worrywort

I think the search for God and the truth about the nature of the universe is the most important search any person can go on, because it gets right to the root of life, from which all other branches of our lives grow out of.

So, I'd like to offer my services! If anybody has any questions whatsoever concerning God, religion, spirituality and the nature of the universe please feel free to ask me, either here on this thread or over PM.

I became a christian about 8 years ago and ever since I've been thoroughly obsessed with theology, apologetics, philosophy and pretty much anything concerning the truth about God. I've also been noticing, lately, a lot of posts around SPW about God, 90% of which I find myself itching to comment upon because I feel I could shed light on the problem, and yet I usually resist for a number of reasons. But I LOVE the truth very much and I believe very strongly that through rational discourse and simple logic the truth can be found.....so I invite your questions!

DISCLAIMERS
1. Unfortunately I'm not an expert [yet! ] so I can guarantee right now that I won't be able to answer EVERY question.
2. Also I have limited time these days so I may not be able to answer everyone with as much detail or thought as I would like.
3. And thirdly it would be foolish of me to claim that I have absolute knowledge of the true nature of the universe, so I can also guarantee that I WILL be wrong on occasion.

But hopefully if I can help a few people work through some problems, I'd be satisfied! So whatever your questions may be; Why believe in the bible? How could a loving God allow suffering in the world? How come, whenever I watch GOD TV I want to pull my eyeballs out? How can I know which religion is the right one? Is faith a blind leap, or can it be rooted in reason?.....whatever the question, ask away!

one final plea...I know this is a public thread so I can't control what people write, but I think it would help if we could all refrain from personal attacks.....if you think someone is wrong, there's no need to call them an idiot! Just tell them you think they're wrong.

http://worrywort.co.uk

Redzer

ok i submit to you, seems like u devote all your time to god something that has never been proven as we all know. why is it that you can put all your trust, faith, whole life in to a thing that might not even be real and i cant? forget about upbringings and such for a minute as u said ur only a christian about 8 years what is it that made you decide wait a mintue yes now i think i will be christian? if someone came out now a days and said ohh wait no this is the real god or went against what the bible says you and every single christian who say yeah right ya crackpot. i mean why waste your life praying and going to church i mean for what? what the hell is the point... so we can go to heaven? no matter what way you look at it this "god" cant do a thing for you. were all gods children..gimme a break! what kinda crap is that?

I just cannot see why people can believe such crap really, what are wanting? whats ur driving force behind this? i dont believe a thing untill i see it or its proven i'm just not that naive. Think about this for a minute, back in the 1940 & 50's in Ireland children were scared into going to church they were told they would die and go to hell if they ever missed it what kinda crap is that? course now u will just blame the priest here no doubt, but what it really is control over people by fear...hmmm yes dont go to church...ok then go to hell is what they were told

Peolpe have beliefs be it god, science, whatever its just a shame that you and so many people waste the rest of your lifes...no really you do though at the time you dont think thats what your doing, when you could be doing so much more with it, why not wonder and become intrested in whats happening in space? our would the mystries around it why things happen? are the blackholes? how stars are born? or why the expolde. Christianity haha it makes me laugh really it does there is so much more important things i have to think about. Now answer me them questions and answer me this what do u feel u will gain from this? and how do you know when you will have it?

Thelema

If your God is the real one, why did he take so long to show up? Humans might have been around for potentially a million years before he showed up as the burning bush. And humans had been worshiping gods for several thousand years before yours showed up.

Fear not at all; fear neither men nor Fates, nor gods, nor anything

Be thou therefore without fear for in the heart of the coward virtue abideth not.

worrywort

Thanks for the questions Redzer. Sorry to hear you're banned?! I hope everythings ok? I dunno if you're still interested in my reply, but I'll try to answer your questions as best I can....

Because we're different people. At this moment your views and beliefs of the world seem totally rational to you, while mine seem totally rational to me. But somewhere along the line one of us is going to be wrong and the other right. How do we find out who's right and who's wrong? We present our reasons for believing what we believe, then rationally and logically deduce what is and is not true

Right now I have an abundance of evidence that leads me to believe the bible is true. That's why I trust it. So why don't you believe in the bible?

either
a] you sincerely have never heard the arguments in defence of the bible that I have [i.e. the cosmological argument,evidence from design & morality, prophetic evidence, etc]
or
b] you HAVE researched and studied the evidence for the bible fully, BUT reject it believing it to be false.

