Can Christianity Be Proven?

Love the sinner. Hate the sin. Is this so hard?

 

I think my voew is rather optimistic and you must have read my mind.

When I first posted my comments, I had a little "science being the path that God provided to seek knowledge" passage at the end, but didn't want to send mixed messages. Really.

But in the end, happy are those who believe without seeing.
I guess your real name is Thomas.

 

Have a child and get back to me.

 

Fair correction on my use of the word "wizard."

I understand what you are saying about truth. My answer is; there are a lot of things in the world today that seem hard to believe but that doesn't mean they are not true.

However, the truth is the truth. It does not depend on you or I accepting it as truth. In this case, God gives us all a choice to believe or not believe. The only thing we MUST accept is that there are consequences to our decision. Just like a soccer player in a game, you are free to commit a "professional foul" if you choose to do so, but there are consequences. The act may result in your exclusion from the game. But accepting, results in being able to play the game forever and never tire and never be bored! That sounds to me like the game I love.

 

The perfect answer, IMO!!!

 

Foos already answered this, but I just wanted to expand on it briefly. You assumption that he must be either or is inherently untrue. Just because the Bible, which already accepted Jesus as the son of God, says he believed he was the son of God, does not necessarily mean that.
There are a lot of hints, including the Nag Hammadi texts and the entire Arian movement, that suggest Jesus's divinity was not always clear. After all, he was a man who started out trying to reform the Jews - his moral and ethical teachings already had the power of God behind them. If you take away his divinity, and assume he was preaching on behalf of Yahweh, there's your moral backing. It doesn't require him to be a madman or a God. Just someone who believes he's foudnd the true path to what Yahweh was saying. That Paul was clever enough to make him divine does not change the probability that Jesus was a Jewish reformer who's followers were a bit more zealous than usual.
Incidentally, there is, of course, no way of proving this, but from a historical basis, this is a likelier scenario.

 

But those things can be proven.

That, sadly, is not nearly always true. Didn't you see Return of the Jedi?

But you can't show that this is the truth. Thus you are left with the argument that this is true only because you believe it to be true. If you admit that - OK. I can't argue with that. But at the same time, I reserve the perfectly valid right to say "prove that this is true", which you cannot do.

 

I love Garcia's answer above.

In a world that seems so full of hate, it IS hard to understand the motivation.
In our human condition it DOES seem impossible. The message here is; hate the sin, love the sinner.

I don't have an especially good way to express that but perhaps it is like trying to explain to someone who hates everything about the war in Iraq except that the life of the people there will be better without Saddam. Why a parent would support their child going there to risk their life for that goal requires a great deal of faith. BUT there is an even greater part of this plan; your KNOW child will surely die in order for this plan to be successful.

As the father of a 22 year old who is NOT in Iraq and doesn't plan to enlist, it is impossible for me to even consider what that option would feel like, I just have to accept that there is a level of caring there that I do not understand.

Accepting that fact is what proves Christianity exists. It is not about science or mythology. It is about acceptance something we do not yet understand. Again Garcia puts it well; it is like trying to explain email to a caveman. No offense intended. In this case we are all cavemen in this sense.

 

I wish you'd stop slinging such loose language. ASSUMING this fact allows one to prove Christianity exists. There's a giant difference.

 

We are God's children.

Wouldn't you forgive your child?

 

What better way to alleviate suffering in this world than by putting value in another?

 

Let me sum up what the Bible teaches, if I may. According to the Bible, God created man to have fellowship with him. However, God is perfect and absolutely holy and once man messed up and became not perfect and holy through disobedience (in other words, sinned) then that created a gulf between man and God. No one, obviously, has ever lived a perfect or sinless life (other than infants or those who were mentally incapacitated enough to not know right from wrong). And since God demands perfection in order to be in his presence, it seemed that man was hopeless.

that's where Jesus comes in. By living a sinless life, he was able to at his death, bear all the imperfections of man and substitute his life instead. (Dan, the word you're thinking of is propitiation.) So, we can, in essence, become perfect in God's eyes by accepting the gift of Christ's sacrifice.

That's the new testament in a nutshell.

 

You know that science and religion can coexist, right?
There was some poll on medical doctors. 92% agreed that something "unexplained" other than science helped cure people. I don't quite remember the wording, but it did have some "higher power" influence.

It's not about the caveman being able to understand email, rather the natural process you see (yes, call that evolution and science) in which email is developed. Before email, who had the concept? Nobody, but that doesn't mean that it can't be.

