asaris

Philosophy is not a democracy, but as long as we're voting, how many people believe in a God as opposed to people who don't? I'm allowed to say that most people have gotten some things more or less right in their religion, but the atheist has to claim that all the religious people for all of human civilization are just dead wrong about the most important part of their belief.

I never said that, just because some people claim to have had a personal experience of God, that means that they therefore have had that experience. All I've said is that this constitutes evidence. And I've never made any claims about the quality of that evidence.

No, I'm not going to admit the same about God. I've never said "God must be there because people testify, etc." All I've said is that this is evidence, evidence that should be considered with all the other available evidence.

There aren't many people who know the Bible better than I do. Your first sentence, I think, misunderstands the prohibition against testing God. We have to trust him, yes. But we're also allowed to struggle with questions of doubt and belief. When Jacob wrestled with the Angel of the LORD, he was not condemned for his wrangling, but he was rewarded. You say that "the only way that you can justify your beliefs as a Christian is by faith alone". This isn't quite right. As I've been saying, the notion that you can't proove God's existence doesn't mean that there's no evidence for that claim. I tend to view it as follows: Imagine that coming to belief in God is like a journey. Reason is not a bad guide, in fact, she's a very good guide, for most of the journey. But, as Kant and many other philosophers have recognized, reason has her limits. Eventually, reason leads you to a chasm, across which you have to leap in faith. That's not to say that the whole journey, or even the leap of faith, is just a leap in the dark. It's just to say that reason can only take you so far.

I'm all of the above (though probably less a man of science than a man of logic or faith.) I don't believe that faith is opposed to either logic or science. All three come from God.

I'm sorry that you've been lied to by Christians. None of us is perfect. But the fact that someone who claims to believe certain things acts in a certain way isn't a very good argument against the truth or falsity of their claims.

If I said you were confused, I apologize. What I meant was that your post was confused.

The last thing I would ever do is to make any claims about who God chooses to save or who He chooses to condemn. I can't say much about why God chooses to reveal himself to some and hide himself from others. This is, in part, what I meant when I spoke of trusting him earlier. There's another story, other than Thomas's, to consider here. At the end of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the rich man asks if Abraham can go and appear to his sons, so that they don't end up in hell like him. We have enough evidence to believe in God; it's not his responsibility to force himself on us. Thomas might well be a special case; he was undoubtedly very upset at the death of his rabbi, and so perhaps his rabbi choose to be gracious to Thomas, just as I am sure he exhibits his grace to everyone. But often the demand for more evidence is less intellectual honesty and more a deep desire not to believe.

Imagine if we already knew all this, and did it anyway! I doubt that any appearance of God, short of one which would shear away our free will, would suffice to end any of this suffering.

When you're quoting very specific religious documents, you should be aware that there's a good deal of disagreement among Christians about these sort of things. The doctrine you're alluding to here is the doctrine of Total Depravity. All Christians believe that one cannot simply earn salvation by doing 'good deeds'. They disagree on what can be inferred from this. Some say that this means that none of our deeds are really good, and there's of course some truth to this, since everything we do is corrupted by pride and egoism. But it seems to me that there's value in being able to say that a certain deed is good, even if it isn't rigorously pure. So I tend towards the less strict interpretation, that even if our deeds are 'good', they cannot earn us salvation.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche