Virtual Internet Bible Blog

I want you to know that I am writing this first response here WITHOUT having read your last three entries. I am purposely not reading them before writing what I am about to write because I don’t want to write in “response” to yo…ur latest three responses, but rather some thoughts I believe the Lord brought to my mind and heart. First, I believe you said in an earlier message that you are finding the Bible to be more difficult to read and understand than you thought it would be. This does not surprise me at all. Spiritual truths can only be understood by the spirit within us. You are reading it simply as a book, without the revelation of the Holy Spirit because your spirit-man within you, at this point, is still not alive. Therefore, the spirit behind the book is nonsense to you because you cannot comprehend what God is revealing through His written word only with your intellect. Which brings me to a second, I hope related point. I remember in one of your responses that you want everything in life to be objective and tangible and measurable and anything that is not that is stupid and foolish and should not be trusted or believed in. You mentioned that subjectivity is wrong. This surprises me a bit because of the major you chose in university. You were an English studies major. My understanding of that is that you had to read many authors and their imaginative writings and thoughts which are not based on science but on subjective experience. Do you simply think they too are insane, foolish and stupid because they don’t look at the world from a naturalistic, “objective” perspective? And really, you are a living contradiction of yourself. You say everything must be objectifiable….i.e. must be scientifically measurable to be true…yet you yourself do not live that way. How do I know? Because you love. You hate. You feel. You have a personaliity. I know, I know, you will try to explain that scientists can measure the brain and see that when you love there is a chemical reaction…of course. However, why did you choose to love your girlfriend? There had to have been some subjectivity in that decision. So, to say that you live by and believe only those things which are objective is not being true or honest about your own life and the way you live. Plus,  subjectivity is ALL around us. There is both objectivity and subjectivity and one is not “better” than another, they are simply different and all a part of the great human existence.

Abortion: again, it is not *life* we’re arguing about, but being human. what do you mean my argument is so lame? could you elaborate? then who draws the line on what constitutes human and what does not? god? how will we know where he drew i…t? how do you know he draws it at the sperm touching the egg? an apple tree is not an apple tree until it doesn’t look like one. until then, it is just a seed. if your morals prohibit the killing of trees, you can still go into the ground and remove the seed, because it is just a seed, and a seed by definition is not a tree. human “seeds” if you will are not human beings, hence doctors are not “annihilating generations of human beings”, because the fetuses were never human beings to begin with, and whether they are or aren’t is 100% subjective; or is there an objective, absolute, ultimate standpoint on that? what is it and why is it objective, and what is it based on? feel free to express why you think abortion is outrageous, answering these questions in the process.

i think the word delusional needs some explanation: it is someone who believes in something with certainty in spite of massive evidence showing the contrary. now, what part of this applies to doctors performing abortion? because you just called them delusional (and evil, but being evil is subjective here, because it is based on your opinions on this matter, while being delusional is not, so i’ll just deal with the delusional part).

you’re going back to your “everything around us screams of a designer” argument, which i dealt with a couple hundred times during our discussion. just because our limied human mind cannot comprehend the workings of the universe, does it mean that there surely is a creator? not in the slightest, so the “this is too complex to have been a coincidence” argument is null. i repeat, null. if you think it is not, explain why not, but please, stay away from subjective claims, such as “i as a human being think (thus it must be true) that the world is too complex to have been…” because this argument is based on comprehension of our human minds being in accord with the universe’s workings, and that our concept of “too complicated” can be used when defining why the world came to exist; and those are some seriously wrong suppositions.
you gave me no objective examples that even suggest that there is a designer. all of your examples can be explained via non-god-involving ways, but if i missed something, and you have something truly objective in mind, feel free to share.

you still don’t get why i’m not religious. it has nothing to do with me not wanting to be held accountable for my actions, but everything to do with me choosing not to believe in something that there is no evidence of.
of course i could be wrong! but that DOESN’T mean you’re automatically right!
person a: might be anything, i’m not sure, i might even be wrong.
person b: it was god. i’m 100% sure. i’m so not wrong.
which mindset is better suited to consider other possibilities other than what it currently believes? person a? you bet. imagine someone who believes in another, false religion so blindly that there is nothing to convince him otherwise. for me, you are that person.

“I and the millions of other TRUE believers in the world are completely out of our minds, wrong, and have been the cause of all the problems in the world today. THAT, my friend, is a rash, judgemental statement to make.”
did i say that? not exactly. religion itself is to blame for many problems today, however not for ALL the problems of course, and i never said that, neither that individual peaceful people mindig their own business are the cause. i said religion as an idea, as a way of thinking does that, not individual people. that’s why i have no problem with religious individuals, it’s just the effects of HALF THE WORLD being religious that i hate, because it sways the whole of humanity towards “not thinking”.

“When one loses connection with the Creator, he has to invent his own form of reality”
haha, there’s no way i’m going to be the one inventing a form of reality. oh, no. i have all the evidence i need to know that the world i live in is the actual world i actually live in. YOU and half the world are the ones who invent unseen, unknowable, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient beings. i only believe in what i am sure of, and i am only sure of what i can sense with my senses. i don’t “believe”, i “know”, and i “know” because i “experience”. you “know” because you “believe”, and that is a huge difference.

another thought: saying that through abortion, doctors “[annihilate] generations of human beings” is like saying i’m slaughtering puppies because i got my dog sterilized. preventing someone/something from being created is not the same as killing it.

