[quote]pookie wrote:
vroom wrote:
Steveo,
I still think you need to explain why different people of faith do not have the same interpretations of “the truth”.
An absolute truth must be absolute!
Also note that much lesser truths can easily be demonstrated and proven. One wonders how the “Absolute Truth” could be so intractable. Unless there is no such thing, of course.
People of faith, around the world, to this very day, routinely disagree on how the word is to be interpreted.
With over 3000 different faiths and variations within, for any given faith, there is a majority of people on the Earth that believe differently than any one group of believer does. God sure does a bang-up job of getting his word out.
A common comment that comes up when stating the above, is that a majority of people believe in something, and that billions of people can’t be wrong.
Honestly, if that is what you call absolute truth, it is meaningless because nobody can ascertain it’s meaning and have others agree.
This is a serious flaw in the theory of absolute truth!
It does appear that all religious “truths” suffer from the same problems. In so doing, they all show themselves to be anything but absolute. Probably anything but truth even.
A good explanation for this, that I have put forth a few times, is that the writings may have been inspired, but that they were done by man. As such, they contain the flaws that all works of man contain.
Another equally good explanation is that there never was any divine inspiration and that there are only tales and stories given an air of respectability by being ancient and having mysterious unnamed sources.
Cloaking it all up with words like “Sacred” and “Holy” helps stop the questions and critics.
Do you really believe that mankind would require faith at all if he was not flawed? If is in fact our flaws that deny us the knowledge of any absolute truth and it is why Christ had to die for us and why we need to have faith.
It always surprises me that a God so petty and small as the one from the Bible evokes any kind of awe in anyone.
That an omnipotent and omniscient being would have to play such silly games with his creation is simply ridiculous.
Why put a forbiden Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, when you already know Eve’s going to eat from it?
Why punish Eve for doing so, when she was previously “innocent”, ignorant of the difference between Good and Evil, and as such incapable of arriving at correct moral decisions?
Why punish all of Humanity for ever because Eve chose badly?
Why later change your mind and get your Son sacrificed so that he could “save” everyone you’d previously damned.
An omniscient being does not change his mind. No new facts can come to light to have you revise a decision…
Etc, etc. It requires serious mental damage to be able to read the Bible and accept it as any kind of truth while at the same time thinking you are being honest with yourself.
Faith is an important word in religion. Faith means that we must believe that which WE CANNOT KNOW. It is the basis of religion. I submit that all religions of faith are predicated on the fact that absolute truth is denied to humans. We are flawed and as such require faith.
The search for absolute truth is not answered thru religion. Religion simply makes up all the answer it needs and then works at quieting the doubters.
The real search for the absolute truth is done through science and physics. Simply behold the technological advances made since the early Renaissance from the knowledge we’ve acquired through the scientific method. A method that requires you to believe nothing apriori and that encourages you to question and reject current knowledge, provided you can supply better knowledge to replace it.
[/quote]
Pookie,
Your responses are understandable in that, as I replied to Fighting Irish, I probably would have made those same aruments BEFORE I came to faith in God’s Word.
I want to pick up on just one point you made, because this was a problem for many years for me thinking about “religion” and I know it is a sticking point for many. That is the existence of literally hundreds of religions that have their own “truths.” When I looked at this fact alone as a teenager, I concluded that if there was one God there could NOT BE MANY WAYS TO HIM. Thus I concluded that since they cannot be all correct, that none were correct and thus I dismissed “religion” as fantasy for those who are too ignorant to think for themselves (much as you do in your posts).
The problem is that I never thought of one other possibility, which I now know is true. That is, although there are many religions and they all cannot be correct, one of them could be correct and the others incorrect. The fact is that the correct “religion” is not “religion” at all. You see, “religion” is man’s way of coming to what he perceives as God. The correct way to come to God is through Jesus Christ and to find out how is to read His Word. Instead of having a “religion” I have a “relationship” with God, through the Lord Jesus. That is the Bible way of having a relationship with God, hence Jesus stating that “I am THE way, THE truth, and THE life, no man [nobody] comes to the Father [God the Father] except by me.”
I appreciate your honest post Pookie, but would encourage you to search out the Scriptures for yourself to see if these things are so.
SteveO
