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Why Didn't God Leave Huge Quantities of Secular Evidence For Jesus?

S

Skywalker

Well-Known Member
sojourner said:
1) You’re not citing the source. This could be anything.
2) The provided evidence does not speak to the other scriptural references to an imminent Parousia.
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In John 21:22 Jesus told Peter about John if I want him to live until I come, what is that to you? He wasn't talking about an imminent second coming.
 
sojourner

sojourner

Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Skywalker said:
In John 21:22 Jesus told Peter about John if I want him to live until I come, what is that to you? He wasn't talking about an imminent second coming.
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You still haven’t cited your source. Now you’re onto a different passage, that is not cogent to the argument.

You might try reading some Paul.
 
S

Skywalker

Well-Known Member
sojourner said:
1) You’re not citing the source. This could be anything.
2) The provided evidence does not speak to the other scriptural references to an imminent Parousia.
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The verse is about the transfiguration and the spread of the gospel, not the Millennium Kingdom. This is based off of common interpretations of the text.
 
S

Skywalker

Well-Known Member
sojourner said:
The issue at hand regards the biblical evidence that the writers thought the Parousia was imminent, hence no reason to leave a lot of proof of God; God was to be revealed fully shortly. The poster’s interpretations of the provided passage are not cogent for two reasons: 1) the interpretation is not valid, not being based in an exegesis of that passage, and 2) the interpretation does not pertain to other passages that point to a belief in an imminent Parousia.
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the second coming was not described as imminent, because there is more to the kingdom of God than the second coming.
 
S

Skywalker

Well-Known Member
S

Skywalker

Well-Known Member
sojourner said:
None of this addresses the belief in an imminent parousia.
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It refutes the belief that Jesus was talking about the second coming when he said that the people around him won't die until they see Jesus coming in his kingdom. I believe that Jesus was talking about the Transfiguration.
 
Subduction Zone

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
Skywalker said:
It refutes the belief that Jesus was talking about the second coming when he said that the people around him won't die until they see Jesus coming in his kingdom. I believe that Jesus was talking about the Transfiguration.
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A poor handwaving ad hoc explanation is not a refutation. You can't just say "well this interpretation seems to work". One must look at the context of the speech and that does not appear to be the case.
 
Bird123

Bird123

Well-Known Member
SeekingAllTruth said:
Accepting and believing is done on blind faith without a need for evidence. I believe that's why the church invented the doctrine of "believing without seeing" (trusting on no evidence).
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Yes, I agree. This also changes people in all areas of life. People are accepting and believing in all areas instead of searching and Discovering answers. Many totally depend on others for any knowledge that could enter their lives thus limiting one's capabilities.

Truth and knowledge will not always be an agreeable thing one can like and accept. How much is lost on that journey. Further, since accepting and believing has been taught from a very young age, it might take many a lifetime to overcome this.

Those that see must shine a light in their eyes at every opportunity. After all, it is never really fun being blind.

That's what I see. It's very clear!!
 
S

Skywalker

Well-Known Member
Audie said:
I have seen it.
You can feel it. You have to breathe it.
You can analyze it, do chemistry with it.

Your "god" has all the characteristics of a big fat nothing.
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We see God's creation all around us. The heavens declare the glory of God. We breathe the air from the plants. Scientists study God's creation. God created science.
 
S

Skywalker

Well-Known Member
Audie said:
Vacuous assertions.
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There have been situations of theists who studied the details of creation seeing God in the creation. When you look outside the window, you see the heavens declare the glory of God. Atheism Was An “Error”: English Professor & Atheist Mark Bauerlein Converts to Christianity | Reasons for Jesus

Atheism Was An “Error”: English Professor & Atheist Mark Bauerlein Converts to
Christianity
By
James Bishop
-
March 8, 2017
74352
By James Bishop| Mark Bauerlein is an English professor at Emory University, Atlanta, USA, and is the senior editor of First Things journal (1). He also serves, in addition, as a Visitor of Ralston College which is a new liberal arts college in Savannah.

Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and The Times Literary Supplement (2).

His latest book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future was published in May 2008. He recently co-edited a collection of essays entitled The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism published in 2015.

In his 30 years as a professor “of graduate seminars, academic conferences, committee meetings, lunches and dinners, and conversations short and long,” Bauerlein explains that he has “heard God mentioned rarely, and when he is mentioned he is never talked of in a way that assumes his reality.”

