What do you guys think?

[Willtysn89]

As someone who is struggeling with faith what im looking for the reasons for rather than against, i have already exshusted the question s for against. But its all left me in a state of doubt.

[turquoise]

45 minutes ago, Willtysn89 said:

As someone who is struggeling with faith what im looking for the reasons for rather than against, i have already exshusted the question s for against. But its all left me in a state of doubt.

O.k. I've been reading your earlier threads. Praying is therapeutic for me. Mostly I'm an atheist though.

[HAZARD]

Free moral agency, or free will. Free will consists of intellect and sensibility, and these form the foundation of moral obligation to moral government. The intellect includes reason and self-determination. The sensibility includes self consciousness, all sensation, desire, emotion, passion, and all feelings. Free will is the power of choice concerning moral law. It is mans faculty of choosing good or evil without compulsion or necessity. It was created in man, and man will have it in all eternity.

[petula]

If the Jesus I love is a big scam , then I've spent my life feeling loved and forgiven , I've learnt to look beyond the obvious and see a persons heart and need , I've always had someone to talk too , I've never been alone , have always felt loved , some astounding coincidences have occurred during prayer , I've met and enjoyed being with wonderful people , have had incredible adventures and much much more I'm unafraid of death because I believe my Lord . If it was all a delusion then I've had a lot fun and happiness 

[turquoise]

6 hours ago, petula said:

If the Jesus I love is a big scam , then I've spent my life feeling loved and forgiven , I've learnt to look beyond the obvious and see a persons heart and need , I've always had someone to talk too , I've never been alone , have always felt loved , some astounding coincidences have occurred during prayer , I've met and enjoyed being with wonderful people , have had incredible adventures and much much more I'm unafraid of death because I believe my Lord . If it was all a delusion then I've had a lot fun and happiness 

Thanks for this post. As an atheist, I sometimes wonder if I should try to lead my family and friends into a state of disbelief. I pretend to have some nominal belief in Christianity, because my mother would be distressed for her son to be "going to hell", and I try to show respect to their beliefs by pretending that I nominally agree. I never know if my strategy is the correct one. Shouldn't I give them the truth as I see it, instead of assuming that they are better-off with the status quo of their false beliefs?

Why is truth better than delusion? If delusion makes a person's life better, then maybe the delusion should be left undisturbed. On the other hand, the benefit of delusion depends on the circumstances. Often Christianity causes unhappiness, distress, bigotry too. How many gays and lesbians have struggled needlessly with their sexuality, because they were Christians? Of course not all the bigotry against homosexuals derives from the Bible, but it is a factor. That is only one example.

When I went to bed last night, I felt a militant resolve to do my tiny part in wiping-out the delusion of Christianity. I read your post, and I felt that it might be best to hold my tongue and let people believe as long as possible. It's a tricky issue IMO

[Willtysn89]

I can see what the logic says however I would argue that through several lines of reasoning.

1) If free will is deterministic then we wouldn't need awareness to perform actions as they would be automatic, and not needing concsiousness to interact with our bodily forms.

Logical argument to this would be that awareness isn't born of determinism but free will and the two go hand in hand, and thus you can still have a universe that came about through random chance.

Which leads me to point to to refute this.

2) If free will goes hand in hand with random chance, and biology has evolved our brains to have this safety mechanism in which free will is perceived as an illusion to keep our sanity in tact and therefore it feels familiar and reasonable given the vunrebility of the human mind to concoct the idea of a God. I would refute this by saying that, if this safety mechanism was so to keep us from the truth then why is it we were able to work it out and this break down the walss of reality.

Logical argument to this is that it is not natures garuntee that the wall it put into place for our survival is assured to do so, for if we so WILL it, we can scratch at the wall and tear it down.

And I would refute this argument by this point.

3) If free will is the cause of random chance, and random chance was there in order to create the mechanism in place with which our brains would evolve in order to be able too cognize in such a way that it developed a psychological defence mechanism, and that the coming together of neurons in our brains is what brings this free will concept and determism by evolution together. I would argue this by saying that, there is no actual proof of evolution from one species to another, for if there were we would see loads of examples of this in the meusums across the globe.

Logical argument to this would obviously be that the variences are so slight, that if you lined up every single male against the homosapein genetic liniage we would all look similar yet one side at one end of the spectrum would not be able to recognize the other.

 

However I would refute all three lines of argument for the three lines of logcal arguments against the three creationist statements I make by saying the following.

It has been proven that cells cannot add information, there are varinces within a species but not an entire mutation between one species and another. One would argue here that for example, sicle cell animia is an example of a genetic mutation within humans, however this is only true in the varience of the human species and not others and it does not show the exact evolution in which species evolve. Furthermore species are actually all shown together throghout history, even the dinosoaors are dated by scientist to have not exsisted at the same time as man, so how can we have evolved from them. To add to this if we were then to say well we are actually distent cousins of chimps then we would see that our DNA would be closer to theirs and we wouold see all the cross overs from chimps to humans inside the DNA. But instead what we find is, we are less closer to the primates than we are a baked potato. Meaning, we actually share more genes than a vegetable than we do monkeys.

Back in the 1800s Darwin was actually given private funding to publish his works of the origin of species, and apparantly by the Rothwchilds, a powerful banking family who were establishing the federal resever banking system at the time. Whats interesting here is that, Darwin was actually a Christian and yet most of the modern world views that argue against creationism is Dawrins theory of evolution. At the time wrote an excerpt at the end of his paper called "The Prooblem with The Theory" in which he stated that if the theory of evolution does not prove the natural selection and evolution from one speechies to another, his theory would be in big trouble. This excerpt at the end of his paper however, goes seemingly unoticed as if it wasn't ment to be.

