I too have really enjoyed this. I am and will continue to pray for you, that you will be willing to be open to things spiritual; but also that God will continue to reveal Himself to you in ways you are able to understand. Oh, one more tho…ught regarding my faith being the “right” one. Religion is essentially man’s way of trying to reach God…and most religions are based on what are called “works”…you do this and you get this from god. My faith is the exact opposite: I cannot do anything to earn anything from God, and I don’t have to because He has done it all in the person of Jesus. His grace (unmerited favor) paid everything for me, for you and for every person on the planet. Lastly, life for me is not about man’s glory, but the naturalist and rationalist have put man at the center of everything and have made life about man’s glory. That’s why we’re so screwed up, even in various world religions…it’s about man at the center. In my faith, it starts with the glory of God as revealed in all of creation and all of His creatures. Each one of us is a reflection of His glory, and everything in the natural world is a reflection of His amazingly creative glory. Instead of starting from the bottom up, I begin from the top down, which brings a sobriety and a humility (in the most positive sense of the word) as I recognize that the God of the universe has chosen me to bring glory to Himself and to usher His love into this world through every means possible. And you know what, it’s ok if you think I’m a fool and foolish….the Bible has already said you would think this way about me and it’s ok. I bless you with all of His blessings in Jesus! Thank you for this amazing dialogue! You are a treasure!

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.

Another thing just popped into my mind. according to you, miracles do happen (a myriad of them actually), and i am supposed to believe in them solely by giving credit to subjective experiences.

my question then: how is it that through hum…an history, no non-believer was ever able to document a single incident, which had no other explanation but to be a miracle? you might say that god is “hidden” in some way, and would only like to help people “undercover” so to say, and not in an obvious way (otherwise someone somewhere sometime could have been able to witness and document such a thing).

so my question becomes: then why did Jesus go around healing people? that does seem like direct miracle-doing to me, which is not something a god wanting to remain hidden would do. also, there were countless deeds in the bible which would have no explanation today, so if someone parted a sea for example, scientists would have no choice but to admit that it was indeed a miracle. how come these things don’t happen today, and god’s/Jesus’ power is reduced to “appearing on toast”?

god only performing miracles which are undetectable by science, and healing people who belong in african tribes, out of reach of modern “miracle-detecting equipment” are just rationalizations. there is no sensible explanation as to why we have not detected one single miracle to date. oh, there is one: they do not happen.

Pro: onto your facts. the two that you mention are not actually facts. first, the world all around us “scream[ing] of a creator”. let me rephrase your words. “the world seems so complex that there’s no way this could be a coincidence.” now, the information we collected so far seems to indicate that even the most intricate things – anything, essentially – can spring into existence merely by chance. if you can’t wrap your mind around that, it’s okay – I can’t either. my point is that looking around you and declaring “okay this is too complex for me so it can’t happen by chance, only by a creator” is kind of a selfish supposition. just because you (as a human being) will never be able to wrap your mind around how the world came into existence and how it functions the way it does, does not, again, directly imply that a creator is involved. it just proves that we are all too stupid basically.

second, evidence of Jesus. whether or not being able to prove that he really existed as a historical figure is irrelevant to me, because as far as i’m concerned, he was just a man. what is important though is whether or not he was the son of god. when i say evidence, i mean first-hand experiences of his miracles, HIS writings (not the bible, which is only word of mouth, and wasn’t being written until like a hundred years after his death). the problem is that according to you, there is only one Jesus-scenario: his body hasn’t been found because he ascended to heaven. period. if he hadn’t been divine, he hadn’t ascended, thus his body would have been found, so CLEARLY, he did ascend, so he WAS/IS divine. in actuality, there is another scenario, which doesn’t have any divine elements to it. bodies from 2000 years ago simply can not be identified. he probably died, buried, and did not ascend. did any of the 500 witnesses leave first-hand evidence that they themselves actually witnessed his revival or ascension? nope. not a single shred of that exists – only the bible, which is by no means first-hand, also, i wouldn’t like to get into it (yet).

yes, i CHOOSE not to have faith in Jesus’ divinity, because faith by definition is believing in something without evidence, i.e. the process of “not thinking”. science is appealing to me because it is something based on logic, evidence, and reason. it is about setting up hypotheses, then trying to disprove them. thus, a scientist is always asking questions, sort of always being sceptical about his own ways. religion however discourages, or i’ll go so far as to say prohibits rational thinking by turning beliefs with little to no evidence into unshakeable truth. i don’t need to have “faith” in the physical world, because i have all the evidence that i could ever want.

denying Jesus’ divinity might remind you of people denying the holocaust, but let me add one teeny-tiny detail. holocaust is a fact. everyone knows it happened because there is unshakable evidence to support it. anyone who chooses to simply ignore the cold hard facts is out of his mind. now, do you think that a couple of people telling tales of Jesus long after he died is in the same ballpark as actual, verifiable historical records? if they were, we wouldn’t call it religion, we would call it history.

let me ask you the following: do you think something will be the way you’d like it to be if you have faith in it? would a million dollars fall from the sky if i wanted it to? of course not. but you yourself say: you have faith in god (according to you, your belief is faith+fact, now i’m only talking about the pure faith part). in other words, you believe in him because you choose to, not because you have any kind of evidence. so you DO think that i would be closer to that million dollars just by having faith that it can actually fall from the sky. i didn’t mean to ridicule you, i just wanted to show how absurd the idea of “if i believe, it will be so” is. scientists don’t have “faith” in the outcome of experiments, because they know very well that it changes nothing. god won’t be any closer to existing just by having faith that he does. what is left after we subtract faith? facts, from which, let’s admit, there’s not much of. facts, by definition, can be verified using experiments. name one experiment, containing no ambiguity whatsoever, that even comes close to proving god’s existence or Jesus’ divinity. just to make it more interesting, make it so that it can be used towards proving the christian god or Jesus, but not the other gods or prophets. after realizing there’s no such thing, you will realize that your faith in god is not based on faith and fact, but solely on faith.

i thought of a carrot when you asked, and you know what happened? electrical charges surged through my brain, finding their paths among billions of neurons, stimulating correct ones so that my brain called forth the image of a carrot. thought itself only exists as a stimulus in one’s mind (mind = the consciousness of the brain). if we had the technology, we could actually see charges racing past neurons, we can’t now, but we DO know what thoughts are; by no means mysterious semi-existing somethings, but electrical connections between the neurons of our brain. there’s no mystery here, the only reason why we can’t see thoughts is that we don’t have the proper equipment yet to make them visible real-time. see, there isn’t anything which is “real but undetectable”, because things which are not energy, nor mass do not exist. we might simply not possess the required technology to measure everything, but then again, not being able to measure something and something existing AND NOT BEING ABLE TO BE measured is two different things. the latter is just a hypothetical concept, because if something exists, then it can be measured somehow, we might not possess the required technology to do so just yet.

because of this, so-called “unseen things” or “unmeasurable things” can and do exist, but one day they will be probably revealed for what they are, just as people figured out lots of things since the beginning of christianity that they attributed to god before discovering otherwise.