People want to be their own gods. Is that good or evil?

No one can prove God exists to you unless you open yourself up to him. It's your choice.

 

Well if you are Christian and believe in the Bible your statement that no one can prove God is a false statement. For example, a prophet could call down fire as it is claimed Elijah did. Now if someone can do that I will believe. But of course nothing like that happens in modern times when it would be subject to verification.

Someone claiming to hear an imaginary voice in their head from an invisible man is not proof that God exists -- if that is what you mean by "open yourself up."

Well, lets take another example of "proof", i.e., prayer. There have been scientific studies of the efficacy of prayer (there is one published on the NIH website) and prayer is proven to not work.

But the bottom line is one does not prove something to a person based on that persons mindset, which would be subjective proof. Real proof is objective fact-based proof, i.e., a hypothesis (such as the existence of God) is demonstrated via experiments that can be replicated by multiple people independently all getting the same results. Why do you think a God that you claim exists and no doubt feel you have a relationship with, works so hard to be invisible?

 

On the contrary, I'd talk about it with anyone who was interested.

 

Good is what God is; evil is what God is not.
God reveals both good and evil because anything, even God, is revealed just as much by what it is not as it is by what it is.

 

Your contention seems to me to be exclusively reserved for those "most Christians" you cite above. You are also very careful in your argument to define, at some length, the beliefs of those "most Christians" to whom you are referring. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for narrowing down so exactly those to whom you are referring to. That written, I do not at all qualify as one of "most Christians" by your above description of them. My take on the legend is quite a bit different. I hope that you haven't read it before. I'd not want to bore you.

The closest that I can come to even thinking about a sovereign/subject paradigm is to think about the relationship between an author and his novel characters. To be honest, that's the extent of my imagination. That's the most sovereign/subject relationship that I can think of, so that's what I go with. My interpretation of the bible is within the author/character paradigm; as such, my interpretation of the creation legend within the bible is quite a bit different than you might imagine.

I am happy to explain why I am left to believe that there is sovereign/subject paradigm and/or the implications going forward. On the other hand, if you only want to discuss the subject in juxtaposition to "most Christians", I completely understand. After all, you didn't go to so much trouble to so narrowly define those to who you were referring for nothing.

 

What I meant when I said that no one can prove God to you, is that only you can prove it to yourself by opening your heart and mind to Him. It's then that God will start revealing Himself to you. It's a gradual process. I can't relay all my experiences to you, and even if I did you probably wouldn't believe them - but if you opened yourself to Him, then you would start having your own experiences.

As for calling down fire, well that doesn't happen, but it does come up from Christ's tomb in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on the day of the Resurrection. It's a verification by God of the light Christ gave to the world.

The actual presence of the fire on the tomb cannot though be verified by others, other than the glowing in the walls, since only the Patriarch of Jerusalem is able to go into the Sepulcher and receive the flame. What thousands of people do verify every year, is that the flame from the Sepulcher does not burn for the first 20 minutes. There are also flashes of light all around the church as well as candles lighting up on their own.

No it's not proof of God. Voices in one's head are usually demonic, and they are quite common. But someone with a pure soul will hear from God, and I say this because Glorified/Canonized Saints usually know everything about a person even though they have never met or seen them before. But Saints are spiritualized, and not completely in this world, so God gives them many charisms.

How can prayer work if it's for a study? How offensive it must be to God. Why should He prove anything to anyone when he had his own son suffer every pain and humiliation imaginable to redeem mankind? The sheer arrogance behooves me.

Anyway there are thousands of miracles, and thousands of testimonies - and by doctors, but you're not going to find them in secular papers. You would have to look for them.

To say God is invisible, means you can only think of God in relation to what you know and understand. As for me, He exists in everything I see around me - but especially in the love I feel. Can that love be explained scientifically, especially the love I have for my dog? I don't think so!

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebunkThis/comments/bma4ob/the_holy_fire_doesnt_burn_clothes/

With respect to the question how can prayer work for a study, the answer is obvious. It can't work for a study because it simply doesn't work. Can you provide a verifiable example of someone who lost an arm, a leg, an eye, etc. and through the power of prayer had a leg, arm, or eye regenerate? The idea that God would be offended by proving proof that he exists is simply an example of the mental gymnastics people exhibit when forced to confront the idea that God simply does not exist. Claiming that God will not provide objective proof but provides subjective proof certainly seems like mental gymnastics to me.

Human emotions such as love are generated by the human brain. Scans (MRI or PET) demonstrate that emotions are the result of brain activity.

 

Actually all that demonstrates is correlation.

 

No.

 

But this is what you said:
John 14:23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

Jesus may well have been gay, in fact; unmarried at 33 and surrounded by male disciples....after all, god would never create people and then deny them love, now would he?

 

Let me simplify everything. What you're saying is that God should prove something to you, and God is telling you that you should open your heart to him and you will see the proof. So tell me what are you gaining by your intransigence?

 

According to you, everyone who doesn't indulge themselves in sexual proclivities, must be gay?

 

How do you know he didn't get laid?

 

What I am saying is a claim of God must be supported by scientific evidence to be anything other a claim. What you call intransigence is actually critical thinking. It may be comforting to suspend critical thinking, but not something I will be doing. Your evidence for God seems to be based on subjective feelings and the reality is subjective feelings are not evidence for anything. Particularly a belief in the supernatural.