Quote:
Originally Posted by barbarian
My decision had/has zero to do with any really old book. I admit that I have spent time reading that really old library of 66 books from 40 different authors spanning over about 1500 years and the most recent being about 1900 years ago, but my decision on whether there is a god or not came before any of that reading ever happened. That moment was 15 years ago when God used an ordinary person at my job to reveal a couple of very important things that have changed my earthly and my eternal life forever
1. He loves me more than I can ever comprehend and He loved me just as much prior to my believing He was real as He does today 15 years later.
2. He wants me to love Him back just a hair as much as he loves me.
3. He wants me to understand that I am not perfect and that He knows that and because of that He sent Jesus Christ down to live a life here on earth and be a forever sacrifice for us. And all we have to do as acknowledge that gift and open that gift from Him to be considered part of His family.
Since that day, I have learned that I can not ever win the debate over whether God exist in the form we Christians believe. It just makes no sense to a nonbeliever. I know because I would debate you until the sun came up and down that it was all hogwash.
So I am not going to say any more on the topic and surely not debate it, but the bible had nothing to do with me changing my mind. It was a real experience and continues to be every day real experiences. I will close with 2 things
1. I don't have to be right. If I am wrong, it is over when I die just like you so in a weird way we tie. But if I am right, then there is no a tie at the end. So the believer doesn't have to be right, but the non believer better be right. We get so passionate sometimes about our belief because we have people we really care about and love that we are worried about them because we believe in the consequences of not accepting Jesus Christ. Sometimes we really really struggle with how to handle that concern for people we truly care about.
2. Don't worry about believing the bible, but focus on the life of Jesus Christ and figure out what you believe about his time on earth. His time on earth is believed as a real 33ish years by every historian and scholar - believers and nonbelievers. You have to walk away with believing something about Jesus
1. Are almost 99.999% of all historians wrong and a guy name Jesus from Nazareth really never lived? That it was all made up by people afterward to start a following in which all of them died trying to tell people.
2. Was he a pathological liar and scam artist because of all the things he claimed and all the things he did and said?
3. Was he psychotic in that he actually believed everything he was saying, but nothing was really true. It was all made up fiction stories?
*The challenge with 2 & 3 is even nonbelievers of his day and our day including all other religions say nothing but good things about him
4. Or could all of it actually be true and Jesus is who he claimed to be. Send from Heaven to be our sacrifice. That he died a brutal death as a sacrifice for us and then rose from the dead to once again be with The Father. Thousands claimed to have seen him after he died.
Maybe there is another scenario that can be believed, but I don't what it could be. I know that my first 32 years of unbelief was hung up on the bible, this mysterious God figure, and religious hypocrites. None of these actually matter. It is how you answer the question -
Who was Jesus Christ?
4.
|
Someone's been reading Lee Strobel. I was just like you, and had a very real, whether to me or in an absolute sense, experience. I was an "inside man", if you will. I understand everything you're explaining, as it's very similar to the same rhetoric I orated in a VERY public forum.
However, no matter of faith (however great or small mine was) could ever make the math right. I dug deeper.
I realize that there are several archetypal things that we experience within our human condition, and it's easy for factions to form when folks believe like-minded stories or teachings that are aligned with their upbringing or previously held beliefs (or perhaps beliefs that fill a very real void).
I will never argue with anyone about their right to hold any belief, however silly I find it to be. I'm pretty much a dumbass most off the time, and I wouldn't expect anyone to believe anything, much less everything, that I think is true.
As for Jesus' life on Earth, I don't have a single problem with a third of the Holy Trinity coming and living among us, and ultimately dying to find a loophole for our complete depravity.
My problem is believing what humans wrote about it.
On the bright side, if I'm wrong (although basic agnosticism can't really be wrong or right), perhaps I have fire insurance...?
"And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand.
My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand."
-John 10:28-29 (KJV, none of that translated-from-arabic nonsense
)