Trusting God(s) Considering Experience

1robin said:

No, nothing I have claimed is beyond mainstream doctrine and can be easily found in a thousand places.

What I am is:
1. A born again Christian.
2. A person who has once felt the eternal presence of God which made all earthly knowledge seem trivial.
3, And one who despite all previous interests has found theological debate and study almost obsessive.

You do not seem to be familiar with the theological definition of freewill. Freewill is the capacity to choose between things that are choices. What you described is some kind of omnipotent ability to self determine everything. Freewill only applies where a choice is available. BTW: many of those things you said we do not chose, we in fact can. I can change the way I feel about a thing. Sometimes it is hard but the choice is still possible.

1. Also keep in mind I am not asserting we have infinite capacities or that freewill is always possible. I do believe on very rare occasions God short circuits freewill. As in hardening God's heart. I meant that we have the power to choose in general (virtually in all cases).

What you seem to be arguing against is some kind king of absolute sovereignty which I do not claim.


I know Craig very well and know his moral arguments very well. To my knowledge he has never put his arguments into the formula I provided. The person I got that chain of necessity from is Ravi Zacharias. Between them they have about 6 earned degrees and at least 4 honorary degrees your going to have to invent one heck of an argument to persuade me they are wrong. I have been almost obsess3ed with professional theistic debates and out of hundred only one Atheist said that both objective morality exists and that God does not. When Sam Harris did this Craig backed him into a corner and he admitted he merely assumed they do. This from the side that accuses the other having faith based conclusions.

From the looks of it your argument is a muddled and drawn our version of euthyphro's dilemma which is to take your first step down the wrong path. God neither chooses morality from an external source nor does what he commands become God merely because he commanded it. God is not the moral loudspeaker, he is the moral locus of the universe. His nature (which is both unchanging and eternal) determines what is right or wrong. Murder is not wrong because God says so. Murder contradicts God's nature and therefor he commands it to be wrong - because it is wrong. That is as objective as a moral issue or duty can possibly get. You cannot even imagine or invent a more objective source for morality than God. God does not choose morality, he is morality.

In this context objective would be defined as: A moral duty which is true and not a product of THE OPINIONS of any of it's adherents.

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Mainstream doctrine is a fallacy. There are millions of different interpretations and hundreds of booms written on the trinity alone all expressing different ideas. It's a complete non sequitur to go from some feeling, which could easily have been a delusion or neurological phenomena, to choose a particular Christian doctrine and pretend to know gods mind and morality.

Furthermore your persinal theological definition of free will is just an opinion and reflects a misunderstanding of my position which is that most of the time we don't have the ability to make a free choice. You also presume a naive idea of consciousness that it is a single continuous static entity that makes decisions throughout a lifetime. and you presume that you not only know that free will exists but also that you know how God has determined the parameters of free will and you presume that most of the time we have free will over our feelings. I rejwct that assunption amd would hypothesize thay in mpst people the feelings determine the actions a person takes. Consider alcoholism for instance--a persins free will is obviously overriden with strong feelings and force that person to drink. Rage also makes people lose their free will. Same with love. My point was that most of the time we don't have that free will as you define it.

We follow a variety of statistical patterns which is why statistics works in the first place and what we believe and the decisions we make depends on pre generated thoughts, feelings, as well as the culture and Era were born into. I am not talking about absolute sovereignty whatsoever and you didn't get the point which is that the place and time we are born determines many of our actions because society profoundly influences our feelings and thoughts. And finally you claim to know that God short circuits free will--you have so many sources of knowledge that are denied to me. It seems like you should be a prophet since you claim to know the mind of God as well as which interpretations of Christian doctrine are correct. You're basing all of this on some arbitrary feeling. IF you accept your random feeling you also have to accept the feelings of the Islamic suicide bomber or the feelings and experiences of the Christian lady who drowned her children because she had a vision and feeling from jesus.

But also if you watch Craigs debate against Chris Hitchens Richard Dawkins etc then you will find that many of your arguments resemble his. Furthermore you haven't shown why God would have an objective morality. God made evil and clearly needs it according to your Christian doctrine, so if anything God is neutral and has no particular moraliry, which is especially true as demonstrated by the old testament where genocide is the norm. He needs evil because otherwise we couldn't choose between good and evil. I see no reason to assume that God needs or cares about morality. You keep telling God about how he gets is morality and what he is. Stop telling God what to do and how to be. And you presume that God can't change his morality--you imply that he is locked in to a particular morality and has no free will.

To say that murder is wrong because you know own gods morality requires so much proof from you. Murder may be right in some circumstances. You suggest that God is this simple entity who has no exceptions to his rules. Is it wrong for a tribe who doesn't know gods morality to murder another tribe since there isn't enough food for both of them? False assumption. Is it wrong to murder one person premptively to save a school bus of children? Is the psychopath wrong evenumber though God allowed his existence? Was the entire old testament wrong where genocide occurs? Who are you to say that all of the murdering in the old testament commanded by God is wrong? You're not a moral authority. You dont speak for God or speak for his morality. You don't know gods nature and your feelings are not a basis whatsoever. The muslim terrorist might say that some murder is justified in the name of Allah. It all just depends on your subjective interpretation. It's called moral relativism and you are subject to it as well as everyone else. Even if objective moraliry exists you can't know what it is because who are you to say for instance that all the crusaders or other Christian fundamentalists were wrong. You can justify any morality using the bible.

1robin said:

1. Also keep in mind I am not asserting we have infinite capacities or that freewill is always possible. I do believe on very rare occasions God short circuits freewill. As in hardening God's heart. I meant that we have the power to choose in general (virtually in all cases).

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If what you state here is what you truly believe, then free will is not free will at all and your faith seems to be built on sand. If God can 'short circuit' free will, it was not free will to begin with. It was coercion. Either do this or else, and perhaps the else no matter what.

ether-ore said:

You are correct in that we do not choose any of those things, but then we were sent here to see how we would react to challenges. If mortality is a test (and I believe it is) then being faced with a variety of variables regardless of circumstance does not negate agency or freewill. You are looking at it as if this physical body is a biological machine. I'm looking at it from the standpoint that we are eternal beings; the spirit children of a loving Heavenly Father who is granting His children the opportunity to prove themselves in a new and uncertain environment.

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This is so similar to Buddhist teachings, I have a hard time believing you don't see the parallels here. Challenges being the lessons we choose to learn, and further, that we are 'spiritual children', which I interpret as higher selves that come here to learn those aforementioned lessons. The one point I would say does not work is your connotation of God being a 'father' which, IMO, is simply an affection of the Christian faiths. Or that God is masculine. That one has never made sense to me ever. How does one know God is male? Why not female or neither??

