Reclaiming Jesus: Making sense of the man without the miracles

We become climate change believers or deniers not just because of formal evidence but also because of personal pathos and social factors ethos. On the other hand, those who like a good conspiracy theory will easily suspect that the guild of climate change scientists have some ulterior motive in presenting their case. This is pathos at work. More simply, chances are we all find ourselves influenced by social factors on this question ethos.

Our political bias, the university we attended, the friends we talk to about the topic: Put simply, on a topic as complex and far-reaching as this we ought to acknowledge that our current beliefs—whether positive or negative—will have developed partly through logos, partly through pathos and partly through ethos. They will talk about some book they read or sermon they heard that laid out the facts about God and Christ. Their intellect was nourished and impressed.

But they will also happily tell you, for example, how one day while pondering the significance of Jesus they felt a deep resonance with the Christian gospel. The message somehow became attractive and personally satisfying. It answered deep longings and clarified certain confusions. And very often such people will admit to having been drawn into a community of Christians, at school, church or wherever, whose lives had an authenticity and goodness that was hard to argue with.

But what I find especially fascinating is the way many skeptics of religion today will not admit that they are skeptics for the same combination of reasons. Instead, they claim to resist Christianity for logical reasons only. There is not enough proof for the reality of God, they say. Books and documentaries on Jesus have undermined his uniqueness or even existence. So it should be. An event in the past called into question the fairness or existence of the Almighty.

A Christian they once knew turned out to be an ugly hypocrite and it spoiled their appreciation of anything coming out of the mouth of believers. Personal and social factors prove important for unbelief, after all. The point of all this is to ask readers, whether Christian or not, to explore the life of Jesus fully aware that we form our views on the big questions and the small ones through a range of factors.

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We are complex people. We are intellectual, emotional and social beings, and each of these components plays some part in how we respond to material like this. I will definitely be laying out what seem to me quite robust arguments for the life and significance of Jesus, but I have no intention of hiding the fact that some of what follows appeals to the personal and social dimensions of our lives. An important minority of Westerners identifies as atheists but it is much smaller than the publicity suggests.

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The last World Values Survey , the most reliable data set available, found that Olivera Petrovich is an expert in the psychology of religion from the University of Oxford in the UK. In she caused a stir by presenting empirical evidence that infants naturally incline toward belief in some kind of Creator: Even in my own country of Australia, which has often been described as the first post- Christian society in the world, surveys continue to reveal very high levels of spiritual, and specifically Christian, belief.

For most people throughout most of human history the stunningly rational universe we see out there and the uncannily rational mind we experience within suggest the existence of some kind of Divinity or Deus responsible for this reality. I am not trying to prove the existence of the Deus or God. This is not that sort of book, and nor do I think it is really possible.

Frankly, I am trying to get the God-question out of the way, so I can focus on the history and relevance of Jesus. I offer these comments simply to point to the near-universal human belief in some kind of divinity. Put simply, most of us perceive in the physical world and in ourselves a larger intention. The whole thing seems arranged not accidental, created not a product of chance. And so we imagine there must be a Creator.

The ancient Hebrew poet describes the sentiment well: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.

It is far more basic, more instinctive. It is something most of us perceive directly by living in a world that seems strangely rational in the way it is put together. This is not to deny that countless professional philosophers go beyond this intuition to provide sophisticated arguments for belief in God. Some people dislike music, for instance, and others hate art. I cannot explain this. Plenty of people are anarchists too. They honestly believe that cultural mores, ethical standards and systems of government are bad things, mere inventions which hinder human flourishing.

I am just observing that some ideas can be fabulously compelling to most thinking people and not at all obvious to a minority of equally thoughtful people. Intellectually, I puzzle over atheism just as I puzzle over anarchism and a-artism. At this point, my atheist friends like to throw in a favorite rhetorical flourish: For one thing, believers in any particular religion do not reject other gods in toto. They deny only the particular manifestations and stories of the other deities.

A Christian, for instance, can happily acknowledge the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians or Indians in positing the existence of a powerful Intelligence which orders the universe, whether Ra or Vishnu, and then beg to differ with these ancient cultures when it comes to the elaborations and add-on characteristics of these particular gods.