Now although there is no way for me to prove this, heres what I think. Since Dawrin was a man of God, went to church and got on with it like everyone else. For back then lots of people believed Darwin but it didn't stop them from being Christians, isn't it strange now that most athiest now use Darwin as an arugment when actually its theory lies in jeopordy due to new discoveries. And it sure wasn't a Christian school that ever said Darwin was right or wrong, his name was never mentioned in the bible of course. Yet it was the schools of our modern secular society which teaches it even though its actually technically a beleif since there is no proof to evidence genetic mutation.

And if you believe in the new world order stuff, then if God was never a threat to them then why stump this part of science out. Because if they could knowing it isn't true then they certainly wouldn't be botheed by 'new' information in which it could potentially de-rail their agenda, no. Instead they would have been fine with it being added there, because they would have known full heartedly that there was no 'God' and therefore nothing to be worried about. However it is becaise they too know that in this it does add stength to the notion that there may be an intelligent designer, which says to me that they too must have a beleif in our God.

 

This is just to list a few, another is the fact the universe is so finally tuned. In that if you just changed one thing then all of it falls appart. Another is the fibonachi numbers, in that every single thing in nature, to measurments in our fingers, the petals on flowers even inside our DNA is this patern. It can be found anywhere and it has baffelled people for centuries, this aloing with the probability of the universe exsisting in the first place.

 

Now as I said before, I was fully athiest 2 months ago. Now I have seen enough to be able to at least look and re-examine things again. But how did I even come to all of this, well things started happening in my life which lead me back to it, things which I did not go looking for but they came to me, which is what lead me as an athiest to asbsolutley investigate as much as possible and when I did this is what I found, the expeiricnes with what I thought is God are very personal and even if I said they wouldn't make sense because no one was there except me. But I know if those things had happened to any other athiest then they too would have at least had the thought to investigate. Because in not doing im only closing my mind off and not being open enough to at least consider Christianity once more.

With that done what was left to do for me was confirm three things.

1) Is there a higher being? Yes

-Because of the personal things which happened to me, a man couldn't have managed.

-Because of what I began to discover because I had these experiences to re-examine what evidence is out there.

 

2) If so, is this the right one? Yes

-Because of more personal things which happened to me.

-Because of things I had seen happen to other people.

 

3) If this is the right one, is what is being taught true and right? Yes

-Because of seeing hisotical evidence for the bible, the placing of the Isrialites and witniessing Jesus death.

-Because not only this but I have seen proof in the stars, corroponsing in the Bible which I saw though another persons story. Except he was able to show me picturs.

 

This last part I touch on about Jesus death, sure there are loads of statements that say there is no hisorical evidence for his exsistence. However there are two things wrong with this than even I as at this point as an athiest thought this...

 

Back then records of history were not kept like they are today, one example is the destruction of the Cananite city of Hatsor (you can see this in recoroded hisootry), that the city was destroyed by the Isrialite people. Back then if it had been any other civilization they would have claimed responsiliby for it.

One event that actually demonstrates this is a mention on the earlist mention of the Isrialites, on an Egyptian plaque. Stating all of the peoples they had conqured (mainly Libya) hower the last two sentances say...

"The House of Israil Has Been Shorn"

This is imperical data as not only are they mentioned, but are so by the Egyptians. And in the same way had any other civilisation been responsible for what happened at Hatsor, this would have been screamed out by whoever had done it, and yet none other than the Isrialites claim responsiblity. Okay so, we have confirmed that there were a peoples called the Isrialites.

But how does this prove at all the Bible, or its most important figure, Jesus.

Well that would have to be the ones closest to him right? So we look at the desciples and see what they report, and again. Back then history was recorded in a very different way because they were totally different times. They didn't have PC's or even pencils to document with, so with what they did have we would have to assume that they were a little limited in being able to record what they had seen.

We see the dsicples writte in the new testiment that when Jesus died, to make sure he was dead the roman solider pierced his side with his spear. And that blood and water could been seen coming out. Now even to me this sounded a little odd as when you cut someone they bleed, and no water comes out. However what I learned next was amazing.

In a medical journal it was found that dying in this way you would sufforcate, this is why Jesus legs were not broken because he had already sufforcated and died. So there was no reason to do this to eliviate his pain, because that was too late. Which is why they did with the other two because they were still alive.

So what does this mean?

Well on its own just how he died, however all of Jesus disciples were all brutally killed for what they beleived in. All of this shortly after the ressurection of Christ, however they got the chance to renounce their faith and live. Now if these people were lying, surely at the cost of their life they would not have died for a lie, I couldn't think of anyone that would ever do that. And we see this mentioned in the Bible and it being tested in the real world we live in today. Tell me why would the disciple make a statement that he knew to be false without even knowing it to be medically true?

Ill leave you with that.

 

[Ezra]

On 8/27/2016 at 5:50 AM, Willtysn89 said:

I just hate having all these doubts, I hate it and I know how happy I really would be if I did believe it. Im just so lost its driving me crazy.

Will,

I would suggest that you put aside all your speculations and your focus on free will (which is a reality) and concentrate on the Gospels, beginning with the Gospel of John. This Gospel opens with the revelation that Jesus is God, who also created this universe.  

If the universe is real, then the Creator is real, not imaginary. And if the Creator is real then the Creator as our Savior is also real. Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. So focus on Him, His words, and His salvation.