How God works (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Monday, January 21, 2013, 20:10 (4325 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: But the sources of their information, and their credentials for announcing to us the nature of God, his motives for past actions, and his future intentions are unknown and uncheckable.
> TONY: That is why the prophecies and histories are so important. The historical accuracy gives confidence in their credentials. They have never been proven inaccurate.
> 
> Whose credentials? Even if I were to give credence to some of these ancient texts, does an accurate prophecy in Daniel mean I must believe the prophecies of St John the Divine? The bible is a collection of books by different, fallible, human authors (and sometimes we don't even know who they were), put together by a group of men with an agenda of their own, who somehow or the other have succeeded in promoting the idea that their selection is "the Word of God".
> -Ok, so think of it this way. If a hundred scientist all wrote papers in a particular field, and they all agreed with each other as to the overall big picture, and they were all verified repeated by outside experiments, would you question the credentials of each and every one? The criteria that we impose on science is much less rigorous than the scrutiny to which the bible has been subjected, and for the bible has been under such scrutiny for thousands of years. Yet, you seem much more trusting of a bunch of scientist whose hypotheses and theories have been overturned on a regular basis. -
> TONY: Whose justice should coincide with whose?
> 
> DHW: God has the last word. And supposing ... purely for argument's sake, of course ... he decides that murderers, fornicators and agnostics are equally deserving of eternal death, I can't argue. That's why it's scary.
> -It is only scary if you are afraid of death. I don't WANT to die, but it holds no fear for me. Sadness, sure; fear, not at all. ->DHW: As I have tried to make clear many times, I distinguish between belief, non-belief and disbelief. Belief in God = I think God exists; disbelief = I think God does not exist; non-belief = I neither believe nor disbelieve in God. Absence of belief is non-belief, not disbelief. In talking to a theist, I explain why I do not believe in God. In talking to an atheist, I explain why I do not disbelieve in God. This distinction is very important for the understanding of what I mean by agnosticism.
> ----Ok, so then let me pose this question to both you and David: What would you accept as valid evidence? What brings you from the non-belief to the point of belief, regardless of the subject being discussed?-When I have presented quotes from historians, they historians credentials and sources were discarded. When I have presented fulfilled prophecies, they have been discarded. When I have presented archaelogical evidence, it has been discarded. When science provides evidence, it is discarded. So, the question becomes, what is acceptable as valid evidence if not history, science, archaeology, or an accuracy rating that smashes the Law of Probabilities?

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.