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Depends on what you mean by "love". Sometimes love requires us to speak harsh truths and not play into people's delusions for fear of hurting their feelings. Love is not simply empathy or an emotion, sometimes it requires we intervene and draw lines in the sand.
Absolutely. That is what Jesus said His church would be built upon, the truth of the Father, not of man. This is where discernment comes in as man has done a good job of making Christianity over in our own image.
Have you though? Perhaps you share the same love of neighbor that I do and belong to the same Master, but it seems to me that truly loving another person depends on helping them to sift through the graveyard that is knowledge so-called and reveal that Trith is Truth no matter what we call it, but that to say more than that it is Truth we must have some external source for our understanding. The question "does God exist?" isn't a meaningful one, because God's existence is tautological. The real question is what is the best way to come to know what God is like, and ultimately that requires us to accept something purely on the basis of faith. The fallibility of our reasoning remains, but God provides us with a foundation to sort various statements by ranking the likelyhood of their truth. So what is your foundation for discovering Truth?
Because they are not focused on the Kingdom and the will of God but upon themselves and how it pertains to them. They seek kindred ears to tickle and self justify their backwards ways even within Christianity. 8 billion at present seeking to self justify their own will, even using God to do so. The Adversary and adversarial man have no interest in the Kingdom where 'self' and all it entails is no longer allowed.
That seems to me to be a bridge we shouldn't cross, though I'm more of a pragmatist when it comes to my faith. Do I know it is true in a technical sense? No, I am still dependent on my ability to reason and cannot escape that reality. I know God can be found in the texts of the Bible, but I can conceptualize various models of history depending on what it is I am hoping to inquire about.
Except if you are a solipsist, it would seem that you have no basis for disagreeing with me or anyone else because you've accepted the proposition that the only demonstrable fact is your own personal existence. You and I are close in our positions, I have just accepted that there are two things I can be reasonably certain of: that truth exists, and that I exist. Truth is just another name for God, and the best we can do without an external authority is wallow around in the dung heap that is human boast of knowledge. I know Truth is found in the Bible, but whether or not that is the sole place to find Truth I cannot say for certain. The name of my God is "He IS", in Hebrew that is YHWH. I know of Him not because I have developed a grand argument or theoretical understanding but only because of the history of prophetic revelation that found its fullness in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. All of which have a reasonable circumstantial case to stand on.
No, I won't be defining you 'as I see fit' since the structure of my epistemological position doesn't really allow me that privilege.
But independent thinker, that works for me as well. I'm just lucky if I can avoid sounding totally stupid.
You're the first person I've encountered who willingly takes on the classification of solipsist.
That's hardly solipsistic, and it seems to misunderstand the idea of illusion within philosophy. It isn't about whether anything "exists" but whether or not how they appear can be taken as reliable or if anything can reliably be said about such experiences. Given your willingness to dive in head first into calling yourself a solipsist, it would seem to me you have abandoned reason since none of what you know can be held to be reliable.
Typically, when I've heard something described as solipsistic is it not intended as a description of a person's worldview but as a criticism of what commitment to a given proposition entails. As you are the only person I have ever encountered who self-describes as a solipsist I will have to take your word for what the "solipsist worldview" is. Though it would seem that the nature of solipsism would preclude mutual agreement on the entailments of solipsism as that would be an oxymoron.
That's a whole tangled mess, but knowledge as is commonly used does not require certainty or immaculate and unquestionable justification. It is simple enough to argue that there is warrant for believing in one proposition over another. Faith is a gap filler, where reason is unable to accomplish the task of getting us from our internal experiences to reliable information about the world. It attains the level of common sense knowledge, in that there is a clear and discernable line that connects the facts we can establish together. Knowledge doesn't require epistemic certainty, it merely requires warranted belief.
I stand on my experiences, though I am not always quick to share because doing so would be casting my pearls before swine. I am content to preach the gospel, and leave God to sort out the details. Faith to me is a surrender to God's descending plea, not a move from me to God. I can reasonably call this knowledge not because I have epistemic certainty, but because if God as I define Him does not exist then it would seem that tautologies can be false. And if tautologies can be false, then nothing can be said to be true.
It certainly isn't self-evident, but then again whether there is anything that is self-evident isn't apparent. More appropriately, God's existence is self-referential. It is true in the same way that A=A is true.
The truth of the Bible is a confouning mess, but that's not surprising considering what is written in the Bible.
Why would one expect such a thing? The Bible states that He ntended to hide it from the wisdom of the world and reveal it to those who are innocent as babes. The hiddenness of God is not an argument against God if we take our description of what God would and wouldn't do from the Bible rather than beginning with philosophical intuitions.
It is undeniably human, with the flaws and foibles of any other document. But somewhere in there is the God named Truth. Whether that is His exclusive revelation, or if He can be found in other places is a matter of debate. But epistemology depends on something being true by way of self-reference, and the universe or cosmos or whatever name creation is called by cannot stand on its own but instead requires us to begin with synthetic rather than analytic propositions.
According to Christ the Lord, those that live in eternity, that are counted worthy of that age, have no marriage at all, regardless of marriages that occurred previously.
I can’t see a true believer actually being someone