It seems you are accepting on faith what science suggests. I am accepting on faith a coherent and cohesive record of scripture that says they did exist. You are assuming that conditions on earth today are the same as they were back then. I don't think there is justification for such an assumption. Inbreeding is a modern issue (relatively speaking). Back when the race was pure and had not developed genetic inconsistencies over time, inbreeding was not an issue. There was no one else to marry except brothers and sisters for a time. Also over time, the cumulative abuses to the genome have changed that.

Can you prove any of this? Can you prove that inbreeding was not an issue then? Or that it is simply a 'modern issue'? Please only provide credible sources or admit this is your opinion, which I suspect it was.

ether-ore said:

The scriptures tell us that God is eternal. Meaning, there never was a time when God did not exist. Since that is the case, that means that good and evil have also always existed along with the moral law to distinguish the two. This makes God's moral law objective because it is true in all times and in all places. This is not God's first rodeo. We are not His first children (meaning those assigned to this earth). Neither is this heaven and earth His first creation and it will not be His last. God's works are one eternal round; they had no beginning and will have no end. This earth is not the center of time or space since there is no such thing in an infinity. There are temporal pockets within the infinite and eternal universe (and we are in one of them... created by God) and created for God's purposes for His children of which there is no end.
Evil is a product of agency. Since we are eternal beings who have always existed, then we by nature have agency. We and our agency were not created, otherwise you would be right and we would have no freewill. If that were true, all we could do is what we were created to do. At some point in eternity, God made us His spirit children; something we could not do for ourselves. But God did not make Lucifer, a son of the morning, evil. That was Lucifer making a choice to rebel using his natural agency and becoming Satan in the process. With the creation of the heaven and this earth (this temporal pocket or bubble) God is giving us the opportunity to gain physical bodies and to learn how to control them, giving us guidelines to follow which is His eternal objective moral law.

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What if good and evil don't exist outside of human understanding? What if there is merely a balance of what we as humans define as good and evil? The reasons I ask you this is because the concepts of good and bad have changed dramatically over the centuries. One need only take an undergraduate course in ancient history to see this. Even a more modern course would prove the point. You state here that evil is a choice but how can evil be this choice if the ideals that define evil are ever changing? There was a time when well meaning Christians would subvert people to the faith by force, on penalty of death. Do you really think that is what God would want and if not, then you can see how evil has changed face. And btw..do you have proof of other of God's planetary creations? Or will you admit it is sheer supposition on your part?

I know Craig very well and know his moral arguments very well. To my knowledge he has never put his arguments into the formula I provided. The person I got that chain of necessity from is Ravi Zacharias. Between them they have about 6 earned degrees and at least 4 honorary degrees your going to have to invent one heck of an argument to persuade me they are wrong. I have been almost obsess3ed with professional theistic debates and out of hundred only one Atheist said that both objective morality exists and that God does not. When Sam Harris did this Craig backed him into a corner and he admitted he merely assumed they do. This from the side that accuses the other having faith based conclusions.


You agree with this person owing to a number of degrees, whether earned or honorific, yet you don't respect my opinion on any matters, despite that I have more degrees than that. It would then seem to me your acceptance is biased at best. It aligns with your POV so you accept them as factual while you dismiss others with as much knowledge. Why is that?

serp777 said:

Furthermore your persinal theological definition of free will is just an opinion and reflects a misunderstanding of my position which is that most of the time we don't have the ability to make a free choice. You also presume a naive idea of consciousness that it is a single continuous static entity that makes decisions throughout a lifetime. and you presume that you not only know that free will exists but also that you know how God has determined the parameters of free will and you presume that most of the time we have free will over our feelings. I rejwct that assunption amd would hypothesize thay in mpst people the feelings determine the actions a person takes. Consider alcoholism for instance--a persins free will is obviously overriden with strong feelings and force that person to drink. Rage also makes people lose their free will. Same with love. My point was that most of the time we don't have that free will as you define it.

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Hi Serp,

A free will is a free will, anything that you acted from your own choice is based by a person's judgment to decide. How could you separate the feeling over the free will of man? Did you ever do something that is without free will? If we don't have free will, how come we are here in the RF posting messages with different answers?

God does not created a puppet. He created man to having a free will, if not, we are not here right now. We will like a ventriloquist, a puppet who is only controlled by himself. We will have same mind and thinking, no RF forum and discussion.

serp777 said:

We follow a variety of statistical patterns which is why statistics works in the first place and what we believe and the decisions we make depends on pre generated thoughts, feelings, as well as the culture and Era were born into. I am not talking about absolute sovereignty whatsoever and you didn't get the point which is that the place and time we are born determines many of our actions because society profoundly influences our feelings and thoughts. And finally you claim to know that God short circuits free will--you have so many sources of knowledge that are denied to me. It seems like you should be a prophet since you claim to know the mind of God as well as which interpretations of Christian doctrine are correct. You're basing all of this on some arbitrary feeling. IF you accept your random feeling you also have to accept the feelings of the Islamic suicide bomber or the feelings and experiences of the Christian lady who drowned her children because she had a vision and feeling from jesus.

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A Christian will know the will of God by having a personal relationship with Him. It is like a husband and wife here, they get to know each other by personally knowing each other since the time they were not yet married. Same application with a follower of Christ, we don't claim to be a perfect person to know God's Word and His will. We used the Scriptures as the prime standard or the basis to know Him well. The faith is being developed by hearing the Word of God.

serp777 said:

But also if you watch Craigs debate against Chris Hitchens Richard Dawkins etc then you will find that many of your arguments resemble his. Furthermore you haven't shown why God would have an objective morality. God made evil and clearly needs it according to your Christian doctrine, so if anything God is neutral and has no particular moraliry, which is especially true as demonstrated by the old testament where genocide is the norm. He needs evil because otherwise we couldn't choose between good and evil. I see no reason to assume that God needs or cares about morality. You keep telling God about how he gets is morality and what he is. Stop telling God what to do and how to be. And you presume that God can't change his morality--you imply that he is locked in to a particular morality and has no free will.

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God is moral. Without God, there is no morality. This is our basis and standard. People can kill each other if there is no moral. You cannot conclude that God, if He needs evil or not. In the first place, He even gave Satan, a free will. God cares for morality because He is not evil in nature, like man who is sinful now in nature.

serp777 said:

To say that murder is wrong because you know own gods morality requires so much proof from you. Murder may be right in some circumstances. You suggest that God is this simple entity who has no exceptions to his rules. Is it wrong for a tribe who doesn't know gods morality to murder another tribe since there isn't enough food for both of them? False assumption. Is it wrong to murder one person premptively to save a school bus of children? Is the psychopath wrong evenumber though God allowed his existence? Was the entire old testament wrong where genocide occurs? Who are you to say that all of the murdering in the old testament commanded by God is wrong? You're not a moral authority. You dont speak for God or speak for his morality. You don't know gods nature and your feelings are not a basis whatsoever. The muslim terrorist might say that some murder is justified in the name of Allah. It all just depends on your subjective interpretation. It's called moral relativism and you are subject to it as well as everyone else. Even if objective moraliry exists you can't know what it is because who are you to say for instance that all the crusaders or other Christian fundamentalists were wrong. You can justify any morality using the bible.

