[Fung Koo]

And yet the Biblical view stays the same from the first page to the last. And if you think you can provide anything from God's character as seen in the old testament not found in the new (or visa versa) let me know. That one's a great argument for the person who has never actually read the Bible.

I thought it was fairly well understood that the old testament and the new testament exist as separate bodies because God does change between them.

Isn't the case essentially that God sent his only begotten son so he could basically retire? In the old testament, God is a prominent character, alive and well, and very involved with the doings of humanity. He intervenes and gets his hands dirty all over the place. In the new testament, God takes a back seat and withdraws from the world of men, basically giving up on us because he's given us the access path to heaven. Jesus was his attempt to lead by example, but in the old testament he tried to rule with an iron fist.

Am I totally wrong here? Cuz I read the books and that's what it seems like to me, and I'm reasonably sure I'm backed up by Christianity on this, too. God is very different between book 1 and book 2.

[ironchef texmex]

Tex: your answers about that statistic present an obvious problem -- If men lead women to convert at a rate of 89%, but women only lead men to convert at a rate of 40%, then to me that means the statistic is very human. It tells me nothing concrete about God. I know Dobson's whole shtick is the classic nuclear family with the man as the breadwinner, and that statistic certainly proves the power that a man has in his family - if he walks with Christ, the rest will follow. But it would be difficult for me to say that it proves much about God because my feeling is that if its the power of the faith that leads to the conversion, then there shouldn't be such a high level of disparity between the genders.


No, you're right when you say that it says nothing specific about the nature of God. The reason it doesn't is that simply "converting" -- as in adopting the external trappings of religious creed and liturgical practices -- does not mean that one has truly given God the position of preemminense in one's life. There is no way to poll what percentage of those 89% or 40% figures truly put their faith in God.

But that wasn't the point. The point was that worldviews make predictions about the way things should look. The above stat is an entirely Biblical prediction, one that goes against modern thinking on the subject of gender differences or the lack thereof (mostly the lack thereof).

Back to my marriage example: When we married my wife was a recent convert to Christianity. Her parents were committed Atheists. I was a lifelong Christian, but had not yet begun to study in earnest. My thoughts on marriage rolls were informed more by culture than by the Bible. I just assumed our spiritual rolls would be that of equals. The Bible says something different here. Husbands are to be the spiritual leaders whereas wives are to take a supportive roll. The natural gender differences are supposed to undergird these rolls.

I had trouble accepting this because it seemed counterintuitive. My wife was always an independant woman. Certainly, I thought, she wasn't sitting around waiting for me to assume some sort of spiritual leadership roll. But as soon as I took the roll of spiritual leader I saw my assumptions were wrong. A weight had been lifted off her shoulders. Not that I'm supposed to be some sort of totalitarian bossman around the house. More like being the captain of the ship, where I am to set a spiritual course and then react quickly if I notice us slipping off that course, and then my job is to take the lead in getting everyone working on a solution.


The above stat shows a greater willingness to follow spiritually on the part of wives than that of husbands. The Biblical worldview predicts that. Modern attitudes toward gender rolls typically don't.

Again, it's about external verification of worldview, not about prooving the individual characteristics of God (other than perhaps 'reliability').


Heaven and hell next.....

[ironchef texmex]

Which brings me to another thing: What is it about heaven that is so appealing? Every time I try to conceptualize heaven (which I have been told is my first problem, since it's supposed to be inconceivable), I just imagine a place I will eventually get bored of. Is there more to the concept of the afterlife than just fear of death?


Alot of Christians think of Heaven as a sort of highbrow country club and hell as a torture chamber. The idea of hell is influenced by Greek paganism, I don't know where the country club thing came from (the WASPish nature of many modern Christian thinkers maybe).

Neither has any basis in Biblical thinking.

The below quote is from this article --
http://www.near-death.com/experiences/articles005.html

The existence of light is probably the most common and dominant element in the accounts of NDEs. It is this, which has the most profound effect upon the individual being (Moody 58).

Typically, at its first appearance, the light is dim, but it gets brighter quite rapidly until it reaches an unearthly brilliance. Most people make the specific point that the light, even though of great ‘unearthly' brilliance, does not in any way at all hurt their eyes, or dazzle them. The light is also usually described as being either clear or white (Moody 63).

