Do you believe in God?

Which of the potential countless versions of yourself is the real you and why?

Why? Because prioritizing lasting meaning is associated with quality of life.

You know, something that helped convince me early on that Christianity is true; the instinct everyone has to "claim" Jesus.

Buddhists say Jesus was enlightened.
Muslims say Jesus was a prophet.
Mormons say Jesus was a god, but not God.
Atheists say Jesus was a good moral teacher.
Hindus say Jesus was an avatar.

None of them say "Jesus was God."
But they all want Jesus "on side".

You don't see many folks trying to claim Vishnu to their exterior religion.

All the versions of me are real. Why? Because they are in evidence ... they can be demonstrated to exist. The veracity of it is not based on stories thousands of years old arising from superstitious cultures. You know, the same way anything else is said to exist, except you-know-what.

Prove it. Or you're just like all the other religions.

Jesus made Comet 3I Atlas, and the quantum fields, and the bubonic plague bacterium, and the propensity for cancer, and Mount Everest, and the fault lines in the earth's crust, and the trillions of galaxies .... right? Why?

When we take our religious beliefs outside of their religious membrane -- outside of their seclusion from reality -- the dubiousness of it is bald-faced. Meanwhile, if we debate it back and forth in terms of other religious mumbo jumbo ("Look how many religions talk about Jesus?"), this stark fact evades us. Such a tack never leaves the religious arena and is just insisting on being claimed by one of them.

Each of us is entrusted with some life to see what we do with it.

With your life, you prioritize evidence over meaning.

I’ve prioritized meaning over evidence.

We’re running the experiment..

If your question is, "Why?" then just read through Genesis and you'll get your answer.

He created a good world.
He saw that it was good.
Humanity's sin caused the Fall.
Creation fell with humanity.
The fallen creation is broken; it now contains evils, privations, flaws.

That's it.

Jesus created the bubonic plague bacterium and understood all about it .... OR .... the thought infectious disease was caused by demons?

Religion is so often a bypassing of the actual spiritual element of human consciousness. Amen.

It's not quite either of these.

In many ways, all of humanity caused that bacterium to exist.
In another sense, Satan's pride and temptation in the garden.

We distinguish between the active and permissive will of God.
God never actively wills evil; he is incapable of doing so.
But He can permit it, in order to bring about a greater good.

God didn't actively will that the bubonic plague exist.
But He did permit humanity to fall, in deference to the free will He gave us, and despite His warnings to the contrary.

The wages of sin are death. Beings that were not God (humans, angels, demons, etc) freely chose to do evil,
and thus brought evil into the world. This is seen in the horrific privations of our reality, such as the existence of
bubonic plague.

Is the good father not capable of being the bad guy for the sake of his son? So that his son will act heroically in faith?

*It is the one who trusts in the goodness of his core identity that is willing to appear to do evil.*

The evil one will do evil, as it’s his nature, but he must blind himself to it if he wants to view himself as good.

It is the good son — who desires goodness and insists the good father is sovereign — that says, “My father does evil” while simultaneously holding to the ultimate truth of his goodness.

This is the lesson of Job.

If you want to truly follow the way, then you will be put in the blender of chaos and confusion.

Congratulations to the one who is willing to accept the challenge in the name of the Holy Spirit.

Nothing can save humanity except for the spirit of man.

Not the social morality of man, not the politics of man, not the rational intellect of man, not the science and technology of man, not the religion of man. Only through the spirit.

Do you get this yet?

And the spirit of man will communicate to you what it communicated to me: If you are serious about saving humanity, about saving the universal self, then you will need both the soul and God.

And you will need to follow the teachings of Jesus.

Refuse to align with the primary part of yourself which would rather be comfortable in death than inconvenienced by life.

Peace.

Notice that at any point where a critical question comes up, you instantly and reflexively plug in the doctrine of the religion to explain it. No time for thinking, no time for analysis, no time for a reality check ... just the parroting of the doctrine. This is indoctrination point blank.

Whatever the question is, your answer is the doctrine of the religion. Which is to say: just whatever the 2000 year old book says. Meh. Why don't you try plugging the answers of that day into any other field, like medicine, chemistry, biology, engineering? See how that works.

Besides, there are many, many, many religions, and you can do this with any of them. Furthermore, they all come from the same place ... from the mind of man. So without some kind of verification/demonstration that one of them is actually true, and not just based on folklore and myth (LIKE ALL THE REST OF THEM BY YOUR OWN ASSESSMENT) ... you are laying something like 20,000-to-1 that you have the right god/religion. And that is if there is any actual god at all.

Quantum fields as "god." That's the cosmos based religion Einstein spoke of, instead of the fear/myth based type. True story.

