Truth: either God exists or He don't.

[Trailblazer]

I have 100% positive evidence that Christ lives, and His Holy Spirit abides in all His children. How can a woman who lives with her invisible husband deny His existence, when He lives inside her. And how can she prove it to others who Christ has blinded so they can't see spiritual things.

What is your evidence? How can you prove that Christ lives or that His Holy Spirit abides in all His children? How can you prove that others are blinded? You can certainly 'believe' that but how can you prove it?

Evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid: https://www.google.com/search

 

[Trailblazer]

When a person has the truth, everything else is immediately exposed as lies and deception. Until one finds the truth, he is tossed around like a boat without a rudder or sails on a stormy sea.

I agree, but how does one know one has the truth?
What is the truth is not what you think it is? What if there is more than ONE truth?

 

[Trailblazer]

I can drink and use heroin and walk away if I wanted to, but God has completely removed the desire and replaced it with unspeakable joy. So why would I want to spoil a perfect feeling, by using those things and feeling less happy. The only way is down when you're at the top.
I have great job, I've saved so much money and bought a beautiful house and got married since being saved. I was told by the psychiatrist that I have an addictive personality and that I would need their support for the rest of my life. I now see them as blood sucking vampires.

Maybe God removed your desire to drink or maybe not. Maybe it was your belief and trust in God and Jesus that removed the desire.

You attribute all that you have to Jesus, but I attribute it to fate. Do you want to know how I know? Logic. Many Christians who are ‘saved by Jesus’ do not have a great job, a beautiful house, or a marriage.

 

[Trailblazer]

I will just assume you are too smart for me.

No worries, these atheists are also too smart for me, with all their science stuff.

 

[37818]

The "basis" that it is true is that it was written by Baha'u'llah, a Manifestation of God who had knowledge from God. He also knew all that Jesus experienced better than the gospel writers since He was the same Spirit of Jesus. Thus at one time He said He longed for the cross.

You raise a good point. What I mean by Essence is the intrinsic nature of God. I agree that we can know God is Spirit because the Bible says that but we cannot know any more about God's nature than that. By contrast, we can know some of God's Attributes such as Good, Loving, Gracious, Merciful, Just, Righteous, Forgiving, and Patient because they were reflected in Jesus.

Jesus was a clear mirror, and God became visible in the mirror. This is why Jesus said, “The Father is in the Son” (John 14:11, John 17:21) meaning that God is visible and manifest in Jesus.

“I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) means that the Manifestation of God, in this case Jesus, and God are one and the same, so whatever pertains to the Manifestation of God, all His acts and doings, as well as whatever He ordains and forbids, is identical with the Will of God Himself.

1 Timothy 3:16 King James Version (KJV)

16 And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory.

Very good set of responces.
Part of what I need to understand is what conviced you that the founder of Baha'i faith is who you believe that he is?
Understand, if the Jesus of Nazareth you believe to be is not the one who died as one's subtitued for one's sins and the one who was risen from the dead, then we do not believe in the same Jesus.

 

[37818]

I think the equation doesn't mean what you think it does.

E is energy measured as the product of the mass of the square of the space and time of light. There is of quanity of matter in terms of the square of space-time of light. Maybe you can better state it.

OK, that gets us started. In what way is something else a 'result'? Why does every event have such a cause?

What has been called by some the law of cause and effect. You many not accept this. I do. I am not going to play dictionary here.

How do you tell if an event is such an effect?

Where possible by observation or logical deduction. Again, by what is called by some the law of cause and effcct.

 

[Trailblazer]

Very good set of responses.
Part of what I need to understand is what convinced you that the founder of Baha'i faith is who you believe that he is?

I believe Baha'u'llah was who He claimed to be because of the evidence. There is a lot of evidence, as I explained a while back on this post, where I posted both the claims and the evidence:

Questions for knowledgeable Bahai / followers of Baha'u'llah

Understand, if the Jesus of Nazareth you believe to be is not the one who died as one's substituted for one's sins and the one who was risen from the dead, then we do not believe in the same Jesus.

There is only ONE Jesus Christ, logically speaking, so what you are really saying is that we have different conceptions of Jesus, different beliefs about Jesus.

What you believe in is substitutionary atonement, and that is not in the Bible, it is a Christian doctrine. I believe that Jesus died on the cross for the salvation of humanity. In the following passage, in referring to Jesus as the Son of Man, Baha'u'llah wrote that by His sacrifice Jesus sanctified the souls of the sinners.