This didn’t bug him much at the time for he was himself an atheist who did not believe in God, “God was gone, utterly, and so was all spirit and meaning and moral value. If anybody had passed at that moment and casually remarked upon the morning with the slightest hint that it had a moral or metaphysical meaning, I would have answered, “That’s a lie.”” (3)

Bauerlein felt that his atheism was never out of place in the academic world, “Never did I feel out of place in my unbelief, and so, as the semesters passed, the roguish aspect of my atheism diminished. No more shock over the fact of mortality and no more self-promotion into an elite band of thinkers and seers, just an occasional shiver when alone and undistracted, plus a routine conviction that I was more educated and clear-sighted than ordinary people.”

Though Bauerlein was comfortable in his atheism, and certainly as an atheist who viewed religious belief as a delusion, he didn’t possess the vitriolic anti-religious mindset that some fellow atheists did, “I never regarded religion as evil or sought to disabuse the faithful.”

However, if he felt his atheism was challenged from a Christian it would still “easily spark a contemptuous response. I might admire the conviction of the believer and the good deeds of the church, and crisis-of-faith stories still had their appeal, but faith lay on the other side of a mental wall.”

This was because as a comfortable atheist he “didn’t sense the existence of God, and so I couldn’t understand the motive for religious expression as anything but ideological or subjective… I couldn’t reify God or contemplate God, not even from a skeptical distance. God was just a token abstraction.”

But there was a moment in Bauerlein’s life in which he admits having hope in God. He would stare out of his window at night and pray to God for help but he felt nothing ever materialized in response to his prayers, “though he hadn’t done anything for me. From that day onward, his being didn’t matter.”

From that day forth Bauerlein, expecting tension within his closer circles, hid his atheism from his peers and family, “In the subsequent weeks I walked around in a daze. I didn’t tell anybody about it, not even my identical twin brother, but went through my routines as before. I had a truth in hand: God is gone, and indeed never was.”

As an atheist Bauerlein had a keen interest for history and before class he would go down to the library to pore over the “Great Books of the Western World.” This led him to some prolific writers and thinkers of the likes of Aristotle, Dante, Bacon, Shakespeare, Rousseau, and many others. However, he was particularly fond of two well-known writers, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom were atheists that vehemently opposed religion as well as belief in God,

“Most important to me was Freud—not his diagnosis of religious belief as an infantile longing but his list of defense mechanisms (sublimation, projection, reaction formation among them). They gave me tools to interpret every religious, altruistic, and in any way ideal assertion or action by others as merely a tactic of ego.”

These writers had convinced him at the time that “Moral and supernatural thoughts and words were just false and phony masks covering narcissism and fear. That believers would dress up their selfishness in grand and high-minded objects only worsened their dissembling. I laughed at the notion of a God who actually cared about me or anyone else. Against the prayers and hopes of the faithful I set a steely nihilism held with the ferocity of a late adolescent who has suddenly discovered the hypocrisy of his elders.”
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sojourner

sojourner

Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
Skywalker said:
It refutes the belief that Jesus was talking about the second coming when he said that the people around him won't die until they see Jesus coming in his kingdom. I believe that Jesus was talking about the Transfiguration.
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See post #390. You’ll need to show exegetical evidence that your interpretation has basis in fact.
 
SeekingAllTruth

SeekingAllTruth

Well-Known Member
Bird123 said:
Yes, I agree. This also changes people in all areas of life. People are accepting and believing in all areas instead of searching and Discovering answers. Many totally depend on others for any knowledge that could enter their lives thus limiting one's capabilities.

Truth and knowledge will not always be an agreeable thing one can like and accept. How much is lost on that journey. Further, since accepting and believing has been taught from a very young age, it might take many a lifetime to overcome this.

Those that see must shine a light in their eyes at every opportunity. After all, it is never really fun being blind.

That's what I see. It's very clear!!
Click to expand...
It angers me that the doctrine of blind faith is promoted so heavily in the Christian religion. I cannot decide if it was born of genuine belief in the merits of believing without seeing ("Because you have seen, Thomas you have believed. Blessed are they who haven't seen and yet have believed.") or if it was, as I believe, concocted as a way to get around the fact that there is no evidence for Jesus and so later churchmen had to invent it as a way of getting around this obvious inopportune reality. Whatever the reason, I came to a point where cynicism took over my life after seeing so much phoniness and deception in the world. It was at that point I knew I couldn't stay in the faith any longer and so I dropped out and became an agnostic deist.
 
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