If asked, how would you PROVE the existence of God? How do you know he exists at all and not a figment of your churches imagination to keep you in line? How do you prove the existence of Siberia, unless you’ve been there? You have to take the word of those who have, or disbelieve everything. A lot of this is FAITH. Faith in what is NOT seen. Trying to explain faith to someone who has never experience it is like trying to explain green to a blind man.
I guess what I am saying is that I feel sorry for you because you do not have the faith to believe in God. You believe in your church and what it says about God, you believe in the Fathers of the church and what they say about God, but I am really having a hard time understanding how you can put so much belief in them and not the book that God says he wrote. Both of my examples turn to the Bible as their source, and yet you deny it.
If I see a building, it is evidence of a builder. If I look at the universe ("the Creation"), it is evidence of a Creator, based on our knowledge that all things are caused; it is cause and effect. God is the cause and the world is the effect.
Something was the first step (the first cause) in a chain reaction that caused all this to exist, something that by necessity pre-existed the existence, something not of this world. That first cause is what we call God.
It really takes a very special person to deny that something caused all this to exist, or to claim that a house just built itself from ground up!
The Creation was created to procreate based on created physical laws, perpetuum mobile (perpetual motion), a self-generating and re- generating mechanism.
The second thing we know, based on what we can see, is that mercy is not found in animal nature. Only humans are capable of mercy, but it is not intrinsic to our nature; it must be learned from without. And since it is found in no other species on earth, we can safely say that mercy is something we know that is not of this world .
In the course of human history we have come to connect God with mercy, as we see that the world we live in is full of abundant blessings, and that with our capacity and knowledge we can truly live in paradise if we follow that which is not of this world.
Different peoples have developed different ideas of what or who that first cause is and what mercy means; they are human constructs that reflect humanity in different shapes and forms. This is where we begin to depart from things knowable (self-evident truths), to man-made attributes about God.
The bulk of our faith is based on our man-made constructs and preconceived notions because the core tells us very little about God, except that He is the First Cause who gave us plenty in abundance.
You are not asking this in seriousness, are you? You are placing objective geography on the same level as something as subjective as the indwelling spirit guiding you? Please. We can show that Siberia exists the same was we can show that the bible is objectively a book. But we can't show that it is objectively the word of God.
I guess what I am saying is that I feel sorry for you because you do not have the faith to believe in God
I appreciate your sorrow, but I do believe in God, perhaps just not your version of God. The Muslims believe in God. So do the Hindus. So do the Jews. Yet they all reject Christ as God. Does that mean they don't believe in God if they reject our God?
The Reformed God is not the God of the Church. He is the God of the Reformation, just as the Mormon God is the God of Mormons and not Christians.
Where does the Bible say God wrote it? Even if it does, what does that prove? The Koran says that God dictated it to Mohammad. The Torah says God dictated it to Moses. Is that, in and of itself, proof that it is true?
No, of course not. We believe what we choose to believe. You choose to dismiss the Koran and believe the Bible. That's why we can't speak objectively about the Bible as the word of God. We can only accept is subjectively as such, and say "I believe the Bible is the word of God."
The Church doesn't have all the answers, as I have painfully discovered myself, and as I have tortured my fellow Freepers with it.
But, the Church is here to provide spiritual guidance based on love we recognize as God's mercy, and in imitating it.
In accepting the combined wisdom and love of the Church, whose lifestyle is in the liturgical worship, and in biblical readings, and in documents that survive earliest Christianity, I submit to it voluntarily because it is a great source of joy and beauty. I am convinced that if all of humanity lived the life of the Church, we would truly have paradise on earth!
Regarding the Bible, we know it is a canon of books (that actually varies a lot more than most poeple realize) written by human beings. Everything else beyond that is a speculation.
We know that the Bible contains many things that reflect the understanding of the authors and are factually false (i.e. bats are called "fowl"), and contains cultural and other attitudes of the authors and the realities of the society they lived in that are clearly not acceptable or extant in modern societies (i.e. slavery).
In reading the bible we must look for the spiritual message (God's loving mercy) and not the human attributes and factual errors the authors included knowingly or unknowingly. So, if you can't find mercy, it is probably not from God.
It was the Church hierarchy that determined the canon of what you consider infallible word of God. How can you trust them on that and not on anything else?
Actually, the objective truth is that most of the books that were considered canonical from the start were the books that existed and were read in the earliest churches by the end of the 1st century (the Epistles and the Gospels).
The New Testament deuterocanonical books appended to the bible were the source of controversy, as they did not appear until later, and were not read in all churches.
The objective truth is that many of those books were eventually included in the Christian canon through such "inspired" methods as bargaining and swapping (such as the book of Revelation for the book of Hebrews).
Others were simply dropped for no apparent reason, even centuries after Christ (i.e. the Epistle of Barnabas). Did those suddenly become "uninspired?" Or were they never inspired and the Church couldn't decide? Or simply because there was no other book they could bargain and swap!
They cannot, which is why we perceive so much of their faith being in men. As the responses to you indicated, they can show that there is A God, but not THE God. For that they must rely on the opinions of uninspired men, since we have seen what some of them think of scripture. On this very thread their faith has been described to us by them as wholly irrational, a totally blind faith. I would think, then, that such questions as you ask would be unanswerable. A blind faith is based on nothing.