The mere existence of religion in our modern world baffles me so much that i cannot even begin to describe.

anyone who doesn’t think the way i do is wrong? where do i say that? i say anyone who believes in anything… which is not supported by proof, and accepts it as fact is wrong, and that is not a stretch.

read this back: “you are clearly a very angry young man, which is evidenced by your discussion here of late, and you have been deeply hurt in life to have had to narrow your mind to the point of making rash judgements.”

me not being religious, or not having a relationship with god, and expressing that i strongly disagree with everything requiring faith is evidence that i’m deeply hurt? nope. my mind as i’ve said is totally open, but only for sensible arguments, devoid of any subjectivity. also, no rash judgements have been made on my part, but feel free to give an example of any judgements that i did not support with facts.

your cat: so if you take both the before and after diagnostics into the hospital and ask a non-religious medical professional, he will happily sign a paper that says “it is 100% sure that the cat was healed through a miracle by god, there is no other humanly possible explanation”? i highly doubt that. not having an explanation for something is not the same as having ready-made miracles. see, it is not enough to say “aha! you don’t know! it must be a miracle!”, but YOU are the one who should be able to prove it, because you’re making the claims. it’s called burden of proof.

example: (a widely-used example i might add) i believe that a teapot is orbiting the sun. will my belief become automatically validated if people cannot disprove it? of course not. it is me who should be able to prove it, because i’m the one making the claim. (needless to say, if i got many people to believe that the teapot was orbiting the sun, it would be called not delusion, but religion.)

bottom line: even if the doctors can’t tell why the cat’s kidney healed, it doesn’t automatically mean that it was a miracle. it should be proved that it was a miracle beyond the shadow of a doubt, because it is you who is saying that it is so.

limbs growing out: you couldn’t find medical evidence, because if it existed, medicine would be investigating those cases, and would finally come to some conclusion, which, yes, could be “miracle!”, but i have yet to see any of that, so the logical conclusion is that none of those cases you might find are sure to have been miracles, because they lack the needed objectivity for science to conclude that they were indeed that.

sorry for confusing religion with you relationship with god. still, it is you who makes arbitrary claims here. “[these deeds] were done by men under the influence of not God, even though they called it God…it was NOT of God” how. do. you. know? who told you? where is the evidence? anything of god bears good fruit? who told you that? it was either the bible, or you can feel it in yourself. neither of those are objective enough. it was the christian church, *the very representation of god on earth*, that did those things. you’re saying that the christian church is not following the true god, that it acted on behalf of some false one? so the christian church was simply wrong? elaborate on that please.

islam is a false religion. wow. just wow. millions believe in it, just as millions believe in christianity, or other religions. muslims think the same things about you as you think about them. they’re saying that people are turning away from other religions, and are starting to find the true one in allah. mohammed appears to christians in their dreams and commands them to follow him, for it is islam which is the true religion.
now i suppose you believe in the ten commandments of christianity. one of them is: you’re not supposed to have any gods other than me. you know what christians are supposed to do with people who don’t believe in god, according to the bible? oh yes, kill them. not even just kill, but STONE them to death. so christianity also has the “infidels must die” slogan, it just doesn’t call them infidels, and christians are not as keen on practicing it, but it is there.

now please pay close attention to the following bit:
i asked you the following question before, but i’ll ask it again, and if you stand by what you claim, you should have one hell of an answer in order not to contradict yourself.
can you name one experiment devoid of any subjectivity that will conclusively and objectively show that your religion is the true one, and the other ones are just lies and fabrications? a criteria: make it so that the experiment can be used towards proving the christian god and Jesus, but cannot be used towards proving other gods or prophets.

you can’t see it, can you. there is no such experiment. if there was, there would be no multiple religions. the very existence of multiple religions is the evidence (that’s the word i’m looking for in your arguments as well) that you simply cannot argue with religious people even with simple logic. believers will always, always come up with rationalizations to assure themselves that what they believe in is true, because if they didn’t, their decision of believing their own religion and not another one would make. no. sense. read that last sentence again, the logic is infallible. and that is not a selfish claim, it is *objectively* infallible.

I do bless you….not as an enemy, but as a friend and as someone who is deeply loved by my God, so much so that He knew we’d be having this discussion. Random chance on the Internet? Maybe. But, maybe not.

One area where we do agree is this: you say that science is ever evolving and we may never know all the answers. God is the same way…not evolving, but rather He’s so HUGE and unfathomable, that with our limited minds, we cannot und…erstand Him fully, nor will we in this short lifetime we have on planet earth. That’s why we have eternity. Let me close this portion with this: Suppose you reach the end of your life and when you die, you discover that you were absolutely right. You go into oblivion or whatever…so, you have lost nothing, nor have you gained anything. Suppose I reach the end of my life and realize I’ve been living a complete delusion my entire life and I go into oblivion or whatever….I have lost nothing either. However, what have I gained? Love, joy, peace, relationships that have been meaningful and incredible beyond words, I’ve been able to travel the world, impact 1000s of young people through teaching and counseling them in their lives so that they get to live lives that are full of meaning and joy, etc. Now, let’s say I reach the end of my life and it turns out I’m “right” and everything I believe is true. I’ve gained everything listed above, which takes on even more meaning because it’s not simply about life on this earth, but for eternity as well, AND, I’ve gained eternal life with God. Back to you: you reach the end of your life and it turns out you are wrong. Not only have you lost eternity spent with God, but you have missed out on the fullness of life here on earth because you lived believing a lie. Because I believe that God is love, I also believe that an eternity separated from God is an eternity separated from any form of love whatsoever, and seeing as a human life-span is a small blip on the screen of eternity (even according to evolutionists time frames) an eternity spent separated from any sort of love is quite a long time. This argument I just presented is known as Pascal’s wager….the great mathemetician, so it is not my own. It is something worth considering though in light of all of our discussions up to this point.