Looking at youtube Christian vs atheist debates, I think most if not all of the atheists misunderstand Christianity, and I'm frustrated that the Christian debater is often too concerned with formal arguments and jargon to correct them and express what I would have wanted to say. So I'm going to post it here:
God is infinite and eternal, not a part of the universe, but the creator of the universe. We know the universe is not infinite and not eternal, so we are not going to observe God through telecopes looking at the big things of the world, nor through microscopes looking at the small things of the world, because God is not of the world. If you are on the road of looking for scientific proof of God's existence, you are already on the wrong road.
Hell exists, but God does not condemn you to it. God is omniscient and ominpotent, but knowing something and being able to do something is not the same as must do that thing. God gives you free will as a gift, it's up to you what you chose to do. You can chose to go to hell, which is not the same as being condemned to hell. Hell is eternal existence in the absence of Grace. Eternity is not a really long time, it is eternal. So you will have an eternity to learn that human behavior is economic behavior and everything can be quantified then bought and sold, until nothing is of value to you anymore. You will be incapable of love or being loved, instead of love for your husband/wife you will only feel that he/she was with you for sex/money/connections/etc. The Bible uses the imagery of being burned by flames to warn you just how painful such an existence will be.
There is Good&Evil. Not everything is a case of he said, she said, who knows who is right? Somethings are good and somethings are evil, and we know this because we are created in God's image, and when in doubt you can refer to the Bible. There has been plenty of atheist morality systems, but good & evil is always relative in the abscence of God. You can express a preference for relative morality over absolute morality, and most of the time if not all of the time, it's because you want to sin. Murder is wrong (absolute morality). So let's declare war, and now it's legal to drop cluster bombs on them and take their oil (relative morality).
Scientific method is a way of understanding the world, but it's not the only way of understanding the world. When God can not be proved through the scientific method, it does not mean God doesn't exist. There are things which we know exists but can never be proven to be existing by the scientific method. For example, things inside a black hole. We can only ever observe the things outside it and theorize about the things inside it, but when a particle falls into a black hole we believe that particle still exists. The other interesting point here is Atheists say if evolution is not true that does not mean creation is true by default; but if God can not be proven by science then surely that does not mean God does not not exist by default.
Bible is a collection of books not a single book. Gospels were written by illiterate people paying scribes to write for them. 1st century AD Israel had literacy rate of maybe 1% at most, and Jesus' disciples are not in that 1% of rich and powerful elites who know how to read and write. When the book says this is the gospel according to Matthew, then that's the author of that gospel. And of course you would expect the scribe to refer to Matthew as Matthew instead of "I". And of course you would expect some scribe errors between the gospels of Matthew and Mark on the exact date of the passover. This is many years after the event and this is an era when common people can't even remember their own birthdays. It's amazing that random unrelated people can attest to the resurrection, rather than say just forget about it and get on with their lives. The documentary hypothesis is nonsense, if you applied it to the Harry Potter books, I'm sure you will find J.K. Rowling didn't write any of them.
I'm reasonably smart person and most of the Christians I know are pretty smart people too, so stop entertaining this notion that Christians are just stupid people gullible enough to believe in magical fairy tales. Faith is not blind belief. It's a reasonable position that can be defended. And I hope everyone can open their hearts to love and open their eyes to God's Grace.
God is infinite and eternal, not a part of the universe, but the creator of the universe. We know the universe is not infinite and not eternal, so we are not going to observe God through telecopes looking at the big things of the world, nor through microscopes looking at the small things of the world, because God is not of the world. If you are on the road of looking for scientific proof of God's existence, you are already on the wrong road.
Hell exists, but God does not condemn you to it. God is omniscient and ominpotent, but knowing something and being able to do something is not the same as must do that thing. God gives you free will as a gift, it's up to you what you chose to do. You can chose to go to hell, which is not the same as being condemned to hell. Hell is eternal existence in the absence of Grace. Eternity is not a really long time, it is eternal. So you will have an eternity to learn that human behavior is economic behavior and everything can be quantified then bought and sold, until nothing is of value to you anymore. You will be incapable of love or being loved, instead of love for your husband/wife you will only feel that he/she was with you for sex/money/connections/etc. The Bible uses the imagery of being burned by flames to warn you just how painful such an existence will be.
There is Good&Evil. Not everything is a case of he said, she said, who knows who is right? Somethings are good and somethings are evil, and we know this because we are created in God's image, and when in doubt you can refer to the Bible. There has been plenty of atheist morality systems, but good & evil is always relative in the abscence of God. You can express a preference for relative morality over absolute morality, and most of the time if not all of the time, it's because you want to sin. Murder is wrong (absolute morality). So let's declare war, and now it's legal to drop cluster bombs on them and take their oil (relative morality).
Scientific method is a way of understanding the world, but it's not the only way of understanding the world. When God can not be proved through the scientific method, it does not mean God doesn't exist. There are things which we know exists but can never be proven to be existing by the scientific method. For example, things inside a black hole. We can only ever observe the things outside it and theorize about the things inside it, but when a particle falls into a black hole we believe that particle still exists. The other interesting point here is Atheists say if evolution is not true that does not mean creation is true by default; but if God can not be proven by science then surely that does not mean God does not not exist by default.
Bible is a collection of books not a single book. Gospels were written by illiterate people paying scribes to write for them. 1st century AD Israel had literacy rate of maybe 1% at most, and Jesus' disciples are not in that 1% of rich and powerful elites who know how to read and write. When the book says this is the gospel according to Matthew, then that's the author of that gospel. And of course you would expect the scribe to refer to Matthew as Matthew instead of "I". And of course you would expect some scribe errors between the gospels of Matthew and Mark on the exact date of the passover. This is many years after the event and this is an era when common people can't even remember their own birthdays. It's amazing that random unrelated people can attest to the resurrection, rather than say just forget about it and get on with their lives. The documentary hypothesis is nonsense, if you applied it to the Harry Potter books, I'm sure you will find J.K. Rowling didn't write any of them.
I'm reasonably smart person and most of the Christians I know are pretty smart people too, so stop entertaining this notion that Christians are just stupid people gullible enough to believe in magical fairy tales. Faith is not blind belief. It's a reasonable position that can be defended. And I hope everyone can open their hearts to love and open their eyes to God's Grace.
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