The love and warmth which ‘emanate' from this light are beyond words.

“It is a light of perfect understanding and perfect love,” states a woman (Moody 63).

People also make it clear that they feel surrounded by the light and accepted in the presence of this being. Mrs. Ebrahimzadeh, who is now thirty years old, describes herself in an ocean of light, and her being a part of it (Ebrahimzadeh).

Astonishingly, many people describe the light as having a personality. People recount it having a sense of humor, and it being fun to be around. A little girl who died in a swimming pool, and who then told about her experience simply said, “You'll see, heaven is fun” (Morse 1).

Maybe this light is just much, much more than just a light!

In the Christian worldview this wouldn't be Heaven, just the perception of approaching Heaven.

Now, compare:

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made. Without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. There came a man who was sent from God. His name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning the light, so that through Him all men might believe. He himself was not the light, he came only as a witness to the light. The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. John 1: 1-9.

And:

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been through God. John 3: 19-21.


The statement "after you die you go to Heaven" is never found in the Bible. To the Biblical writers Heaven was not a location on a map, it was the personality, the nature, the "light" of God in its fullest measure. An unobstructed view.

There are a series of recorded parables and teachings of Jesus that typically begin with the phrase "the kingdom of Heaven is like....". In these teachings Jesus attempts to break his audience of thinking of Heaven as a physical destination (in Jewish messianic thought the time after the coming of the messiah was called the "eternal kingdom" or the "eternal city" -- Zion). Jesus teaches that this kingdom isn't going to be something with borders, not like a human kingdom. This Heaven was coming into the lives of people. Yes, you still go to God when you die. But now, He said, God was also coming to you while you were still physcially living.

If this teaching is true, then a believer in Jesus should already be able to feel a small measure of Heaven's presence in their own lives. The love that they feel, the joy -- apart from any circumstance -- the overriding satisfaction are all rays of the "light" of Heaven.


Heaven = the presence of God's personailty, His goodness, His love, His "light".


So what's hell? Sticking with the light motif hell would then be a place where there is no light. Jesus often refers to it as a "a place of utter darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth." Gnashing of teeth was a Near Eastern symbol of anger, in case anyone is curious. So it's a place where God prevents any measure of His personality from reaching. This world may be "dark", but it still gets a measure of God's ambient light. Hell gets none. So it is a place that is completely devoid of God's goodness and love.


I'll save the inevitable "so why do people go to one place or the other" question for when I get to your post on "what does God want from me?"

[ironchef texmex]

Is there sex in heaven?


No. But not because everyone there is too "holy" or "pure" for it, more like because everyone there is constantly enjoying something more than even sexual pleasure could compare to.

[ironchef texmex]

How can you ever tell if the voice is really God's if you're a believer to begin with?

As always on this website, I'm not going to discuss other religions, but from the Christian worldview God's voice (in any phenominal sense) is supposed to match God's word (the Bible). Familiarity with the second will hopefully keep any mistakes in hearing the first from turning into indiscriminate killing.

Hopefully.

[Fung Koo]

You may not be surprised, but I find the darkness vs. light thing hard to accept as much of anything beyond human experience.

At a very basic level, darkness is to be feared because of the things that go bump in the night. As I've said elsewhere, vision is usually the prime human sensation of perception, and when light is absent, vision fails, people get scared. So is it really any surprise at all that light is associated with goodness and dark with the bad? And it goes beyond light -- really when any sense fails, then perception is altered. Experiments in sensory deprivation show a whole range of psychological effects, many of which are terrifying -- hence its usefulness in interogation. So is it really that easy to say that God-sourced "truth" is what is being represented in the bible when it references light and dark and being synonymous with good and evil? Isn't it much more likely that human experience has lead to those associations?

I allow that there really isn't much that can be said concretely about near death experiences. There are a host of non-theological theories, but they really can't be meaningfully verified. I guess that's just one of those lines.