Yes there is lots of chaos and confusion in human life. Folklore from centuries ago is probably not the answer. The most Christian nation in the world is also the most materialist, the most addicted, the most depresssed, etc. The religion is merely lip service to the masses of "believers." That's hardly debatable given the above.

I get it. The claims of the Bible are remarkable. Worth noting that they are overwhelmingly metaphysical claims; the Bible is not there to show us how to make aspirin, or computers, or cars. It's there to show us how to follow God.

Why do I believe these claims? On the balance of the evidence. Kind of like how we do in poker; we may not always be sure, but we can make +EV guesses based on the evidence available to us.

The critical claim of the New Testament is that Jesus is God, he came with a message, and that he was crucified and rose from the dead. Historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a real man, who proclaimed a message, and was then crucified. They, of course, resist the idea that He rose from the dead. But the historicity of Jesus is a datapoint in favour.

We can't know with 100% certainty and detail what happened 2,000 years ago; but whatever it was, it was enough to challenge the Roman Empire, and ultimately, set the course of history for the next 2 millenia. That, to me, is another huge datapoint in favour.

My own personal lived experiences; the literal religious experiences of my life, the vision of the Sacred Heart, the movements of the world around me in ways that seem ordained; while incommunicable and ineffable, to me, they are a decisive datapoint.

My journey through other spiritualities also contributes; I was a Buddhist for a while, and an atheist, and briefly involved in the occult. All of them ultimately left me wanting. Christianity (specifiaclly Catholicism) has not.

We make all our life decisions based on the balance of the evidence; we know nothing for certain (save our own existence, big ups Descartes).

On the balance of the evidence, I do not believe the world was churned out of butter, as Hindu cosmology claims.
On the balance of the evidence, I do not believe in samsara, as Gautama Buddha claimed.
On the balance of the evidence, I do not believe that there is no intelligent force behind existence itself, as the atheists claim.

On the balance of the evidence, I believe Jesus Christ was God incarnate, died on the cross and rose again on the third day.

I believe this to be, as Pascal might say... a +EV play.

Millions of children believe in Santa Claus. That, to me, is another huge datapoint in favor.

Translation: wurlitzer aka lagtight aka geezerchess loves child molesters even more than the Catholic church does.

Don't compare religious stories and their track within cultures, look at the natural world and ask if any of the magic stories make sense to account for it. Muhammad was a man in history and so was David fukking Koresh. That point is ridiculous. The fact that one of the Roman rulers converted to Christianity doesn't mean anything about the truth of it, any more than whatever religion they practiced before that means it was true.

I respect the personal experience angle, but only if the experiences are listed out, which no one ever does when they mention personal experience.

Yet again "the balance of the evidence" is cited with no evidence given. Just "lots of little things, ineffable."

The Pascal's Wager thing is a joke because it is in direct violation to the discipleship and belief required by the religion. You don't get to say "Well, I'll just hedge my existence here and make sure I get into heaven if there is one." That's not allowed by the religion, and it always amazes me that it keeps getting raised by those who claim to be in the religion.

It's a religious club. Not a metaphysics. The "poof theory" by the Magic Man is against all reason, physics, reality and is indeed worthy of the 1st Century superstitious time in which it originated.

Honestly, I respect your skepticism a great deal; Koresh was a sick man. You should read The Road to Jonestown, great book. Same author wrote about Koresh/Waco, though even I find it too hard to read. And yeah; tbh, I agree with you on Pascal's wager. It was more a gag about +EV than anything, but true discipleship is definitely bigger than what Pascal was imagining, hah.

I'm happy to tell you my personal experience, if that's something you have more respect for. I'll TL;DR it so I don't drown you, it's honestly a lot of things added up, so I'll just give you the "big one".

My personal conversion came when I found out someone I'd met at a party was homeless. I was surprised, they were this shy, nerdy, autistic girl. Not the type to get mixed up with a bad crowd or anything, you know? I'd only met her once and shook her hand, that was it.

I kept talking to them over Facebook while they went through this. They'd been kicked out by family. They'd stopped eating and were being ferried between different hotels while the social services tried to figure out what to do. Eventually, they stopped eating due to the strain, and ended up hospitalised.

A few days later, I get a text saying they're being discharged, and they think that now have to sleep on the streets; the system has failed them. I live around the corner from the hospital, so offered them the use of an airbed in a spare room for a while. I figure, hey, families have bust-ups; her mum's actually probably worried sick. Give it a week or two and she'll be wanted back home, right?

Well, unfortunately, that didn't happen. That girl ended up living with me for 3 months, and I became her personal carer. At 26, she couldn't feed herself competantly, couldn't manage basic appointments, basically couldn't... life, you know? I grew extremely fond of her, and we grew close. Over the course of that time, I unpicked what had happened to this girl.

