Do you believe in God?

The writers of the Bible were unaware of radio waves and the law of gravity. Hell, they didn’t even understand female anatomy or they wouldn’t have prescribed the death penalty for brides who don’t bleed in their wedding nights.

Claiming “unseen” implies it’s evidence detectable by other means is ludicrous. Faith has never been congruent with actual physical evidence, and the passage offers nothing to support such a conjecture. Clearly, the Bible is telling you to use faith to believe despite the lack of physical evidence.

But I’ll bite. What actual evidence is it they are referring to? Because “the Holy Spirit” is a claim about something that lacks any physical evidence, and is no different than claims of numerous other religions. We all know praying makes you feel warm inside, that does zero to establish any evidence that god is responsible.

I'm okay with these definitions for the sake of this discussion.

Citation please?

Faith and trust typically have the same meaning in Scripture. "Blind Faith" is virtually a contradiction in Scripture.

The visible evidence of the Holy Spirit is the sweet fruit produced by faithful (i.e. obedient) Christians for the past 1900+ years.

False beliefs don't typically inspire folks to write great hymns, build hospitals, establish great universities (e.g. Harvard), produce great works of literature, produce great art, comfort the afflicted, etc..etc...

When there is an immediate need, you seldom (never?) see atheist groups on the front lines. (I guess they're too busy arguing on the internet 😀)

A good read that goes deeply into this is What if Jesus Had Never Been Born, by Dr. D. James Kennedy.

Most of what you describe has arisen from advances in technology. That is why the western world is dominant in areas like literature, art, etc. This was not always the case. If you looked at the world in 900 AD for example, you would have guessed that the civilizations that would become globally dominant would be China or Islam. Christian Europe was a backward area at this time. All advances in knowledge and essentially all great works of art, literature, and philosophy were the result of the efforts of Muslims and Chinese. This is not the only example. The Greeks of the classical era did a pretty good job of producing philosophical texts, works of literature and art that survive to this day. Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, the civilizations of the Indian subcontinent, and those of the pre-Columbian Americas all were quite advanced.

Christianity has no monopoly on great works in the world, and certainly such works are no proof of the correctness of the religious beliefs of those who created them anyway. Otherwise youÂ’d have an equally goo argument that Islam or the Greek pantheon must be true as well. Christians in todayÂ’s world undeniably do some great things. But it is very much questionable whether that is because of their Christian beliefs or independent of that belief. Non-Christians likewise do some great things as well.

There are historical reasons why European civilization emerged as globally dominant. It is not because it was a Christian civilization. This is evident in that during the time when Christianity actually had secular power in Europe, Europe was not dominant - this was the era when it was backwards relative to other civilizations. Europe started to become dominant during the Age of Enlightenment, precisely the time when secular monarchs asserted power and the secular power of the church waned. In short, Christianity appears to yield superior results not because of any truth it conveys, but rather because it happens to be the majority religion of the culture thatÂ’s came to be globally dominant. Had Europe converted to Islam, Judaism, or some other religion, youÂ’d be making the exact same argument about why that other religion must be true.

Oh, and BTW, read Deuteronomy 22:20-21. The “tokens of virginity” references are bloody sheets caused by the bleeding of a female virgin whose hymen is torn when losing that virginity. Trouble is that the majority of women actually do not bleed when losing their virginity. You’d think an omnipotent deity might know this and not tell people to stone actual virgins who failed to bleed on their wedding night.

Stremba70 nailed it, but start at Deuteronomy 22:7 to get full context. Essentially a new husband can petition to have his marriage annulled by claiming his new bride wasn't a virgin. The only evidence required is that she didn't bleed on the wedding bed sheet their first time.

Now, if he is found to have lied because some blood is discovered, he merely pays a fine, but if no blood is found she's taken to city gate and stoned to death. Besides being a brutally unjust punishment on its face, and misogynistic given the Bible never cares about male virginity, the other problem is that most women don't bleed their first time.

Only about 45% do, meaning god's law led to the murder of many innocent virgin brides. Its this kind of casually brutal immorality codified in the laws of Moses that make it so difficult for me to believe in a loving god from this book's description.

Especially when reaffirmed by Jesus in Matthew 5:17-18. "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.”

It doesn't matter whether you call it "trust" or just "faith", believing in anything without reasonable evidence is blind faith. Faith alone is mere gullibility, which is why its often taught by conmen and grifters.

If the definition of "Faith" used by Christians today or meant by the Bible's description "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” actually means to use evidence to support your belief, please provide a citation.

Typically people who don't believe in god don't go around proclaiming their atheism, they prefer to limit potential conflict with co-workers, bosses, teachers, etc. And most atheists call themselves as "agnostic" because society has promoted that sloppy definition. Pew Research says only 4% of Americans directly declare they are atheists, while 5% are "agnostic".

So in our society maybe 10% of the population is atheist, but only 4% adopt the label. And they aren't usually joined in organizations like religions. So obviously you see far more organized efforts coming from the 70% of the population that's tithing and being led by religious leaders. But every atheist organization I'm aware of has charitable outreach programs. You just aren't looking.

How does he spin the Crusades that killed millions, and were accompanied by waves of mobs murdering jews in Europe (because the new testament is so antisemitic)?

Does he cover the inquisition where thousands of heretics were executed just for the thought crime of not believing in God/Jesus, and hundreds of thousands were tortured and punished for same? And its attack on human progress by prosecuting early scientists like Galileo Galilei, and anyone who attempted to advance human understanding of medicine, natural history, and astronomy?

How about the trans Atlantic slave trade, and how Confederate leaders used Leviticus 25:44-46 to demonstrate Gods clear approval of their slave-owning?

Or does he just make lame claims that great artists were "inspired" by jesus, instead of forced to make artworks about him because the Church controlled much of the wealth and was the largest source of funding for artistic commission, and would absolutely prosecute them for blasphemy if the art they did create contradicted Christianity in any way.

Or lame claims that because some early scientists were Christian (whether by choice or fear/force, 90% of europeans were), that means Christianity somehow enabled their research? After imprisoning their forebears for similar research?

Let me guess, he also trots out imaginary "judeo-christian ethics" too, doesn't he? The ethics that say
• women are property, who shouldn't be allowed to speak in church or teach a man.
• that daughters can be sold as sex slaves
• that rape is ok if you pay the bride price to the victims father (not the victim herself because she's property).
• that descendants can be punished for crimes of their ancestors.
• that slavery is cool, as long as your slaves are foreigners, or Hebrew bondsmen that you blackmail into surrendering their freedom forever by threatening to keep their wife and children as your own.
• That the proper punishment for a King taking another mans wife and sending her husband to die at the front lines is to make their baby suffer for a week before killing him, and then command that his other wives be raped by an usurper.
• That you should kill women, children and babies captured in battle, unless you find any of the girls/women attractive, then you can make them your concubines so the murderer of their husbands and children gets to rape them for the rest of their awful lives.
• That you should burn your daughter alive if you ask for gods help to win your battle and she's the first to rush out of the house to greet you.
• That disobediant children who taunt a man should be murdered by bears.

I of course agree with you many cultures and religions can and do produce great art and literature. My point was that for many centuries Christians have excelled almost beyond measure in literally every art, every science, literature, philosophy, etc... It was specially their faith that propelled these great achievements.

We are all made in the image of God, and any one of us can excel in whatever talent God has graced us with. This is known as "common grace." That is, even unbelievers benefit from the Christian worldview.

Here is a comprehensive(?) analysis of the "virginity test" in Deuteronomy 22:

https://www.gotquestions.org/virginity-test-torn-hymen.html

GotQuestions.org

How accurate was the virginity test mentioned in Deuteronomy 22? | GotQuestions.org

Yes, it’s the typically long train of broken excuses, diversions and lies from apologetics.

First, it’s not protecting women. Men don’t get a “stiff punishment”, they get fined, women get executed.

Second, there is no other proof of virginity given in the “investigation”, its bleeding on the bedsheet, that’s it. Virginity can’t be proven by character witnesses and nowhere in the laws says it can.

The blood on the bedsheet is the test given because either God didn’t understand female anatomy, or the misogynistic laws were written by early Iron Age men who didn’t.

And there is no Hebrew super hymen. Woman of that era were very active, whether doing physical housework, lifting and carrying sometimes heavy things, and yes, riding horses or donkeys. They had innumerable ways of accidentally breaking their hymens. Slave girls in Egypt (assuming you believe the myth of the Exodus) weren’t wrapped in bubble wrap in their quarters as claimed, they were workers, that’s what slavery is.

Rabbis wrote at those times knew all this because they bemoan the law’s harshness and unjustness. One wrote about how a new bride explained how hers “rubbed off” while climbing the steep stairs in her home.

And the last diversion is to claim we don’t have direct records of the law being imposed (apparently we don’t have copies of the Jerusalem Times going back to that period, lol). So what? So the excuse is ro admit God decreed an awful, unjust law with brutal consequences, but MAYBE everyone violated Gods commands by never enforcing it?

Weakest of weak sauce. And I guarantee the law didn’t exist without being enforced at least some of the time. Even once was a horrific unjust punishment.

