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.

The term “divine” in a broader sense can be used to refer to concepts that exceed humans’ comprehension capabilities. that’s all well and good, but we’re talking about an actual self-conscious deity here (namely the christian god), and not the concept of infinity, timelessness, eternity, whatnot, which are in my opinion should not be considered divine just because we can’t comprehend them.

even before i read your comment, i knew that you were going to comment on the faith healer topic. what you’re saying is that your way of healing is basically placebo. you give nothing to your patient, but the belief that he would heal faster, and he does. the brain works in mysterious ways, and it can affect the body in lots more ways than you would think. still, the placebo effect is as factual and measurable as it gets. yes, it brings happiness, hope and stuff like that to people, but it doesn’t change why the healing happens, and that is not divine, rather a “mind trick” as you put it.

there is indeed love which is unlike the “mating type”. this one is instinctive. i’m not a neurobiologist, but i can assure you that if i was, i could conclusively state that there’s nothing divine about being attached to one’s parents. hell, animals do it. it is not a conscious decision whether to love your parents or not when you’re little. humans and animals alike instinctively love / feel affection towards their parents, which exists to make sure that the offspring stays alive until it reaches adulthood (or even after that). do you really think that just because there are multiple aspects of feeling love, one must come from a divine source? why is that?

what you’re saying about there being great morals in most religions is 100% true. i don’t think it’s a bad thing if someone believes in and lives by those guidelines, but we’re not arguing about morals here (for which there can be many sources and obviously not only religion), but mainly about the existence of the deity of christians, or any deity for that matter.

you’re making a huge mistake which is typical to religious folk. just because something has no scientific explanation (because we can and will never know everything) doesn’t mean that it must be divine. scientist: “i don’t know, might be anything, even something divine”. religious guy: “it was god. period. no doubt. if you’re in doubt you will burn in hell for eternity”. there has never been a *scientifically proven* miraculous healing of someone, or any proven divine intervention for that matter. period.

“Jesus healed people, trillions saw it!” – we don’t have any first-hand evidence of that, hearsay doesn’t count. would you believe me if i told you that my neighbour made my gallstones disappear, oh, and by the way, he’s the son of god?

“she started walking after 25 years of being confined to a wheelchair!” your brain can affect your body in truly amazing ways, it just needs a little placebo nudge.

“doctors said he was going to die, but his tumor shrank thanks to our prayers!” really? prayer? do i really need to go into the countless contradictions it would introduce if it was effective?

first, a question: how come god never healed someone with a visible physical deformity (for example growing back a severed leg or transforming someone’s burnt face)? now, my point: there is a reason why there has never been a well-documented miracle in recorded history. miracles do not happen. you could come up with a gazillion rationalizations, and i think you will, but it doesn’t change the facts, only reassures you in your belief, and you NEED to have miracles in order to have god, in order to keep having answers for everything.

the “if i believe it will be so”: of course if i believe in something, i know it won’t be like that. it might get me into the mindset of actually doing something other than “having faith” or “believing” that it can happen. but in the context of a believer, solely believing in something is supposed to help on its own, and supposed to help that something “come closer to existing”. what do you make of prayer? don’t bother, i’ll tell you what it is: another comforting concept, which makes you feel as if you had done something, while in reality, you’ve just been talking to yourself, hoping that a being which created THE CONCEPT OF EXISTENCE, THUS EVERYTHING THAT ACTUALLY EXISTS IN THIS WORLD is listening to you, and will alter his DIVINE PLAN to fit *your* liking. seriously?

now, coincidences: the lots of things which are nowadays seen as coincidence by science are rather seen as “probably coincidence but science is not sure; this is the best explanation we can come up with because of the lack of proof”, but religions says “it is our god. period.”. looking for something divine in the unknown is exactly why people created the concept of god in the first place. as i’ve mentioned, some people can not deal with “not knowing”, so they invented something to fill those holes to soothe their anxiety.

human qualities, different personalities, emotions, ergo EVERYTHING we feel are created by our very own brains. even creativity, even inspiration, even conscience, etc. the reasons are highly unlikely to be divine. of course there is a chance that the reasons ARE divine, but by the same rationale there is a realistic possibility that the tooth fairy exists; religion makes people believe something exists just because we can’t prove the opposite. that logic is simply dumb. also, if the tooth fairy was believed to be omnipotent, i assure you there WOULD be people genuinely believing it exists. having a divine “component” in the world is very tempting, because it seemingly has all the answers science will surely never have.

no matter how laughably ridiculous and obviously made up concepts are indroduced, like an actual talking snake or a magical granddaddy living outside of time and space, or any divine concept taken for granted for that matter, christians (or religious people in general) genuinely accept them, because they DESPERATELY need those holes filled. challenge: ask a religious person any question for which his answer will be “no one can know”. there’s no such question. god knows everything, deals with my petty “where’s my car keys” problems, helps me out or punishes me once in a while, and does things that feature my irrelevant, blink-of-an-eye-lifespan ass in his great, divine plan. self-delusion at its finest.

people of reason however can say “i don’t know”. we accept that there are a great deal of things which are out of the reach of our senses and intellect. yes, we will die not knowing what infinity is. yes, we will die not knowing how the universe came into existence; but we can deal with all this without, again, having to invent an imaginary, comfortig concept, which has all the answers wrapped up in a neat little package called god.

people around the world believe in SO many different gods, prophets, whatnot, and they are SO ignorant towards this painstakingly obvious contradiction. they all fail to see their error, thus miss out on seeing the world for what it really is: a miracle on its own, without any magical men high up in the sky.

i couldn’t answer everything again, tomorrow i’ll get back to you. meanwhile, a suggestion: read some Richard Dawkins, “the god delusion” for example. we both know you won’t, also that i won’t read your Christ-books either, so recommending books back and forth is futile.

I am still working on compiling some scientists for you to read. Sorry for my busyness is keeping me from doing that with any fervor. Let me address you…I believe your argument about finding the divine everywhere is good on one level: you have reached the conclusion that the divine exists. Now, does it matter “which” divine? You may think no, but I believe it does because I’m sure as he will “argue”, not all of them can be correct. That you sense and know the divine demonstrates what I already pointed out regarding the God-shaped vacuum inside every person. Now, because we are living creatures, that God must be a living god, not a dead god like so many religions worship. Otherwise, it would make no sense. So right away, one can pretty much toss out religions that worship dead gods or even concepts. That’s where the argument about the Truth of the Living God, as manifested in our human form in the person of Jesus Christ rises to the surface. If Jesus lived a human life, died and rose again from the dead, then everyone on the planet needs to grapple with that claim. Taking it one step further, you really only have three options regarding Jesus: he was either a liar and deceived multitudes in his day and in subsequent milleniums, a lunatic (which would be evidenced by inconsistencies and irrational behavior) or he was who he said he was, the son of God. You cannot simply say he was a great teacher because then you have to dismiss the miracles (both then and today) and you have to call him a liar because he claimed to be God, which would also mean he’s a lunatic and delusional. I do want to say to Aron about your description of love….this is good and right. Love is not simply a chemical reaction based on biology because as you have noted, there are different kinds of love. I’m assuming that you, Bence, will say that different chemical reactions occur and so different “feelings” of love come forth in the different situations but we call them all ‘love’. I think that is a huge stretch and more probable is that the emotion of love is a spiritual thing that manifests chemically and then physically. Let me toss out another question:  where do morals stem from? (by the way, this is so much fun for me!)