What would you expect people to do if a real God sent a real Messenger to earth?

[YmirGF]

Leaps of faith in this day and age a thing of the past? Where have you been sleeping?

Oh, hush, you you.

To expand on my intent. What I am thinking is we have now had so many people claiming to be the "mouthpiece o' god" that we have become a teeny bit skeptical of such claims as virtually all have not withstood the test of time. Those who have managed to keep our interest are almost exclusively in the domain of faith as meaningful evidence remains scant to non-existent.

For someone new to come out of the blue and deliver a new message that was still the same old story would take an exceptional leap of faith due to the collective rubbish surrounding the idea that we are already hip deep in. What I am thinking is that for a new "Jesus class" personality to emerge would take extraordinary events to burst into public consciousness, let alone hold the public attention, for many, many years to come.

From another angle, how many people have arrived on RF who have claimed to be Jesus (or godlike) in the last 10 years. Oddly, none of them actually develop a following and I'd suggest there are good reasons for that.

 

[Al Ibn Al Amra]

Could Baha'ullah create a bird from dust , because according to Al Qur'aan Al A'zhiim : Al Nabi Al 'Iisa AS could create a bird from dust . Do you think that by doing so , that Al Nabi Al 'Iisa AS
become The Creator also ?

 

[Stevicus]

What if the Aliens motives were good for everyone in the Galaxy, except for us?
Let's face it, as a group, the Human Race is violently dysfunctional. What if the Aliens are acting out of self defense when they sterilize the Earth? The way we humans might put down a dangerous dog?
Tom

Well, I suppose they could assimilate us.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

What would you expect people to do if a real God sent a real Messenger to earth?

This is a hypothetical question and it is mostly directed at nonbelievers.
Believers can answer this too if they want to.

I have a specific reason for asking this but I want to leave it open-ended for now.

They would listen to and believe the messenger.

Any god worth his salt should be capable of being convincing.

 

[columbus]

They would listen to and believe the messenger.

Any god worth his salt should be capable of being convincing.

Suppose somebody showed up with a recipe for safe cold fusion and a 100% effective antiviral, and a way to detect earthquakes a year in advance.
I would go to their church and believe about anything that they told me about God.
But if all that they do is incorporate some more secular morality into the same old crap, not so much.
Tom

 

[Brickjectivity]

What would you expect people to do if a real God sent a real Messenger to earth?

This is a hypothetical question and it is mostly directed at nonbelievers.
Believers can answer this too if they want to.

I have a specific reason for asking this but I want to leave it open-ended for now.

This would be a bad time for that to happen. First, every major country, politician and religion would scrutinize any claimant. In fact it would only be reasonable to be refuse to accept the moral yoke of any self proclaimed deity. If they came claiming authority we must resist and would do so. To arrive in splendor and claim deity would be a pointless endeavor, for we are not capable of confirming identities. There would always be questions both about their identity and their morality and if not it would mean they had reduced us and made us back unto amoral animals.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Why send messengers anyway? Why wouldn't God just appear in the sky and start bellowing at everyone? Or why not just have the Moon or the Sun start talking?

Or have everyone just be born knowing whatever God wants us to know.

Any sort of intervention by God would imply that his creation is imperfect... and therefore that he's an imperfect creator.

While I dismiss most of deism as ridiculous, one valid point that the deists make is that a god whose creation keeps running fine by itself would be a more competent god than one who has to keep tweaking his creation to make it run properly.

Edit: IOW, any creator-god that needs to send messengers is at least a bit of a failure as a creator-god.

 

[Etritonakin]

All that may be so and may not but it is unrelated to why I spoke of
"projection".

For lo-this is the way of the creationist.

incessantly say that the burden of proof was on the messenger as the messenger explained every last detail of everything which collectively provided the complete evidence, and then say that no one piece of evidence was proof

I am technically not a creationIST
I actually find most of the things claimed by creationISTs to be false.
Furthermore, I am considering things -not telling scientists to believe things their rules will not allow.

I also don't understand your point -perhaps you could make it more clear?.