The evidence. Everybody has a reason for believing in what they believe. Whether that reason is good or not is the question. How do you find out if it is good? You test it. You hold it up to the light of scrutiny. Many people's first steps into Christianity begin with a spiritual experience. Maybe a supernatural answer to prayer, or unexplainable feelings that pull you to the bible. This is fine to begin with, but that reason won't sustain you when the storms of life come. So you build your case, and the more your belief holds its ground under attack, the more trust you will put in it.

I'd test it first. See what the religion claims. See what evidence it provides to support those claims. Then compare it to the bible.

Because if God really does exist then I believe it would be a waste of life to do anything OTHER than to devote your entire life to exploring and understanding God. You know what I mean? think about it. If God, the ultimate source of love and goodness, REALLY existed how would that change your life?....well, I believe I can provide you evidence that proves Gods existence.

yep, i fully agree! that would be crap of the bull kind! But I believe these are misunderstandings of the bible. God never forces anyone to do anything. I also don't believe hell is a place of eternal torment. That's a misconstrued concept from the early catholic church. I believe the original use of the word hell in the bible means simply "death" or "the grave". The choice is heaven or death, not heaven or hell.

if God created the universe, then to explore the mysteries of the universe further would be to explore God further, and that's what I love to do. A Christian who doesn't embrace the wonders of science, doesn't embrace God.

http://worrywort.co.uk

worrywort

hmm....that's a good question, I've not thought about that much before. My honest answer is I don't know, but I do have some thoughts.

Firstly, I don't believe the fact that I don't know should affect my faith at all. God tells us what we need to know. If a boss wanted his employee to do a job, he wouldn't be expected to give a complete history of the business and a detailed description of the inner workings of the company before the employee can do his job. God provides us with enough evidence for us to trust him and to get our purpose on earth done....and If the employee was genuinely interested in the history of the company, I'm sure a good boss would find the time to eventually enlighten that employee, but it's not vital information.

Secondly, the bible is not the only way God can reveal himself to people. Is it possible that God was around and amongst human life before the bible was written? Yea, absolutely.
"since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse" [Romans 1:19-20]

"Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them. [Romans 2:14-15]

So I guess the question you have to answer is, when should God have shown up? At what stage of evolution would it become necessary for God to reveal himself in written text? When we were still apes? How about Neanderthals? Would they have benefited from Gods revelation if it were in the form of a book like the bible?

I believe God tells us what we need to know, and his revelation can come in many forms depending on who we are and at what time in history we happen to be living in.

http://worrywort.co.uk

Thelema

Your boss analogy isn't a good one; the Bible starts out with the creation story, which is supposed to be the literal history of the World. It also happens that the story is factually wrong. So it's more like the employer sitting you down and telling you the story of the company, but the story is a lie. Unless you believe the creation story is true?

God revealed himself. The important word is "reveal." Reveal means to uncover or make visible, so he wasn't around in any tangible or knowable way. And that doesn't make sense since God deemed fit to make one of the commandments not to worship other gods, and since God is supposedly unchanging, he was sort of contradicting himself while we worshiped false gods.

He showed up, he proclaimed the other gods false and a major no no to worship them, which doesn't make sense that he'd be so hostile towards other religions when he sat on his hands as they were started. Keep in mind that some religions are still around that are older than the Jewish one, so God is still supposedly fighting these gods. Why would he do that? He's fighting gods that don't exist, that he allowed to be created, still? Why would he let Zoroastrianism flourish?

If God is the light, then by God not showing up, he left us in the dark for maybe a million years of us being humans. Did you know that the human species nearly died out in Africa? We almost stopped existing. We were down to the tens of thousands. That would have been a good time to show up. Right then. That's the point that he should have stepped in.

And he obviously felt he had to show up, so you can't argue that he didn't need to, if he didn't have to, he wouldn't have. Even if we somehow knew the world was created by a god, it doesn't tell us what god and the qualities of that god and what he feels about us. I think that would be the major reason in his showing up, except that doesn't jibe with the other gods that came before him.