“Know thou that when the Son of Man yielded up His breath to God, the whole creation wept with a great weeping. By sacrificing Himself, however, a fresh capacity was infused into all created things. Its evidences, as witnessed in all the peoples of the earth, are now manifest before thee. The deepest wisdom which the sages have uttered, the profoundest learning which any mind hath unfolded, the arts which the ablest hands have produced, the influence 86 exerted by the most potent of rulers, are but manifestations of the quickening power released by His transcendent, His all-pervasive, and resplendent Spirit.

We testify that when He came into the world, He shed the splendor of His glory upon all created things. Through Him the leper recovered from the leprosy of perversity and ignorance. Through Him, the unchaste and wayward were healed. Through His power, born of Almighty God, the eyes of the blind were opened, and the soul of the sinner sanctified.

Leprosy may be interpreted as any veil that interveneth between man and the recognition of the Lord, his God. Whoso alloweth himself to be shut out from Him is indeed a leper, who shall not be remembered in the Kingdom of God, the Mighty, the All-Praised. We bear witness that through the power of the Word of God every leper was cleansed, every sickness was healed, every human infirmity was banished. He it is Who purified the world. Blessed is the man who, with a face beaming with light, hath turned towards Him.” Gleanings From the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, pp. 85-86

So that is the basis for my belief in Jesus, the confirmation of who He was and what He actually did on His earthly mission. I was not raised in any religion, so before I became a Baha'i, I had never read one page of the Bible and I did not know the first thing about Jesus. Now I get my information from the gospels but also from what was written about Jesus in the Baha'i Writings.

You also believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead and I agree that there are stories written in the Bible about the resurrection, but I do not believe those stories are literally true. In other words, i do not believe that the body of Jesus literally rose from the dead and got up and walked around. Rather, but I believe that after Jesus died on the cross His soul ascended to heaven to be at the Right Hand of God, which is just a metaphor for being close to God. In the following passage Baha'u'llah described what happened to Jesus at His trial and what the Jewish divines of that age said and did to Jesus, and how Jesus took His flight to the fourth Heaven when he died on the cross.

“Similarly, call thou to mind the day when the Jews, who had surrounded Jesus, Son of Mary, were pressing Him to confess His claim of being the Messiah and Prophet of God, so that they might declare Him an infidel and sentence Him to death. Then, they led Him away, He Who was the Day-star of the heaven of divine Revelation, unto Pilate and Caiaphas, who was the leading divine of that age. The chief priests were all assembled in the palace, also a multitude of people who had gathered to witness His sufferings, to deride and injure Him. Though they repeatedly questioned Him, hoping that He would confess His claim, yet Jesus held His peace and spake not. Finally, an accursed of God arose and, approaching Jesus, adjured Him saying: “Didst thou not claim to be the Divine Messiah? Didst thou not say, ‘I am the King of Kings, My word is the Word of God, and I am the breaker of the Sabbath day?’” Thereupon Jesus lifted up His head and said: “Beholdest thou not the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power and might?” These were His words, and yet consider how to outward seeming He was devoid of all power except that inner power which was of God and which had encompassed all that is in heaven and on earth. How can I relate all that befell Him after He spoke these words? How shall I describe their heinous behaviour towards Him? They at last heaped on His blessed Person such woes that He took His flight unto the fourth Heaven.” The Kitáb-i-Íqán, pp. 132-133

 

[37818]

You haven't given arguments. You have made claims, but not justified them.

You reject my claims as arguments. Show proof for each argument why each is simply not true.

 

[37818]

I believe Baha'u'llah was who He claimed to be because of the evidence.

Can you give a one most compelling piece of evidence that convinced you.

What you believe in is substitutionary atonement, and that is not in the Bible,

Well, I understand differently from you.
Isaiah 53:6, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."
Romans 5:8, "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
1 John 2:2, "And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world."

You also believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead and I agree that there are stories written in the Bible about the resurrection, but I do not believe those stories are literally true.

1 Corinthians 15:15, "Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not."

Just for reference I personally understand the historic date of Christ's death and resurrection according to the Jewish calandar to be the 15th-18th of Nisan 3790.

Calendar Converter
Reference text for the 14th of Nisan 3790, Mark 14:12.

 

[Polymath257]

E is energy measured as the product of the mass of the square of the space and time of light.
There is of quanity of matter in terms of the square of space-time of light. Maybe you can better state it.

Not even close to what it means. it says that when considering questions about the conservation of energy, the mass of a particle at rest enters into the considerations in a particular way. There is no meaning to the 'space and time of light'. The value c is the speed of light in a vacuum.

What has been called by some the law of cause and effect. You many not accept this. I do. I am not going to play dictionary here.

There is no such law in physics. It was proposed by some philosophers without any actual reason other than intuition.

