Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #1  June 14,2011, 6:06pm
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Why do you believe in God? Is it because of the evidence? Is it because of fear? Is it because there are no other viable explanations? Is it because of love?

Please share!

 
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llw11 is offline llw11 Post #2  June 15,2011, 6:24am
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apprently there's actually a book called "50 reasons you believe" or something like that. in the beginning i believed because i was told to believe by my parents. once i got old enough to have rational thought, i began to question like everyont should. i still believe today though i remain skeptical (so i guess i'm an "agnosti-theist"?? lol!!). i believe because it makes sense to me; i simply don't think that this is all there is. its not about wanting to exist forever or being afraid of the unknown or wanting to feel secure. despite what religions might claim, we can't know anything about the unknowable.
 
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charmingphlsphr is offline charmingphlsphr Post #3  June 15,2011, 1:40pm
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Diana_P wrote :
Why do you believe in God? Is it because of the evidence? Is it because of fear? Is it because there are no other viable explanations? Is it because of love?

Please share!

When Jesus asked Peter who he believed Jesus to be, Peter confessed, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." After this, Jesus said, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven" (Matthew 16:13-20). Paul, to the Corinthian church, wrote, "I want you to know that no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says, 'Jesus be cursed,' and no one can say, 'Jesus is Lord,' except by the Holy Spirit" (1 Corinthians 12:3).

We believe by faith through the grace of God.
 
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charmingphlsphr is offline charmingphlsphr Post #4  June 15,2011, 1:42pm
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llw11 wrote :
despite what religions might claim, we can't know anything about the unknowable.
Unless that which is unknowable reveals the unknown.
 
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hermes01 is offline hermes01 Post #5  June 21,2011, 4:26am
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Believe WHAT?
 
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llw11 is offline llw11 Post #6  June 21,2011, 3:51pm
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hermes01 wrote :
Believe WHAT?
in God...or whatever it is you believe in regarding the supernatural.
 
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Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #7  July 2,2011, 3:37am
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llw11 wrote :
despite what religions might claim, we can't know anything about the unknowable.


charmingphlsphr wrote :
Unless that which is unknowable reveals the unknown.


The unknownable is what makes life possible.

What I find interesting about life is that other than your family and close friends most people in general won’t trouble themselves with “your” impending trip across a bridge that is out. I guess they feel that if you can’t read the “bridge is out” sign or “see” it with your own eyes you deserve to plummet to your death. That’s mean I know. It could actually just be that they are so busy trying to deal with their own problems that solving your dilemmas is just not on their radar.

At any rate, life occurs when we are forced to experience things that our previous knowledge and behavior patterns haven’t equipped us to deal with yet. For example, you could say that Adam and Eve weren’t really alive until they were forced to experience something beyond perfect happiness. I don’t really agree I’m just using this as an example. Before they sinned, all they did was eat, sleep, and have sex all day. How disgusting! They were satiated with pleasure! Seriously, watching Adam and Eve all day was probably like watching non-stop porn. How much of that could anyone take? Perhaps God got tired of watching the two useless sloths squander eternity away and wanted to give them a challenge? I don’t know, but for me the apple and the serpent represent the introduction of a foreign element into the equation for which they were ill-equipped to deal with.

Today our lives are full of apples and serpents, things for which our present knowledge is insufficient to guide us properly. The basic point I’m trying to make is that if we had all the answers ahead of time LIFE simply could not happen! Do you agree or disagree?
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AZJoe is offline AZJoe Post #8  July 4,2011, 11:42am
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Diana_P wrote :
Why do you believe in God? Is it because of the evidence? Is it because of fear? Is it because there are no other viable explanations? Is it because of love?

Please share!

Because I was first exposed to this belief as a child but as I matured and was able to critically review things I saw validation everywhere I looked (the incredible order and scale of the Universe and nature etc.). And over the years I then saw people's lives change and events and also read the early church histories to discover that none of the early believers had any reason to die for a lie. Then as I dig even deeper I see that God used the least likely of humans who were full of faults to advance His knowledge and that from age to age He always sets a people aside for His purpose and these always escape calamity and live and prosper no matter how corrupt society becomes and no matter how many wars and nations topple from power. There is an ever present divine fingerprint in all of know history that screams "Providence" - there's a plan and an objective in motion. There's an ever present benevolence that loaths and operates against the mighty and the haughty and the unjust but favors the meek, the mild and the true of heart. Then in scripture we see profound prophecy and the divine fingerprint again - using Israel as a living metaphor for thousands of years to show us explicitly how He plans to elevate our human nature to the divine estate so that we can participate with Him in a way that we can exist beyond our corporeal limits. The bondage to slavery of he ancient Jews in Egypt is prefiguring image of the bondage of sin. The delivery through the red-sea is a prefiguring image of baptismal waters. The wandering in the desert for 40 years is a prefiguring image of gestation (40 weeks to make a baby) and purification to delivery to the promised land (heaven). The story of Abraham asked to offer up his only true son Issac is a living image of what God Himself would do with his own son 1000 years into the future (this time not withholding his hand) to His only son. The cross is seen clearly as the Tree of Life withheld from Adam in the Garden - with the new salvific fruit of Christ Himself as the remedy to the poisoned fruit of the knowledge of Good and Evil ("eat this bread so you may have eternal life"). Scripture is so integrative and so amazing that its impossible for any human to have collaborated over thousands of years to develop a grand conspiracy that is now seen as a divine love story with unfathomable hope and promise for humanity's elect.