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In the Old Testament, God had his own reason why He wiped people. If we try to reach the mind of God, I tell you, you cannot comprehend the mind of God. He is more advance than our thinking. His thinking is super higher than us.

Isaiah 55:8-9
8. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
9. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

God gave His Ten commandments. One of the commandment is "Thou shall not kill." Therefore, we should follow God's commandment.If you insist that murder is right, then, if somebody wants to murder a person on the road, do that person can say " ok, come on, that is absolutely right."

There is an objective truth, the Absolute truth that God is morality, and you cannot erase that nature.

Thanks

Yoshua said:

Hi Serp,

A free will is a free will, anything that you acted from your own choice is based by a person's judgment to decide. How could you separate the the feeling over the free will of man? Did you ever do something that is without free will? If we don't have free will, how come we are here in the RF posting messages with different answers?

God does not make a puppet. He created man to have a free will, if not we are not here right now. We will like a ventriloquist, a puppet who is only controlled by himself.


A Christian will know the will of God by having a personal relationship with Him. It is like a husband and wife here, they get to know each other and personally know each other since the time they were not yet married. same application with a follower of Christ, we don't claim to be a perfect person to know God's Word and His will. We used the Scriptures as the prime standard or the basis to know Him well. The faith is being developed by hearing the Word of God.


God is moral. Without God, there is no morality. This is our basis and standard. People can kill each other if there is no moral. You cannot conclude God if He needs evil or not. In the first place, He even give Satan a free will. God cares for morality because He is not evil in nature, like man who is sinful now in nature.


In the Old Testament, God had his own reason why He wiped people. If we try to reach the mind of God, I tell you, you cannot comprehend the mind of God. He is more advance than our thinking. His thinking is super higher than us.

Isaiah 55:8-9
8. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
9. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

God gave His Ten commandment to the Israelites. One of the commandment is "Thou shall not kill." Therefore, we should follow God's commandment.If you insist that murder is right, then, if somebody wants to murder a person on the road, do that person can say " ok, come on, that is right."

There is an objective truth, the Absolute truth that God is morality, and you cannot erase that nature.

Thanks

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There is much irony here. You talk a lot about God's mind, his characteristics, and what his moral positions are , and then st the end you proceed to say he is too advanced to possibly understand. So make up your mind. I would agree that it's impossible for anyone to know the mind of an infinite being since it would take another infinite mind to understand anything about his mind.

And your point that because we can write different messages on rf means we have free will is a non sequitor. I am not saying free will certainly does not exist I'm just saying you and everybody else hasn't established it. It may be the case that we are just an observer, following statistical patterns determined by our genetics as well as random chance and our phenotypes. So we could follow very advanced, sophisticated algorithms, in essence, which incorporate randomness in it. Thus it does not require free will to post to rf. It may be the case also that we have a little bit of free will but 99.99 percent of the time our decisions are made for us. It may also be the case thathat certain humans have free will and others do not. So basically you have no clue about the characteristics and parameters of free will.

God may also make puppets. Don't tell God what to do ok? Don't you think it's insulting that you're saying what God does and does not for him. Are you a prophet for him?

Also a relationship with God is nothing like wife and husband. You can see your wife, you can talk to her, you can have sex with her, etc. You can talk to God, but your mental health is questionable if he talks to yku. Usually people who think God talks to them have major illnesses which can be seen in their brain with an mri. To say that you're special enough to have a relationship with God requires astounding arrogance. We're half evolved primates. God wasn't talking to humans 50k years ago or our other human ancestors. Much more likely is that God isn't involved with our tiny pathetic planet.

Also it's funny how you think the scriptures allow you to know him. The scriptures were inserted into the bible to align with socioculturalpolitical aspects of the time period. Then you naturally reject the Quran or other holy books. Somehow you presume also that your particular interpretations are correct. I mean it requires truly unfathomable arrogance to say that you know all of this stuff which is denied to me. I accept your interpretations and feelings just as much as I accept the terrorists visions from Allah to blow up a school bus full of children. I mean if you trust your feelings and experiences then you have to trust everyone elses.

And I can conclude God needs evil. Without evil we couldn't have free will and we couldn't make a decision between right or wrong. Furthermore if God is perfectly moral then he can't make an evil decision which mears he has no free will. He couldn't make an evil act. Creating evil is an evil act in itself, regardless. So clearly God can and has made an evil act which means he would be a God unconcerned with human morality. With God morality is relative anyways. You should go and read my counterargument where I already addressed God's morality. You didn't address much of what I said.

Finally God need not have an absolute morality. The bible asserts that Moses received some special tablets alone. It's likely Moses just wrote what he wanted which is why it conveniently forgot about slavery and the equal treatment of women and not stoning people just because they are gay, etc. If we follow the ten commandments then slavery is okay. Clearly it was createD for the needs of the social and political climate of the time.

serp777 said:

There is much irony here. You talk a lot about God's mind, his characteristics, and what his moral positions are , and then st the end you proceed to say he is too advanced to possibly understand. So make up your mind. I would agree that it's impossible for anyone to know the mind of an infinite being since it would take another infinite mind to understand anything about his mind.

And your point that because we can write different messages on rf means we have free will is a non sequitor. I am not saying free will certainly does not exist I'm just saying you and everybody else hasn't established it. It may be the case that we are just an observer, following statistical patterns determined by our genetics as well as random chance and our phenotypes. So we could follow very advanced, sophisticated algorithms, in essence, which incorporate randomness in it. Thus it does not require free will to post to rf. It may be the case also that we have a little bit of free will but 99.99 percent of the time our decisions are made for us. It may also be the case thathat certain humans have free will and others do not. So basically you have no clue about the characteristics and parameters of free will.

God may also make puppets. Don't tell God what to do ok? Don't you think it's insulting that you're saying what God does and does not for him. Are you a prophet for him?

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Can you prove that God make puppets? Can you explain it to me?

I’m not insulting God and telling God what to do. We have Scriptural evidence.

serp777 said:

Also a relationship with God is nothing like wife and husband. You can see your wife, you can talk to her, you can have sex with her, etc. You can talk to God, but your mental health is questionable if he talks to yku. Usually people who think God talks to them have major illnesses which can be seen in their brain with an mri. To say that you're special enough to have a relationship with God requires astounding arrogance. We're half evolved primates. God wasn't talking to humans 50k years ago or our other human ancestors. Much more likely is that God isn't involved with our tiny pathetic planet.