There is an irreducible conviction shared by all worshipers: The analogy of marriage might help. It will take more than neat rhetorical flourishes to undermine the tenacious, near-universal conviction that there must be some kind of Deus behind our world. Where believers of the various faiths part ways is in the particularization of the Deus. While I can happily endorse the logic behind a deity like Vishnu— that a powerful, intelligent being preserves the universe—I cannot see a good reason to believe, for example, that Vishnu appeared as the avatar Krishna to Prince Arjuna on the eve of his great battle with the Kauravas to strengthen him and disclose the paths of salvation.

This story comes from the Bhagavad-Gita and, unless I already accept the authority of this sacred Hindu text, I fail to see how I can accept its claims as true. I am left with no reason to accept this particular manifestation of divinity, even though I concur with my Hindu friends that there must be some mighty, preserving Being behind the universe. On the reality of a Deus we agree, but as we start telling stories about this Being we go our separate ways. This is probably the place to flag the philosophical distinction between deism and theism.

Deism accepts that there is a powerful Mind behind the universe, but it stops short of saying anything descriptive about that Deus. A soft deist would simply plead ignorance about the personal qualities of the Deus; a hard deist would insist the Deus has no personal qualities as such: It accepts the core conviction of deism that behind the rational world lies a rational Mind, but it goes further, insisting that some things can be said about the Deus. In a sense, religions begin with the assumption of deism and then move beyond it to theism as they start talking about the Deus as benevolent, righteous or angry, or that it has spoken in some sacred text, or that it has revealed itself in history, or that it can hear our prayers, and so on.

With all due respect to committed atheists, it seems to me that deism is the only responsible conclusion one can draw from simply pondering the uncannily rational nature of the universe. Whether the Deus cares for us, what its moral views are, whether it hears our prayers, whether it guides human history—i. But I will happily acknowledge that my theism rests not on rational observation of the physical world but on other factors I will discuss in a moment.

What I am saying is that thoughtful reflection on the origin and nature of existence will lead you only as far as deism, i. Albert Einstein was a deist, so far as we can tell from his own statements and from those who knew him. Davies even wrote a book called The Mind of God in which he openly discussed his conviction that the order of the world and, in particular, the emergence of our own rational minds cannot have been an accident but were in some meaningful way intended. Antony Flew was professor of philosophy at the University of Keele and Reading in the UK and author of a number of important textbooks on philosophical atheism, including God and Philosophy and The Presumption of Atheism.

But in he surprised many by publishing There Is a God: The good can be improved. The uninvented can be invented. Cellphones would still be useful even if we did not use them to summon rescue helicopters. John, I am losing track as to who I did and did not answer. I do not see that i responded to you, so here goes:. Your claims are patently absurd. Christianity dictates that one must believe in the Christian god and in Jesus at a minimum, am i not correct? So demonstrate that those billions of people who die of starvation, and cancer, and natural disasters to the person do not fall into that category.

My idea of a world with no evil is simply a world with no evil. We both have time to engage in this discussion, so whatever you wistfully apply to me, do so to yourself as well. I will take it from your use of seven consecutive question marks that you cannot rationally address any of the points I raised, and I will pray for you.

Hope you feel better. So, the quarter million people who lost their lives in the tsunami some time back were all killed because they did not acknowledge your god? Children starve to death in Africa because they did not accept your god even though they may not ever have heard of him? Milton — your argument is that there is no God because he does not operate as sort of a Super Hero Saving Squad.

This is a childish notion. God has a plan and every single human being is part of it. People died in that tsunami because spoiled cretins like me and you would rather spend time arguing with each other on the internet than developing ways to detect and alert people to natural disasters. The technology to warn and evacuate people in tsunami zones already exists.

Have you contributed anything to that field of study? Kids are starving in Africa because their parents are unable or unwilling to feed them, and because me and you are not feeding them either. Because, according to Christianity, he designed the system that produced these results……. His alternative is to deny there is a God who cares about people because some times bad things happen.

