Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
@43, by your logic, if there is absolute truth then I have to accept that truth may not exist, making the all truth is relative concept a thing all over again. No, if absolute truth exists, it is because there is an absolute truth giver, else truth is merely a belief you can wipe away with another.
@Jayde, 44, it is up to you if you're the one claiming he doesn't exist and that you're personally convinced of it, in as much as you believe it's up to me because of my personal conviction. Making the claim is what puts you in that position because you're making a statement you claim is true. To say that God does not exist is to say that you know without the shadow of a doubt that what you are saying is true. ON the other hand, you also state that you don't know so we should keep trying to find out, which tells me you're still conflicted to some degree, as you cannot hold to both as true.
As far as Christianity goes? Yes, you are absolutely right, and apparently it began as the result of the audacious claims of some guy who was born out in the middle of nowhere to a young woman who had apparently never had sex with anyone but was apparently visited by at least one angel and told that she had found favor in God's sight. Why her? I don't know. He also apparently performed 7 signs that affirmed his divinity.
1. He reportedly turned water into whine, bypassing the way chemistry usually works.
2. He supposedly healed a man who is not in his physical presence, bypassing both the ways medicine and space/distance usually work.
3. He apparently healed a man who has been crippled for 38 years, bypassing the way time usually works.
4. He is said to have fed at least 5000 people with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, bypassing the way matter usually works.
5. He was mysteriously seen walking on water, bypassing the way the human body and the forces of nature usually work.
6. He was um, sighted? By blind people? Healing blind people, bypassing the way chronic disabilities usually work.
7. And finally, he somehow, by some means, at some point, at some home, with a bunch of someone's watching him, raised a dead man after he'd been buried and all that jazz for quite some time, bypassing the way life itself usually works.
Now, this is a bunch of apparently and reportedly and supposedly and hypothetical yada yada that came to us from a bunch of other guys who were around some 2000 or so years ago who all believed this stuff to be real, and that's a lot of big stuff to believe in. But he apparently, yeah, apparently, went further!
1. He claimed to be the bread of life. Interesting that he should then feed 5000 or so people with just a few loaves of it...
2. He claimed to be the light of the world... I guess giving blind people sight wasn't such a miracle after all?
3. He claimed to be the door/gate by which all good sheep enter. I'm not sure how that ties into the 7 signs so I won't even bother to try there...
4. He further reaffirmed that sheep business by stating he was the Good Shepherd... I guess he really wanted people to follow him.
5. He said he was the resurrection, and the life. Lazarus apparently felt the same way, after his sisters had left him for dead.
6. He stated he was the way, the truth, and the life. Nobody who wants to go anywhere of any great importance and know anything of great importance and see anything of great importance can do it by any other means, if that statement is to be believed.
7. And finally, he said he was the true vine. Apparently that's how water became whine, or some such.
In reality, what makes any of these statements of any worth is the utterance "I am," coupled with the symbolism he used to illustrate without any hesitation that he was the foretold messiah of scripture, written about hundreds of years before his time. IN and of them selves, those I am statements are useless. Coupled with the old testament and if he is to be believed as having had any ounce of truth in him, Jesus was in essence saying that all of this had been planned from the beginning of time and that he was equall to all of it.
Is it true? Most biblical scholars are at the very least in support of some Jesus who apparently lived in Nazareth, born in Bethlehem. The archeological evidence of his existence, however, is practically none. What does that mean? That Jesus, like 99 percent of the world in his time, made little impact on it from an archeological standpoint. It means he was a peasant. It means that if he lived he lived a hard life. Eyewitness accounts of him are biased in every respect, as they should be given what those people reported. Outside of the new Testament, historians such as Flavius Josephus coroberate his existence in his writing the Jewish Antiquities Coupled with Annals of Imperial Rome, we get the idea that there was a Jesus who was excecuted by Roman law and that his followers were blamed for many things by the great emperor Nero. There master, "Christus," was apparently put to death during the reign of Tiberius by Pontius Pilate. Both of these historians, as Roman citizens, could hardly have had any bias toward Christ or Christianity. Roman governor Pliny could hardly have had any reason to write about people singing hymns to Jesus as if he were God if in fact it didn't happen. The historical evidence we do have suggests that Jesus at the very least existed, even if we don't want to agree on the why.
But that begs the question, if his followers believed that he was the real deal, as it were, and that is confirmed by what others who weren't followers of his wrote on the subject, why on earth and why in heaven should Jesus be so influencial at all? Why start this organization of losers? Of misfits? Of people who would be seen as nothing but walking talking breathing wastes of space? What does it proffit a loser to lead a bunch of other losers to their deaths because they would not refuse this so-called way? This reciter of parables? This man of paradoxes? This wordy wish washy teacher who claimed that the last shall be first and the first be last? This nobody from nowhere who had nothing to live for and who was hated by his own people, shunned and scorned and crowned in thorns for a world that would not believe in him? For that matter, so bad was his loserness that one of the other losers inside of his sphere of influence said he didn't know him right before Jesus died! Three times!
The truth is that there is no way any popular figure today in this world we live in would go to the cross for you and I. The truth is that no top business leader is going to give his all for you. The truth is that winners have nothing to gain if they've already won it all, while losers gain the knowledge of knowing that if there is a God who loves them that he loves them just as they are and that he'd willingly give up his one and only begotten son for them to have a chance at redemption in this sick and twisted world we've wrought with our own hands, thought up with our minds, desired by our hearts and full of our selves with no thought other than the here and now because it is all we see and everything clouding our perception. For humanity to love, it must be loved. For humanity to do good, there must be a reason for its good. For humanity to exist, there must be a cause outside of it that has made it so, or else I'm just a predestined ape with just a bit more rationality than my three million years or so ago cousin writing a load of nonsensical sweet nothings for a world that is doomed to the vast bleakness of anticlimactic and brutal nothing that means we've all wasted our lives for nothing and our very lives were nothing in a forever nothing nothingness. Love cannot work like that. Love has to work on the basis that one is free to choose to act inside or outside of its influence, to better the one it is they love. If we are simpy molecular and atomic collections in a shell cooked up by primordial soup for no reason other than that we are, then none of this should matter at all.
To conclude, you can be spiritually apathetic... I won't fault you. I was there at one point. You can claim that there isn't any solid proof of his existence. You can even claim that there isn't enough evidence to compell you personally to believe! What you cannot do, is tell me definitively that there is no god. The day you do that, truly do that and leave me with no doubt, I'll Christen you God myself and I'll show the world why. Until then, I'll claim that either Jesus was mad, or he was a liar, or he is precisely who and what he says he is, because those are the only three choices I see before me that make any sense, and each and every single one of them have implications surrounding them. It's up to me and me alone to make the choice, just as it is true of us all. "You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
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