AsburySkinsFan

I wrestled with it for the last five years or so, at first I wanted to hang on, but then as I stopped the reinforcing efforts I noticed some things more clearly in my mind. I like the idea of god but I'm pretty sure I'd be classified as an atheist at this point. I wanted to be an agnostic but when the idea of the Judeo-Christian god fell away, anything else just felt false too. I don't know for how long it's been since I haven't truly believed, and I can't honestly point to one thing even now. It's really been a process where I discovered just how much I was reinforcing the idea of god on my mind and now it's just not there. Oddly enough, I think it was guys like Hitchens that pushed me back into the fold for awhile since their arguments were always full of holes and partial truths built more for shock value than enlightening.

I think that is a fair assumption to make about my concern. My process is my own, and I'm just recently at the point where I am sharing in places like this, I don't know that I'll ever come out of the closet in my public life. But at the same time I don't want to break someone else who is just wanting some dialogue. Other guys on here I know through experience and feel comfortable with some full contact engagement on this front. I seriously doubt any of the challenges I bring on this issue will strengthen your beliefs. You focus on your kids, they are far more important. If we choose to pick this up later then so be it.

Some process we don't understand or a divine being. Simpler is the process we don't understand.

Fine where is your data for your peer review. This way we can analyze your results and see if they can be repeated. Oh, I know you used the word experiment loosely because you're trying to win an argument and decided to be cute. That stuff works in Sunday School and from the pulpit, ask me how I know, but it doesn't work in the real world.

If your experiement is running every single day then by scientific method you can draw NO conclusions until it is over and you can analyze the test results. You sir are cheating. Before we go farther, just know that I'm not going to quit with this, and that will include deconstructing something you trust in. If you are up for that then ok, but if not, then best just cut it off here.

No no, it's Thanos. It's as plausible as anything they've brought forward. That's the point, it's the whole weakness to the theological argument is that at the end of the day you have to take it on faith and nothing else. They'd like you to believe otherwise, but it's not true, their own book even says as much even though they've spent a lot of ink trying to do otherwise. It's the ultimate cheat, anything can't be explained...God. Anything seems to contradict that...mystery. It's a self licking Popsicle.

@PeterMPobjects in motion tend to stay in motion until acted upon by another force. So you want to know why? and my guess is that your reason is god said so. Yeah, see that's not nearly as convincing as you want it to be. Not to mention that all this does is get us to First Mover, and that's a LOOOOOOOOOONGGG way from Jesus as my personal lord and savior. Go for it Run your science experiment to prove your hypothesis. We'll wait Fine here's my explanation, it isn't the Judeo Christian god, it's instead aliens from a parallel space-time continuum that have the ability to snap their fingers with a special glove and cause entire dimensions to come into being or cease to exist. There is my explanation, and it is EVERY bit as valid as yours.

Here's my biggest problem with the "God wants us to take him on faith not proof" argument, why? The answer is typically "obedience", but that doesn't make sense either. If there is a god and that god is the Judeo Christian god then he created us with smart minds that seek evidence and proof, scientific minds. But he hid himself and chose only to whisper to a few people and has all but stopped since. So what's the purpose of just faith without seeing? Why the game? If god's purpose is to save the world then do it, he's changed the rules before why not do it again. I know the answer, it's the mystery of god. Well, for me, that answer stopped being acceptable.

Well we are certainly beyond arguing for the Judeo-Christian god. At the very best what you're after is a primary mover god, one who sets things in motion and then hides himself from perception. Sooner or later we stop talking about a god and start describing an external force. And we can work with this through Occam's Razor, all things being equal the simplest explanation tends to be the correct one. So which is more likely 1) an all powerful god and conscious god created everything, set it all in motion and then hid himself through purposeful blinding of intelligent minds and is now off somewhere entertaining himself or 2) an as of yet undiscovered process brought the universe into being and is only hidden because the limits of our scientific exploration? My mother in law would say, "It's god" but then she's not real bright. The scientific mind says that we cannot assume god simply because we don't have a better answer.

Augustine started with the assumption of God as are you, that's not proof that a presupposition. It was Augustine's fault, as it is yours. Believe it or not Augustine was wrong.

@PeterMPthe sun coming up is not proof of God, neither is the fact that since the sun has come up for millions of years proof of God, neither is the fact that I'm reasonably sure that the sun will come up tomorrow. I don't know where you came up with this idea that predictability is the evidence of god. Not when physics provides a reasonable answer to whether or not the sun will come up. You seriously sound like the ancient Greeks that look out in the morning and see the sun rising and give glory to Apollo for riding his chariot across the sky again.

I always feel like a drunk when reading your posts. If god intentionally put blinders on people because we might prove his existence then that god is a bit of a prick. And there is a way to see beyond your own perception. It's called community. Where you may not be able to see others can. And if your argument is simply about the limited nature of perception then your argument isn't for god, it is instead the limitations of the human creature. And then science's quest would be to reduce those limitations by expanding human perception.

This right here is why I no longer believe. I have no reason to believe that god exists. And you can argue first mover, you can argue gaps, you can argue sunsets, you can argue love, you can argue complexity; I know them all. I've tasted the goodness of the word of god and I have fallen away. Those faith commitments I once held as true no longer are sufficient. I don't see god working in this world, I see people. I don't see the church as an alternative, in fact I see the church is exactly the same as everyone else only in denial through their delusion that they are exempt because they said a cosmic "I'm sorry". It doesn't even bring me pain to write this because it's not like I've lost something. So in your mind god exists until we open the box that finally shows that there is no god. That's gaps brother, shoving god into the cracks of the unknown all to maintain the idea of a god. The only problem is that with every day your god becomes smaller, shoved into a tinier box than the day before because human knowledge grows forcing the idea of god to the margins.