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Therefore he prefers a world in which child rape, etc are simply natural occurrences, which have no intrinsic moral effects. He is acting like a baby, who wants a God who prevents each and every instance of evil, everywhere, or he is not going to believe in him. You forget that believe in God is to also believe in Satan. There is a spiritual realm and it influences everything that happens in this world, whether for good or for evil. Satan is an awful, awful individual.

He is rotten and takes absolute glee in the pain and agony and atrocities that take place in this world.

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They are his doing. But God allows it because he created us as free, he wants us to have the choice otherwise there is no point. And at the end of set time alloted, our choices will be rewarded eternally. And we are offered an eternity, a promise, stated over and over again in the Bible where there will be no more suffering, no more pain, no more crying, no more dying, no more war, but everlasting, everlasting peace and safety. An eternity with God. Sin and satan will no longer exist or threaten to touch us. But even now, the promise remains in Romans 8: I bhave experienced this personally.

There is no lose with out gain. Look at the nation of israel. They are prime example of this truth and evidence that God does exist. They have experienced some of the worst hatred and suffering than any group of people on the earth and yet they remain and maintain their faith.

After the holocaust, after great, great loss, because of it they gained back their homeland and then their capital and holy city. After thousands of years of exile, they made a great gain followingtheir great loss. Look at the life of Joseph. He went through tremendous tragedy and set back and in the end he said what you meant for evil, God meant for good.

That is the final answer. We obviously live in a fallen and wicked world. Why should that keep us from faith? It should actually increase our faith!! Because the bible doesnt say not to expect trouble, it actually promises it. But Christ defeated him at the cross and promises to dispose of him for good at the end of the age. Until then, we have to live in the world that he is ruler of and embrace the love of God and the promise that our pain may endure through out our lives, but joy will be ours through Christ, eternally. Ultimately, faith is listed as one of 9 fruits of the spirit.

It is a supernatural thing to believe. It is not in our nature or in our surroundings, it is of God himself. For more on this, please watch this video. Are you under the impression that suffering is of no worth? I would say that it is of little to no worth, yes. Especially when one has no idea why they are suffering inexplicably. God can, will and does intervene, especially when we seek Him. They are being the hands and feet of God, being his love in action! To believe in good, does not mean to deny evil!!

It is a very real and obvious fact of life in this world. But it does not help those who lost their lives or were permanently maimed. Heather, please ask God to cure all cancer patients in the country of Australia? Have him do it at midnight tonight. If that happens, I think a lot of atheists will become believers. Jesus and the Apostles already healed thousands and only a few were convinced. You only have anecdotal accounts. That is wholly insufficient to support such claims.

There are no medical records to consult, and no witnesses to talk to. If Jesus wanted to impress the world, he should have eliminated disease. Now that would have still resonated throughout the world. I am sorry he is not an amputee. Thousands of these on the internet. But thanks for the effort. What makes this a miracle rather than a rare event?

Yes Heather like the Salvation Army who indeed have been trying to compete with the Catholic Church when it comes to child abuse. I appreciate the good that some religious organizations do. There is no denying it, nor would i wish to.

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But the question of a god preventing evil is quite apart from the question of people helping others recover because he chose to allow it to happen. All of that merely proves the existence of Satan in a fallen world. There was no such in Eden and there will be none in the New Earth. God has given us the free will to choose evil or to choose good. Which have you chosen? No, it proves much more.

Your statement implies one of two possibilities exist. The free will question does not come into play. One cannot choose not to get cancer, or not to go blind because of a parasite infection, or choose not to be swept away by some natural disaster. A child cannot choose not to starve to death because there is no food.

I am nowhere addressing whether one chooses to believe in a god or practice a religion. I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. His ways are perfect. I do not understand them. I am not God. But the more I study His character, the more complex He becomes.

I love your thought process. I wish you Shalom. When you figure out how a supposedly completely benevolent being can commit immoral things, get back to me. I wish you well. Milton, You seem to believe that you have a unique point of view. Were you seriously seeking the answer — several people have given you suggestions for finding it. So I believe that you are not actually seeking an answer — but rather merely seeking to destroy the faith of others. Christ came to earth. They traveled the known world — baptizing with water and the holy spirit. With difficulty, a man might give his life for his friends — but no man will give his life for something he knows to be a lie.