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Talking to God is by means of prayer with the guidance of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of God. This is not mental illness. God talked with the first human Adam, Abraham, Noah, Elijah, David, Jesus and down to the modern time as of now through the Holy Spirit.

serp777 said:

Also it's funny how you think the scriptures allow you to know him. The scriptures were inserted into the bible to align with socioculturalpolitical aspects of the time period. Then you naturally reject the Quran or other holy books. Somehow you presume also that your particular interpretations are correct. I mean it requires truly unfathomable arrogance to say that you know all of this stuff which is denied to me. I accept your interpretations and feelings just as much as I accept the terrorists visions from Allah to blow up a school bus full of children. I mean if you trust your feelings and experiences then you have to trust everyone elses.

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Knowing God through Scriptures is not a funny thing, but an incredible thing. I don’t know everything, it is still God our creator who knows everything. I trust your answer to me, that is why I’m answering you in this forum.

serp777 said:

And I can conclude God needs evil. Without evil we couldn't have free will and we couldn't make a decision between right or wrong. Furthermore if God is perfectly moral then he can't make an evil decision which mears he has no free will. He couldn't make an evil act. Creating evil is an evil act in itself, regardless. So clearly God can and has made an evil act which means he would be a God unconcerned with human morality. With God morality is relative anyways. You should go and read my counterargument where I already addressed God's morality. You didn't address much of what I said.

Finally God need not have an absolute morality. The bible asserts that Moses received some special tablets alone. It's likely Moses just wrote what he wanted which is why it conveniently forgot about slavery and the equal treatment of women and not stoning people just because they are gay, etc. If we follow the ten commandments then slavery is okay. Clearly it was createD for the needs of the social and political climate of the time.

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God’s morality is truth. Moses did not write the commandments of God. It is God who gave that commandment.

The Ten Commandments
Exo. 20:1-2
1. Then God spoke all these words, saying,
2. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

Thanks

If I went by experience I would believe in some sort of karma, a balancer if you will but it's probably since that's how energy works anyway, working for balance.

Tumah said:

I say that G-d orchestrates tragedies for those that are deserving, just as he orchestrates benefit for those that are deserving. My trust in G-d is that He will do to me, whatever is most beneficial for me, whether by rewarding me for good behavior, or afflicting me to cleanse my soul of bad behaviors.

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I'm confused by this thinking. There are infants starving to death in slow and painful agony as I type. How can they deserve their tragedy?

The Sum of Awe said:

What good came of the holocaust. or Ebola, miscarriages, hurricanes?

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I doubt God expected us to fully understand these mysteries. I do know that what has been revealed should not be discarded, however. It is enough to give one assurance, joy and hope. I also believe most of those who perished in the holocaust and so many other atrocities will find their way to heaven and not only will it all make sense to them (those horrors) but their joy will thoroughly overwhelm any temporal sorrows from earth.

The great sins of mankind are not without consequence. They greatly affect, horribly affect, the innocents around them. The evidence for the Judeo-Christian G-d is all I need in order to know what is best for me and what is my purpose on this earth.

Looncall said:

Argument from ignorance is unimpressive. So is inventing an imaginary friend to plug the gap.

Your rhetoric could easily be reworded to show your god as unbelievable.

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It is not finishing a puzzle a finding a piece missing so you get one from another puzzle and hammer it in until it fits. It is finding you missing piece but remember one you though might have fallen out of the box and finding it fits right in. My argument if not an if X then Y in this case. It is an if X then Y is the best explanation. God is by far the explanation of the uncaused first cause, which stands outside time, powerful enough, intelligent enough, moral enough, personal enough, etc...... to fit in the hole where there is a missing piece for thousands of puzzles. Since you did not mention a counter argument but tries to magically sweep my answer under the carpet there is nothing to consider right or wrong.

serp777 said:

Mainstream doctrine is a fallacy. There are millions of different interpretations and hundreds of booms written on the trinity alone all expressing different ideas. It's a complete non sequitur to go from some feeling, which could easily have been a delusion or neurological phenomena, to choose a particular Christian doctrine and pretend to know gods mind and morality.

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No mainstream doctrine? In one council Constantine invited 1800 bishops to decide one of the most fundamental doctrines in Christianity, it had merely two nay's. I once read that 90% of denominations agree on 90% of doctrine. However the bible makes it's central points fairly clear. Which are you challenging? You say it is meaningless to go from feeling to conclusion. Then why do we do so in most of the important matters in our lives. We rarely marry people we don't care about.

You were referring to salvation concerning feeling to conclusion I believe so let me give you some details that render that statement null.

1. Salvation as well as being a feeling can contain other things.
2. For me I had a couple of habits I had spent years trying without any success to stop. When I was born again I lost all desire what so ever for those habits. No withdrawn, no struggle, just gone.
3. I met a born again preacher was an ex drug dealer. One day we were walking through the airport. He stopped dead in his tracks. He pointed at a girl and said she does not know me yet but we will one day be married. I saw him years later and asked about the girl, he had in fact married her.
4. Even after I was born again I had an issue that troubled me so much I would turn off the tv and spend hour on my knees praying about it. Several times while doing this I felt a strong urge to turn on the TV. I thought it odd but was so exhausted with prayer I gave up and did it. Both time the same preacher just happen to be on and preaching about the exact subject that was troubling me. Yet I am stubborn. Driving down the highway I got so frustrated that I pulled into a Christian book store and prayed. I said God I am going to ask the first employee I see to give me what they thought the best book on the subject they had was. When I asked she lit up and said she knew of a good one. It was by the same preacher and on the same subject.
5. One time I did something that was causing me a lot of guilt. I was drying a dish and asking for forgiveness. The next thing I know I am in the floor of the kitchen in perfect contentment. I was lying in my dirty kitchen floor with no will to stand up and in perfect communion with God.

Now I can add thousands of stories like this that go way beyond a feeling and happened to me or other people that I or many trusted others observed but this post is going to too long as is.

Furthermore your persinal theological definition of free will is just an opinion and reflects a misunderstanding of my position which is that most of the time we don't have the ability to make a free choice. You also presume a naive idea of consciousness that it is a single continuous static entity that makes decisions throughout a lifetime. and you presume that you not only know that free will exists but also that you know how God has determined the parameters of free will and you presume that most of the time we have free will over our feelings. I rejwct that assunption amd would hypothesize thay in mpst people the feelings determine the actions a person takes. Consider alcoholism for instance--a persins free will is obviously overriden with strong feelings and force that person to drink. Rage also makes people lose their free will. Same with love. My point was that most of the time we don't have that free will as you define it.

