Please convert me

I'm not trying to be an edgelord, I'm just asking how can anyone actually believe in God- especially the Christian God. We know that there have been countless religions on the planet used to explain the unexplainable. We know that Judaism was just one of those religions, and a small one at that, and Jesus was basically a reform figure within the religion. We also know that Jesus's teachings weren't codified until hundreds of years later. So how exactly is the Bible the one true source of salvation? Maybe there is ancient wisdom within the religion but why should any rational human being in 2017 with the scientific knowledge available to him believe in anything supernatural?

Grew up Catholic btw

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if you grew up catholic then there's no conversion to be had. you're culturally a christian alreasdy.

Not how shit works.

Religion is a choice you make personally, I doubt someone will be able to convince you to follow one or not. It's up to you on whether you want it or not.

You mean decades later the new testament scriptures were all written in the first century

other religions are dirt real catholics hate pedophiles and other sick shit look islam has child brides hindus eat cremated remains buddhist do weirder shit and shitnos i dont know wtf there at but they do werd shit too

>why should any rational human being in 2017
>in 2017
>in THE CURRENT YEAR
KYS. Being a catholic is bad enough but LARPing as agnostic on a Balinese spriograph forum is patheic.

>real catholics hate pedophiles
so the pope wasn't a real catholic?

well yea, as far as human scientific knowledge goes we know more now than we did 1500 years ago

There isn't really a reason. People believe in it either because they were brought up with it, or dislike the idea that ultimately there is no rhyme or reason to the universe existing, and thus themselves.

Or because they find it to be true like the martyrs of the early church

Practical religion is a vehicle to move you in society, to find a wife, holding a job and friends. You don't go outside nor have friends, so that's that.

Dont bother. Just dont bother.

Proverbs 25:24
proof enough for me

(True) Christianity shaped the modern world, including science and the industrial revolution.
youtube.com/watch?v=4f4NjcxP-3Y

The bible isn't the source of salvation, Jesus is through his church

it was an all encompassing ideology that stamped out all others, so of course it shaped the world we're in today

Natural science cannot prove or disprove the super natural, this is why naturalism is a circular philosophy

I'm sure that they sincerely believed that, but that doesn't make it true. People have died for many different religious beliefs.

But to say that people choose a religion because of upbringing and comfort is false

Many Christian converts In China and the Middle East are being arrested and put to death because they find Christianity to be true

>was Christian
>apparent logical contradictions keep me from holding onto what had been the most important core values I'd had, because I'd feel hypocritical
>explore different religious systems, philosophies
>end up oscilllating between science as some kind of way of at least tying up some kind of objective truth, and nihilsm
and so it went. but I kept on thinking about it, which was weird because why would I continuously find my thoughts drifting back to religion after losing my faith?
but then I discovered Jordan Peterson who basically lays out a completely different approach to Christianity, which isn't predicated on surrender to unproveable metaphysical axioms about God, the soul, and the afterlife.
instead, he integrates his understanding of evolution, psychology, mythology, and literature into a coherent interpretation of these deep stories, that make their underlying meanings explicit:
youtube.com/watch?v=07Ys4tQPRis
one of the things he mentions constantly, is how Jung thought that the West was no longer able to live within the Christian stories "literally," and that they'd have to drill down to the archetypal level of analysis to really find out what these stories mean.
I don't think I stopped "not believing" - but I've been reading these stories for the first time in a decade, and realizing how central they are to the life of our civilization.

* only

I don't see how that contradicts what I said.

You said people pick there religion based on upbringing and comfort

I provided examples were that is not the case
Paul said if Christ did not rise from the dead, we are wasting our time
I take this at face value and if I did not believe it, I would not be a Christian

People can still can find comfort and meaning in Christianity in countries where it is not the predominant religion. The underlying desire in any religion is to feel a sense of purpose.

I'm sure getting your head cut off for Islamic apostasy is very comfortable

You can't be converted as long as you insist on retaining use of your reason.

All religious argument is based on the idea that it's possible to choose what you believe in, instead of your beliefs being a matter of what you are convinced of.

Nah... Fuck off and burn in Hell!

Not necessarily
Faith is a gift of Gods grace

You're twisting my words here and you know it.

1: The universe has a soul, a consciousness, all of that. Read theoretical physics.
2: Your soul is a part of it and connected.
3: God created the Universe.
4: By the Universe you can reach Him and ask him to lead your life.
5: Once he leads you, you can become the next most renown master in any field, or at least bring forth someone like that.

You can observe yourself making choices, you can observe your own exercise of will -- but in the material universe there is no will or action, only reaction, the endless cascade of matter and energy.