And even if the bride was actually “guilty”, how is execution a just punishment? If your daughter snuck out one night and slept with her boyfriend she was in love with, do you really believe she should be executed? What kind of Muslim level medieval misogyny and hatred is this?

All the primitive, brutal, ignorant, misogynist stuff about sex just proves further that the book is not from god, but exactly straight out of the primitive, brutal, ignorant, misogynist culture of the day.

@DesertCat, @Fella,

In the beginning of Terrence Malick's film called The Tree of Life, there is the following quote:

I’m curious, does this dichotomy mean anything to either of you?

Yeah, it means divine grace is a made up fanciful religious construct and the quote is trying to smuggle in the unfounded supernatural by putting it on a par with nature. "Take your pick: the fairy tale or reality" ... is the dubious actual idea of the quote.

There is certainly such a thing as living gracefully as opposed to ungracefully. As usual, religion hijacks a natural thing into supernatural claims ... be it grace, lord, resurrection, sacred, gospel, salvation, divine, spirit, soul, etc. All these words mean something in the natural world, but religion makes a fairy tale meaning out of them.

Note the significance of believing as the ticket to "salvation." It matters not, according to the doctrine, when you get down to brass tacks, if you are a murdering, thieving, raping, lying scumbag. What matters is if you believe in the new religion and the "savior."

How could that possibly be a more blatant, callous, and manipulative market share ploy? "If you believe our religion, you live forever in paradise with streets of gold. If you don't, you go to hell."

Open your eyes to what you are looking at. Letting the dominant religion of your culture be your baseline reality IS THE MISTAKE!

Why is there such a major difference between the natural world and the Darwinian world for you?

How is the Darwinian world not the natural world?

Surely grace is not an aspect of the Darwinian world in your mind, right?

WTF is the “Darwinian world”? We only have evidence for a natural world.

You reject the theory of evolution based on Darwin’s work as the fundamental model of reality for this world?

If there is a fundamental model of reality for this world it is based on our observations of physical phenomena that indicate everything is made of atoms (and their subatomic components), and driven by a small number of forces we have identified such as gravity, the strong force, the weak force, etc.

Observations show us that life has evolved increasingly complexity over billions of years (based on fossils, stratification, nuclear dating, DNA relationships and ESVs) and the current best explanation is the theory of natural selection. But I would hardly call it fundamental to anything, not even the science of biology, and it can easily be replaced by a different theory that better explains the available evidence of evolution, without changing anything fundamental about our model of reality.

Theists greatly overrate the importance of Darwin and the theory of natural selection. It’s not a disproof of God, and disproving it wouldn’t provide any evidence for god.

Darwinism provides a ‘why’ for the reality of this world. What is the why for your “natural world” if it isn’t Darwinian?

Do you claim to be able to live your life outside of a story? Are your biological drives not within the Darwinian story?

If you are riding on top of an elephant, then you don’t get to decide whether or not you’re in a story by ignoring the elephant.

You are in whichever story your elephant is in, and I’m saying your elephant is in the Darwinian story.

Are you claiming your elephant is in another story called “natural” but not Darwinian?

Once you accept you’re in the Darwinian story like the rest of us, then let’s talk about how your compadre is smuggling in things like grace, unconditional love, etc from the Christian story and claiming them as “natural”.

It provides an explanation for how life evolved. Which is just one part of reality. It provides no explanation for physics, chemistry, mathematics, economics, most of biology or whether god exists.

Darwinism is a model that explains the evidence of evolution. It’s not a story. Stories are accounts of events, real or imagined.

Stories are accounts of events, real or imagined.

I’m not claiming to ride an elephant, or that I’m in a story. Whether natural selection is a correct model or not, it has nothing to do with whether god exists. Evolution could be a natural consequence of the universe god made, or god could have guided it, or god could have created the evidence for it to convince us it’s true.

Therefore to determine whether god exists natural selection is irrelevant.

Forget it. You’re a waste of time. You can’t even track what the conversation is about. You just want to bring everything back to “WHeRe’s the EvIdeNcE oF GoD?” Derp.

Btw:

Can a human live completely outside of a story?

Grok:

Once you accept that reality is not a story, then maybe you’ll be able to pose coherent questions.

Grace is not a concept within the theory of natural selection. You haven’t even defined how you are using it, its most basic definition is elegance or simplicity of movement.

Unconditional love is not a Christian concept, it’s been around since long before early Iron Age peoples invented Yahweh. Most parents feel it for their offspring. If you need an evolutionary explanation for why we feel it, one is that it’s probably an important part of social instincts mammals developed that made them more successful as parents and species.

lol at appealing to a pattern matching algorithm built out out of random internet data.

More specifically, did grok say a model is a story?

Is Darwinism exclusively a model or is it a story as well?

Grok: