crin

Anyway, I'm not going to go on the internet much more. The thing is taking up all my time. I may come back briefly but probably not. I'll leave my last piece of evidence; My elder brother Tom died when I was young, too young to understand what death was (about 3-5, Tom was 14). He was the nicest person I knew. I thought he had just been sent to hospital. At birth, he apparently had some kind of breathing problem. Just coming out of my Mum's womb, he started to go blue. The doctors were all in another room, so my Dad was the only one watching (he is in fact quite a well-respected doctor, but was only there cos his son was being born). What he did is he shut his eyes and prayed. He prayed really, really hard; "God, please let this child live". He said he had never, ever, concentrated so much in his life, and it seemed like an eternity. But the blue left Tom's face. My Dad never said this to my Mum, or to anyone, until after Tom's death. I can understand you not taking this as evidence and just as a coincidence. What strikes me as evidence is what happened after; About a week before Tom's death, my Mum was at church with my eldest brother, Paul, and Tom. Tom had had problems before this. He suffered from depression attacks and had just been sent to a new school. He said there were times when he felt God's love and times when he didn't. When he was young my Mum used to have nightmares about him drowning and her being behind a fence, unable to get to him. Now in church, when praying about Tom, my Mum suddenly had a really weird feeling. She told me she felt as though God had picked her up in strong arms and cradled her as if she were nothing but a baby. He said things were going to get very, very, bad in the time coming, but afterwards it would be better. "Oh, OK," thought my Mum, "He's going to get depressed about his new school and his problems, but then he'll get over it and things will take a sharp turn for the better. No problem". It was about a week later that Tom died by jumping out of the train on the way home from school. My whole family was distraught, though I was too young to understand. I still don't understand how things have got/will get, better, but I can't help feeling I have every reason to trust. The things I told you before are other pieces of evidence I found after this but this is main reason I believe in God is this.

Freethinker, the statistics actually go 40% of scientists are atheists (not sure what date but somewhere from 1990 to 2003) and 40% atheists in 1900 as well. And MOST scientists say that it is beyond human knowledge. Check for more famous scientists apart from Einstein, Newton, and Darwin, freethinker. You'll be suprised at how many believe in God AS WELL as them. Not in the Old testament or in the whole Christian Doctrine, but in God. Even I do not believe in the WHOLE Bible. Out of the 3 people I knew personally (went to my 6th form) who study in Oxford and Cambridge now, all of them are Christians. And I did not say that if you are more scientific you are more likely to believe in God. I said that you realised such things were beyond science. But, wanting atheism to be true, you imagined it. Just as, wanting parts of Christianity to be true, I imagine things you say. Why don't we both just calm down and study the evidence in an unbiased way. Would that be a bad thing?

If anyone here believes in any kind of "Good" or "Bad", I would like to put something to them; there are 2 things they may believe; 1 Good and Bad may be things of their own opinion (like preferring, say, beer to cider), so if the human race had never existed, or if someone did not witness you doing a good action, there is no good or bad. If this is the case what I'm saying doesn't concern you. 2 They believe Good and Bad are real. It follows there may not be any correlation between what is Good/Bad and what evolution has taught us to be enjoyable (i.e Gene-sustaining). So Good is actually Right and Bad is actually mistaken. But the moment they say this, they are putting a third thing in the universe in addition to Good and Bad; some law or standard of which Good is right to be Good and Bad is wrong to be Bad. If a (wo)man does not see something or you doing something, it/you are neither good or bad by his/her opinion. But if you do something then this standard must apply to you, for what you've done is either Good or Bad. And no human in his/her right mind would call this thing "deaf", "dumb", or "blind", for then Good and Bad are meaningless, which is a contradiction. It is because so many people believe 2 that you will never be able to kill religion. The human mass always wants some purpose (call it "weakness" if you like, but be on your guard they don't reply that, if you call it a weakness, then there is no such thing as "weakness"). I wouldn't be surprised if dolphins and chimps are on the brink of religion. If so, it would be well established in humans. Then belief in God would be practically genetic I admit there is no evidence to believe in Good or Bad and it is 50-50. But then, is there any evidence that all our every sense and thought is not flawed? Your brain may just be going haywire. It is technically 50-50. You believe it simply because you will do infinitely better if it is true than not. You will do infinitely better if Good and Bad are true too.

The evidence that Jesus was the Son of God is basically the fact that there were over 300 prophecies about him in the 1st half of the Bible that came true. Now I only read this on 1 website (the 1st one that came up when I typed in "Jesus" on google) so I thought the information wasn't really trustworthy. For example, it didn't take into account that there were some prophecies historians couldn't say were true, some that him or his family could have deliberately fulfulled, and obviously, there was the fact that simply loads of people have existed and Jesus was 1. Plus it was only 1 website. But no, all the other websites said the same thing. Granted, they were stricter; they all took into account that Jesus could have fulfilled some of the prophecies, that some can't be historically proved. And anyway Jesus was a man out of millions. But they all admitted that the chances of it all happening were close to zero. 1 in the hundreds. There wasn't one (I saw) that refuted the evidence. You can check all this. The other thing is that few historians who look at everything that happened at the place and time of his dying/ressurection come up with alternative explanations, and many sceptics go away saying that they think he did, incredibly, rise. This matter is beyond the scope of this tiny box so you can check it all up.

Well done Beaker. I hope, because you realise no one can know anything beyond nature (the circuitry in our brains has evolved just to cope with nature), that you realise theories of bizarre things are really just as likely as theories of seemingly non-bizarre things. I would agree with most that the Christian theory is bizarre (That God exists, and made the universe, and the universe is different from him, and those parts of the universe that are men have "sinned", and the way God has made it right is to have become part of the universe himself; to have become a mere ape in fact, and by this ape existing, dying, and rising, the universe has somehow been made right with God.) but it is not strangeness that must be thought about; it is evidence. The more scientific a man is the more, I think, he will agree. That may be why Darwin, Einstein, and Newton (I don't know about the rest of them) all believed in God, but it may not, I don't know.

It is not a property of the idea of a crocophant that the crocophant exists, but it is a property of the idea of something Perfect (un-[stop*]-able) that the Perfect being exists. I can't make it any simpler *This includes any arguments in your mind now

But we can't comprehend how the world is Perfect. The circuitry in our brains has evolved to light fires and hunt buffalo, and generally operate in the bit of the universe we can see. We call floods and earthquakes "bad" because evolution has taught us to find gene-sustaining things enjoyable. "good" may not always be enjoyable, if you believe there is a thing called "good".

The reason it has to exist is that if the idea of something ABSOLUTELY Perfect, un-limit*-ed, and un-stop*-able does not exist, it is a contradiction. If you are thinking of something ABSOLUTELY Perfect (un-stop*-able), no arguments in your mind can stop it, so it must actually be un-stop*-able. If it isn't, then what you are thinking of obviously isn't Perfect and un-stop*-able, for it has been stopped.

But God must exist. He is imperative: The idea of something Perfect (un-stop*-able) must exist. (it must ACTUALLY be un-stop*-able) But this means everything must be perfect. Your fingernails must be perfect. So must the chair you are sitting on. So must everything; The idea of everything Perfect (everything un-stop*-able) must exist. But this second idea of everything being perfect is the first idea of something perfect with extensions. Being Perfect, it must have controlled these extensions; So there is an all powerful being who unites the world to himself thus making it Perfect. To put it simply, there is a "God" who "loves" the world. The asterix (*) denotes any arguments in your mind now