And most of the disciples died in very difficult fashion, for the sake of the gospel. For something they had no doubt was true. Thats the truth of the matter. The truth of Christianity is in the changed lives — not in theoretical philogenical constructs. If you truly wish an intellectual answer to your questions — read Lewis, kiirkegard, Buber. Your questions are not unique, and they have been answered.

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Obviously God could stop evil. He could have made us all robots who do nothing but His will all the time. That is obedience, but it is not love. Unlike the Muslims, we place love above submission. The true God is a God of love and He believes His children will ultimately choose to turn to love. Preventing harm to people does not in any way make the human population into robots. What he might ultimately believe is first of all unknown to anyone. A god of love would not be a god who sits by and watches immoral things happen and does nothing.

It does not matter what he ma want ir do in the future. The child was raped. I appreciate your honesty. That is the default position for humanity — misery exists and there is nothing ahead but death and rot. I choose to believe him. I understand those who choose otherwise. I was there for a very long time. Why do Christians make this leap? This is a false choice.

You seem to think EITHER God must make humans who only obey his will, all the time, merely mindless robots, OR God must allow people to starve, must allow rapists to get off with no consequences, must allow tornadoes an tsunamis and etc. I believe in the police. I believe police can exist, and stop some crimes from occurring, without totally overruling free will. I believe any god could allow a world to exist without overruling free will and yet still provide some check to the worst excesses. Why not give a child miraculous powers to stop an attacker?

Or the child is starving to death, but when he prays God sends mana from heaven to help him. You are parroting an excuse for evil given to you by your preachers and teachers, but if you think about it using your own common sense you will see the excuse in inadequate. He made a perfectly valid point, if a bit overstated. What would human life be like if God took away all human pain and suffering? Atheist make this goofy leap that the only good God is one that would take away human misery, because God could do such a thing.

I find his argument naive in that he equates all gods in history with the Judeo-Christian God who spoke against child sacrifice. He infers that all religions practised child sacrifice and placing children in the foundations of buildings for protection. Unfortunately, as a disciple of Christ, I agree with his point about the narcissism of Western Christianity. Under an evolutionary, scientific view the highest form of life is the human but my view is that God is even higher and incomprehensible to us as temporal beings, limited in time and space. I do not know how I can fully comprehend the God that I consider to be transcendent.

Phil, thanks for your feedback. If it does, what has been done by this god which we can all know for sure it was done by a god? Hi Pierre, I apologise for not responding to your polite questions. I have been off-line with other more pressing matters. I am not sure if I can answer your question in a way that will satisfy you. Unfortunately I see that either scientific evolution, or belief in God god , both have a large element of faith.

Neither can be proven, both require adherents to believe in aspects that have not been witnessed or proven. My experience is a God who manifested in his creation, the sun, moon, planets, earth, animals, plants fish and birds. I cannot prove his existence to you. For me it is belief. I will inform you that my belief comes from partially from similar understandings to CS Lewis and Chuck Colson. Chuck Colson, who was imprisoned for his role in the Watergate Scandal under President Richard Nixon marvelled that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ must be fact.

There is no reason that 12 men would die for a lie. Unfortunately, all gods tend to be supported by the same kinds of weak evidence as the Christian god. Unless there is some way to really quantify this god in a realistic way, his existence will be questionable. You cannot say at the same time that you know this god and then say he is incomprehensible. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them. Maybe, a very weak argument, is that I know Donald Trump. I am unlikely to ever meet him, and as an Australian, the US President is mostly an abstract concept to me but still nonetheless very real.

Many people are moving away from empiricism, only that which can be perceived can be proven. Modernity relies on empiricism, but post modern thinking questions truth. Under the new paradigm supernatural and incomprehensible phenomena are welcomed as fascinating. I find the same with spiritual matters. I have experience that I can only describe as intimate, comforting and real but as I move closer and attempt to define these experiences I have no explanation.

My faith journey is happy to attribute these experiences to a loving, creator God. Rather God Himself says that He uses the evil, which is in the world because of man, to serve His holy purpose. Is there a holy purpose or any good result from child rape etc…no, but neither does Gid cause this to happen but brings comfort in the midst of it.