So you must accept that your own subjectivity is either an illusion or has a metaphysical existence. If it is an illusion, you must further question the scientific data that led you on this path all passed through the gate of that illusion. If it is metaphysical, it's time to start wondering about the terms.

So do former Muslims that convert to Christianity do it because they think it's true or because they find comfort in it?

What does that even mean
If you ask God nice he'll install a belief without reason for you?

Jesus isn't a reform figure. Paul is the one who came in and bastardized everything and then they bastardzed John 3:16 .. Yahowsha(Jesus) said he didnt come to change anythingf rom the Towrah.

Go to blessyahowah.com if you want unbastardized shit from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Greek Manuscripts

In order to be christian, you have to first be a jew. Once you sacrifice the red bull, you are anointed by a rabbis mouth over your penis and you are supposed to meditate on jerking off jesus, just like Joseph warmed up Mary's bull.

ItItsbout faith more than ritual, but if you kneel before muslims to wash their feet, like the Pope, then you can be the christcuck jew lemming you always wanted to be.

Both. They think it's true because they find comfort in it. The same is true for Christians who convert to Islam. They want to believe in a higher power and convince themselves of the religion that they find closest to their values and ideal vision of the universe.

Reason requires the laws of Logic
Were do the laws of Logic come from
And can you use the laws of logic to prove the laws of logic

And to answer your question God has many times revealed himself to people some who asked for it, some who didn't

So by your logic people can reject Christianity and accept atheism because they find comfort in the idea they won't be judged by a Holy God

LOOK, YOU LITTLE FUCKING WEASLE FAGGOT!

God has his chosen people, and if you dont drain as many jew cocks as possible, you are gunna burn in Hell! IS THAT FUCKING CLEAR ENOUGH?

I honestly have no idea what you're getting at with that first part pal. Logic exists independent of anything's existence. It doesn't have a source...

And for your second point, if God "reveals" himself that'd be evidence of some sort. Not a necessarily convincing piece but it'd be something you can fit into your reasoning at least. So then if everyone believed their reasoning would have be based on the sole piece of evidence "I saw God"

If the Jews are trying to shut something down for the last 2000 years, there must be something to it.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=obtgaZ97Kdc

Of course, but Atheism is the default position.

I'd disagree

Agnostic is. Cultural

So you don't have any evidence that the laws of logic exist?
Do you take the laws of logic on faith

The default position before believing in anything is to not believe in it unless there is sufficient evidence.

They were cut off from Gods Grace
Luke 20

Its culture, not some fools notion of a universal religion. Born yesterday?

The laws of logic are founded on proofs. If you don't know what those are, blame your teachers.

You're making a category mistake.
Logic isn't an entity to be identified. It's a description of how things are necessarily.
You don't need empirical evidence for that.

Unless God revealed himself to all people in a way that shows they have some knowledge of his existence

I.e. Laws of logic
A sense of right and wrong
A perception of beauty

"any rational human being in 2017" blah blah blah. I'm not trying to convert you, nor do I believe skeptics burn in hell, but when satan comes with work for your idle hands and you accept, you will burn such as long as you work for him. and jesus was not "The reform figure" he was the messiah, the prophesized being that did certain things, in a particular order, was a being from god, and rebuilt the church in 3 days being the sacrifice of all sacrifices, ending the system of sacrifice, and tearing the veil between man and god opening communication directly.

Those things do not necessitate God. Well, it depends on how loosely you define God I suppose, but it certainly is not evidence of the Christian God specifically.

wut.

>I'm not trying to be an edgelord

Proceeds to be an edgelord. Just another angry atheist that want a "debate", to preach his opinion and feel justified in hating religion. Same story over and over again. But to the young, they think they are paving new territory.

>mlp threads everywhere
>mlp comes to pol
>suddenly atheists are asking for conversions
The jokes write themselves.
youtube.com/watch?v=04wyGK6k6HE
Sort yourself out.

But it is not material
It's conceptual ( of the mind) yet it is also universal (the same for everyone) therefore the laws logic is of a universal mind

Can you show me were the laws of logic came from then

But how can you have proofs without using the laws of logic

Everything would be constrained by logic regardless of the existence of any mind. Logic is not "of the mind", it's just observed by minds.

You have to ask yourself to be saved.

Are you saying they are transcendent or are you saying they are material

Logic is used to describe how the universe works, it doesn't determine anything. If he universe behaved differently, then we would use different logic to explain it.

Are you using logic to come to that conclusion?

By "they" do you mean the "laws of logic"?
Neither.

Are they conceptual?

Yeah, what's your point?