[falcon57]

Fung Koo it may be that Ironchefs position is not acceptable to you or me, but it is understandable. As I see it each
of us is expert in myriad of questions. Some of those questions have one solution some have several alternatives and
others have none. A belief is a way to bring order into that chaos. By putting together similar questions you can
eliminate alternatives. 'It starts to fall into place'. You start to see a part of the world with new eyes. There
are many beliefs not just the spiritual beliefs, your professional know how is a belief, how you treat others is
a belief.
A belief is a boon as it is a curse, because it gives you insights and certainty in some areas and makes you
blind for alternatives. Whether you organize yourself mostly in one big belief or lots of mini-beliefs is up to you.

Have fun

[Gary Wassner]

Falcon, that's generous....and probably partially true. But it doesn't address the question here. We stray so much from the original topic, which has been productive for quite a while. Regardless, we began by discussing Scripture as history. Belief in a deity is one thing. Belief in odd and unusual occurrences because we believe in something else that tells us these things occurred is another.

Consider this - (If you don't know where this is from, I'll tell you later.):

"Over many years the sun shining melted a great crevasse in the ice. In the sides of this crevasse were great shapes of ice, and there was no bottom to it. Deops of water melted from the ice-shapes in the sides of the chasm and fell down and down. One of the ice-shapes said, "I bleed." Another of the ice-shapes said, "I weep." A third one said, "I sweat."

The ice-shapes climbe up out of the abyss and stood on the plain of ice. He that siad "i bleed," he reached up to the sun and pulled out handfuls of excrement form the bowels of the sun, and with that dung made the hills and valleys of the earth. He that siad "I weep," he breathed on the ice and melting it made the seas and the rivers. He that said "i sweat," he gathered up soil and sea water and with them made trees, plants, herbs and grains of the field, animals, and men. The plants grew in the soil and the sea, the beasts ran on the land and swanm in the sea...

...Each of the children born to men had a piece of darkness that followed him about wherever he wnet by daylight....'Because they were born in the house of flesh, antherefore deth follows at their heels. They are in the middle of time. In the beginning there was the sun adn the ice, and tere was no shadow. In the end when we are done, the sun will devour itself and shadow will eat light, and there will be nothing left but the ice and the darkness."

Why not accept this as history? Why not base our beliefs upon this? Why is this any less acceptable than creation as depicted in Scripture?

[ironchef texmex]

However, humans also evolved with wisdom teeth, an appendix, and a tailbone. We don't need those to reproduce or survive, either.

No, but we did at one time in our evolutionary history. Those are called vestigial systems, meaning that they are the remnants of things that were once useful, but no longer are.

Atheists typically are in agreement that metaphysical beliefs are not useful to us now (and would therefore be vestigial), the question is why we would have evolved our metaphysical tendancies in the first place. The examples you gave are both things that might be useful now, but would not have helped our prehistoric ancestors.

And not all humans have the innate readiness to believe. It's only some of us. I don't have it.

So you say. And yet....


The way I see it, the will to believe is just one of those human quirks, one that may or may not help some people to survive. It's just a human feature, not common to all humans.

.......here you make a classic statement of dogma. Dogma because you lose your "adequate grounds" for establishing a point of view by going against modern day evolutionary theory, as well as neuroscience/psychology. You can't have dogma without belief.

I'll say it again. You clearly do have beliefs, you just don't have the same beliefs that I do.

[ironchef texmex]

Religion is different. Animals don't appear to have religion (but who knows, eh?).


No, they don't appear to have religion, but they have tool usage (otters/orangutans/etc) highly developed social structures, forward planning in creatures as low on the evolutionary tree as the raven.

The problem with asserting science as the evolutionary goal of metaphysical belief structures is that now evolution has a sort of "forward thinking" mechanism. The trick here is in visualizing how a single human would have benefited over the ones without metaphysical awareness to point where the mutant is at a reproductive advantage. What could he do that they couldn't? The mutant can visualize a metaphysical existence, and somehow this gives him an advantage in the physical world over those who can't....... the point that those who can't will be rendered extinct.

I'm not saying it couldn't have an evolutionary benefit. I just haven't heard a good explanation for how it could yet. The usual line about control doesn't work in this model. A metaphysical mutant couldn't have "controlled" another human who had no metaphysical understanding -- the mutant would have been of freak to the others.

In less the others were all killed in a flood or something.....:D