I was being a bit sarcastic -as complete evidence would be proof.
I understand that science cannot accept certain things until there is absolute scientific proof.
I am able to make decisions based on overwhelming evidence which is not yet absolutely complete -because I'm not just trying to be a scientist -but then I have experienced evidence which I personally cannot reproduce for another -and have sought things in which others have no interest.

 

[Trailblazer]

The problem would be in ascertaining the legitimacy of the claim. How would one arrive at accepting such claims as being genuine? It would almost have to be a leap of faith... and that is expecting a lot in this day and age.

Don’t you think there would be a lot of good evidence to help determine the legitimacy of the claim if a messenger was a “real messenger of God?

Don’t you think that a real God that wanted us to believe in His Messenger would send a Messenger with a lot of evidence to back up His claim?

Granted, we would still have to have “some faith” because nobody can actually prove a God spoke to a Messenger. But evidence and proof are not the same.

Evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid:

Proof: evidence or argument establishing or helping to establish a fact or the truth of a statement:

 

[Trailblazer]

Perhaps many would be inclined to put such a God on trial (via any messenger), or at least ask him/her/it to explain why there was not a clear and obvious indication of there being such a God from the very beginning, and where all the conflicting religious beliefs might not then have arisen so as to cause so much strife and death throughout history. So, more judgmental perhaps than acceptance. But I assume any God would have appropriate excuses - being omnipotent and all.

So, what if the Messenger and His appointed representatives explained all of that to people? The Messenger who represented the God would have good explanations but not excuses, since (logically speaking) an infallible/omnipotent/omniscient God needs no excuses. Only humans need excuses.

People should use their good judgment before they accept a messenger who claims to speak for a god. That is no small thing.

 

[Trailblazer]

Why would God send any Messenger at all. Everything is Perfect just the way it is. Who am I to judge anything about God's creation.

The creation might be perfect, but what mankind has done in it and to it and what mankind has done to each other is far from perfect. The reason God sends Messengers is to guide humanity to the straight path. Who could possibly know better than an All-Knowing and All-Wise God what humanity needs?

 

[Trailblazer]

It's human nature in its current state of evolution as I see it. When a World Teacher comes, the current state of affairs is disrupted with a new dispensation and people resist the change.

I fully agree. So wouldn’t that mean that only a numbered few people would recognize and believe in that Messenger at least in the beginning?

 

[Trailblazer]

Most people would ridicule them, and not take it seriously...

Religions wouldn't accept the change, thus would ignore, and even delete them if possible from people learning alternatives.

Thus they'd not be noticed, even if they explained it to people.

In my opinion.

I fully agree. So, that would that explain why there would only be a few believers in the beginning.

 

[Trailblazer]

Be astonished. I mean, what why would a deity -- any real deity -- do such a thing?

We are so accustomed to hearing stories of deities coming to earth -- or sending messengers -- that we simply no longer think about such stories. Instead, we just accept that as something deity might do.

Why wouldn’t a deity do such a thing? If a deity wanted to communicate a message to humanity, how else could a deity do it?

How does the fact that there have been many false messengers pretending to speak for god have any bearing on a whether there can be a real messenger speaking for a real god?

 

[Trailblazer]

People's reactions depend on how charismatic some speaker is and how popular the message is, no matter what source they quote if any.

What would the messenger do and would the messenger say he is a messenger?

The message would be very new and different, and the messenger would claim to supersede the previous messengers that God sent, so the message would not be popular among people who tenaciously hang onto their older messengers and older religious beliefs.

The messenger would claim to speak for God and He would have a mission that was entrusted to him by God and he would write scriptures. He would gain a following and a religion would be established.

 

[Trailblazer]

All people drop to thy knee's
Look towards the sky
For heavens no more deny
no lie
cry
we would be saved!

This can't be true
They would say
On that day
In a disbelieving way
But hey !
Proof is in the pudding
Heart beats thudding
Excitement and joy
like invention of new toy
Child like may
Who's to say

If the messenger looked like man
People would think
Just another scam
Throw them in a van
With a nice white jacket
Wrapped in a packet
They would not hack it
Just another nut job
Poor sod
They was from God
Didn't look like a frog
Yet we flushed them
Down the bog

I hope that answers your question
With absolute objection
Love and affection
Trying to find perfection....
Be people
Be like people
Be individual
But equal
For I am
And you are
The children of God.

Nice poem. Yes, it answers my question.

 

[Trailblazer]

If you remove religious prejudice and take it into consideration as something significant that happened, even with complete undeniable scientific proof; there would still be people that outright deny it. Not just stubborn-type atheists but religious people from other religions, matrix/simulation theorists and conspiracy theorists - will likely disagree all over the board rather than see what is objectively happening in front of their eyes.

True, that is exactly what has happened throughout the annals of religious history, and that is what is happening now. The religious people from older religions that reject the new messenger account for the bulk of the population that rejects them, although the atheists also reject them, they are a small group comprising only 7% of the world population.

 

[Trailblazer]

OK, as a non-believer....

The first thing that'll happen is all the religious people will declare 'it' a false prophet because it doesn't comply with their religious beliefs.
Then there'd be a TV bidding war to get exclusive rights to the interview.
Trump of course will be calling it 'Fake News'
Non-believers will be very skeptical, certainly wanting this being to jump through a few hoops to prove its claims. Once they are convinced, non-believers will listen to what it has to say, ask questions, interrogate. If it demands worship, it'd probably lose me there and then.

Be very interesting though.

Yes, that is the first thing that happens, religious leaders from older religions reject the new messenger, and then because they reject him, the followers of those religions follow suit and reject him too. It is a rare person who thinks for himself and investigates the claim of the new messenger.

Matthew 7:13-14 Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

Most people enter through the wide gate and follow the road that leads to destruction... It is easier to walk through the wide gate and walk the easy road that is behind it because people do not have to think for themselves, they just follow the crowd. It is also easier for people to have many others who agree with them rather than just a few.

In many ways, nonbelievers have a leg up on believers because at least they are not mired in religious tradition. However, most nonbelievers have confirmation bias because most were raised in a religion and dropped out, so they employ the fallacy of hasty generalization and assume all religions are the same, false. That of course would also imply that all messengers of God are the same, false.

For example, if a person travels through a town for the first time and sees 10 messengers, all of them false, they may erroneously conclude that there are no true messengers that represent God in that town. However, maybe they just did not look hard enough or in the right neighborhoods.

So that is what nonbelievers do, they don’t look at the evidence at all or if they do not look at it hard enough or they look at it with confirmation bias.

The messenger never demands worship. Only God demands worship, not because God needs it for Himself but because it is beneficial for humans. Worship means love.

 

[Trailblazer]

This 'prophet' would have to do something far more spectacular that any so called prophet has done to date. If he volunteered to stand by a wall under a firing squad of 1000 high powered rifles, got blasted repeatedly for 20 minutes, and then got up and addressed the entire world through the power of whispering simultaneously in everyone's ear from the ethers, coupled with a 3-D image of himself 10 inches in front of everyone's eyes and speaking in 200 different languages, then sure.

But so far we've never had anything close. Good orators, zealous devotees, delusion, braggarts, colorful writers with imagination, fictional characters, ... that combined with gullible people and a debilitating psychological need for such a thing, easily explains everything to date.

The Execution of the Báb was just what you described. What happened after that was no less spectacular.

The heroic age of the Baha’i Faith is unparalleled in the annals of religious history. Also unparalleled are the over 15,000 Tablets, all of which Baha’u’llah wrote in his own Pen or dictated to His secretary after which time He stamped the Tablets with His official seal to authenticate them.

There is no need to whisper in anyone’s ear since God can communicate to one messenger who can write Tablets and make them available to everyone in books an don the internet.

 

[Trailblazer]

Because there is no way for a human to verify that one is a "real messenger from God", I expect people would react pretty much as they do, now, to those who proclaim themselves to be "real messengers from God".

Yes, that is what they do because most people need verification, since they lack spiritual eyes and ears.

Matthew 13:16-17 But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. “For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”