. Apparently scientists agree that the world had a beginning.

 

[MoNiCa4316]

Of course they do. They have objectively identifiably symptoms.

Which are not the 'fruits of the Spirit'. Surely it's suspicious that God has the same effect on the person as the Bible says He would? Even if a person has never read the Bible - many of the early Christians were illiterate and poor.

Hearing what you attribute to your God does, yes. The Muslim attributes it to Allah, the Hindu to Vishnu or Brahman, the Buddhist to a deva, etc. From across the globe, auditory hallucinations are most readily attributed by the sufferer to their primary deity.

Auditory hallucinations can even come from demons. I'm not talking about anything auditory. Sorry when I said 'hearing God' I should have been more clear....when the Holy Spirit communicates with you, it's different than anything else. It's not just some words you hear from nowhere. You don't just attribute it to Him, you recognize Him as you recognize a friend. I can't really describe it...but this only happens with the Holy Spirit.

If he is not physical, then he cannot interfere with us. This is the definition of 'physical'.

Oki, what about 'material'? What I was trying to say is that the Holy Spirit isn't made of cells or atoms and stuff like that...at least, I don't think. Since we have the soul, which is also not 'material', it's perfectly possible for Him to communicate with us. Do you believe in the soul/spirit?

Naturally. No scientist explicitly rules out the possibility of not disproven, nor expliticly holds true that which is not proven. While your god may exist (barring disproof), this is no reason to believe. Otherwise, you may as well believe that I am the Second Incarnation of Christ.

Well..I think that when Christ would come, all the believers would for a hundred percent know it's Him. They would recognize Him. But seriously though, I see what you are saying about science, and it makes sense. But what do you define as a 'reason to believe'? What would be enough?

A claim echoed throughout human culture; hardly indicative of Christianity.

Oki, but I believe that only in Christianity has it been really God. I'm not going to debate that because it's something that I can't 'objectively verify'. However, it makes sense theologically, because only those who are 'in Christ' have the Holy Spirit.

Instinct is hardly evidence. We 'feel' that there is something lurking in the dark; is this evidence of said thing?

I'm not talking about instinct or even anything that feels like instinct. It's a very different type of feeling. Maybe someday I'll find the right words to describe it.

Why?

I suppose that God would only give people miracles like this if they need it. By definition, miracle isn't something that happens regularly, but God interfering with cause and effect.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

If I prayed for an event to happen, it happened, even if it wasn't very likely (some things were not likely at all!).

I don't understand; do you consider a request-prayer to be answered if the request comes true?

Not always...and when you're in darkness, you don't know dawn is coming. You just hope for that. How do you know that God isn't responsible for the 'dawn'?

You don't, and that's my point: people attribute chance occurance to divine intervention. Continuous troughs of bad luck don't get attributed, but a shimmer of light always is. If you're going to chalk things up to a deity, at least be consistent.

I didn't make this up, I got it from the Bible. I have no idea how much you believed when you were a Christian, or how much you sought God. I just have my experience, which I've just described.

Nevertheless, to hold this belief is a tad arrogant.

As far as I know, atheists don't faithfully pray, believing that God would answer them. Or they wouldn't be atheists. God answers people who faithfully pray in a way that they could understand.

Which is my point: if he answers so reliably and consistently, then Christianity should be far more widespread. There should be no deconversions, for starters.

oki, I cant' comment on your experience...mine has been very different...I honestly don't know why.. Do you pray to any gods/goddesses now? Do you get any answers?

I pray insofar as I talk to them when I cast a spell. Apart from that, I don't pray for requests; one of the tenents of Wiccan magick is to do things yourself before you resort to magick and the intervention of the gods.
That said, I do give the God a quick salute when I see the Sun, or the Goddess a kiss when I see the Moon. Just so they know I haven't forgotten about them

This only makes sense if you believe in the Trinity.

Pray tell, what is your stance on divinity?

Would you rather that He sacrificed one of His creations?

No. But my point was that he didn't need to sacrifice anything at all.

He sacrificed Himself because He is perfect

No, he is not: the perfect cannot create the imperfect. The world is imperfect, so therefore so is it's Creator (assuming one exists at all).

and the only one who could defeat death. He is life, there is no death or darkness in Him. And His law never modified! That's why the sacrifice was needed in the first place, because He didn't want to lower His 'standard' or law.

Why could he not modify his law? It's not like people would chastise him for removing Hell, for instance.

