More Challenges to Atheists and Agnostics
From what I have seen of many atheists and agnostics, (not that i have seen all of you that would be impossible) there is one thing that seems consistent.
You refuse to look at information and evidence from every angle. There is more data than you could possibly ever read that supports the existence of God. If you will not research for yourself this data, then whatever "reason" you have for not believing is just an excuse.
Even if you read 20 books in support of your unbelief, you are not objective if you do not read 20 books which support belief.
You are not being honest with yourself nor truly open minded if you refuse to listen to and/or read arguement from both sides.
This is what our universities are supposed to be doing, but they are not. It is what a person honestly searching for truth (or facts, or reality as you call them) should be doing.
How can you believe that there is no absolute truth yet still be searching for it? You cannot say there is no absolute truth, because that statement itself is an absolute.
If you haven't done the research, your excuses are only there to enable you to continue living your life the way you want to.
God has a desire for you. He wants to fill your life with purity, love, peace, righteousness and holiness. But you only acquire these things from Him.
He does the work to make you these things.
As He puts His finger on the things in your life that need to go, then you have to give them up.
But only then.
Not when other people think you should.
And certainly not before you bow your knees to Him and offer your life to Him for what He did on the Cross!
There is a known world, and it can be explained by a known God. He is not unknown. I know, because I know Him.
When you are ready, if you aren't dead by then, He is waiting with open arms to wash over you with forgiveness, and if you are dead, I pray someone raises you from the dead in the name of Jesus so you can have a second chance!
He has complete forgiveness you!!! It lifts the weight and burden off your shoulders that you try to carry for all the difficult things in life, the things you've done wrong, the things you don't understand.
Yes it is a problem many people can't get their head around bad things happening to good people.
I want to address this too. In my next post.
You refuse to look at information and evidence from every angle. There is more data than you could possibly ever read that supports the existence of God. If you will not research for yourself this data, then whatever "reason" you have for not believing is just an excuse.
Even if you read 20 books in support of your unbelief, you are not objective if you do not read 20 books which support belief.
You are not being honest with yourself nor truly open minded if you refuse to listen to and/or read arguement from both sides.
This is what our universities are supposed to be doing, but they are not. It is what a person honestly searching for truth (or facts, or reality as you call them) should be doing.
How can you believe that there is no absolute truth yet still be searching for it? You cannot say there is no absolute truth, because that statement itself is an absolute.
If you haven't done the research, your excuses are only there to enable you to continue living your life the way you want to.
God has a desire for you. He wants to fill your life with purity, love, peace, righteousness and holiness. But you only acquire these things from Him.
He does the work to make you these things.
As He puts His finger on the things in your life that need to go, then you have to give them up.
But only then.
Not when other people think you should.
And certainly not before you bow your knees to Him and offer your life to Him for what He did on the Cross!
There is a known world, and it can be explained by a known God. He is not unknown. I know, because I know Him.
When you are ready, if you aren't dead by then, He is waiting with open arms to wash over you with forgiveness, and if you are dead, I pray someone raises you from the dead in the name of Jesus so you can have a second chance!
He has complete forgiveness you!!! It lifts the weight and burden off your shoulders that you try to carry for all the difficult things in life, the things you've done wrong, the things you don't understand.
Yes it is a problem many people can't get their head around bad things happening to good people.
I want to address this too. In my next post.
posted by Heather Simpson | 11:20 PM
4 Comments:
You've said yourself a number of times that belief in Jesus requires faith. In other words, it requires "belief without evidence"--and in fact requires "belief in spite of contrary evidence."
If there's such overwhelming evidence for the divinity of Jesus then why is faith required to believe it?
I don't need to have faith to belief that the world is round, or that it revolves around the sun, etc.
I kind of address this in my comments on the "What if you are wrong?" post, but it does require some degree of faith to step out of your comfort zone and choose to put trust in something you cannot see.
actually i think there is a small degree of faith you need to believe those things. you have to have a bit of faith in the people who write about these things, or the pictures you see of the earth/solar system etc or video that they are true and not false. it seems so obvious to us now, having the technology we have, but lets pretend we lived in a box for the last 100 years or so, or before magellan. and we came out and everyone had changed from "flat earth" to "round earth" etc.. it would take a huge degree of faith to believe that the technology is true and the people giving the info are not crazy, stupid, or lying.
Same thing with the life of Christ.
We weren't there, but others were and wrote about it. If you lived at the same time as Him, there is quite a bit less faith required to believe. but since you aren't there, you must sit back and analyze peoples testimony and the evidence presented and say "is this real?" ask God to show up! Ask Him to let you feel His presence. He will!
I have read a number of books in English that are translations from other languages - and yet they are classics in English as well. Dostoevsky comes to mind.
Given that the Bible is supposedly the divinely inspired word of God, why wouldn't God make sure that the persons who were responsible for making the translations could do it in such a way that none of the (supposed) emotion, none of the (supposed) persuasiveness, and none of the (supposed) storyline was lost?
Does God just not care? Does he want to deceive us?
You would think that it would be important to him that we understand what he wants.
The fact that none of the above is the case - that the Bible is poorly written and often hard to understand (and that's when it makes sense at all), that the Bible is not believed by the vast majority of people on the planet today - is something that demands an explanation from those who think it truly represents the "word" of the creator of the Universe.
"it would take a huge degree of faith to believe that the technology is true and the people giving the info are not crazy, stupid, or lying."
No it wouldn't. "Belief" in the technology could be created via a direct demonstration of it. I "believe" in my televsion, for example, because it's right there in my living room. No faith needed.
As far as for a spherical earth, it would take, at most, a first-grade-level education. Probably all it would really take is the pointing out of some basic evidence, such as discussing the changing shape of the shadow on the face of the moon, or talking about why shadows are longer in northern latitudes than in mid latitudes... or just looking at pictures.
We weren't there, but others were and wrote about it.
Funny how those are all Biblical sources. Show me the contemporaneous accounts of eyewitnesses to Jesus's miracles (not stuff written decades later). Where are they?
If you lived at the same time as Him, there is quite a bit less faith required to believe.
Agreed. It kinda makes me wonder, too. Why leave at all, if he's really all that interested in people believing? Why was it so hard to convince even the people that he talked to directly that he was the Son of God? Seems a bit strange, don't you think?
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