That clip right there describes religion better than anything I could ever do or say. "You didn't see what was, you saw what you wanted to see." A car accident: "God was with my baby." says the mother ignoring the implication that God was not with the guy in the other car who died. Recovery from Cancer: "God cured me." says the patient sitting in the hospital room as the doctors who just finished the last round of chemo leave the room. Missionary "God has called me to the foreign mission field" he says with empty pockets and no way to get there. We see what we want to see, and I was as guilty of that as anyone. I spent a lot of time at first trying to prove God, then when I found out I couldn't prove god I shoved him into the cracks of life, then when the cracks got filled in and god got smaller I put god behind everything, but then if god is behind everything then god is culpable. Finally, there were just too many unresolved problems that theology couldn't account for; why doesn't god speak today? Oh yes, god speaks through the church. Which one? Because there are a LOT of voices speaking on behalf of god that say contradictory things. Oh the true and authentic church....yours. In the end it's nothing more than a Rorschach test that reveals more about you than the world around you.

So your argument is that science is irrelevant because a caveman pulled a "Little Orphan Annie"?

And then when the science of the gap is explained the response is, "See how amazing god is, look what he ordered the world." This IS the definition of a presupposition in an argument, god is presumed therefore god IS the answer...to every question.

And the theologically trained mind simply fills in the gaps of human knowledge with "god". Except when those gaps are pushed back then god gets smaller. Come on man, you know me. I know the arguments and I know st the end of the day the best apologetics can do is argue for a first mover, all the rest is doctrinal leaps. Can't explain it? God Can explain it? God Except all of those are faith commitments not a basis of fact.

Don't believe my question was addressed to you

It seems an odd approach to preach Jesus to a bunch of Greeks without talking about the biographical nature of Christ. You seem to be suggesting that Paul's sermons to polytheistic Greeks was absent biography, and based on doctrine? How do you think that would play without the biographical gospels? At some point you have to talk about the man and how he figures into all the rest. It's the very reason the Gospels are first in the New Testament. As for Jesus' kingdom, you're confusing the question he was asked, they were asking about borders, and the Kingdom of God is borderless it is "from above" but if Revelation is to be believed it will be THE kingdom on Earth as it was in the beginning.

So the burden of proof in a discussion about the existence of god does not fall to the one arguing the claim of god's existence? I'm not sure you understand how this thing works.

Ok, I thought that might be the case that your experience is mostly with a traditionally more liberal denomination, Presbyterian church, which typically falls farther Left than my own United Methodist tradition. The three that I mentioned are the three that we're experiencing in our culture today, which is when the leadership voices need to be heard even more. And I get how difficult it is as a religious leader to talk about equally respecting other's religions. In NoVa it's probably easier given the cultural diversity there, but here in vanilla America where most Xians are evangelical and feel that god has called them to convert everyone else, that message rings oddly. Instead what we get here most often a carbon copy of the Jerry Falwell/Pat Robertson. As for what I used to believe, I totally get how folks still believe. Hell, I'm only a couple years removed myself. My sarcasm comes because that's who I am and how I approach things. These were the things that I struggled with the most and things that just don't make sense to me any more. I can't even pretend about it anymore. Look, if I'm wrong then I'm dead wrong and so be it.

1) the Jews ignored it because it was just another in a long line of failed Messiahs. 2) and yet by 397 CE those four texts receive the primacy of importance in the canon, to which Paul's letters serve as supplemental. What's more is that we never hear an evangelistic sermon from Paul, what we do have are letters to established churches, so lets not pretend that Paul was ignoring the biographical, that biographical is what establishes Jesus and frames his existence and purpose. 3) you are blending the term gospel here from the gospel genre to "the gospel", that said there is so little focus on the afterlife in the gospels, instead they focus primarily on the last week of Jesus' life and his sermons on how to LIVE in the Kingdom of God. These are not texts to tell people how to get to heaven. They are instead texts proclaiming a new king, a new kingdom, and a new way to live within that kingdom. 4) the Synoptics certainly do flip the conquest expectation on its head but at the same time, but that doesn't take away from the royal connections, and even the coronation by the soldiers with the crown, reed, and robe. This king is certainly different, but make no mistake the entire framework of how the story is told is borrowed.

And yet the burden of proof is not on me anymore.

That one case sets the historical precedent, and sets the framework for how a "gospel" functioned in the first century. The Christian gospels take this tradition and infuse it with nearly every other religious tradition and royal announcement known to the first century ears. These people were not strangers to this stuff. They would have heralds who would go to the towns and tell of the new leader's great deeds. As for whether or not Jesus said or did anything we'll never know, what we do know is what the evangelists said about him. When we see the gospels they are certainly longer than the single proclamation but that what frames the entire view of a gospel in the 1st century mind, it shows that the Christians didn't invent the genre but instead borrowed it, built on it, and drafted many of the fantastical things that were said about other rulers are gods of the time, and they boiled them all into a giant Jesus stew so that when that first century Jews heard this being told (because they were read aloud) they it would be as familiar as the Star Spangled Banner is to us but as challenging as reframing of that song to be about Mexico rather than the USA.

Edit: I tried to write it, but the profanity filter keeps blocking it.