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Goodbye Jesus

Proof From The Past


dB-Paradox

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Why is it that proof for God must always point to the past? Why is there no proof today without referring to something in the past, namely the bible? For those Christians who are eager to submit how there are plenty of proofs for God right under our modern noses, think about this first...any proof submitted can be explained by either some natural explanation as much is it can by supernatural explanation, and even if there is some supernatural proof (i.e. proof not yet understood, such as a miracle for example) it must line up with the bible, a set of books from the past! If I'm not making sense, let me use an example or two:

 

Let's say that after extensive prayer support, a family member recovered miraculously from cancer, leaving no trace of the disease remaining. This is not supernatural, and is actually well known to have happened a number of times in patients. But let's say that we can't explain it, and we therefore settle on a supernatural explanation. It must have been God. A Hindu then uses it as proof for a god (Vishnu or Shiva, I don't know which one) based on ancient sacred texts. The Christian also uses it as proof, but for Yahweh or Jesus. Again, based on ancient sacred texts! Jews and Muslims will resort to their ancient sacred texts for proof also. The thing is, at one time, ALL these ancient sacred texts were modern in their day. According to the texts, the god(s) spoke to the person(s) writing the texts to communicate who they (the gods) were. Why is that no longer happening, and why must we look to the past to prove one god over another? Does this not testify to the absence of god(s) in modern times?

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Guest Valk0010

"God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consiousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time -- life and death -- stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. Therefore I don't think that the laws can be considered to be like God because they have been figured out."

-- Richard P Feynman

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/quote-f.htm

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I think it was more a cultural thing back then, most were illiterate and merely accepted what they were told.

 

Only a few had the ability or opportunity to read the sacred texts.

 

Not much has changed as folk still ess. do what they are told.

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Put another way, as per my original post, can theists prove their god without their sacred texts? For example, was Jesus in North America prior to 1492?

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  • 2 months later...
Why is it that proof for God must always point to the past?

 

Have you seen Benny Hinn knock all those people over just by yelling at them? If that's not proof of God...

 

:P

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For those Christians who are eager to submit how there are plenty of proofs for God right under our modern noses, think about this first...any proof submitted can be explained by either some natural explanation as much is it can by supernatural explanation...

This was one of the realizations of my deconversion -- that there was nothing in anything I'd ever heard anyone give god credit for that was distinguishable from random happenstance. The general practice was that god got all the credit for what went well and you got the blame for whatever didn't. Great system -- for god anyway.

 

As for displacing the miraculous into the past (or into the distant future, e.g., heaven) -- my religious tribe had an actual doctrine that divine revelation was "not for today" because god had said everything that needed to be said, it was all in the Bible, and anything more was unnecessary and therefore automatically to be considered counterfeit revelation. They felt it was a virtue that we don't see direct revelation anymore because we have complete revelation presumably written down in black and white (no matter than Christians can't agree on what the writings mean).

 

For me in retrospect one of the funniest parts of all this was that it was said that god always answers prayer -- but he might answer, yes, no, or not right now. What they didn't seem to realize they were saying was that answered prayer is random! In other words, random things happen if you pray, random things happen if you don't. They simply relabeled random happenstance as answered prayer. To the extent the "answer" was some horrible tragedy or the like, they would simply deflect that with babblings about life being a beautiful tapestry that god is weaving, that seems random from one side but has a fabulous pattern on the other side (that we conveniently can't see).

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  • 1 month later...

Whatever that is, I'm glad that our actual past and future are actually far more interesting than the biblical vision of the past and future!

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  • 2 weeks later...

the idea of god and religion is a convenince to explai nand the define the laws of the universe witch humanity can not understand. with the lack of science and knowlage assosiated with primitive man this seemed the only explaination and through cultural evolution the ideas are handed down generation by generation and considered true by those generations in their inturpritations and explainations of reality that have been given to them. they must look back to the past to find explinations for miracles because miracles were science and the idea still pretains to a good number of people as the idea is handed down through their culture and parents.

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  • 2 months later...

One thing I have faced is that for christians there is no evolution in a knowledge. For example, creationists have the idea of young earth ... that means that this world and human has been created exactly in the way Bible tells us about 6000 years ago. After the falling into sin, everything has been straight downfall because sin corrupts. This goes to all aspects of life. The first humans lived hundreds of years and because of sin the living age of man has falled into, what, 76 years.

 

So for fundamental christian there is no evolution in life.. only downfall. All information we need is given in the bible and science trying to use unreliable methods is in error and corrupt because of the original sin.

 

Of course when there is no evolution in knowledge.. there just isn´t anything worth studying. The holy Bible is all we need and is the only reliable source of information.

 

When I was a young christian I was taught that way. I believed in Bible without a doubt. Then as an older and having studied theology I started to realize that Bible was not inerrant. And talking to people who blindly insisted in front of a massive theological and scientific evidence that Bible was inerrant, made me to realize the whole concept of classic christianity.

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A book that I'm currently reading is "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. Trying to put his theory into a few short sentences is going to be hard. He theorizes that the human mind evolved in stages that first led to us having names for each other, then people would still hear voices of the dead, which evolved into gods, which now has evolved to where the mind doesn't hear god's talking anymore. The left and right hemispheres weren't connected as they are now, so the voices appeared to be coming from somewhere else when they were actually only coming from the other hemisphere of the brain. King David would have been one ahead of his time because of his occasional rants about not being able to hear god. Anyway, it's a good but deep book to read, and definitely quite an interesting theory, which is as good as anything I've come across yet on explaining why god has gone silent. If there's any other theories out there, I'd be interested in knowing about them - reading is good!

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