No, that's not how it is. It doesn't matter what the reason, if the person is not a believer they can't be close to God. It's impossible. And everyone chooses what they believe, or don't believe.

I beg to differ; I had no choice in being a Christian, and it is no coincidence that almost all theists follow the faith of their forefathers.

"Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe."
Saint Augustine
It's like..God is saying: "if you choose to believe, you'll get the evidence you're looking for". And the unbeliever says: "I want evidence first".

Is this such an unreasonable request? If I told you that punching a baby wouldn't harm it, would you take my word for it or ask for evidence?

I don't think it generally works that way, because we're supposed to make a free choice.

Then the questioning atheist has a choice between Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jain, Sikhism, etc. If Christianity is true, but there is no hint that it is true, then how is the unbeliever supposed to come willingly, blindly, to God?

When I opened myself up to the possibility that there's God, I saw that He's there.

Why the Christian god, though?

I don't reject Buddha's wisdom, I think some things he said were wise, even though I disagree with much of his philosophy. But 'wisdom' is sort of a subjective thing for us humans. Christianity talks about an event: the Resurrection. You either believe it, or you don't.

And we come down to the buden of proof again: Christians claim the resurrection occured, and that this is physical proof of Christianity's claims (even though it's only proof of the resurrection, but still). When sceptics reasonably ask for evidence that the resurrection occured... no response. So Christianity is just one religion among thousands that makes claims it cannot substantiate. Why, then, should the atheist convert?

But to put it simply, do you really believe that your mind or my mind can ever hold an infinite amount of knowledge?

No. But that does not mean we cannot comprehend infinity itself.

When I say that God is infinite, I mean something like: He is outside of creation and time (since time is part of creation), and has no beginning and no end...He sees everything and knows everything, and is perfect in wisdom, love, power, etc. Maybe 'infinite' isn't the best word for it.... maybe 'absolute' or one of Plato's 'first things' that we can't describe or comprehend? It still remains that the human mind can't grasp all of that, because we are in time and are bound by space, experience, etc.

I see. Timeless might be a better word. Question: how can an entity outside of time (that is, unchanging) have an active and dynamic affect in our universe? If God simply created the universe and continued doing whatever timeless beings do, then this is deism. However, since you believe that God has had an active role in the universe, how can he be timeless? Indeed, to influence the universe he must be part of the flow of time, and thus cannot be it's Creator.
There are also conflicts with Free Will, but that's for later.

Oki thankfully I know a little about quantum mechanics (not much though). I don't think it's nonsense, because if something looks random to us, it doesn't mean that it is. Maybe we're just not seeing the big picture.

By 'nonsense' I meant that it makes no sense. But I still believe it to be true, Hamiltonians and all.

Personally, I believe that those who have never heard the gospel would get a chance to accept/reject it after death. Anyway, Christ told His disciples to tell everyone about Him, which they are still doing today. As I said before, sometimes He uses people to help establish His Kingdom.

You miss my point: those born in Islamic countries have heard the Christian gospel (or, at least, know of it). Those who are proselytised to are very unlikely to convert, much less likely than somone born in Middle-America. Thus, God, by dictating where and when a person will be born, directly dictates how likely they are to convert to Christianity.
So my question is this: why would God make it so unlikely for most of the world to convert? Why would he favour those born to Christian families?

We're getting into theology here, aaagh.... oki:
Rom. 5:12, "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned"
Here's how I see it: at first, Adam and Eve were sinless, and were made to live and never die. They were united with God. They didn't even know about the possibility of evil. Then, they ate the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge

Why did they do this? Since it was forbidden, eating from it's fruit is morally wrong. Since they could do no wrong, they couldn't have eaten from something that was forbidden.

(might be a metaphor, who knows) and found out about this possibility. They were tempted, and chose it, and sin entered the world.

What do you mean by 'entered the world', exactly?

..they began to die.

Why?

and their children were born with that knowledge of evil also,

Why?

and were able to commit sins,

But they did not eat of the fruit. How did they know of evil?

Compared to the garden of Eden, I think we're all quite miserable.

Fair enough.

God made the world to be a better place than it is. That's what I was saying.

At the first sign of corruption, why didn't he send a global (or, indeed, local) flood? Why wait a few thousand years for the wickedness to spread?

God makes a perfect world where we can be perfectly happy, and we reject it, and so He dies to give it back to us. How is this 'doing nothing'?