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No it is not. You can find what I will paraphrase in theological textbooks. It is the will to choose what is desired and logically consistent. It is not a loss of freewill for God not to chose to be evil, or to not choose to be able to make a square circle, because they are logically contradictory.

I think your making a mistake now, in another way. Instead of suggesting freewill is that ability to actualize sovereignty over circumstance, and now your claiming the freewill is only free if uninfluenced. I may have a Roman axe over my neck but I can still freely chose not to sign the paper agreeing that Caesar is God. In fact there is a letter from Pontius's successor that says if you do not change the policy of agreeing that Caesar is God or death in Palestine there will shortly be no one to rule over in that region. Freewill is still free even if influenced or even coerced.

Freewill does not imply insulation from influence. It merely implies the freedom to overcome influence.

We follow a variety of statistical patterns which is why statistics works in the first place and what we believe and the decisions we make depends on pre generated thoughts, feelings, as well as the culture and Era were born into. I am not talking about absolute sovereignty whatsoever and you didn't get the point which is that the place and time we are born determines many of our actions because society profoundly influences our feelings and thoughts. And finally you claim to know that God short circuits free will--you have so many sources of knowledge that are denied to me. It seems like you should be a prophet since you claim to know the mind of God as well as which interpretations of Christian doctrine are correct. You're basing all of this on some arbitrary feeling. IF you accept your random feeling you also have to accept the feelings of the Islamic suicide bomber or the feelings and experiences of the Christian lady who drowned her children because she had a vision and feeling from jesus.

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I do agree that many factors go into the choices we make. What I do not agree with is that any one of them, or a combination of all of them ever makes it where I can choose differently. How many Muslims raised in the strictest Wasabi traditions have left to become Christians, Ravi Zacharias came from a quasi-shaman class in Hindu India and yet now it probably the most beloved Christian apologist on earth. I can't think of any set of circumstances where someone chose to make the hard choice. I can think of dozens of famous Christians who began life a street thugs and drug pushers, filled with hate. Read George Forman's of Johnny Cash's biography or some of the Muslims who forsook their own family, country, and faith the become Christians, or just take the apostles they knew without a doughty whether Christ rose from the dead or not. The explanation they knew it to be true is the only explanation that satisfies their motive for denying family, their own country, their own religion, and the wrath of one of the most efficient and cruel empires on earth. If they did not whole heartedly believe what they preached their is no other motivation that can be found. Look at Paul for spiritual events resulting in material change. He was on a road to kill and detain as many Christians as possible and arrive completely convinced those he had persecuted were right all along.

But also if you watch Craigs debate against Chris Hitchens Richard Dawkins etc then you will find that many of your arguments resemble his. Furthermore you haven't shown why God would have an objective morality. God made evil and clearly needs it according to your Christian doctrine, so if anything God is neutral and has no particular morality, which is especially true as demonstrated by the old testament where genocide is the norm. He needs evil because otherwise we couldn't choose between good and evil. I see no reason to assume that God needs or cares about morality. You keep telling God about how he gets is morality and what he is. Stop telling God what to do and how to be. And you presume that God can't change his morality--you imply that he is locked in to a particular morality and has no free will.

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I have seen them all but the formula I put my response in is (to my knowledge ) only used by Zacharias. IF you are merely talking about similarities it is because we are al talking about the same thing. I can find similar arguments from Greek and Roman times. The idea that if objective moral duties exist men could not possibly have created them is very very old and without any counter argument. The only alternative is to do what most professional atheists have done and give up on the idea that any actual rights or wrongs exist. I will give you an example. The philosopher of science Michael Ruse sincerely puts it:

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God's will ...In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding... Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place."
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/nave-html/faithpathh/ruse.html
Once you deny God's existence the best you can do is ethics and since ethics comes from people as flawed as we are, it would be juts a flawed.

To say that murder is wrong because you know own gods morality requires so much proof from you. Murder may be right in some circumstances. You suggest that God is this simple entity who has no exceptions to his rules. Is it wrong for a tribe who doesn't know gods morality to murder another tribe since there isn't enough food for both of them? False assumption. Is it wrong to murder one person premptively to save a school bus of children? Is the psychopath wrong evenumber though God allowed his existence? Was the entire old testament wrong where genocide occurs? Who are you to say that all of the murdering in the old testament commanded by God is wrong? You're not a moral authority. You dont speak for God or speak for his morality. You don't know gods nature and your feelings are not a basis whatsoever. The muslim terrorist might say that some murder is justified in the name of Allah. It all just depends on your subjective interpretation. It's called moral relativism and you are subject to it as well as everyone else. Even if objective moraliry exists you can't know what it is because who are you to say for instance that all the crusaders or other Christian fundamentalists were wrong. You can justify any morality using the bible.

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To say that murder is actually wrong requires an impossibility given your world view. Your world view does not even contain the objective categories of goo and evil. Whatever fault you find with the epistemological efforts required given God to define morality they became incomprehensibly worse without him. Without God there exists no actual objective right or wrong to be, and no objective law to distinguish between them. Without him it is your opinion versus Hitler's and no transcendent fact of the matter to dictate which is right. This results in and will always result in might makes right.

For me to believe murder is wrong merely requires:
1. I have a book written of God that I can have reusable faith in.
2. A conscience which is consistent with the moral principles in that book.
3. At least a few accurately reported events of God's judgment on those who murder.
4. I should also expect to find this moral duty to be generally shared by mankind.
5. A logical agreement with the moral principle.

I may lack perfect certainty in my world view, yours lacks everything but opinion and preference.

Let me explain away what your argument was, in essence.
Murder did not become wrong when God gave Moses the ten commandments.
God has encoded the idea that murder is wrong in virtually all human hearts.
The ten commandments served only to validate our intuitions and ground them in
the only possible source that would make them objectively true.[/quote][/quote]

JoStories said:

If what you state here is what you truly believe, then free will is not free will at all and your faith seems to be built on sand. If God can 'short circuit' free will, it was not free will to begin with. It was coercion. Either do this or else, and perhaps the else no matter what.

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I said I allow that this may have occurred. In fact in the entire bible I know of only one instance where it may have and it was not about salvation and occurred very briefly. I believe that virtually everyone is left with their freewill in tact with no exceptions worth mentioning. In the 750,000 words of the Bible the phrase and so God hardened pharaoh's heart is not exact grounds for denying that we have freewill, or at least way more than enough of it to freely choose God. One exception (or in the volumes were talking about billions of exceptions) do not cancel the rule. In my whole life, all the books I have read, and all the people I have known Pharaoh is the one "possible" exception to our ability to freely accept or deny God. Even Pharaoh's experience was not about accepting or denying God, it was merely the actions he took because he denied God, and even then for one or two actions over a few days. It's like you saw Michael Jordan miss a shot, got up, and went to get a refund because there is no such thing as a good basket ball player.