I also don't buy the Bible somehow proclaiming God is the One that did it, since Gods earlier than yours claim the same thing. So you can't use the Bible as evidence that God is the One that did it. We can go around in circles with gods claiming to create the world and being around forever. Do you have any evidence that puts your God above the other ones that isn't just the Bible saying so? Asserting the Bible as evidence doesn't make sense since you haven't established the Bible as credible.

Fear not at all; fear neither men nor Fates, nor gods, nor anything

Be thou therefore without fear for in the heart of the coward virtue abideth not.

worrywort

Yes, the prophecies. Almost 1/3 of the bible is prophecy and it's claimed to be 100% accurate. Many of the prophecies are not vague but include specific names, places, events and times.

For example, in the book "science speaks", mathematician, Peter Stoner, works out the probability that any one man could fulfil just 8 of the over 300 prophecies that Jesus fulfilled, and they conservatively estimated it to be 1 in 10^17 [that's 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000].

Some say the prophecies must have been written after the time, but the Septuagint [the Greek translation of the old testament] is dated at 250BC.
Some say Jesus could have deliberately fulfilled the prophecies, but many were beyond his control, such as place of birth, time of birth, manner of birth, betrayal, manner of death, piercing, burial and people's reactions.

1 in 10^17, and this is just from 8 prophecies about Jesus. There are thousands of prophecies in the bible. In the same book Peter Stoner works out the odds of just 11 various old testament prophecies being fulfilled, and it comes to 1 in 5.76 x 10^59!

Coincidently he also examines the genesis account of creation and shows that the order of events matches perfectly with modern geological findings, and places the probability that Moses could've known this at 1 in 3.1 x 10^22.

the book is free to read here, and if it's evidence you're looking for, then I highly recommend you read this book.

http://worrywort.co.uk

Thelema

Can you acknowledge the other points I made? I think I made some good ones.

You still aren't getting anywhere. To accept those prophecies as evidence of the Bible's validity, I'd already have to accept the Bible is an accurate record of the prophecies, and that the Bible is an accurate record of their fulfillment. So you're still saying the Bible is true because it says so. Other religions also claim fulfilled prophecies and have books that supposedly prove that. You need to find another way.

Fear not at all; fear neither men nor Fates, nor gods, nor anything

Be thou therefore without fear for in the heart of the coward virtue abideth not.

worrywort

sure, sorry, yes you did make some very good points...I just didn't want my posts to become too lengthy! I have a habit of babbling a bit sometimes!

How do you know that God left us in the dark? He may have communicated to those people in ways that we don't know about. Giving a bible to a society of Neanderthals is unlikely to help them. They wouldn't understand it. According to Wikipedia, [history of communication], speech began around 200,000 years ago, symbols around 30,000, writing around 7000, and then the first alphabets emerged around 2000BC. Moses wrote the first books of the bible around 1500BC, so I'd say Gods revelation in written form came about on time.

But why do you care? God's provided us, today, with evidence in the form of the bible, so why not investigate that first, and worry about Neanderthals later?

No, the prophecies can be verified using sources outside of the Bible.

Take the Genesis account of creation. Peter Stoner [link] matches the order of events to modern geological findings to produce the figure 1 in 3.1 x 10^22.

Or take the prophecy of Tyre. You can look in any history book or encyclopedia and match up the events with the prophecy. The entire Bible is rooted in history, so you can accurately date when the prophecies were written then verify their fulfilment externally. I'd be happy to provide examples if you'd like to hear some.

I'm yet to find even one prophecy from another religion that comes close to the accuracy of biblical prophecy. The Prophecies in the Koran are seriously lame! [link] They're really vague. Whereas biblical prophecies often include specific names, places, times and events sometimes hundreds and thousands of years before their fulfilment.

p.s. let me know if I missed any questions out that you wanted answered?

http://worrywort.co.uk

Pookah

I think this will probably degenerate quickly into atheist vs religious thing as forum topics often do. I don't think either side can prove anything and that is why it becomes a circular argument, round and round it goes.