For non-believers: What evidence would it take for you to believe in 'god'?

by jay88 176 Replies latest jw friends

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento
    Yeah, like death. Pretty inconvenient.

    Nature's way of telling you to slow down ;)

    A million people dead. That is, indeed, powerful.

    Amazing isn't it?

    The hatred that can swell up inside some people.

  • Nickolas
    Nickolas

    The hatred that can swell up inside some people.

    Let us pray, then, that a man of God-inspired faith like Ghandi does not decide to change the status quo in our country.

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento
    Let us pray, then, that a man of God-inspired faith like Ghandi does not decide to change the status quo in our country.

    It almost sounds like you are suggesting that they would have been better off under the British and that Ghandi shoudl have left well enough alone...

  • Nickolas
    Nickolas

    It almost sounds like you are suggesting that they would have been better off under the British and that Ghandi shoudl have left well enough alone...

    I am no fan of British imperialism, but I am less of a fan of the dark side of religion.

    India and Pakistan have fought three wars since partition in addition to innumerable bloody skirmishes across their shared border. They are now poised to exterminate one another with their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. And how about this:

    "Mothers were skewered on swords as their children watched. Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then set on fire. A pregnant woman's belly was slit open, her fetus raised skyward on the tip of sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city." (C. W. Dugger, "Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics," New York Times, July 27, 2002.)

    This was just nine years ago, when a thousand people died in India in one month arguing over each others' religions. This is the legacy of God-inspired faith, PSac. Perhaps the country would have been better off under the Brits.

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento
    This was just nine years ago, when a thousand people died in India in one month arguing over each others' religions. This is the legacy of God-inspired faith, PSac. Perhaps the country would have been better off under the Brits.

    If you truly believe that, well...it's understandable.

    Though one has to wonder how the very religion that spawned a Ghandi could spawn this, which of course it can't.

    Religion being an innanimate thing can't spawn crack-all, PEOPLE need to stop blaming religion, politics, ideologies for what PEOPLE do.

    If religion is the cause of these horrific acts, what is the cause when non-religious people do it?

    As much as Hitchens and his ilk would like to put the blame on religion and OUT of the lap of the human race, it doesn't work that way.

    Sorry.

    Violence is the legacy of people hating people and finding ANY excuse to do horrific things to each other.

  • tec
    tec
    Either one or even both. Google cognitive biases. But I should warn you, it's a double edged sword. Reading up on the subject may cause you to distrust yourself.

    Well, I have considered both of them already.

    As for trust in myself... well, I make mistakes all the time. It isn't me that I trust, but rather Christ. I'll screw up over and over again. He won't. I had zero trust in my judgment after the witnesses, so I'm no stranger to it. So while my experiences and interpretations of them may be completely wrong... or I may be completely wrong about doubting them... my faith is not dependent upon them, but upon Christ.

    But thank you for the warning, and the honesty behind it. I probably won't get a chance to look until tonight or tomorrow night. I've got less than an hour between shifts here, so I'll get back to you on it later.

    Violence is the legacy of people hating people and finding ANY excuse to do horrific things to each other.

    It is also people wanting something that someone else has, and making any excuse about them to justify going after that something by any means necessary.

    Tammy

  • jay88
    jay88

    Tam-It is also people wanting something that someone else has, and making any excuse about them to justify going after that something by any means necessary.

    Whether the plundering of an entire continent of people or the enslavement of millions,....all in the name of religious expression.

    Agreed.

  • myelaine
    myelaine

    dear PSacramento...

    you said?: "God reveals himself to us, not only in the Bible and the many religions of the world, and not only via his Word ( Christ) but via the universe.

    To only focus on ONE is to get only a partial picture."...

    in the bible it says that the invisable attributes of God can be seen in the creation...these would be the orderliness of the creation, as in the way each day is measured and the sun is just this close to the earth, the moon illuminates the night, the beneficial "seasons" etc..."being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead" and the reason for gentile guilt was because they had made God to be like perishable man (rom 1:20-23)...I don't think scripture says that God has revealed Himself to mankind through differing and opposing religions. God is a God of order not a God of chaos. in fact paul went about telling those on mars hill that God was willing to overlook the previous time of ignorance but now commands all men everywhere to repent because He has appointed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.(acts 17:30-31)

    I wonder how it makes sense to you and maybe you could explain how it could be that God would "reveal" through the Hebrew prophets in such a way as to intimate that there is a coming Messiah then Jesus enters into the world as the image of the invisible God...the Way the Truth and the Life and then some 600 years later mohammed comes along with an immature grasp of Jesus and the gospel message...vetos clear teaching in the gospel (ie. original sin, salvation, Son of God, regeneration, resurrection) yet you believe that somehow a God of order is "responsible" for giving him this information? Jesus said, "And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent". There really doesn't seem to be any significant agreement between the gospel revelation of Truth, who is Jesus Christ, and what mohammed taught about Jesus Christ...if you are to suggest that the God of the Hebrews, the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob who was conceptualized as God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit is the same God that gave mohammed his "revelation"...wouldn't that be like NOT revelation but more like receeding back into darkness since by the time mohammed came along christianity HAD spread beyond the borders of israel, he himself had heard of Jesus Christ.

    I think it far more likely that the one who gave mohammed his information to "recite" is one who didn't understand the nature of God or His redemption "plan" through Jesus Christ...being either uninformed or a reviler of Jesus Christ...or that mohammed completely misunderstood what his informer was saying (which would be short-sighted on the part of God as mohammed was the only one to bear "his" message) ...either way because Jesus said, "I am the Way the Truth and the Life and no one comes to the Father but through Me" the people who practice islam would eventually need to repudate what mohammed taught in order to come to the Father...why would the God of truth, who cannot lie, give mohammed the wrong directions to get to Himself? *note gabriel in the bible told mary that she would bear the Son of the Most High yet the gabriel who supposedly spoke with mohammed caused him to say that God has no need of a Son.

    please, seriously consider this: you are actually elevating your thoughts over the words of Jesus Christ.

    love michelle

  • tec
    tec
    Whether the plundering of an entire continent of people or the enslavement of millions,....all in the name of religious expression.

    Confirmation and belief bias!!!!

    (thank SBC )

    In reality, wars and atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, politics, national pride... and who knows what else that I can't currently think of. They are not all committed in the name of religious expression. Leaving PSac as one of the wisest posters here when he said:

    Violence is the legacy of people hating people and finding ANY excuse to do horrific things to each other.

    Tammy

  • Nickolas
    Nickolas

    Just back from on the town.

    Back to India, PSac, no I guess I really don't believe India would be better off still under the dominion of the UK. I wonder, however, if its independence might have been better orchestrated by someone secular, although I have doubts it would have happened at all if that had been the case. India was and still is a highly religious country and needed someone to look up to in order to coalesce and rise up against the British. Ghandi filled the bill. But it's just too easy to blame human nature alone for horrific violence done in the name of god (or gods, in the Hindus' case). The savagery is of course inate. I won't argue with you there. We are as a species not all that far removed from the other animals, after all. The thing about religion, though, is that it holds us back from advancing our tolerance toward one another. In India we have a vivid example of an indigenous people, all of the same race, some even of the same family, whose only difference was what they believed and for that sole reason they murdered one another. To suppose that the slaughters that happened in 1947 would have happened anyway, even if all Indians were either Hindu or Muslim, is not defensible. Directly or indirectly, religion was the cause, and that cannot be denied.

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