JoStories said:

I know Craig very well and know his moral arguments very well. To my knowledge he has never put his arguments into the formula I provided. The person I got that chain of necessity from is Ravi Zacharias. Between them they have about 6 earned degrees and at least 4 honorary degrees your going to have to invent one heck of an argument to persuade me they are wrong. I have been almost obsess3ed with professional theistic debates and out of hundred only one Atheist said that both objective morality exists and that God does not. When Sam Harris did this Craig backed him into a corner and he admitted he merely assumed they do. This from the side that accuses the other having faith based conclusions.


You agree with this person owing to a number of degrees, whether earned or honorific, yet you don't respect my opinion on any matters, despite that I have more degrees than that. It would then seem to me your acceptance is biased at best. It aligns with your POV so you accept them as factual while you dismiss others with as much knowledge. Why is that?

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You formatted this in such a weird way I just happen to see it. I do not agree with Craig, Zacharias, Newton, Galileo, Da Vinci, etc...... Or anyone else based on their degrees or merely the appeal of their argument to my wishes. In fact I disagree with them in a few areas where I wish they were right I in fact now hold a world view that I despised through the 80's and most 0f the 90's. However the argument (where I merely borrowed the formula from a scholar) is not a theory it is a conditional necessity. You cannot deny it's conclusion even if everyone with a degree attempted to given it's premise no more than you could deny the opposite of it's conclusion if you could disprove it's premise. Your basically telling me the only reason I believe two plus two = four is because my teacher a BS and MS degrees. On this issue there is no escape other than the conclusions they reached.

1. If God exists (in their case a moral, creative, personal ) God exists. The biblical God.
2. Then objective moral values and duties exist.

1. If that type of God does not exist.
2. Then objective moral values and duties do not exist.

Now those with degrees come down on both sides, but they both follow the conclusion of the premise they chose. I admire and quote Michael Ruse who honestly admits morality is an illusion without God, just as I quote Zacharias who suggests the almost universal apprehension of objective morality requires God. The only argument is which premise is true, the conclusions follow necessarily. I do not know what you find objectionable about this. It is one of the simplest and most necessary conditional necessities I can think of. It's like philosophical kindergarten.

BTW it is almost a certainty you do not have as many relevant degrees as either of them. However even if you did you have never mentioned them nor shown the level of competence in the relevant fields as to hint at that level of education. You debate like an intelligent person slightly familiar with theology. You do not debate at the level of a PhD or even a masters as best I can tell in the matters we have discussed. If you do not know worshipping the Sun is something almost no Christian does, or know that it is forbidden, and you cannot understand what is required for objective values and duties to exist then no one is going to assume you have several degrees in theology and philosophy. Despite this I have listened to you. You have made very few arguments. You have mostly just blurred a clear image a little, to which a smoothed back out.

1robin said:

It is not finishing a puzzle a finding a piece missing so you get one from another puzzle and hammer it in until it fits. It is finding you missing piece but remember one you though might have fallen out of the box and finding it fits right in. My argument if not an if X then Y in this case. It is an if X then Y is the best explanation. God is by far the explanation of the uncaused first cause, which stands outside time, powerful enough, intelligent enough, moral enough, personal enough, etc...... to fit in the hole where there is a missing piece for thousands of puzzles. Since you did not mention a counter argument but tries to magically sweep my answer under the carpet there is nothing to consider right or wrong.

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However good an explanation that might seem, it holds no water unless there is good evidence that it is true. The actual case might be something quite different altogether.

What is your evidence?

The Sum of Awe said:

If God(s) you believe in are personal and loving exists, and of course so do events of extraordinary tragedies in human history, regardless of 'why' God(s) allowed these things to occurred - whether they aren't powerful enough to prevent it, to the more popular reason that it'd disrupt freewill which they don't want to do, any sort of reason you can think of for them not doing anything about preventing it, how can they be trusted to take the wheel of your life? or to pray to for guidance or protection?

The fact such incidents happened at least once in history (again, for WHATEVER reason the god(s) allowed them to occur) means there's a chance it'll happen again, that the god(s) you believe in will not prevent it from happening again. So why trust them?


Just to note, my personal answer to this question is I don't expect God is a loving God, but the sum of all characteristics everpresent in the universe. So this question of course doesn't apply to any theological concepts that aren't exactly trustworthy.

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Why would anyone assume that God would protect people from the vicissitudes of life when the people themselves do not behave in such a way that their actions do not invite calamity? Shall God protect when His commandments are not kept? If anyone wishes to know how God interacts with His children on earth, all they have to do is read the Old Testament. When the Children of Israel were obedient, they had God's protection. When they broke God's laws, God withdrew His protection and they were left to their own resources. Leviticus chapter 26 lays it out quite clearly.

The children want to rebel and get into all kinds of mischief and when things go wrong, they want daddy to protect them. It doesn't work that way. You can stamp your feet all you want and rage, saying that it should work that way, but God will not hear you until you repent.

One thing to remember: This life is not all there is. This life is not our natural state. We are only here temporarily to be tested. If we are obedient to God and keep His commandments, our sojourn in mortality can benefit us with much learning and experience. Conversely, God can decide that you failed the test and say, ok, that's enough for you; you're done, and take you outa here.

Looncall said:

However good an explanation that might seem, it holds no water unless there is good evidence that it is true. The actual case might be something quite different altogether.

What is your evidence?

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Looncall entire libraries contain volumes of texts full of rational reasons to believe in God. Even if I wanted to simply list my best reasons it would take post after post.

Your misstating the burden of faith to begin with. The burden of faith is only that it lack a defeater. However I think that too lopsided and not worth debating so I raise my standards to best explanation. While I cannot even touch upon the full measure of why I think God exists, let me give you a few of the most interesting. These are not my best reasons but they are some I find interesting.

How did Iron and Bronze age men get cause and effect, and cosmology right even when Einstein got it wrong and others are still getting it wrong.

A. Their was no Hebrew philosophy to speak of 4000 years ago. Yet they somehow knew.
1. That effects can describe causes and that they require them.
2. That the universe began to exist. Not just that but that time, matter, and space began to exist together. Which the most dominant models in cosmology agree with.
3. Then they managed to describe a being which had every attribute necessary to create the effect. Before Ptolemy thought the universe revolved around us the Hebrews knew all that stuff. How?

B. There was no Hebrew medical universities 4000 years ago.
1. How did they practice sanitation in a way that if we in 1860 would have been practicing tens of thousands would have lived instead of dying because of scientific ignorance.
2. How did they know that leprosy was caused by things outside the body and was not hereditary as we only in modern times discovered.
3. Etc.........ad nausea.

