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To: ahayes; betty boop; hosepipe; .30Carbine; Dr. Eckleburg
There are other religions that have their own holy Scriptures, and all religions have the universe. There is nothing about your religious experience that you can point to and say is demonstrably unique.

Your objections to God's ways don't improve with repetition.

Of course it is demonstrably unique - the power of God - as I have mentioned before.

But I cannot demonstrate it to your satisfaction, because you have not received - or perhaps, have rejected - the divine revelation that Jesus Christ is Lord.

But to my brothers and sisters in Christ, some of whom I am pinging to this post, it is only obvious! We share in the same Spirit. We are dead and yet alive with Christ in God. We have the mind of Christ. We are different.

437 posted on 06/11/2007 11:01:46 AM PDT by Alamo-Girl
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To: Alamo-Girl
Your objections to God's ways don't improve with repetition.

Your inability to defend your religion as uniquely true does not improve with repetition!

Of course it is demonstrably unique - the power of God - as I have mentioned before.

Others have experienced the power of a different God. You are no more able to declare their experience as invalid than they are to declare yours invalid.

It boils down to a person's individual faith. Unfortunately this renders a person's choice to declare their religion as leading to ultimate truth pretty meaningless. When there's not much to choose between different religions and all claim to have the Truth(TM) but are unable to show why their truth is better than someone else's, it makes it all seem rather pointless.

My truth is that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist, based upon his character as depicted in the Bible. The only way I have been challenged on this is by being told I am seeking to believe a lie (for what possible reason?), told I am close-minded (no, if I were close-minded I wouldn't have changed my mind!), and that I was never really Christian in the first place (I was).

439 posted on 06/11/2007 11:17:08 AM PDT by ahayes ("Impenetrability! That's what I say!")
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To: Alamo-Girl; ahayes; betty boop; .30Carbine; hosepipe; cornelis; 1000 silverlings; ...
But I cannot demonstrate it to your satisfaction, because you have not received - or perhaps, have rejected - the divine revelation that Jesus Christ is Lord.

But to my brothers and sisters in Christ, some of whom I am pinging to this post, it is only obvious! We share in the same Spirit. We are dead and yet alive with Christ in God. We have the mind of Christ. We are different.

Amen. AG! By the grace of God alone.

WHY I BELIEVE IN GOD
by Cornelius Van Til

I tried to find a couple paragraphs from this essay to excerpt but found it difficult to narrow my choice. Every word is golden. Every sentence speaks to God's glory, much as your post does, AG. I hope you all read Van Til's argument and enjoy it as much as I do. Here's just a small part of Van Til's discussion with an unbeliever...

"...Take now the four points I have mentioned -- creation, providence, prophecy, and miracle. Together they represent the whole of Christian theism. Together they include what is involved in the idea of God and what He has done round about and for us. Many times over and in many ways the evidence for all these has been presented. But you have an always available and effective answer at hand. It is impossible! It is impossible!...

Van Til concludes...

"...Looking about me I see both order and disorder in every dimension of life. But I look at both of them in the light of the Great Orderer Who is back of them. I need not deny either of them in the interest of optimism or in the interest of pessimism. I see the strong men of biology searching diligently through hill and dale to prove that the creation doctrine is not true with respect to the human body, only to return and admit that the missing link is missing still. I see the strong men of psychology search deep and far into the sub-consciousness, child and animal consciousness, in order to prove that the creation and providence doctrines are not true with respect to the human soul, only to return and admit that the gulf between human and animal intelligence is as great as ever. I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by the ever-changing tide of the wholly new, only to return and say that they can find no bridge from logic to reality, or from reality to logic. And yet I find all these, though standing on their heads, reporting much that is true. I need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead of man the center of it all, and I have a marvelous display of the facts as God has intended me to see them.

And if my unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject it, it is large enough even to include that which those who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see. My unity is that of a child who walks with its father through the woods. The child is not afraid because its father knows it all and is capable of handling every situation. So I readily grant that there are some "difficulties" with respect to belief in God and His revelation in nature and Scripture that I cannot solve. In fact there is mystery in every relationship with respect to every fact that faces me, for the reason that all facts have their final explanation in God Whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and Whose ways are higher than my ways. And it is exactly that sort of God that I need. Without such a God, without the God of the Bible, the God of authority, the God who is self-contained and therefore incomprehensible to men, there would be no reason in anything. No human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things, but only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is an explanation at all.

So you see when I was young I was conditioned on every side; I could not help believing in God. Now that I am older I still cannot help believing in God. I believe in God now because unless I have Him as the All-Conditioner, life is Chaos.

I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians, and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy."

"...the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian."

"Don't use your circular logic on me. I work for the phone company." -- the guy from the phone company to Elaine on "Seinfeld" who later "disappeared."

460 posted on 06/11/2007 12:17:57 PM PDT by Dr. Eckleburg ("I don't think they want my respect; I think they want my submission." - Flemming Rose)
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