And, in reality, the idea that an event is produced specifically by something preceding it (a cause), thereby making it an effect, is wrong.

Like I said, most quantum events are uncaused in this sense. For example, there is NO difference between a radioactive nucleus that will decay right now versus one that will decay in a million years. The nuclei are identical and NOTHING is causing the decay to happen now instead of in a million years.

And, like I also pointed out, most quantum events are uncaused. Again, using your definition, there is nothing that specifies that a quantum event will go one way instead of another. it is probabilistic and NOT determined.

Furthermore, it is possible to eliminate any option of 'hidden variables' that are causing the observations. it is *known* that there is no cause because if there were, certain statistical properties would hold and in reality those properties do NOT hold.

Where possible by observation or logical deduction.

Except that you can't *observe* causation. You can only observe that one event follows another, not whether it was caused by the previous one.

Again, by what is called by some the law of cause and effcct.

Which is not a law of physics or of science. At best, it was a proposal by some philosophers centuries ago, before we learned more about the universe.

More to the point, the idea the notion of causality that you proposed is the standard one; that one event (the cause) produces (through natural laws) some other, specific, event (the effect).

This is known to NOT be the case in many situations where there is a *probability* of several different events from a single original, with no specific one being determined by that original (just the probabilities of the different options). At the quantum level, things are inherently probabilistic.

 

[Polymath257]

You reject my claims as arguments. Show proof for each argument why each is simply not true.

Not my job: you made the claims, so you need to demonstrate them.

But, even though it is not my job, I have pointed out that causality is NOT the way the real world works. This is a discovery from the last 100 years or so, but it is fundamental to how the universe is now known to function.

I suspect you also have outmoded notions about time (that it is the same everywhere, for example) and the range of possibilities for whether time is finite or infinite into the past.

 

[Subduction Zone]

You reject my claims as arguments. Show proof for each argument why each is simply not true.

LOL, that is not how it works.

 

[Trailblazer]

Can you give a one most compelling piece of evidence that convinced you.

That is difficult, because there is so much evidence that convinced me, but were I to pick one thing it would be the Writings of Baha'u'llah, which can be found in the Bahai Reference Library: The Works of Bahá'u'lláh

Well, I understand differently from you.
Isaiah 53:6, "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."
Romans 5:8, "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."
1 John 2:2, "And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world."

Now I understand what you mean, I was just hung up on the words "substitutionary atonement." Basically it just mean Christ died for us, so we could have eternal life, and I agree with that.

In order to fully understand what Baha'is believe about the significance of Christ's sacrifice you would have to read this chapter: 29: EXPLANATION OF VERSE TWENTY-TWO, CHAPTER FIFTEEN, OF THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. PAUL TO THE CORINTHIANS

Below is an excerpt from that chapter, but I suggest you read the entire chapter. The substitutionary part is in the second paragraph: "Christ was like a seed, and this seed sacrificed its own form so that the tree might grow and develop."

"But Christ, Who is the Word of God, sacrificed Himself. This has two meanings, an apparent and an esoteric meaning. The outward meaning is this: Christ’s intention was to represent and promote a Cause which was to educate the human world, to quicken the children of Adam, and to enlighten all mankind; and since to represent such a great Cause—a Cause which was antagonistic to all the people of the world and all the nations and kingdoms—meant that He would be killed and crucified, so Christ in proclaiming His mission sacrificed His life. He regarded the cross as a throne, the wound as a balm, the poison as honey and sugar. He arose to teach and educate men, and so He sacrificed Himself to give the spirit of life. He perished in body so as to quicken others by the spirit.

The second meaning of sacrifice is this: Christ was like a seed, and this seed sacrificed its own form so that the tree might grow and develop. Although the form of the seed was destroyed, its reality became apparent in perfect majesty and beauty in the form of a tree."
Some Answered Questions, pp. 120-121

1 Corinthians 15:15, "Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not."

I think that verse needs to be read and interpreted in context. Below is my interpretation of the key verses in that chapter.

In 1 Corinthians 15:12-22, Paul was referring to a spiritual resurrection. That Jesus was raised up means His spirit was resurrected; brought back to life. If Christ’s spirit was not brought back to life, then your faith would be in vain and you would still be in your sins. 22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive means that all shall be made spiritually alive, not physically rise and be alive in bodies. That does not mean Jesus’ soul (spirit) was brought back to life (because the soul cannot die, so it does not need to be brought back to life); it means that the Cause of Christ (what He taught and represented) were brought back to life after three days... Had it NOT been brought back to life you would still be in your sins because it was the Cause of Christ that needed to be brought back to life in order to save people from their sins. People needed to get the Gospel message that Jesus taught and the disciples needed to carry that far and wide. Their faith in Jesus needed to be renewed (resurrected) after Jesus had died and the disciples lost all hope.