As any good parent, God does not stop us from failing or seek to remove the consequences of our actions, rather He loves us through them that we may learn from both good and bad. What Imsaid wasmthat if you seemamchild being raped and do nothing even though you have the power tomstop the rape, you are immoral in that instance. Are you saying that there is a moral justification for child rape? If you were a parent, would you allow your child to rape another child for the purpose of some greater good? You seem to want to dictate to religions what a proper conception of God must be, according to your limited understanding of God.

He needs to walk! And then later on the guy dies because of gangrene. Usually atheists are full of seeming good debate points, but no real deep understanding of human life. God Himself says that He uses the evil, which is in the world because of man, to serve His holy purpose. Not superior reasoning, just reasoning. At the end of the day, if your god designed the system, he is immoral for designing such a system, and immoral for not preventing the harm it causes. Simple, we got our ideas of God from Christians, nobody else.

This is the God Christians convey, one who finds them parking places and saves one person from a plane crash which He did not prevent. And is simultanously all-powerful and all loving and all knowing. In short, an impossible being. Because I think it is immoral to allow these things when you are easily capable of preventing them. This goes back to my original question, so let me post it yet again and you can be the first to not dodge answering it.

It is an easy yes or no question. If you could stop a child from being raped with no danger to yourself or others, would it be immoral for you to turn your head and not stop it? If you think it is moral to allow the child to be raped, please explain your justification. If you think it is immoral, then we agree, but your god has some explaining to do. Michael, do you believe God can do anything? If so, he could accomplish his holy purpose regardless of whether or not the child gets brutally raped.

Or perhaps you could explain how preventing a rapist from brutally raping a child causes God to lose some of his power. You conceive of God as Malevolent, because he does not do what you think he should do. Yet you do not know everything. You do not know what effects one action has on anther. You arrogantly think this way because you do not know what the total effect of any one action might be.

Free will does come into play in any situation in which man is an actor. Children dying due to lack of food is something that people can control. They choose not to, because they engage in war, or implement communism, or do any of the things that cause famines. So many having free will, will experience the effects of using that free will incorrectly. The only place your idea holds up is the case of tsunamis, etc. Your assumption is that there is no afterlife an unproven assumption and that the only thing that matters is what happens to people on earth. As I said before, if we take religion on its own basis, then those who die in a tsunami probably go to heaven,at least the vast bulk, and their situation is improved.

So at least the claims of Christianity make logical sense, at least taken on their own terms. We live in a fallen world, ruled by Satan and hatred. But we can personally choose another path. Unfortunately, few make that choice. So you are saying you believe it is moral for a being that has the power to stop suffering to not act and end it? You actually believe it is moral for your god to stand by while amchild is raped a d watch it rather than stop it?

Therefor he is wholly resposible for any and all results. And what is that reason? Is he not capable? Does he not know about the killings? Does he not care enough to do anything about it? I thought you Christians believed that it was HIs idea! And also that he WAS Jesus. He obviously could have prevented it. You, too, are hard to follow.

So your god is omnibenevolent and all loving and he wanted to not have those thing happen. He cannot allow them and be omnibenevolent at the same time. I would accuse the Father of child abuse for sacrificing his Son if I believed in either of them. So you have TWO all powerful deities in your universe. I do wish you peope would keep your story straight. No one chooses to be a child rapist.

One day, the hateful and bigoted will finally recognize this truth for what it is, the child rape is normal. One day, child rapist will also proudly be able to stand under the rainbow flag. As for starving children, tsunamis and earthquakes, we should be thankful that these natural forces help keep the world from be over populated. It saves the abortion clinics a lot of work. In fact, if there is no God, then there cannot be good or evil.

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To even acknowledge such a thing is to acknowledge a good, a God. I never mentioned whether someone chooses to be a child rapist. I am not blaming him for anything.

I am pointing out the consequences of religious reasoning. Other people say he exists. Other people say he allows this sort of thing for some greater good. I am pointing out that it is still immoral. Morals are subjective and not objective, at least not in that sense.

