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I am starting this thread with no idea where it would lead to but I have decided to write down these thoughts because I think it will could be interesting to someone and I myself would like to hear some ideas. Forgive me if this is a bit long. As a Christian, I am thinking about my understanding of scripture. Some background: I have been a Christian since October 2000. I grew up in a Christian family and have been in church nearly all my life. My dad is a theologian and a preacher. My mother is a teacher and so I come from a strongly academic family which also includes theological He is in the Dutch Reformed Church. I was also in that church until I was about 12 or 13. After that I have been mostly in charismatic churches. There is a lot more to this and various complication in my family and home life that come into this but I think this should be enough for now. The basic questions I have are these: How do I know what to believe? How can I be sure that a certain view is correct or not? Who do I trust to give me the truth? and How do I see the truth of scripture connect to the natural world and my real lived experience? As you can see, these are questions that have been asked by many people and there is probably no final answers to them, Now I want to expand on a few things and add some thoughts. They are just my ideas and could be right or wrong but they are sincerely meant and not aimed at anyone. I think I always believed that there must be a God. Even from a young age it just made sense to me. Many people argue that people are Christians mostly because they have been brought up that way. Yet I am quite sure that I would have become a Christian anyway even if I had not been in such a household. I have had doubts and there have been moments where I really questioned God's existence. But I could just never shake off the feeling deep down that there must be a Creator. I allowed myself many times to look at my faith as a Christian and ask myself whether, objectively, my faith was reasonable considering what I know right now. And every time I asked this it led me back to Jesus eventually. Of course, I think my objectivity is compromised, because I find Christianity attractive and want it to be true. That is just honestly my dilemma. Now let me assure you, I believe the Bible is true. I am just asking myself how this faith works practically. What is it about Christianity that makes it believable. In a way, this goes right into the idea of knowledge. What can we know? How do we know something? Is personal experience of something necessary for knowledge? After all, everybody and anybody could be wrong about just about anything. Or they could be deliberately deceiving me. To illustrate my issue let me mention this example of how we can be wrong about things: for many years I have played Monopoly. Recently I learned that I had been playing the game wrong all these years and that the rule we were breaking would have changed the whole game completely. I had simply accepted the rules that were given to me and never questioned it, trusting that they must know what they are doing. I find things like this often in far more serious subjects. Consider this: would a person born deaf and blind be able to believe? This leads me to the issue of my mistrust of "experts" and popular beliefs. I must confess that I do not know that much. Only enough to know how little I know. When you have an abundance in something, it is easy to not fully make use if it. In my family we have an abundance in books and in people with high levels of education and knowledge. In spite of this, I struggle to understand highly technical information and I often find myself uncertain about my facts. I have always struggled to read as much as I would like to. I have tried. And this makes me feel so inferior in my family where dinner conversations are often dominated by intellectual subject. You find in my family atheists, Greek orthodox, universalists and other widely different beliefs. Most of my family, including my dad, believes in evolution and are entirely secular. It has dawned on me that knowledge really is power. Those that seem to know something can easily control and manipulate those who don't and it is this that leads me to doubt. A good argument can be wrong. For a long time I simply accepted what my dad said. After all, he is a very smart man. But as I grew older, I started to realize how he can even be wrong about subjects he is supposed to be an expert in. So having a good argument alone does not ensure that what someone says is true. Proof is needed somehow. And even on this forum I have noticed that very often people differ even on what constitutes proof. This is also why i often avoid non-biblical books about philosophy and theology. For the sake of keeping myself from going insane with deep and difficult questions, I try to base my beliefs on Scripture and on what I can personally observe or experience. Even then I doubt my own understanding so much. I also have made a deliberate decision to stand on certain points where there is a lot of controversy in order to stop myself from being tossed around by opposing but reasonable sounding arguments. One more thought that I have been sitting with. It has been interesting to me to look at the forums and note some of he debates going on. I rarely allow myself to go to these ( because they only confuse and frustrate me more), except to just look at how people are presenting their point of view. I get the sense sometimes that no one has really determined what the bottom line is for each person. And in a public forums where anybody can join and have different motivations in joining as well as vastly different backgrounds, it is surely inevitable that the discussions will end up going the way they do. To someone like me, this does not really help me learn or understand something better. I don't want to choose sides, I want to learn the truth (if this is possible. Is objective knowledge possible?) I am just not sure it can end up any other way, because I have rarely ever seen anyone change their original position on any of these debates.