Aside from that, awesome article and it was great to read your story. I am, like you, uncomfortable with unemployment, but I'm happy to see it can be done!
If you had evidence of a god playing a role in anything you could start your own religion :-)
I ask without expectations that you refrain from using such words when talking about opinions, experiences or beliefs, so that we may protect our languages from further erosion.
PS: not meaning to start a flamewar or engage in endless discussion, I just want to understand your point ;)
Many an atheist has found God after honestly and earnestly investigating the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. However, most people don’t have the emotional fortitude to actually investigate the facts with rigor and end up hiding behind the “implausibility” of the resurrection and/or just end up perpetuating pop-atheism with unfounded critiques of the Bible because they’ve never done a proper study of their own.
If you’ve got specific critiques, feel free to field those, but otherwise your comment reads as a rather arrogant write-off of one of the oldest, and most logically-consistent systems of human belief.
If you prove a correct mathematical formula, you need not spend time figuring out every other incorrect way to solve the problem.
Likewise, once you find the truth it doesn’t require falsifying every other claim to truth for it to remain true. Jesus was the only person whose words and deeds claim deity and with which there is zero evidence to contradict his claims, unlike the likes of Mohammad, Buddha, and countless other claims of godhood—Jesus of Nazareth’s are the only ones that hold up under scrutiny.
Other religions can believe they’ve got a claim to truth if they wish, but truth doesn’t waver due to one’s personal preferences or convictions.
> Likewise, once you find the truth it doesn’t require falsifying every other claim to truth for it to remain true.
The world is not like maths.
A scientific approach to the world doesn't really work like this. It deals not with truth but with hypotheses and (un)certainties. Claiming truth is fundamentally flawed, and really only reserved for fanatics, religious or not. A "truth" is only ever temporary, waiting to be rejected by evidence and replaced by the new "truth". This is why we never speak of truths but only of hypotheses, theories, etc. Falsification is at the core of science, and at the margins of religion, in both cases by design. This is why science has evolved over the centuries: theories held as truth once have been rejected and replaced by better theories. Meanwhile religion has not evolved in the slightest, except in a moral sense where original scripture is rightfully rejected as being archaic. However, it should be clear that this is not religious progress but moral progress, and is still challenged for religious reasons, by religious people.
Its easy to see when somebody is uninterested in reasoning in general, they use words like truth. It's a word you can use and build on without challenge, because its perfectly in the middle between reality and personal experience: the truth, my truth. It's flexible, can be used to your advantage to mean what you please, to imply what you desire it to imply (the truth), and most importantly to evade what you must evade to make a coherent point when challenged (my truth).
It is overwhelmingly unlikely that a human conceived description of a deity is correct.
> Jesus was the only person whose words and deeds claim deity and with which there is zero evidence to contradict his claims
One does not need evidence to contradict claims, one needs evidence to prove claims. This is how things work. If you disagree, I posit you the following claim without proof and challenge you to accept it and thereby follow your own logic: I claim that Jesus was lying about being the son of god but wants you to feel that he wasn't to manipulate you into following his personal views on ethics.
- Evidence That Demands a Verdict, by Josh McDowell
- More than a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell
- The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel
- Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
Finally, this is addressed in probably each of these books, but as for your last comment. It's not unthinkable to imagine Jesus was so insane he was willing to die for his "personal views on ethics" (Although there's precious little evidence to support this, see the "Lord, Liar, Lunatic" argument). Nor is it outside the realm of possibility to think that perhaps his closest 12 followers were willing to die for a charade (Although again, there's no logical reason to support this idea)—I imagine stranger situations have occurred.
But consider the vast history of Christianity, littered with martyrs whose only mandate to escape death was simply, "Deny Christ" and were yet unwilling to do so. It begins to become disingenuous to suggest that across 2,000 years people have been willing to die for one man's "personal views on ethics" when all that would be required to avoid said death is to simply say, "Jesus is not God", unless of course you were utterly convinced it was true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
> I believe all 4 men were atheists who set out to disprove Jesus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_anecdote
> It begins to become disingenuous to suggest that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_incredulity
Indeed fruitless.
Yeah I think "Evidence That Demands a Verdict" by Josh McDowell is a great one. He was agnostic and set out to disprove Christianity and found its evidence was impossible to refute.
Others I'd highly recommend would be: - More than a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell - The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel - Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis
I find all of these books fascinating because they're all written by men who were atheists and set out to disprove the "foolishness" of Jesus. In the end, they all came to the same conclusion which is that the evidence that points to Jesus being the Son of God is very heavy. I'm not sure there's any reasonable evidence to the contrary. In fact, most atheists I've known and talked to were atheists not due to reason, but due to emotion. Christianity has a lot of emotional baggage that comes with it. We're all flawed people and unfortunately most people associate Christianity with abuse, rules, and condemnation. That's why I prefer talking about the person of Jesus. I've never met someone who could level a reasonable accusation at the person of Jesus, and after all—He's the entire reason any of us talk about any of this.
If you read all 4 of those books and come away unconvinced I'd love to have a conversation! I was not able to retain my disbelief :)
When I was little, my mother tried to teach me how to tie my shoelaces, but she had shown me a method I did not understand and did not like, so I invented my own way. I was proud of it for 20 years or so. A friend I trusted more than anyone, tried to tell me in a kind way, that many people tie their shoelaces in a bad knot. When one knows, it's easy to see even from a glance and such a knots gets untied, but I wouldn't listen. Thought of not knowing how to tie shoelaces seemed absurd.
I was the only one I know that would stop randomly to re-tie his shoelaces, occasionally with people piling up behind me. It may be considered incontrovertible evidence in truth, yet at the time, it didn't bare much relevance to me. It was obvious that bad shoelaces were always at fault, or I didn't apply enough force. In my mind it would be too humiliating to even consider bad technique a possibility.
It wasn't until I had the grace to look at a knot-tying website alone, try it, accept I was tying a granny knot, learn how to tie a standard knot, in a recommended fast way, then proceed to one-up it in my own point of view. I didn't get much humbler, but at 23 years old, at least I knew how to tie my shoelaces and they didn't get untied anymore.
If it wasn't for the love of the one who had grace and has given up his grace so we would have his grace, acting through those who follow him, Himself and His Spirit, I would not have seen and felt the loving self-sacrifice, which paled my self-righteousness in an humbling and emotionally painful experience of the pain I've caused, setting me off in a search to do better, so that after nearly a decade I would once and then many times again in humility accept what I cannot deny, that Lord is better than anything I could imagine and Jesus Christ is our (our = all those who accept Him) Lord and Savior.
This is enough evidence (for me, for others it's just word of mouth) to love and worship Jesus. I've seen much more, and for that I accept what is written. It seems I may understand and see more than many, yet still, easily and often, I forget what I know, ignore and blank my mind, to doubt and void the uncomfortable. Only hours ago I've yet again given in to what I know to be bad, to lull and dull the mind, close my eyes and ears so I would not see what I had a longing to avoid.
I write this as an admission and hoping it will be useful to someone. To perhaps understand, that one cannot just see and one cannot just be explained, if it affects him dearly and he does not wish to know.
Speaking of others, but showing the principle:
“Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. ...<<specific judgement of specific people>>... Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’...”
Matthew 13:13-15