If you are looking for like-minded people to pat each other on the back and agree on everything that's fine, but if you are trying to convince someone who doesn't agree with you, one will need a little more than "just take my word" for it.
If this is sufficient "proof" for you, then you only prove what I have been saying all along: one must believe in order to find the Bible believable. In other words, a predisposition to accept everything in the Bible as true must pre-exist. That's the a priori (what you call "baseless") or blind faith (which you profess, but vehemently deny!).
Let's face it, one day you woke up and were "touched" by the Holy Spirit, as you conveyed in a previous post, and He immediately "directed" you to the scriptures.
Is that not proof that this was not learned or thought through, but something that happened (apparently by none of your doing) in a "flash," like being touched with a magic wand, and from there on you were "hooked," or under spell, or mesmerized, whatever, but don't know why or how. Sure sounds like blind faith to me, FK! :)
Ah, this has a little different look to it. I take you to be saying that our belief is that the Holy Spirit zaps us with Biblical KNOWLEDGE and then when we later go read the scriptures we say "Yup, I already knew that". If so, then I disagree. When the Holy Spirit "zaps" what He does is to open our capacity to understanding the logical, reasonable, and common sense Biblical truths that were there all along. In our lost state we are unable to see these truths. They were foolishness to us because we were born fools. :) So, when the Holy Spirit touched me as a teenager, I was not instantly transformed into a believer. I was sent to the scriptures and then BECAME a believer because God's truth was showed to me as it was intended. THEN, it made sense.
Now, when you talk about a predisposition to accept everything (or at least many things, since there are always questions) in the Bible as true, I can live with that. That represents the real change that the Holy Spirit effected in us (heart of stone to flesh). Belief, though, has to be IN something. The word of God tells us what that something is.
So, I see your two statements as being very different. I think a priori, or baseless, faith cannot be true since there is nothing behind it. One would have to legitimize faith in anything else by the same criterion, nothing. I do not legitimize faith in anything else because I think Christianity is very different from other faiths. It makes different claims, its Holy Book is unlike any other, and its effect on the world is unmatched. The Holy Spirit changes a man's heart and leads him to true faith IN something real that is BASED on something real.
Let's face it, one day you woke up and were "touched" by the Holy Spirit, as you conveyed in a previous post, and He immediately "directed" you to the scriptures.
Close enough, yes, but at that moment I did not have faith. The Spirit LED me to faith, so it wasn't baseless. The Bible tells us that we should always be ready to give a REASON for our hope (faith), and also that we should confess our faith. That's not credibly possible is there is nothing behind it, if it is blind.