Re: i am not Tim LaHaye
i am just split right now in what i believe. i just like to question alot of things. like for instance how do we know there is a god.
Nothing wrong with questioning things. I'll never say there is. No real christian would. Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your
mind. I believe that inclusion of the mind in this is key. God gave us a brain and I'm fairly sure that he meant us to use it.
"Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord."
Almost all religions place their entire claim to fame on what someone tells you. Islam is based on what the Angel Gabriel told Mohammad. Mormonism is based on what the angel "Moroni" told Joseph Smith. Whether these people did or did not have conversations with angels is up to the listener - nobody can prove that they did, the same as noone can prove that Siddhartha Guatama (Hindu) achieved nirvana, or if Nanak (Sikhism) visited heaven. Nobody can prove that J.Z. Knight is channeling Ramtha or if she's putting on an act. Unless there's some sort of evidence, everything else they said stands or falls on it's own merit.
I believe that Christianity is different, because there is evidence. Which I'll address below.
Don't roll your eyes at me.
after all of these years the answer is the same. JUST HAVE FAITH. how do we know that its not bullcrap? im sure some churchgoer will make the next post and tell everyone to have faith AGAIN and thats all they can do they have no PROOF. no one does.
I won't tell you that.
What I'm about to say isn't PROOF - but I think there's enough evidence to make Christianity seem a little less distasteful for you.
Somebody get my soapbox - I feel a lecture coming on
This is long, and probably going to be boring as hell - but you ask for something other than JUST HAVE FAITH, and you're in luck. I have more than blind faith for you...
The basis of Christianity is not what an angel told someone. It's not based on anything except who Jesus was, and what he did to show it. Specifically, he was the Jewish Messiah, and he rose from the dead to show it. I believe that everything Jesus said stands or falls on those two things. Since Day One, belief in Jesus's ressurection has formed the core of Christian teaching.
What clinches it for me is that Jesus' followers weren't telling people what happened in some heavenly realm, or astral plane. There were telling about things that happened, right there in their hometown. If Jesus's resurrection had not happened, if the body were not in fact
missing from his grave, then all anyone had to do to disprove it and discredit the apostles was to simply go to the tomb. All that the Jewish or Roman authorities had to do to smash the growth of Christianty before it even got started was to produce a body. And since there was no body, all they could do to try and stop it was to persecute and eventually kill its leaders.
Yeah - I know - the apostles could have removed the body. But the tomb was guarded by Roman soldiers. And even if they
had removed the body, would they have willingly been tortured or martyerd for something they would have
known was not true? These people were not zealots who died because of what someone told them, or because of a religious experience or whatever. Every religion has those. These were men - fishermen, carpenters, rabbis - who, if the resurrection was a hoax
would have known it was a hoax. And yet, they chose to die rather than change what they said about seeing Jesus resurrected from the dead. Some people may be willing to die for what they believe - but nobody gives up their own life for what he
knows is a lie.
I believe that.
And the entire Old Testament is a list of prophecies to the coming of the Messiah - and Jesus fills every single prophecy in full (I can list the major ones for you if you like, there are prophcies from Isaiah, Zechariah, Daniel, Jeremiah, Micah, etc. That predicts his coming to Jerusalem, his birth, death,
and resurrection). And of course, we know that the Old Testament was completed in full 400 years before Jesus was born.
That is a pretty neat trick
i am not saying there is not a god but i just like to question that. as far as the end of the world goes......wheres the proof in that besides the ever changing bible?
The oldest manuscripts of ancient writers like Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus (among other) amounts to a small number of copies that were made a thousand years or more after the originals were written. There are no more then ten manuscripts of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars, and the oldest copy of that was written over 900 years later than the original. Scholars accept these documents as adequate reprentations of the originals.
Why not the bible?
The earliest portions of The New Testament date to within just 25 years of the originals. Some nearly
complete books of the new testament date to within one century or less from the originals. And we're not even talking about a handful of copies that can be compared with one another to determine accuracy or consistance. There are nearly 25,000 complete manuscripts of the New Testament, with more than 15,000 that date to before the 7th Century A.D. (or C.E. if you prefer). These include 5,300 copies in the original Greek, over 10,000 in Latin Vulgate, 4,100 Slavic tranlations, 2,000 Ethiopian thranslations and about 1,000 other early translations.
Further, in the first centuries after Christ, thousands of letters, and other documents were written in which people quoted from other documents that would later be assembled into what was to become the New Testament.. These quotes are so extensive that even if there wasn't a single bible in existence, you could go back to those letters and documents and using only those written within 250 years after the death of Christ, you could find every word of the New Testament, with the exception of 11 verses.
There are small differences in all those manuscripts - however, all these differences, most are a matter of spelling or word order changes that were made as the styles changed over the ages. In fact a total of only about 200 words, or 1/10 of 1 percent of the entire new testament are subject to more than trivial differences. And there no single doctrine of Christiantiy in all it's denominations througout history depend on a piece of disputed text.
As for the Old Testament, the discovey of the Dead Sea Scrolls show that in over 2,000 years those who copied the Old testament were so meticulous that no significant changes were made to the texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls represetn a major library of over 800 total documents dating between 250 B.C.(E.) to 68 A.D (C.E.) Every book of the Old Testament is included except for some minor prophets, and Esther.
You can take that for what it's worth, but I see no reason to argue that the bible has changed a zillion times, or that it is subject to so much red-penciling through the centuries.
if the world was going to end it would have ended along time ago.
Nonsense.
If man were going to go to Mars, he would have done so a long time ago.
If we were going to cure the common cold, we would have cured it a long time ago.
if the sun were going to go supernova, it would have done so a long time ago.
Now after all what I've said today, I realize that there is still room for doubt, and there's plenty of wiggle room for debating - which is why philosophers yammer and scream at each other to this day. But you asked for evidence, and I find the evidence compelling - although I'm fairly certain it's not going to change your mind, I hope it gives you something to think about.
Oh - and I have citations and references to all that stuff up there if you think I'm just blowing hot air.
lets see how many church goers get mad at me now lol. 
I know we've talked about this in a prior thread, but this isn't doing Religion any good either:
.. Great idea!!