Thank you for your response. I do admit, conversing with many 'apologists' can be quite frustrating.
However, what 'mindset' is necessary to simply 'know' Yahweh exists??????
All I'm asking for, in this thread, is for some type of demonstration to the existence of God and/or Yahweh. I either believe it, or not. Sure, I could be in 'denial'. However, I either believe God exists, or not.
One problem is the way you are approaching the concept of knowledge altogether.
For an example, the decimal 0.9 repeating is the equivalent of 1. This is not something that is obviously true, and someone could dig in their heels and refuse to believe it, but as soon as you understand how fractions work, it becomes obvious that this is true.
The concepts involved in wrapping your head around something like theism are infinitely more difficult. There's nothing obviously true about any of it until you put serious effort into trying to understand it, but with something so abstract, you need to understand it on its terms instead of forcing it to fit yours. It's only at that point that someone can make a fully informed decision on whether they think it's true or not.
I'm not sure that I would say that I "know" God exists without some significant qualifiers, but any doubts I have tend to lean in the direction of alternative concepts of divinity (usually Hinduism). Like you, I would like some sort of personal divine revelation, particularly where Christianity is concerned, but it's not something I stress about too much. Except when I do, of course.
At some point, I think we do have to accept that our beliefs or lack thereof are to a certain extent outside of our control. I'm in a somewhat similar situation to you: I actually have no idea whether or not I believe in Christianity. In my case, from the opposite direction--I was virulently
anti-Christian, eventually got drawn in almost in spite of myself, but a part of me still rebels against it. Which is fine, I think. We do the best we can--that's all there is to it. (I am impervious to fear tactics, though, so hell is not something I care about. At least, not over beliefs.)
As for what mindset is required, I think you need to be able to view reality in a specific way for theism to make sense at all, at least from a more Anglo-Catholic perspective. I ran into this quote from Chesterton earlier today which really perfectly describes what I'm thinking of:
There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a substance of gratitude.
Unless and until this is the sort of picture that really resonates with someone, I think they're wasting their time trying to figure out why precisely anyone ought to believe in God.