>the Bible the one true source of salvation
That's a protestant view. The Catholic Church is bigger than that.

For centuries, the various books that today form the Bible were scattered all over the place. It was only after the revolution of the printing press that we managed to obtain and distribute a compiled version containing the canon books, which books are canon or not was decided by the Vatican.

Speaking about the Vatican, for centuries the Pope pretty much stuck to his title: The Bishop of Rome. If other places decided to just do their own thing without asking for the Pope's review, they could. It was only after the advent of fast and world-wide communication that the word "organized religion" could be properly applied to the Catholics.

You say you are not trying to be an edgelord, but you speak like one. There is no reason why faith and reason should be antagonistic to eachother, and specially for Catholics. Think about it: we believe that God created this Universe. This means he created all the laws and constants that rule over our lives. Studying how our Universe works is like observing each fine brush stroke in a masterpainting. For example, the official position of the Catholic Church is that God created the human soul, but says nothing about the human body. The concept of evolution is perfectly compatible with Catholicism (this is why most creationists are also protestants, because they see the Bible in a completely different manner than Catholics). Until you reach the realm of metaphysics, it is mandatory that your faith and your reason walk the same road, as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches us. If at any point they contradict eachother, then there's either something wrong with your faith, or something wrong with your reason.

Can you prove the laws of logic exist?

Scripture, tradition, and the magisterium

Let me put it this way.
If you put two of something together, there will be four of that thing.
This happens independent of minds or language. However, having minds or language allows us to describe logic.
Logic does not exist as an identifiable identity. It is not created and cannot be changed. It is a description of how things are necessarily. You know that it's necessary because you can prove it a priori.

Honestly it's late here and I have no idea what sort of route you're going by. I'll just throw out that God could not make 2+2=5 as well though.

What do you mean by that? Logic is just reasoning based on evidence, it doesn't depend on anything to "exist."

I agree with you he can't
Nor a square circle
Or a rock he can't lift

So you presupose logic?

>physics says the universe has a soul

where?

You don't get it. Logic doesn't require proof, it IS the proof.

then you agree that it's necessary and not contingent
that means you can prove it as self-evident
you dont need an independent source to prove it

Using logic to prove logic circular reasoning

God is self evident

There's this "consciousness is required for Heisenberg measurement" observation thing. Theoretical physicists are now more and more anti-misotheistic. According to current data, a universe-spanning consciousness is required to stabilize the spacetime continuum.

Don't quote me. I read it once in /sci/ and used googlefu.

How can you claim that belief in logic is unreasonable for being self-evident but belief in God as self-evident

i'm getting impatient. do you know what these words means or are you reading off a script because i feel like i'm banging my head against a brick wall.

That's some poor logic.

Why believe in God? Because of this simple axiom: nothingness cannot create anything. Actually, it can't do anything, because it is nothing.

This leaves us with only two possibilities: either this Universe has always existed (no beginning and no end, true infinity), or it was created. In this case, created by a being above our laws that dictate what is possible and impossible. This being would be beyond our comprehension.

Just like a 2D universe would have absolutely no way of even conceiving how a 3D universe would operate, we also have no starting point to even begin to comprehend what would God look like. In order to study something, you must at least be able to properly observe, measure, examine and experiment with it. Just like the 2D universe cannot even begin to study a 3D being, we also cannot begin to understand it. The 2D objects may be able to put up some observations about a 3D thing being projected to a 2D plane, but such observations will always be simplistic and incomplete.

In our case, such simple and incomplete observations are those: this God must be beyond and above our logic and comprehension, but we know that it must exist.

Either that, or the Universe has no beginning and no end, which is kinda worse than believing in God because it must assume that our laws of thermodynamics are wrong. For the same reason why perpetual motion machines cannot exist, our Universe must have a starting point and an ending point. Things must be consistent with themselves. For instance, you cannot claim to be an Atheist because God told you so. You would be contradicting yourself. The same way, an Universe that does not allow for the existence of perpetual motion machines cannot contradict itself by being infinite.

>Another anti-christian thread near IMMEDIATELY after the last 404'd
>Sigh

Is there anything more interesting for you people to do other than shit against Christianity? Does your whole existence just revolve around attacking Christians and their beliefs and nothing else? You ((people)) literally waste days of your life shilling against Christianity, when you could be I dunno, fucking like beasts in the dirt. After all, you don't believe that there is any reason for existence, so why even bother acting civilized or like an intelligent being when it's all pointless. Why don't you just give into your base, "natural" desires, and just fuck your brains out?