C. The majority of NT historians regardless of faith agree to at least 4 among many historical probabilities.
1. Jesus appeared in history with an unprecedented source of divine authority.
2. That he was killed by crucifixion.
3. That his tomb was found empty.
4. That even his enemies recoded meeting him post mortem.
5. That he was baptized by John.
6. That he practiced the type of ministry referred to as exorcism.

D. Why did those that knew the fact (whether lie or true) betray everything to preach a message they already knew they would suffer greatly for, alienate family, anger their own theologians, and incur the wrath of the most powerful empire on earth, and not gain any earthly profit worth mentioning or even try to.

Multiply these by at least a thousand, then add in my personal experiences which have no natural explanation and you would have a good start on why I believe. Multiply all that by a thousand and you would have a good idea why faith is reasonable in general.

It's time to go home or I would have included the volumes of material that would counter any argument you could make against the little evidence I gave, but I could with almost perfect accuracy guess how your going to try and diminish the little I listed and only time prevents me from those attempts at dismissal.
At least a semester long class could be taught on the details and ramification of each line I gave as evidence above.

1robin said:

No mainstream doctrine? In one council Constantine invited 1800 bishops to decide one of the most fundamental doctrines in Christianity, it had merely two nay's. I once read that 90% of denominations agree on 90% of doctrine. However the bible makes it's central points fairly clear. Which are you challenging? You say it is meaningless to go from feeling to conclusion. Then why do we do so in most of the important matters in our lives. We rarely marry people we don't care about.

You were referring to salvation concerning feeling to conclusion I believe so let me give you some details that render that statement null.

1. Salvation as well as being a feeling can contain other things.
2. For me I had a couple of habits I had spent years trying without any success to stop. When I was born again I lost all desire what so ever for those habits. No withdrawn, no struggle, just gone.
3. I met a born again preacher was an ex drug dealer. One day we were walking through the airport. He stopped dead in his tracks. He pointed at a girl and said she does not know me yet but we will one day be married. I saw him years later and asked about the girl, he had in fact married her.
4. Even after I was born again I had an issue that troubled me so much I would turn off the tv and spend hour on my knees praying about it. Several times while doing this I felt a strong urge to turn on the TV. I thought it odd but was so exhausted with prayer I gave up and did it. Both time the same preacher just happen to be on and preaching about the exact subject that was troubling me. Yet I am stubborn. Driving down the highway I got so frustrated that I pulled into a Christian book store and prayed. I said God I am going to ask the first employee I see to give me what they thought the best book on the subject they had was. When I asked she lit up and said she knew of a good one. It was by the same preacher and on the same subject.
5. One time I did something that was causing me a lot of guilt. I was drying a dish and asking for forgiveness. The next thing I know I am in the floor of the kitchen in perfect contentment. I was lying in my dirty kitchen floor with no will to stand up and in perfect communion with God.

Now I can add thousands of stories like this that go way beyond a feeling and happened to me or other people that I or many trusted others observed but this post is going to too long as is.

No it is not. You can find what I will paraphrase in theological textbooks. It is the will to choose what is desired and logically consistent. It is not a loss of freewill for God not to chose to be evil, or to not choose to be able to make a square circle, because they are logically contradictory.

I think your making a mistake now, in another way. Instead of suggesting freewill is that ability to actualize sovereignty over circumstance, and now your claiming the freewill is only free if uninfluenced. I may have a Roman axe over my neck but I can still freely chose not to sign the paper agreeing that Caesar is God. In fact there is a letter from Pontius's successor that says if you do not change the policy of agreeing that Caesar is God or death in Palestine there will shortly be no one to rule over in that region. Freewill is still free even if influenced or even coerced.

Freewill does not imply insulation from influence. It merely implies the freedom to overcome influence.

I do agree that many factors go into the choices we make. What I do not agree with is that any one of them, or a combination of all of them ever makes it where I can choose differently. How many Muslims raised in the strictest Wasabi traditions have left to become Christians, Ravi Zacharias came from a quasi-shaman class in Hindu India and yet now it probably the most beloved Christian apologist on earth. I can't think of any set of circumstances where someone chose to make the hard choice. I can think of dozens of famous Christians who began life a street thugs and drug pushers, filled with hate. Read George Forman's of Johnny Cash's biography or some of the Muslims who forsook their own family, country, and faith the become Christians, or just take the apostles they knew without a doughty whether Christ rose from the dead or not. The explanation they knew it to be true is the only explanation that satisfies their motive for denying family, their own country, their own religion, and the wrath of one of the most efficient and cruel empires on earth. If they did not whole heartedly believe what they preached their is no other motivation that can be found. Look at Paul for spiritual events resulting in material change. He was on a road to kill and detain as many Christians as possible and arrive completely convinced those he had persecuted were right all along.


I have seen them all but the formula I put my response in is (to my knowledge ) only used by Zacharias. IF you are merely talking about similarities it is because we are al talking about the same thing. I can find similar arguments from Greek and Roman times. The idea that if objective moral duties exist men could not possibly have created them is very very old and without any counter argument. The only alternative is to do what most professional atheists have done and give up on the idea that any actual rights or wrongs exist. I will give you an example. The philosopher of science Michael Ruse sincerely puts it:

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God's will ...In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding... Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place."
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/nave-html/faithpathh/ruse.html
Once you deny God's existence the best you can do is ethics and since ethics comes from people as flawed as we are, it would be juts a flawed.


To say that murder is actually wrong requires an impossibility given your world view. Your world view does not even contain the objective categories of goo and evil. Whatever fault you find with the epistemological efforts required given God to define morality they became incomprehensibly worse without him. Without God there exists no actual objective right or wrong to be, and no objective law to distinguish between them. Without him it is your opinion versus Hitler's and no transcendent fact of the matter to dictate which is right. This results in and will always result in might makes right.

For me to believe murder is wrong merely requires:
1. I have a book written of God that I can have reusable faith in.
2. A conscience which is consistent with the moral principles in that book.
3. At least a few accurately reported events of God's judgment on those who murder.
4. I should also expect to find this moral duty to be generally shared by mankind.
5. A logical agreement with the moral principle.

I may lack perfect certainty in my world view, yours lacks everything but opinion and preference.

Let me explain away what your argument was, in essence.
Murder did not become wrong when God gave Moses the ten commandments.
God has encoded the idea that murder is wrong in virtually all human hearts.
The ten commandments served only to validate our intuitions and ground them in
the only possible source that would make them objectively true.

