Neon Genesis

Please explain to me how a lack of evidence constitutes evidence because I just don't get it, especially when you yourself say that the ones testifying the evidence were considered unreliable sources of evidence. And you can't use the bible to prove the bible is real. That's just silly and pointless. The difference between proving events in ancient history occured and that Jesus is real is that we have actual evidence that these events occured, like the various temples in Greece or the ancient pyramids in Epgyt. These ancient people left behind psychical evidence that we can see and touch

But this is one of those things about Christianity that I never understood. Why are some biblical stories that are clearly illogical fairytales made by scared goat herders are accepted by Christians to be a metaphor like the falling stars in Revelation but then other clearly illogical fairytales made by scared goat herders are accepted as being literal truth like the book of Genesis, or walking on water, or some prophesizing carpenter guy gets ressurected after being dead for three days? Kat22 obviously knows that stars falilng to Earth literally is illogical and so it becomes a metaphor. B

When I was baptized, I didn't feel much different than before I was "saved." I was taught that when I was baptized and became a Christian that my life was supposed to be different than before, but my way of thinking wasn't much different from before, I suppose because I was always raised to believe in the bible and I was never really fired up for Christianity. But when I deconverted from it, it was scary at first, and there are still sometimes where I have to fight back against that fear of hell I was raised with, but as a whole I feel far more liberated than I did when I was "saved." Where

So, if God didn't really mean he was talking about actual stars when he gave John a vision, why didn't he say what he actually meant? Surely wouldn't an all-knowing omniscient God realize ahead of time that we mere mortals wouldn't be able to understand his coded message? Why does God want us so badly to believe in his truth but then turns around and speaks his message in smoke signals instead of speaking clearly what he intended? Why should the fate of our souls be depended on God's guessing game?

Thank you everyone for your support and thanks Dave for the book recommendation. I've made sure to bookmark it to check it out sometime. I think part of what made agnosticism appealing to me when I left Christianity was it had a sort of neutral stance, that neither side of the debate can know the truth. I also think part of it is because I just don't know enough about the big bang theory and human evolution to feel confident enough to debate the subject when people challenge me about it as science has never been one of my best subjects. But maybe it's also like what you said and it's just

As someone who is still uncertain about how they feel about the existence of God, I like this quote from one of the intro tracks on the Our Lady Peace album "Spiritual Machines" that I think does an excellent job of explaining about how I feel about the meaning of life even if there is nothing left for us after death. "Take death, for example:a great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider it's intrusion a tragic event. Yet we find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to t

This reminds me of that email someone sent to the Dr. Laura radio show once: http://www.anvari.org/fun/Jokes_by_Email/Dear_Dr_Laura.html

I personally don't believe there is such a thing as "good" and "evil". I think these are merely labels society uses to describe productive behavior vs destructive behavior and "morality" is simply the measure that we use to gauge how beneficial our actions are to society. I don't go around lying and stealing from others because "God said so." I don't do those things because it doesn't benefit anyone to steal or lie. I think humans are creatures that depend on other humans to exist. If everyone lied and stole from each other, it would create feelings of distrust and hatred between each oth

I've been lurking at these forums for awhile now and I've enjoyed reading the topics here, but I finally decided to join the forums to join in on the discussions myself, so here's my testimony about my deconversion from Christianity. I guess it started around the time I realilzed that I was gay. I was raised by parents in the Churches Of Christ and was taught to believe that homosexuality was a sin and that I would go to hell if I was gay. At first I tried to ignore my feelings but when that didn't work out I tried to pray to God to help me overcome what I was taught to believe was a "sin."