Virtual Internet Bible Blog

Faith in what is seen or can be seen is not really faith; faith in what is unseen is true faith. Which brings me back to one of our exchanges a couple of weeks ago: you, rather than me, are the more ‘closed-minded’ of the two …of us, because I not only believe in what I can see, I also have faith in what I cannot see; you, however, have a box from which you function, that only counts as true that which you can see with your physical eyes. You, whether you recognize it or not, have closed off your mind to anything beyond the natural world, and so are indeed the more closed-minded of the two of us.

Finally, concerning morality, you mention God and satan. And if I understand you correctly, you are asking why is God the good and satan the evil. Let me ask you this: is it good to kill? Is it good to steal? Is it good to destroy? Is …it evil to love? is it evil to feed someone who is hungry? Is it evil to give a cup of water to someone who is thirsty? I think that you and I would both agree on these things that it is NOT good to kill, it is not good to steal, it is not good to destroy. All of these things take life away. We see all around us in nature the reproduction of life in the plants, trees, everywhere. Nature screams that LIFE and living and producing is good and fruitful. Therefore, even outside of “god”, we can conclude that morality that is life-producing is good, no? And I believe that we would agree that those same things, killing, stealing and destroying are evil. Thus anything and anyone who functions in these ways has an evil influence on or in or acting upon them. But you see, as an atheist, you MUST, if you are logical, conclude that there is no standard of morality. You cannot ever, and remain truly logical to atheism, say that morality has somehow “evolved” because if there is morality, then the logical conclusion is that there is an ultimate standard of morality, an ultimate standard of good and therefore that had to start somewhere….it didn’t simply “pop into being” out of nowhere, out of water and nitrogen and oxygen….someone sometime made a decision that “this” is the good thing to do in this situation….it did not come from chemical reactions withing them, but rather morality that is outside of them and acting upon the chemicals within them. I know you will want to argue this point again, but I strongly encourage you to get the book I first mentioned, Genetic Entropy, which will really cause you to reexamine your arguments about our chemical make-up and therefore all of this. Ok, I really need to run….thanks for your patience.

And this: ased on your reasonings, i am led to believe that you think that if today we didn’t have religion, the world would be a much worse place to live in. why? No, I don’t believe I said this. Sorry… if I miscommunicated. I believe you said that the world would be a much better place if we didn’t have religion. Well, let me approach it this way: I believe that at the very beginning of everything was God…that God not only created everything, speaking it into existence, but making everything perfect and good. This same God created man in His image and gave man free will. With that free will, and with the free will of all of creation, man chose not to believe in the goodness of God, along with the help of something I like to call “doubt”, and since that time, there has been a never-ending “attempt” on man’s part to regain that proper relationship with God. Enter many religions…many attempts by man to ‘reconnect’ with God. But because only God can reestablish a relationship with God, He had to reconnect His creation to Himself. He Himself did this by becoming a man Himself in order to reconnect mankind to Himself. But in keeping with the laws He Himself set up regarding free will, while He made the way, while He did the reconnecting, every man, by faith, can choose that free gift, that free pathway, that free relationship, which cost God everything and us nothing, and be reconnected to God soley and only through faith alone in the shed blood of Jesus and His resurrection. This is THE defining difference between “Christianity” and all the other religions because all other religions are based on man’s good works rather than on the finished work of God Himself in Jesus. Everything hinges on that one truth. So, if the life, death and resurrection of Jesus can be proved to be false, then Christianity cannot be true. As I have said in previous posts, the fact that there are many religions in the world points to the reality that we have that god-shaped vacuum inside each of us and we try to fill it…either with religion, materialism, science, drugs, sex, or whatever, and it is ONLY when the living God enters in to a person’s life, mind, heart, spirit that things begin to make sense. So, I am not sure what I said earlier that seemed to imply that religion has made the world a better place. Quite honestly, the most hopeless, desperate people on the planet are those that are atheists because they truly have nothing to live for….yet they do live because deep inside of them, something cries out that there must be a meaning, and whether they recognize it or admit it, they live out of that place of meaning, which has its ultimate source in God, which they have yet to know and experience and acknowledge.

Many, many muslims have been convinced about the truths of Jesus, that He is the son of God. I have a very good friend I could put you in contact with who could help you with this question as he has worked with many muslims.

You continue to ask for “evidence”….there is plenty of it, and I’ve been giving you evidence throughout this discussion, but you do not want to accept it as legitimate evidence because it doesn’t “fit” your perspective or your worl…d-view. Instead of coming at what I’ve presented to you as “maybe this has validity”, you have approached it all, it appears, as “nothing you say has any validity at all”. I’m not faulting you for this because this is the human condition apart from a relationship with God. I assume you have not spent much or any time with true believers in Jesus, nor have you seriously sought out God and sought answers from Him. Yet, you have sought out answers from the “gods” of this world, the scientific minds who start from their own premises. That’s fine, but when you start from a certain world-view and premise and are looking for everything to “fit” into that perspective rather than expanding it to a wider premise, then you will get what you seek…the limited view that we are completely meaningless, the world is meaningless, our existence in the universe is meaningless, everything we do is meaningless, and we are simply blobs of matter with zero meaning in a completely meaningless universe. That, my friend, is the ultimate end of the world-view you adhere to, whether you want to accept it or not. However, you DO have meaning in your life. You say that YOU create that meaning and that man has created that meaning….but logically, if that is true, then there must be an ultimate “MEANING GIVER”…or SOURCE OF MEANING. And because we are intelligent creatures, capable of incredible discovery, that Source of Meaning must also be the Source of Intelligence. I don’t know how to make the argument any clearer on a level that makes logical sense…this is science aside, and purely logic working here to, as you want, “prove” God’s existence. I know your question is why the Christian god and not other gods. I’ve already answered that: all other religions, if you study them, have at the heart of them a list of “dos and don’ts” and are attempts to please some god or gods. The faith espoused in the Bible, especially in the New Testament, is utterly different, not only in its premise, but also in its “fruit”. In addition, there are hundreds of prophesies in both the Old and New Testaments which have unfolded on the earth and which are coming to pass even today. Can I list them all for you here? No, but again, there are books written to this end.