First of all, even by Christian doctrine, we did not 'reject it': we were tricked by a creation of God. Second, if this entity is willing to interfere with the world, then it obviously does not care for the sanctity of free will. Third, an omnimax entity has no choice but to eliminate any suffering and to prevent suffering from ever occuring should the entity be absent. It's a matter of logical absolutes.

And why is that? No scientist has answered that question.

Actually, we have an answer: when a cell replicates, it and it's clone are just that: clones. But there is a difference in the original cell: it's telomere has shortened. The telomere is required for cell replication, and the shorter it is, the less likely the cell is to replicate properly. Hence the symptoms of old age.
The trick is lengthening the telomeres of all our cells in one go. But we know the cause of old age.

No scientist has been able to conquer death.

Modern medicine has brought people back after their heart has stopped (or replaced), lifespans are increasing with no sign of tailing off, etc. Indeed, skin cells have been kept alive for 30 years and counting, which is far longer than their natural lifespan.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

A loving being would not force anyone to be happy, He made us free. That is more loving.

Alas, it is not. Enforced bliss is infinitely more loving than mere freedom. Indeed, for an omnibenevolent and omnipotent being, it is not impossible to create entities that are eternally happy and still have free will.
Don't forget that any interference with the world by God is a cooption of free will, and that the intrinsic limits of the human body are boundries to our 'freedom'; I wish to fly, yet my physical constraints prevents me from doing so. Thus, God has infringed upon my free will.

And it's so easy to come to Him! He did everything necessary to make this possible, all we have to do is to agree, and it's done.

The problem, of course, is that he has failed to tell people about it. Instead he has a little commotion in the Middle-East at some arbitrary point in history, and expects humans, those who are 'bound by sin', to spread the good message. Why not do it himself?

He gave us a choice and is offering us a free gift..we are enslaved by sin and He wants to make us free from that, and happy. I think that's so much more loving than having a colony of ants.

If the colony of ants were in a state of eternal bliss and unending happiness, well, I'd be more than jealous.

CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien had this idea that other religions are sort of like 'prophesies' of the real event.

I believe they thought that other religions (especially those older ones with events similar to those surrounding Christ) were preemptive tricks by Satan.

I think it's a neat idea. It's like God was trying to prepare the world for Him.

Why would he need to do such a thing? Surely this has just obscured the arrival of the true messiah amidst a load of false religions?

I think you're still not getting what I'm trying to say. I know that everyone wants happiness! The reason "it hasn't happened" is because the human race has rejected the only true source of happiness

How, exactly, did this take place? I do not remember a UN referrendum on global rejection of the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic God.

and began making up their own: like money, pleasure, etc. He's trying to give it to us, and we're rejecting it.

If he's offering it us, he's doing a very subtle job of it.

People want happiness but are not willing to sacrifice their pride. This is theology, I'm not just making it up.

The last part is sociology, and no offence, but I think you are making it up. Indeed, do you have any justifiction for your claims?

We're all born prideful. That's our human nature.

I beg to differ. We are selfish, sure, and our ultimate biological drive is to bear grandchildren, but I wouldn't call humanity prideful. Indeed, it is the organised religions of the world that have swivelled the theological spotlight from a behumbling view of the universe to an egotistical self-portrait of the human psyche.
That is, the pride in human culture directly stems from the organised religions of the world. It is not, however, in our nature to be prideful.

Let me ask you this question: what sort of answer were you looking for?

Any answer.

Maybe God is just different than what you were expecting.

How do you know its' the gods and not coincidence? I'm just asking you your own question

I don't. But I acknowledge this fact; I don't claim that the unparsimonious faith statment is de re true.

These forces are true for our world today, but were they true for a bunch of energy before the Big Bang (assuming it happened), which according to Stephen Hawking didn't even have electrons?

Though there were no electrons one plank-time after the Big Bang, the laws that govern them were very much in place. Likewise, the laws that governed the post-Big-Bang universe are still in place today, it's just that there is nothing for them to govern.

But the 'first thing that ever happened' could not have happened by cause and effect,

Agreed. But spontaneous action is not unknown in quantum mechanics. Randomness and probability rule the universe, you know.

so why would these forces "decide" to act in one moment and not in another?

There was no time, there was no 'one moment', nor was there 'another'. They acted insofar as they created time. Discussing what happened before time began is like asking what's North of the North Pole, or below the center of the Earth.