Ironically, you're using logic to reach that conclusion

also can you provide your proof for God as self-evident please

You know Christianity is the true religion, because you don´t actually save yourself, it´s not a disciplinary code, you are saved only by faith.

Logic is transcendent to the mind of God

I was trying to demonstrate that everyone presuposes things or as you said that certain things are self evident

I'm tired so I'm gonna go to bed

Did you use logic to come to the conclusion that I used poor logic

Blessed is he who has not seen, but believes.

God is logical
God made man in his image,
Therefore Man has the ability to use logic

me too mate

night night

Yes. Logic is simply reasoning. It is not contingent on anything to exist unlike God.

The only thing we presuppose in the existence of reality.
Logic is the study of how reality functions. Reality dictates the existence and nature of logic, not the other way around.
The way reality functions is logic. We can only examine the universe and try to understand how it functions from our observations.

If our observations are flawed, then our understanding of reality and logic would be flawed, but that doesn't negate the existence of logic itself. As long as something exists, then logic exists as the methodology of reality.

Even if the universe was pure chaos, without any semblance of laws or patterns, then logic itself would still exist in the form chaos; chaos would be logical.

Your mistake was assuming that logic dictates our definition of reality, when it is reality itself that dictates logic. We observe reality and use it to define logic. We see the 1 plus 1 equals 2, and so we write that down as a law of logic.
If we saw that 1 plus 1 equals 3, then we would write that down as logical low instead. No matter how reality functions, we would create laws based on our observations of that function, and those laws would become logic.

You can question our observations of the universe from which we draw our conclusion, and you can question those conclusions yourself, but you can't question the existence of logic without in turn questioning existence itself.

I know for a fact that existence exists in some form, because cogito ergo sum. Good luck refuting the only truly irrefutable statement in the history of philosophy.

And if you mean to refute our understanding or logic, then please, go ahead and prove that 1 + 1 =/= 2.

Fucking faggot.

So why does God get to be the mastermind behind everything we find out scientifically? Seems like a poor excuse, especially when the Church's position on scientific areas has changed as science has advanced.

Let's really stimulate those brain cells:

>It is a conceptual truth (or, so to speak, true by definition) that God is a being than which none greater can be imagined (that is, the greatest possible being that can be imagined).
>God exists as an idea in the mind.
>A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
>Thus, if God exists only as an idea in the mind, then we can imagine something that is greater than God (that is, a greatest possible being that does exist).
>But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God (for it is a contradiction to suppose that we can imagine a being greater than the greatest possible being that can be imagined.)
>Therefore, God exists.
This is St. Anselm's ontological proof of God. It does not rely on empirical proof, like the "intelligent design" argument for God.

Don't worry, even other doctors of the church have questioned it, like St. Thomas Aquinas:
>While St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) believed that God's existence is self-evident, he rejected the idea that it can be deduced from claims about the concept of God. Aquinas argued, plausibly enough, that "not everyone who hears this word 'God' understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought, seeing that some have believed God to be a body." The idea here is that, since different people have different concepts of God, this argument works, if at all, only to convince those who define the notion of God in the same way.

Further reading:
iep.utm.edu/ont-arg/

The Church changes position precisely because we acknowledge there was something wrong with our reasoning. Not doing so would characterize a poor use of God's virtues distributed to us, one of the most important being our reason.

>So why does God get to be the mastermind behind everything we find out scientifically?
Who else would be worthy of credit? The Universe itself? Things cannot create themselves here, if the Universe created itself, it would contradict itself. Why would the Universe change its own rules shortly after creating itself?

Thus the necessity of a being beyond the laws of this Universe, beyond the question "but who created God?", because this question imposes the rules of our Universe onto a being beyond them.

That is, if one day you get to chat with God and you ask him who created him, he would take it as an absurd question, much like if someone asked you "Why does 3 equals 4?"

Basically all that you're saying is that we don't understand how the universe began or how it works, but that doesn't mean that there is no explanation for how it works or how it began or that God did it.

Can a 1D being even begin to fully comprehend a 2D being? Can a 2D being even begin to fully comprehend a 3D being? Can a 3D being even begin to fully comprehend a 4D being?

Not to say God is fourth-dimensional, but the analogy serves the purpose. Our logic and reasoning would not be able to comprehend a being beyond all logic and beyond all reasoning. It is a futile question with no answers. We don't even know where or how to begin to understand it because of our nature and because of God's nature.

It's like trying to fit a LEGO into a Megablok. Things will just never click properly.

Why does God get credit for the laws of nature and the universe that humans discover through the scientific method? If you can just say that God did it for everything because he transcends everything then from whence does God come? It just seems like a cop out.