We make our own moral codes. Assuming that all these people go to heaven, then it is in fact promoting them, and improving their condition. You might as well say the doctor is a bad man for making you take that awful tasting medicine. Are you saying it is the moral thing to do to sit there and do nothing when a child gets brutally raped — when given the power to prevent the rape at no risk to yourself or others? If you say they go to Heaven because of their works, why believe? In what sense is a tsunami medicine, and why were only the people on the coasts surrounding an earthquake blessed with it?

If you think they go to Heaven because of their faiith, then God sent some of them to Hell who would otherwise lived and converted. The facts being what your version of Christianity says they are, right? Why are you rationalizing these things? Blaming God for the evil acts of evil men exhibits a juvenile and childish way of thinking about God and His ways. Merele pointed out that the Christian god is presented as omnipotent and omnibenevolent which means he should have both the power and the will to prevent such things.

Therefore he is either not omnipotent, not omnibenevolent, or he is malevolent. It really is that simple. You seem to have figured God out so there is nothing more to say. Mankind can come to Milton Platt for all the answers in life. I will assume you do not have the answers, either. I challenge you now to explore the unfathomable depths of evil. Start first by gazing into the mirror and the deep crevaces within your soul.

God has intervened many times in human history. Evil became so bad He sent a flood to destroy every living breathing human being, except Noah and his family. For every psunami He has probably stopped one hundred others. Just using reason based upon what Christians tell me their god is. And by the way, feel free to provide the evidence supporting the claim he prevented any rapes at all. Why would god have to destroy mankind to stop evil? You can prevent somewne from committing an immoral act without killing them.

People do it all the time. Where ever does it say that God should prevent any harm from coming to people? Usually this sort of comment comes from someone with a very shallow concept of God as some sort of Santa Claus, or Giant Mommy that must protect us all the time. No religion takes that approach to God. They have a more grown up vision of God. Samton, you are completely missing the point. I asked a question which has a yes or no answer and nobody seems to want to answer it.

The question was if you have the power to stop a child from being raped without any risk to yourself whatsoever and you choose to do nothing, is your decision moral or Immoral??? If you think it would be moral, then I would deem you immoral by my stsndards. If you deem it immoral, then your god is immoral for doing just this. Would you care to answer the question instead of trying to characterize someone you know nothing about?

May I respectfully suggest you do like Sarah: Every Catholic parish that I know begins a course in Christianity and Catholicism in that order in September. Find one near you and learn the answers to these valid questions. Or may be God speaks to us all in the same way but we as mere mortals interpret his message differently? That makes his message worthless if there are billions of different interpretations. Do you accept the interpretation of ISIS?

What makes you the person that gets to interpret for everyone else? That is my point. A message from a god should not need interpretation. It should not be open to human interpretation at all it should be clear and direct and understood the same way by everyone. The Quran is the work of humans, just like all books, including the Bible. I was under the impression that god reveals himself in the Bible, which is constantly being interpreted. He reveals Himself in whatever ways He chooses. Annie — Did God ever reveal himself to you?

If so, how did you go about verifying it was God? God reveals Himself to me everyday in the most wonderful ways. Annie — please provide your best examples of what happens when God reveals himself to you. And how do you know what is being revealed to you is God? As Milton points out, how I think God has revealed Himself to me is of little value to anyone but me. Annie, please go into detail. Thanks for really wanting to know about how God speaks to me, Pierre!

Every day I listen to the Bible while I work and my nearly 2-year-old son has his day-time nap. Do you gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles?

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I hope this answers your question. I am praying that God would reveal Himself to you today, Pierre. Annie — Thanks for sharing that. You have not shown how you know that the revelation comes from God, but have shown why you believe the revelation came from God. I want to know how you know the revelation actually comes from a god. Hi Pierre, if I could prove the existence of God or you could disprove it, then we would be infinitely more well-known than we are. As Milton pointed out, how I think God has revealed Himself to me is of little value to anyone but me.

You are contradicting yourself if you say he needs no interpretation and then agree he does in the Bible. If you are saying he competely reveals himself in ways other than than the Bible, then you have made that collection of stories of little value. Besides, how you think he has revealed himself to you is of little value to anyone but you. How would anyone else evaluate the truthfulness of such a claim against all the other religions that claim the same sort of evidence for their god as well?