13 But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: and 16 For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: refers to rising from spiritual death, rising from the graves of ignorance of Christ, not to anyone rising from physical graves. Had the Cause of Christ not been brought back to life after three days, everyone would have remained in their sins and in spiritual death.

26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death refers to spiritual death, not physical death. The physical body was never designed to live forever, but the soul is immortal so it can never die. Those souls who believe in Jesus will have eternal life (everlasting life) because they are near to God; other souls who are veiled from God continue to exist in the spiritual world after their physical body dies, but they will not have eternal life because in comparison with the holy existence of the children of the Kingdom of God, they are nonexistent because they are separated from God.

Eternal life refers to a quality of life, gaining the rewards of the heaven, which are peace, the spiritual graces, the various spiritual gifts in the Kingdom of God, the gaining of the desires of the heart and the soul, and the meeting of God. Eternal life does not refer to continuance or duration of physical life, since the physical body cannot live forever. Eternal life refers to continuance or duration of the life of the soul, since souls live forever.

Thus all the following Bible verses refer to the eternal life if the soul, not the eternal life of the physical body:
(John 3:16, John 3:36, John 17:3, 1 John 5:13, John 5:24, John 11:25-26, John 4:13-14)

 

[MonkeyFire]

If your passive to suffering it loses its existence.

 

[Pilgrim Soldier]

Just say "science". You are trying to use "secular" as a pejorative. Remember without "secular science" you could not be communicating here.

And you are wrong about what science teaches.

The greatest scientists of all time have been Christians, so we don't need secular scientists for anything

 

[Pilgrim Soldier]

Hardly a test. Unfortunately since when one does not know how to properly test one's beliefs one does not have reliable evidence for one's beliefs. All one has is wishful thinking.

The word reliable is entirely subjective, everyone has a different interpretation of what it means. So it should be removed from the English language and never mentioned again.

 

[Pilgrim Soldier]

Depends. I mean you and I could dodge hellfire if repent now, revert to Islam by believing that Muhammed is the final messenger, and be saved from worshipping creation as God. Because, as the muslims say, all are born believing in Allah. That is why we would become reverts and not concerts. Same logic as you.

See? Multiple options.

Should I just crap shoot and choose a religion dependent on what the dice says? Which religion should I gamble on here? Should I go back to being a JW because they might be right? Maybe a 7th Day Adventist? Should I go back to joining the Catholic Church?

So many options. none of them give me conclusive evidence to follow.

Before Jesus went back to heaven, He warned us that many false prophets would come into the world to deceive people. He said every prophet that comes after Him will be a devil in disguise, so the very idea that another prophet needed to come after Jesus finished the work of salvation is an blasphemous abomination.

Jesus said, "it is finished" on the cross. So for another prophet to claim that Jesus didn't finish the job, is to call Jesus a liar. Jesus said He is the almighty God who created all things including Mohammad and all the other gods.

 

[Pilgrim Soldier]

What is your evidence? How can you prove that Christ lives or that His Holy Spirit abides in all His children? How can you prove that others are blinded? You can certainly 'believe' that but how can you prove it?

Evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid: https://www.google.com/search

As I said, you can't see spiritual things because God hasn't opened your spiritual eyes. So you are spiritually blind, God said that spiritual things are foolishness to the damned. Only His elect can see and understand them.

 

[Pilgrim Soldier]

I agree, but how does one know one has the truth?
What is the truth is not what you think it is? What if there is more than ONE truth?

Only One person in all of history said, "I am the truth" and that was the Lord Jesus Christ and He proved it by raising dead people back to life and performing many other miracles.

So the truth is a person His name is Jehovah God the King and creator of the universe and every atom in it. He said "I will not share my glory with any other god"

 

[Samael_Khan]

Before Jesus went back to heaven, He warned us that many false prophets would come into the world to deceive people. He said every prophet that comes after Him will be a devil in disguise, so the very idea that another prophet needed to come after Jesus finished the work of salvation is an blasphemous abomination.

Jesus said, "it is finished" on the cross. So for another prophet to claim that Jesus didn't finish the job, is to call Jesus a liar. Jesus said He is the almighty God who created all things including Mohammad and all the other gods.

The difference is that you assume that the bible is true based off an irrational standard, which is just your emotions. So no reason for me to take anything it seriously because unlike you , I do not assume the Bible to be true just because my emotions says so.

Therefore Jesus "sayings" which other people who we do not know claim he said, I take with a grain of salt. Much like Muhammeds claims. So I hold them of equal value.