I am someone who has yet to be provided with enough high-quality evidence to rationally embrace the postulate that Jesus Christ was an historical figure who did indeed stem from a virgin birth and who did indeed perform all the miracles ascribed to him by the Gospels.
Count me in with Jefferson and Payne.
Regards,
Atheist beliefs (and anti-God, anti-Christ views) are as welcome on the Religion Forum as liberal beliefs are on the News/Activism Forum.
“Count me in with Jefferson and Payne.”
You are not with Jefferson.
He is a lot smarter than most. Degree in Quantum Physics and such. You also might enjoy this site http://www.veritas.org/talks/ The truth, the way and the light, is definitely out there and he's coming back!
“I am someone who has yet to be provided ...”
In placing responsibility for Faith out side of yourself you’ll be waiting for a long long time. The element left out of these sterile “academic” discussions is the fact that God plainly requires that YOU invite Him in and that your sense of Him then becomes the basis of your Faith. Turn your back on Him and he will turn his face away from you.
It takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that Jesus never really ‘happened’, and more to suppose that [H]e did not say the things recorded of [H]im – so incapable of being ‘invented’ by anyone in the world at that time: such as ‘before Abraham came to be I am’ (John viii). ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John ix); or the promulgation of the Blessed Sacrament in John v: ‘He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life’. We must therefore either believe in Him and in what [H]e said and take the consequences; or reject [H]im and take the consequences.
— Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pg. 338