And then from purely logical reasons - its insane to go against Pascal's Wager to bet on a gloomy hope of oblivion. That all said - its only by Grace that a person can see all this and take it to heart. And God calls all to Himself to give this grace of insight but many are blinded by their own pride or by their own worldly concerns to just reach out and take the gift that God so freely gives. The human race would for the greater part seem to want to stretch forth its hand as Adam did in the garden to seek equality with God as a thing to be grasped at and stolen.

It's all so perfectly clear - how can people NOT believe is my question?? The answer of course is sin taken in pride - which utterly blinds the spiritual eyes.
 
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Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #9  July 5,2011, 2:09pm
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AZJoe wrote :
It's all so perfectly clear - how can people NOT believe is my question?? The answer of course is sin taken in pride - which utterly blinds the spiritual eyes.



AZJoe,

I do enjoy our discussions!

I’m glad you brought up Pascal’s Wager because it is the epitome of my earlier point about binary thinking. Pascal’s wager likens our perception of the universe or our existence as being equal to a coin toss. How many sides does a coin have? Two. The focal point of the argument is that because we can’t logically discern whether or not God exists we should make a wager and toss a coin? He briefly acknowledges infinite possibilities and then reduces them to a coin toss?

It wasn’t just that we couldn’t see past the horizon that made us think the world was flat. We didn’t know about gravity so why would anyone ever phantom that the world is round. There simply just wasn’t any reason or motivation for us to imagine any other possibilities. The same thing is true about Pascal’s Wager. Our understanding of Spirituality, existence, and even our fledgling science all live in a world that is very very flat. When it comes to the argument of science versus creationism no one is trying to sail past the horizon! Everyone believes it has got to be one or the other. Does it really? Why are we so convinced? For Pascal to reduce the infinite possibilities of the “what, how, and why,” to a coin toss is astronomically absurd, pun intended.

My openness to being Spiritual is not because I’m trying to play it safe. My very essence screams that I am more than just atoms and molecules. The thought that matter can be randomly arranged over eons to produce consciousness is unappetizing to me. I have not personally experienced evolution in my lifetime nor have I experienced being created. I know I exist so the burden of proof of “how” that came to be isn’t on my shoulders; it is on the shoulders of those purporting their respective beliefs or theories.

I choose to keep an open mind because I have personally experienced how localized truth can be. At one time mankind believed we would never break the sound barrier. In 1947 Chuck Yeager changed that belief. Now we believe it is impossible for matter to travel faster than the speed of light. We seem to constantly set physical barriers for ourselves or claim a thing is impossible only to discover later that the limitations are self imposed and exist only in our minds.

I’m not anti-science, it is just that giving mankind’s understanding a name, science, and propping it up with the scientific method, doesn’t imbue it with infallibility or make it any more concrete than religion in my eyes because they both have one thing in common, imperfect man!
 
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charmingphlsphr is offline charmingphlsphr Post #10  July 5,2011, 2:51pm
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Pascal's wager is only an effective idea, but is ineffective, practically speaking. One does not approach the matter as choosing to believe on the basis of a safety net from the potential that there really will be an eternal place of condemnation. Beyond this, Christianity is a faith of abstinence, in that we are to live lives of distinction from the rest of the world, abstaining from many of those things we once found pleasurable and valuable.

As for logic is concerned, we, as a whole, need to break away from this. We can assess through reason that there must be a Creator, but this leads us to general theism at best and positive agnosticism at the very worst. There is no way to logically deduce that Christ indeed is God, that Christ Jesus did indeed die for our sins, and that His sacrifice was sufficient. We are to believe by way of faith alone. Kierkegaard labeled this belief "by virtue of the absurd." Remember the first chapter of Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, wherein he writes that God used the foolishness of the world to make the wisdom of the world foolish. To the Jews, Christ was a stumbling block and, to the Greeks, faith was foolishness.
 
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