Something had to make them act;

Why?

Apparently scientists agree that the world had a beginning.

I assumed you meant the universe, but are you talking about the Earth?

 

[Wiccan_Child]

And this somehow has better odds than those you place on prayer.

Where did I say this?

 

[david_x]

Where did I say this?

Sorry, missed punctuation.
It was supposed to be a question.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Which are not the 'fruits of the Spirit'. Surely it's suspicious that God has the same effect on the person as the Bible says He would? Even if a person has never read the Bible - many of the early Christians were illiterate and poor.

Which explains the embellishments added to the NT as it was written. Paul made no mention of the miracles of Jesus, but later writers added myths from other faiths to encourage conversion.

Auditory hallucinations can even come from demons. I'm not talking about anything auditory. Sorry when I said 'hearing God' I should have been more clear....when the Holy Spirit communicates with you, it's different than anything else. It's not just some words you hear from nowhere. You don't just attribute it to Him, you recognize Him as you recognize a friend. I can't really describe it...but this only happens with the Holy Spirit.

Information 'beamed' from an outside is hardly trustworthy: deceptive sources are just as likely as sincere ones.

Oki, what about 'material'? What I was trying to say is that the Holy Spirit isn't made of cells or atoms and stuff like that...at least, I don't think. Since we have the soul, which is also not 'material', it's perfectly possible for Him to communicate with us. Do you believe in the soul/spirit?

No. Can you justify your belief in it?

Well..I think that when Christ would come, all the believers would for a hundred percent know it's Him. They would recognize Him. But seriously though, I see what you are saying about science, and it makes sense. But what do you define as a 'reason to believe'? What would be enough?

Evidence. A fact or phenomenom that that is predicted to occur by the hypothesis. There is no fact or phenomenom to support the existance of your god. Ergo, there is no reason to believe.

Oki, but I believe that only in Christianity has it been really God.

You can, of course, believe what you wish.

I'm not going to debate that because it's something that I can't 'objectively verify'. However, it makes sense theologically, because only those who are 'in Christ' have the Holy Spirit.

On the contrary, it makes no theological sense: why Christianity? Why not Islam? But you do not wish to debate it.

I'm not talking about instinct or even anything that feels like instinct. It's a very different type of feeling. Maybe someday I'll find the right words to describe it.

My point was that a 'funny feeling' is not than reliable, not matter how convincing it may feel.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

Sorry, missed punctuation.
It was supposed to be a question.

I see. In that case, it does not.

 

[irateional]

It would stand to reason it seems, that the less spiritual and religious humanity has become, the better we are.

Think of it. Our farthest ancestors were highly religious. All things were accounted for as being from providence, and they worshipped their Gods. Religion was huge, and they were more "religious" than we are.

Yet, they were the worse off. As the world progresses, the pushing back of religion has only yielded good things.
Slavery, corrupt monarchies, and the witch-hunts were ended not by conservative Christians or the church, but by atheists, agnostics and "liberal Christians" acting against their church. Disease which was long thought to be from the Gods was revealed as simple biological fact. Now, we are finally beginning to beat disease, and quite possibly, we may finally cure a great deal of it (protein folding, anyone?).

You see, there's nothing wrong with spirirtuality. But religioisity has no basis in spirituality, has nothing to do with God. It has everything to do with dogma and the church order, and it's the very antithesis of Christ's teachings. Religion, in it's organized form does not seek an end to suffering or the betterment of humanity. It does not seek transcendance from sin. Rather, it seeks to preserve sin and preserve suffering.

Humanity can end suffering once we adopt a code of ethics that values harmony and peace on a global level. Humanity can end suffering once science knows enough. We might never end it all, but we can accomplish far more through the scientific method, and through reasoned thought on ethics, than we could from a 1000 church sermons from a 1000 churches.

 

[david_x]

I see. In that case, it does not.

Oh, didn't realize you were just playing "devil's advocate"

What were we talking about?

 

[Fed]

Slavery, corrupt monarchies, and the witch-hunts were ended not by conservative Christians or the church, but by atheists, agnostics and "liberal Christians" acting against their church.

Actually most abolitionists were Quakers or evangelical Christians, so they were liberal in the sense of supporting change not in the theological sense.

 

[irateional]

Actually most abolitionists were Quakers or evangelical Christians, so they were liberal in the sense of supporting change not in the theological sense.

Agreed there.
Then again, that's only a small counter-balance to the other end.