You want to prove religion when we are in caveman days in regards to God. What God can turn out to be may be something we have no way of explaining let alone understanding. God should have the power to inform all of us, but God chooses to see who can believe without the need to know it all. We are free to live and God's willingness to let us find God makes this about faith, and if you wish, science.

Nobody in science can tell you where Aids started.
Nobody in science can cure Aids.
I guess Aids doesn't exist.
Where's your ************ science now?

 

You're still missing the point of the Jebediah Springfield story.

I see what you're saying (I think). Jesus' teachings are derived from, and are part of the myth of Jesus, so if I dismiss the myth, I'll have to discount the messages contained in the myth.

Now, the message of Jebediah Springfield, "a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man" came from the context of Springfield's founding myth, as words that came from the patriot who fought a bear barehanded. "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man" originally got its legitmacy because Jebediah Springfield said it. And Jebediah Springfield has legitmacy because he was a patriot.

Lisa discovered Jebediah to be a fraud, but that didn't destroy the message. Because ultimately, it's the message that survives and the myth becomes secondary. And when the people of Springfield honor Jebediah, they're actually honoring the message "a noble spirit embiggens the smallest man". Now, it's the message that gives legitmacy to the messneger, and the messenger gives legitmacy to the founding myth.

So if you believe the message to be the truth, you no longer need to give legitmacy to the messenger, and the founding myth becomes irrelevant to the equation.

 

As I have been saying all along, this is NEVER about "proving" anything. Just as you and I accept the fact that the internet works without knowing all the details of it, I accept the fact that Christianity is what the Bible says it is. It works for me and my life.

God gives us all that choice. As I have stated elsewhere in this thread, it is like the defending soccer player who has a choice to foul or not foul; you have a choice - just accept the fact there are consequences. The player cannot know for sure before the act what the exact consequences will be and so accepts it. I accept it and that is all that matters to me. You have the same option. God, nor anyone else, forces you to make the choice. It is up to you.

 

I'm still waiting for the inheritance.

 

I can't show you the email. I can't even explain how it works. So where do we go now? Deny this entire process?

But your question about the "scientific" mind is a good one. How DO we explain to someone who INSISTS they TOUCH something before they will believe that it exists?

I can offer two examples that may help express my position.

The first is from the Bible in which Thomas, one of Christ's disciples, know at the Doubting One, could not bring himself to believe the Christ had risen from the dead. While he was arguing this point with some of the other disciples who were gathered around him, Christ came up to the group. Thomas, having previously expressed to the group that he would not believe until he had touched the nail wounds in Christ's hand and felt the sword wound in his side, went up to Christ and indeed felt those wounds.

At this point, Christ pointed out that there would be those who would have similar doubts but that they would have to accept the reality of salvation by their own faith in something they could not fully understand.

Another example of a similar lack of total understanding comes from a recent experience I had. My step-daughter, a 20 year alcoholic, finally gave up drinking but only after having become very ill to the point she had to be hospitalized. By the time she entered the hospital her liver had shut down and her kidneys shut down soon after admission. The medical staff sent for a kidney specialist who ordered emergency dialysis. Due to the limited facilities in the area in which we live, this could not be preformed until the next day. We were informed that even with emergency procedures the prognosis was grim.

We all went home that evening fearing the worst. So the next morning when we went back to the hospital we learned her kidneys have begun to function again during the night; a result for which the hospital staff had no explanation. The kidney specialist, who came from a major hospital some distance away, said we could either accept it as a "medical abnormality" or an act of God, but he had no SCIENTIFIC explanation for it. The chances of that happening were "a million to one."

This doctor had the same kind of question you have; how do I explain these things to my scientific mind? His answer was blunt; you can't. The pure scientist cannot explain it and therefore has trouble accepting it. Just like Thomas in the Bible, it is too much to comprehend for the human mind, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. It only means WE don't understand it. Therefore it IS all about faith and acceptance.

 

That's a terrible comparison. I can learn how the internet works and test it - build a "mini-internet" so to speak. You can't, despite Mel's best intentions, recreate the crucifiction and the resurrection.

Right, except that you can't prove the choice has any grounding in reason. I can tell you that you also have a choice to accept Wotan or not to accept him. I can't prove that Wotan even exists. Which would make all those goat sacrifices I've made over the years silly.

 

That's the problem with Pascal's wager - you'll spend all your waking moments covering all of the bases, not to mention killing untold numbers of goats and virgins and such.

And don't forget John Frum, the deity worshipped by the cargo cult of Tanna. That guy is coming back with jeeps and pigs and American flags - whatever you wantum, you gettum.