why do you believe in god? - Page 5

As for proving that God exists, I believe that is not impossible, but it is outside of my ability to prove.

I don't think we were meant to know either. Why should you have to know if God exists? To me, the whole point of life is to see if you would do what is right when you have no idea what came before, or what will come after life. When you think that no one is watching, will you still do what is right? Maybe we were supposed to doubt God all along so that we would not be afraid to make our choices.

Why do people attack faith? Faith is not just knowing, it is not knowing what will happen, but you fight through anyways. So it shows that every one of us holds faith except for those who commit suicide. Everyone holds faith because they believe things can work out so they plow through.
As for the faith in God, that is not an ignorance as some think. It is actually "knowing" something that the others do not know. It is a trust that other people need to have proven to them. How about a stand up for faith? People with faith are people who can figure things out without it speeled out for them. People with faith can trust without being stubborn and bitter. People with faith are usually happy, and that happiness brings out a better side in their life. You could say that it is a stupid happiness caused by ignorance, but I say they believe something that makes sense and that knowledge, that feeling of purpose completes them.

But why do I believe in God? Because of my family's example. Because my prayers have been answered. Because I have had miracles happen. Because I feel bad when I have done something wrong, even though it is something I wanted. Because I feel absolutely great when I know I made a good difference in the world. Those are not chemicals in my brain. Guilt is spiritual. Becaue my religion makes sense. Because I can feel it. I feel that God exits.

" Maybe we were supposed to doubt God all along so that we would not be afraid to make our choices. "
That's what would happen if life was a real test of morality. But God messed that up when he made his existence possible.

"Faith is not just knowing, it is not knowing what will happen, but you fight through anyways."
It is not fighting through, it is in the words of Nietzche :
"Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true."

Just because I believe that quote is merely an opinion built to attack people with faith, I will make this quote to mock Nietzche. This is not directed at anyone else.

Faithlessness (or doubt of that kind)- cowardice in accepting the possibility that there might be higher truths in existence.

If anything, I love the science behind God and all the laws of the universe. You can not tell me that faith is wanting to live a lie. Faith is wanting to find truth.

"If anything, I love the science behind God and all the laws of the universe. You can not tell me that faith is wanting to live a lie. Faith is wanting to find truth."
Nonesense. History and science have shown that truth only comes from those willing to forget what they thought was true. Science has described reality in a more and more accurate way throughout the centuries (with practical applications like cars/guns/medicine that make it undeniable). Science has done this through abandoning its old theories, replacing them with better ones each year.

Your definition of faith is the exact opposite. It is clinging to an old belief, which in practice (and frankly I think this seems obvious in theory as well), has not allowed people to get closer to the truth.

Since you have no reason to believe, apart perhaps, uncounscious self-interest becaus it is far more comfortable to believe that a God is watching over us, thus I am inclined to agree with Nietzsche on the issue.

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History and science have shown that truth only comes from those willing to forget what they thought was true. Science has described reality in a more and more accurate way throughout the centuries

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I think this is true, as we as a society of human beings advance technologically, we become more and more able to describe our surroundings.

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Your definition of faith is the exact opposite. It is clinging to an old belief, which in practice (and frankly I think this seems obvious in theory as well), has not allowed people to get closer to the truth.

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This may be true, but it speaks in bias of atheism. Some could say the same thing about those who do not hold to good science. Those who have theories are the same as those who have old beliefs. It takes good science to show those beliefs to be true.

Those who hold to science - in the sense that science has an answer for everything - and hold that God doesn't fit into the serious search for answers (true science), is not practicing good science. These are the ones who choose not to look.

Start defining some evidence.

Science is a method, you can apply it try to answer any 'how' type question. It is fundamentally useless for 'why'.

Religion claims to answer to both 'why' and 'how'. Religion seems to me clearly inadequate to explain 'how', just as science cannot describe 'why'.

This leaves the possibility that religion can explain 'why'.

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Santa Claus is not a story you can pose against peoples beliefs in God. It cannot tell us whether God is real or not. For one thing, every sane person (excluding gullible children) knows that Santa Claus isn't real. Though he was an actual person who lived in the far past. Telling people to experiment with drugs doesn't disprove a God who may be real.

By no means can I go through all the evidence for Jesus' resurrection since that would fill many volumes of books even if I knew it all. So I will only consider a few - facts that are both strongly supported by evidence and are conceded by almost every scholar, even those that are skeptical.

I gave a summary of that evidence before...

1. Jesus died by crucifiction.
2. Jesus' disiples believed that he rose and appeared to them.
3. The church persecutor Paul was suddenly changed.
4. The skeptic James, the brother of Jesus, was suddenly changed.
5. The tomb was empty.

... and no opposing theories exist that can account for the historical facts, Jesus' resurection is the only plausible explanation.

I'll just start with the first one.

Most all scholars concede that Jesus was an actual person, lived a great life and did many great things. Nobody denies this. There's too much evidence.

And we can know that Jesus died by crucifixion. It was a common form of execution employed by the Romans to punish members of the lower class, slaves, soldiers, the violently rebellious, and those accused of treason. We can know how common this form of execution was by reading books by ancient historians such as Josephus, Cicero, and Tacitus. Cicero explains that it was such a horrendous torture that "the very word 'cross' should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears."

Jesus crucifixion is recorded in all four gospels. However, a number of non-Christian sources of the period report the event as well, such as Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian of Samosata the Greek satirist, Mara Bar-Serapion, and the Talmud.

This shows that the crucifixion of Jesus is a historcal event. The highly critical scholar of the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan, writes,

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"That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be."

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Although this doesn't prove a case for the resurrection, it does show that Jesus crucifixion is a reliable historical event.

The changes in the disciples, and the fact that the tomb was empty can account for the truthfulness of the resurrection.

Do the reliable roman historians describe him walking around after his death?

The situation 2000 years ago is bound to be murky. Any number of things could have happened from the disciples lying, to James being trully changed from the traumatic experience of seeing his brother die. There are also numerous stories about the demi-godhood of Alexander the Great, and he boasts some incredible feats. Including taking a poor backward part of Greece and reunifying Greece, conquering the Persian empire and fighting all the way to India. The historians of the day even claimed he was descended from Zeus and a nymph who's name escapes me. And yet, we don't worship Alexander.

Due to the murky nature of ancient history, it makes it seem like the supernatural is possible. Is it not suspicious, that as soon as we enter recent history (and therefore more well known) that supernatural possibilities disappear?

Why did all manifestation of God halt?

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sorry strongclad but your confused on what my points were, reread some of the last few posts.

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It's kind of hard to see how I might have misunderstood your points of the last post seeing that it's fairly short and direct. You compare Santa to God, implying that God is just a myth or a story, and you question whether God has control over each one of our fates. Then you follow this up by comparing spiritual/emotional feelings to the feelings you get from drugs, implying that all feelings are of this world and none are of God.

As it seems, these points are made all in attempt to belittle the belief in God, but none of them actually build any case against God, since they do not show that God is untrue. How do the feelings of this world disprove that some feelings couldn't come from God? How does the story of gullible people believing in Santa Claus disprove God?

If these are not the three points made in your previous post, maybe you should spell it out for us.

Ancient history in general is bound to be murky in the first place since we do not have as many sources of information as we would like. But saying that a number of things comparable to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection doesn't hinder it's truthfulness in the slightest. The truth about Alexander the Great can be found by looking at his own history and stories, none of which have anything to do with Jesus. Just because there is talk of divinity in all kinds of men, doesn't prove that any of them are wrong. Each has it's own evidence.

The task of historical investigation gives the benefit of the doubt to stories of antiquity that give the most plausible explanation, and when no other theories account for the evidence. No one can prove with 100% assurance that something in history occurred or not. Historians must make there assumptions on the historical event's probability, based on the evidence.

The only way to show that the events are not true, is by confronting the events themselves and showing why they indeed are not true. Not by relying on other similar stories to prove that all of these stories are false. Which doesn't work.

Plenty of people claim that the supernatural is possible nowadays. You've heard the stories of ghosts, Near Death Experiences (NED), and miracles of our day. All of which claim to have no help from natural causes. You could confront all of them individually and show that they are not true. But then again, why do that when I'm only bringing up the miracle of the resurrection?

Since we're touching on whether James or the disciples were lying or not, I'll go a little bit into my second point of evidence for the resurrection: that the disciples believed Jesus rose from the dead.

There is a virtual consensus among scholars who study Jesus' resurrection that, subsequent to Jesus' death by crucifixion, his disciples really believed that he appeared to them risen from the dead. This conclusion has been reached by data that suggest that (1) the disciples themselves claimed that the risen Jesus had appeared to them, and (2) subsequent to Jesus' death by crucifixion, his disciples were radically transformed from fearful, cowering individuals who denied and abandoned him at his arrest and execution into bold proclaimers of the gospel of the risen Lord. This only could have happened if an event such as the resurrection did indeed occur. People don't willingly expose embarrassing information about themselves (such as their abandoning Christ) unless it was true. This embarrassing information gives credibility to the disciples claim. They remained steadfast in the face of imprisonment, torture, and martyrdom. Even though this doesn't prove the ressurection in itself, it shows that it is very clear that they sincerely believed that Jesus rose from the dead and that they were not lying.

Nice arguement strongclad!
Bravo

first i would like to adress the statment that the only reference
of Jesus the Christ is in the Bible
and say you ignorant Dunce, you need to stop making statments you know nothing about

I honestly don't know what the records have to say. I do know that if Chris's resurection was obvious, there would be a more or less general consensus among historians that Chris was resurected. However, this is not the case.