She'd been sexually abused from infancy by her father. It was discovered about 10 years later, dad was kicked out, and her mum coddled her basically forever from that point. Which then lead to a breakdown of life skills. Absolutely heartbreaking stuff.

We found a new place for her to live, just before Christmas. I offered to keep her until after Xmas so she wouldn't be alone. She agreed. My friends and family, hats off to them, knew what was happening and came out of the woodwork to help. Presents were bought, rides were offered, the whole 9 yards. Real Xmas movie stuff, hah.

I can still remember her face; how broken she looked on Christmas day, and me breaking down crying. Just exhausted and heartbroken for her. I remember her shaking like a leaf as I put her in a cab two days later, terrified to be alone again. I was staring at a person that the world had truly chewed up and spat out. I went back inside and wept.

At this time, for context, I myself was a drug addict and living as a trans woman. I'd made my share of mistakes and erred dramatically. This was the thing that broke me, though.

I wept, hard. I fell to my knees, unable to stand, and for the first time in my life, I cried out to God, truly and from the heart. And He answered me. There, my face streaked with tears, on my knees and broken, I had a vision of the Sacred Heart of Christ, and knew completely, in the depths of my soul, that God was real. I saw it, man. I saw this heart, like a planet, towering over me in the blue skies. An instant that could have been eternal. Ineffable. I saw clearly the gravity of the evil I had done, the evils of this world, and God's steadfast and perfect love through it all.

IDK man. The way I see it; if God is infinite, then nothing we say with finite words can capture the reality.
I was blind, and now I see. I am convinced that it is all true, all of it. Top to bottom.

That's all I've got. You're welcome to DM me or hang. We may disagree on this, but I'm pretty chill and I genuinely admire your skepticism and willingness to engage. I have more time for someone who disagrees and cares than who disagrees and doesn't. Frankly, if you just wanna talk poker I'm around. I should probably stop blowing up this thread, hah. If you read all of this, then thanks for giving me those 5-10 minutes from your busy day. God bless you.

You just told a very human story that has very little connection to things 2000 years ago except that you were exposed to that religion, so that when an emotional epiphany hit you, YOUR MIND attributed it to that religion. Had you been raised in India, Saudi Arabia, ancient Greece, etc. ... you would have attributed the source behind the experience to a different god. If you would say that it is true for you, and I am saying if, then it completely discounts the exclusionary nature of claiming that religion is different from any other (in that regard). If you would say it isn't true, totally different discussion.

I will say it's nice to hear an actual anecdote instead of the nearly universal dogma among believers: "It's a lot of things" ... and then have absolutely none of those things to cite when challenged. I know how this works in the mind: just pure self-hypnosis and internal narrative, that when it sees the light of day, does not carry any weight.

I completely respect the experiential side of things, and am much quicker than most skeptics to acknowledge limitations of scientific methods and reason. And if a guiding force is acting in one's life, there should be countless examples of how, when, where, what. Then, admittedly, it does become interesting to consider. But the true believer always fails to provide anything substantive, just relying on dogma and vagueries.

Consider this: there is a thing called a "tulpa." It's a thought within consciousness, i.e. a mental creation, that when believed intensely starts to take on seeming form and identity of its own. This can work for every religion under the sun. So none of them are true and all of them are in this delimited sense. They are true in the mind, and if there is indeed ANY guiding principle or entity, that Source can use the belief of that individual toward their spiritual development. Again, for any religion.

So that the assessment of your experience, instead of "Jesus is God," would be: "tulpas work and Jesus is my tulpa."

I'm very much for leaving space for the human spirit, a decidedly non-supernatural thing. That a myriad of religions has hijacked the term into all sorts of superstitious realms ... not so much.

And so, according the one legend, a woman took a bite of an apple disobediently millennia ago, and that is the reason there is cancer, bubonic plague, asteroids hitting earth, death itself, poisonous spiders, toxins lethal to humans in nature, etc. etc. How could anything be more chimerical and fairytale-ish?

Take that into your cosmology class, your oncology class, your chemistry class, your anthropology class, etc. ... raise your hand and elucidate this to the professor. Tell the chemist that the reaction went that way because of Jesus. Tell the malignant tumor was because of the Garden of Eden. No you won't -- because religion belongs to religion (i.e. to religious clubs), and knowledge and understanding belongs to institutions of higher learning.

Don't muse about the various religions as to which one to pick. Get outside of the religion mindset. Don't separate the natural world and religion. See if the religion fits ... or if it just comes off more like a folklore-ish superstitious myth.