Jacob Samuelson
Active Member
Here is a very common question that I believe is used in various scenarios both introspectively and from the outside.
Faith is subjective therefore mostly rejected by the scientific community. Someone outside that particular faith will ask the question in different ways.
How do you know your religion is correct? How do you know God answered your prayer? How do you know the Scriptures say this? How do you know your not brainwashed into believing this? How do you know Satan didn't come to you? Where's the evidence?
All of these question has been asked to most if not all theists at least once in their lives and to retain our faith we must have an answer to each and everyone of them.
My faith in particular is not only of interest to Atheists but also to many Christian Faiths as it is directly founded mostly on a testimony of a singular man prophet in the early 1800's who claimed to have witnessed God firsthand and organized scripture and a church because of it.
Because the claims are hard to swallow in a modern scientific world, everyone who skeptical to them, find them asking the questions above as a means to rhetorically discredit any possibility of whether the claims could be true or not.
I am most interested in this question, If you read the scriptures and feel it is true and someone else reads the same scriptures and feel that it is not true, how can you determine what is true?
The context being that God has promised those who read and ask in faith will know the truthfulness of the scriptures by his Spirit.
If the Spirit says to another Christian it is false, is it Him or the Spirit that deems it so. Visa Versa.
As a believer, you are taught in scripture to always follow God and listen to the prompting of the Holy Ghost, which was given to us when Jesus left the Earth. The Holy Ghost and Faith in Christ were to be our guide and companion since then.
So to a believer it isn't wrong to follow what you believe God is telling you to do. We also know that God will never tell you to do evil, but only good.
Non-believers will find this to be a recipe for disaster, because now it opens the door for a believer to use God as an excuse for any action they perform whether, to them, it is evil or not. Subjective reasoning at its best.
Thinking about this a lot, I have come up with a way for me to determine the difference between whether God wills this action or whether that person wills it.
We must understand the difference between these two clauses: 1. I feel therefore I do. 2. I do so that I can feel.
For me if I can determine whether the action precedes the feeling or visa versa, I can better determine whether if this feeling comes from God or not.
Example: 1. I feel like I need to go for a jog everyday therefore I jog every day. 2. I go for a jog everyday so that I can feel good about myself.
The first example indicates that you know jogging is a good thing and therefore 'something' is telling you to jog more.
The second example indicates that you care less if jogging is good or not, you only care that it makes you feel good and so you do it.
Think of the examples where you feel people have made the excuse that God told them to do it. Do those examples work for scenario one or two?
. .
Faith is subjective therefore mostly rejected by the scientific community. Someone outside that particular faith will ask the question in different ways.
How do you know your religion is correct? How do you know God answered your prayer? How do you know the Scriptures say this? How do you know your not brainwashed into believing this? How do you know Satan didn't come to you? Where's the evidence?
All of these question has been asked to most if not all theists at least once in their lives and to retain our faith we must have an answer to each and everyone of them.
My faith in particular is not only of interest to Atheists but also to many Christian Faiths as it is directly founded mostly on a testimony of a singular man prophet in the early 1800's who claimed to have witnessed God firsthand and organized scripture and a church because of it.
Because the claims are hard to swallow in a modern scientific world, everyone who skeptical to them, find them asking the questions above as a means to rhetorically discredit any possibility of whether the claims could be true or not.
I am most interested in this question, If you read the scriptures and feel it is true and someone else reads the same scriptures and feel that it is not true, how can you determine what is true?
The context being that God has promised those who read and ask in faith will know the truthfulness of the scriptures by his Spirit.
If the Spirit says to another Christian it is false, is it Him or the Spirit that deems it so. Visa Versa.
As a believer, you are taught in scripture to always follow God and listen to the prompting of the Holy Ghost, which was given to us when Jesus left the Earth. The Holy Ghost and Faith in Christ were to be our guide and companion since then.
So to a believer it isn't wrong to follow what you believe God is telling you to do. We also know that God will never tell you to do evil, but only good.
Non-believers will find this to be a recipe for disaster, because now it opens the door for a believer to use God as an excuse for any action they perform whether, to them, it is evil or not. Subjective reasoning at its best.
Thinking about this a lot, I have come up with a way for me to determine the difference between whether God wills this action or whether that person wills it.
We must understand the difference between these two clauses: 1. I feel therefore I do. 2. I do so that I can feel.
For me if I can determine whether the action precedes the feeling or visa versa, I can better determine whether if this feeling comes from God or not.
Example: 1. I feel like I need to go for a jog everyday therefore I jog every day. 2. I go for a jog everyday so that I can feel good about myself.
The first example indicates that you know jogging is a good thing and therefore 'something' is telling you to jog more.
The second example indicates that you care less if jogging is good or not, you only care that it makes you feel good and so you do it.
Think of the examples where you feel people have made the excuse that God told them to do it. Do those examples work for scenario one or two?
. .