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!

Having only scanned through your last posts and glancing at the pascal’s wager part, about which i happened to read like 2 days ago, i which is interesting to involve, because it is a proposition seemingly working for believers, but it back…fires the following way:

the problem with the wager’s reasoning is that there are a myriad of gods people have worshiped throughout history, so essentially anyone who is/was religious can/could make the claims of the wager, this way it shows that all gods humans believe in are imaginary. believers in one specific god has not “lost nothing”, they simply commit themselves to a lifetime of delusion instead of reality.

the fact that there are so many gods proves that all of those gods are imaginary. this goes back to me asking you about how can it be known that your religion is the true one – there is no answer. if there was one and only one omniscient, omnipotent god, it would be obvious for everyone, and people would all agree on him being the only one god.

i’m off to sleep now, i’ll respond to your other points, which i have yet to read, tomorrow. good night!

Two things in response to what you just wrote…or maybe three. First, your “mountain of evidence” is the same mountain of evidence that I use. Period. Get it? I see your mountain of scientific evidence and it is amazing! I …love it! It is CLEARLY revealing the creator God who made it all and spoke it into being. We limited human beings are simply discovering this mountain of evidence which had to come into existence somehow. Here is where you get angry because I have argued all along that something cannot come from nothing. There had to be an eternally existent being, outside of our time and existence that will never be “proven” by our limited minds scientifically, because this being is not only flesh and blood but also spiritual, that brought everything into existence. I call you “limited’ because you won’t let your mind fathom something beyond your limited physical world. Second, PLEASE don’t lump me in with religion.

I am not religious by the definition you and so many others have concluded with your “rational” mindsets and your man-made definitions. And the reason that I know my faith is real and true is because my God lived in the flesh and blood, died and was raised again from the dead, and there were over 500 witnesses to this. My life has been radically changed for the better mind you, by this same God whom you say does not exist. It is not a figment of my imagination as you suppose…and you only suppose this because you have never allowed yourself to be open to having an encounter with this God. He won’t force Himself on you, nor will He force you to love him or accept him, just as you cannot force your girlfriend to love you or accept you. The gospel (which means good news) is really quite simple. We humans have turned our backs on the creator because He took a huge risk and gave us a free will to choose. He has forever and ever, since the creation of the world been SCREAMING at us through creation, through people, through science, math, language, arts, music, emotions, seasons…through everything, that He is real and is madly in love with us and wants to be in a relationship with us. We have, all of us, chosen to go our own way, figure things out for ourselves rather than inquire of Him, through science, through math, through literature, through love, through art and discover who He is. He, in His love, gave His life through Jesus that we might live with Him forever, eternally, in a loving, meaning-filled relationship both here and eternally. That’s good news! Otherwise, our lives have ZERO meaning. But that’s the conclusion you have drawn. Life has no meaning, so you will live with that. By the way, you never addresses Pascal’s wager.

Upon reflection of my answer to you regarding religion, I know you will be upset about my comment about the muslim faith. You will probably say something like “how can you say that your truth is any more true than theirs?” Well, according… to you, ALL of us are completely wrong and deluded in our thinking so what does it matter to you what I believe or what anyone believes? You are the god of your own universe and you have your own way of approaching life, which is to toss out anything and everything that cannot be scientifically proven according to YOUR standards. I say this (not in connection to the muslim faith or religion at all) but in connection with your comments about miracles not being recorded and proven by doctors. Bence, again, I will find you articles and reports of medically documented “proof” that people have been healed supernaturally if you would like. You may ask why aren’t these reported world-wide? Well, DUH, the mainstream media is completely against anything that would even hint there being a God or something being supernatural in origin or in nature. Our western minds have completely shut out the possibility that the spiritual world even exists. You see, the spiritual mind can receive and comprehend that which is spiritual, while the natural mind cannot. that sounds simplistic, but that is the bare bones truth. See how much of a struggle you are having dealing with the spiritual side of reality? That’s because you have shut it down completely and have reduced everything to the very limited realm of the “seen” world when there is an unseen world that is just as real and just as powerful as the seen world. You have shut down half of who you are and are therefore unable to comprehend spiritual truths. You want spiritual truths to take on the form that YOU believe they should, making YOU to be god of your own universe. Ok, now I’m going to go read your three latest responses…..

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.