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[/quote][/QUOTE]

In one council Constantine invited 1800 bishops to decide one of the most fundamental doctrines in Christianity, it had merely two nay's. I once read that 90% of denominations agree on 90% of doctrine. However the bible makes it's central points fairly clear. Which are you challenging? You say it is meaningless to go from feeling to conclusion. Then why do we do so in most of the important matters in our lives. We rarely marry people we don't care about.

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I may lack perfect certainty in my world view, yours lacks everything but opinion and preference.

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First of all I used to be a Christian since I was brought up in the faith. I think you're mostly unaware of my opinions and preferences. As my mental faculties developed, I realized that so many faiths and different interpretations made picking the correct religion impossible essentially. Who was I to say that the muslims were wrong, or that the protestants were wrong, or that the Native American animists and druids were wrong? all these people have had numerous experiences and visions. How can we possibly know which particular interpretation and faith is correct? There is no way to know for sure whatsoever. Its all up in the air. Unless God actually announces to the world what the correct interpretation is, we simply do not have the ability to know what is the correct religion. Further if God did care about our belief, he could easily have convinced us. He has the power to unambiguously show us the correct morality and the correct beliefs. It also doesn't make sense that God would provide evidence to bronze and iron age peasants in the form of various miracles and a supernatural savior whilst we're supposed to take an ancient book and everything else on faith. Those initial people and disciples received an abundant amount of evidence throughout the bible--so did people like Abraham and Isaac. Its simply inconsistent--God should be, at the minimum, providing us equivalent evidence if not more since he gave us the ability to develop the scientific method. Its clear that he doesn't care about our beliefs.

I actually take the least arrogant and the position requiring the least evidence. It is the most reasonable by far--i am what I call the agnostic, agnostic. This means I'm an agnostic who is agnostic about the probabilities of God's existence or the truth of any particular religion. Rather, I don't claim to know the probabilities of God or even have the ability to say what they could possibly be or what his characteristics are.

If you lack certainty in your world view, then you're closer to an agnostic than you are a christian. I mean the bible demands that you have certain faith in Christ and his salvation. You have doubt which means you're not really a true christian in my submission. Well that's another interpretation at least that many people abide by. I think that if you're not certain about your faith than you may as well just accept that you're an agnostic.

Sorry but this is just wrong, especially today. Consider the issue of homosexuality, or stem cell research, or abortion, or condoms, or GMO foods, or thousands of other issues that easily are subject to a variety of christian interpretations. Furthermore look at all the different Christian sects. Some think that the pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth whereas others reject that entirely. I mean you only have to look at the different sects of Christians to know that there are obviously stark differences in interpretations. I'd like to see your evidence that says that 90% of Christians share mostly the same interpretations. Some believe that most of the stories are metaphorical for instance, whilst many believe that young earth creationism is true and evolution is false. I mean you must be joking when you say most christians are in alignment. You seem quite knowledgable about Christianity and yet you don't know about the vast, vast differences in interpretations. This is also partly due to the vast number of contradictory statements in the bible since it the canon was constructed by gospels and such which were compatible with the socioeconomic political cultural aspects of the time.

Almost all bible scholars and historians recognize that a variety of different humans wrote various gospels and scriptures which were added to the bible. Various filters were then added and the bible came about as a conglomeration that depended on a variety of factors like politics at the time and the opinions of the religious leaders. You make it sound like God wrote this book and that was that. Nope. It was much more complicated than that and developed over the course of many years. Furthermore, how can you then say, based on all of this, that the bible was written by God? Clearly it was written by men.

The division of opinion over the canon was not over the core, but over the "fringe",[15] and from the fourth century, there existed unanimity in the West concerning the New Testament canon (as it is today),[16] and by the fifth century the East, with a few exceptions, had come to accept the Book of Revelation and thus had come into harmony on the matter of the canon, at least for the New Testament.[17]

This period marks the beginning of a more widely recognized canon, although the inclusion of some books was still debated: Epistle to Hebrews, James, 2 John, 3 John, 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation. Grounds for debate included the question of authorship of these books (note that the so-called Damasian "Council at Rome" had already rejected John the Apostle's authorship of 2 and 3 John, while retaining the books), their suitability for use (Revelation at that time was already being interpreted in a wide variety of heretical ways), and how widely they were actually being used (2 Peter being amongst the most weakly attested of all the books in the Christian canon).

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Now I can add thousands of stories like this that go way beyond a feeling and happened to me or other people that I or many trusted others observed but this post is going to too long as is.

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Like I said, things these coincidences as well as feelings do not suggest whatever that you know the mind of God etc. Its simply a non sequitor. For all you know it could be allah who's trying to communicate to you to switch over or something entirely different, which although unlikely is possible, like an alien intelligence from another solar system who's doing an experience. And that would explain alien abduction experiences as well!

What you're doing reflects type 1A thinking errors mainly. THis occurs when you presume an intelligence is at work when there is no evidence that such an entity or intelligence is actually doing anything. It is entirely possible that these events could happen to you in a universe devoid of an intervening God. WHen you start looking for patterns and evidence you'll necessarily find certain things which fit the pattern. Think about how many times when you haven't had these coincidences or feelings. Because you're attuned to things which support Christianity though, you remember all the instances which support Christianity. Its known psychologically as the confirmation bias. I would be more amazed if there werent any coincidences because there are so many different events which have occurred in your life. I

To say that murder is actually wrong requires an impossibility given your world view. Your world view does not even contain the objective categories of goo and evil. Whatever fault you find with the epistemological efforts required given God to define morality they became incomprehensibly worse without him.

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How does it require an impossibility? I have no need for objective morality. I know that society needs an effective morality in order to function. Murder is wrong because our society wouldn't work without it. I wouldn't want to live in a society where murder, theft, etc was acceptable. I couldn't live the life I enjoy now. It would be an awful kind of survival of the fittest world. Utilitarianism can be a basis for morality--what works best for societies. You cannot know if objective morality exists regardless though, or if you're actually following the correct objective morality. Morality changes and adapts all the time so what are the odds that you're actually following the objective morality that God aligns with?

For me to believe murder is wrong merely requires:
1. I have a book written of God that I can have reusable faith in.
2. A conscience which is consistent with the moral principles in that book.
3. At least a few accurately reported events of God's judgment on those who murder.
4. I should also expect to find this moral duty to be generally shared by mankind.
5. A logical agreement with the moral principle.

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1. The book has an inconsistent morality that often justifies genocide and slavery and the stoning of homosexuals and human sacrifice. Morality today depends on secular decisions based on utilitarianism which is a much more functional and pleasant morality.
2. Many people do not ahve a conscience.
3. I don't agree.
4. It often isn't and depends on the culture and time period. Many cultures like the Aztecs thought the God's wanted murder and human sacrifices--some cultures can justify murder. They have no inherent way of knowing they're wrong.
5. How so?