Hi Milton, thanks for your well thought-out comments and questions. It does demonstrate, however, some of the ways that God reveals Himself to some people. Annie, To me, if messages from a god require interpretation, there is no way to know who is correctly interpreting the intent. This is very ibvious from the fact that there are tens of thousands of kinds of Christians.

Regarding your questions, is it specifically child rape that you would like to know about or human suffering in general? Thank you again for your questions and comments. One can then point at all the others the turn to different religions for similar reasons, leaving them in those beliefs when they die, separating them from God forever.

I definitely see your point. However it seems that the appeal of values was only the thing that first opened her eyes to the relevance of faith. In this article she also describes discovering Christianities intellectual appeal, the need for integrity and coherence in world-view and seeing people walk the walk and not just talk the talk.

To put it another way, read how she describes her conversion and ask yourself how much of that can be explained by the comfort of appealing ideas:. If the appealing ideas were all that mattered to her, why would she ask for someone to save her and be the Lord of her life? So she goes to church… Whammo! If she had ventured to Tibet in her search, I suggest Sarah would have found a different god. Of course she will find something that makes her feel better. As a historian, Sarah should have examined the veracity of the Bible and its path to us before taking the leap of faith.

How do you know that if she went to Tibet she would have found a different god? What god would she have found? You also make the claim that Sarah should have examined the truth of the bible. I think she was just reading apologetics. I do,not know of any apologist argument that does not have a compeling rebutal. They were some of the most brilliant theologians of the 19th and 20th century, AND voices of the progressive politics and social reforms of their time.

There are many Truths that you will never find in any religious tome. Here are some of them: While growing up a catholic in grade and catholic high school, the thought that the Jews were to blame for Jesus's crucifixation was still present, although not heavily discussed. Things have changed, such as my older sister's catholic pastor and many fundamental evangelistists that it was all part of the plan. They accept Judaism and many strongly support the state of Israel. Sometimes History changes in our minds, or at least in our views. Could there come a time when christians accept Islamics in a similar manner?

For this is the will of my Lord, that everyone who sees the Son of Man and believes in him may have eternal Life! And my Lord said: When He had made purification of sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. No it doesn't matter, that was my point. I have had a long journey going from being raised in a Fundamentalist home to finding my own way. I can accept that I have a spiritual life, which is the part of me that loves, has empathy, cares for others and practices those parts of life that separates us from the animals.

If I do that then I will basically follow the tenants of most religions without the bother of joining one of their cults. My people perish, because of lack of knowledge. He also said that the fool says in his heart, "there is no God". I don't say this to offend anyone, but rather because of compansion for your souls. One day we will ALL be judged for our actions, and only those who believed in God and followwed His commandments will receive His mercy and be saved. There is no other way around it. This is the most simple plan of salvation and yet many still refuse to listen to God's word and warnings.

You will have no valid excuse on that day when the "roll is called up yonder", and your name is not found in the book of life. All your deeds and offerings will not save you if you did not believe and truly followed His commandments. Analyze your life while you are still in this earthly vessel, and seek Him out in prayer and humbleness - you are ultimately responsible for your own decisions. Why risk you eternity separated from God; in a hot, dark, lake of fire where the demons and the evil-one will pleasure in tormenting your screaming, frightened, helpless soul?

Is that what you want for yourself? Open your eyes and heart and accept His free gift of salvation, that He paid with His own blood and suffereing. Now is the time of salvation! Don't gamble with atheism's lies, and the path to everlasting suffering. Friend, do you chose Life or Death? It is your choice. The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. How to really measure the 'Francis effect'.

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Cohen came away from his Jesus year with a clear understanding of what he believes. My hijab is my hoodie. Star Renowned Rabbi in Israel reveals name of the Messiah October 7, at Cloud-man No James, you got it wrong - there is no scripture to support your far-off-the-mark interpretation.

October 13, at 7: April 28, at 1: April 13, at February 19, at Richard Cranium The US does not call itself a christian nation. June 14, at January 13, at Vincenzo Giovanni Ruello I have discovered the second shroud type photographic image in the St Peters Veronica Veil showing an alive Jesus Christ about to be crucified http: I'm ex Chabad you can have Jesus. January 8, at 5: Des Currie Jesus was not Jewish.