good answer...
i'd like to say that Christians don't have a monopoly on hope/love/joy though... i don't believe morality or love comes from God
Non-christians can have hope and non-christians have love, too. It's just for me, with Jesus, there is a lot more reason to have those things.
LukeF said:
and the whole 'finding out it's fake when i die' is an interesting point as well. It's the whole wager issue isn't it... you're better off believing in a God because of the 'risk' and so on..
I didn't say Jesus is fake, though. I don't have doubts that Jesus is real. I've seen too much to say "Jesus isn't real." I just said that even IF it was fake, I would have rather lived for Jesus and find out when I die He's fake than to live for nothing but yourself and find out when you die Jesus is real. I'm not skipping out on risk, life is full of risk, I'm skipping out on living a pointless life. When you take out God what do you have?
LukeF said:
but my response to that is just because of the question - is there or isn't there a God? that then doesn't make the choices 50/50. (i'm sure you'd agree to that). i'm taking into consideration ALL the theology debates... evidence for miracles... faith healing... intelligent design arguments... and i've not been all that convinced by any of it.. so (in my mind at least) i'm so confident in their not being a God that i don't see it as a 'risk' at all.
Probably not. But here's an evidence for a miracle - we all woke up today alive and breathing. All of us - including me - have taken life for granted, when life in itself is a miracle.
And somehow, man has never been able to make something out of nothing...so where DID we all come from? See, Evolution doesn't even go along with cause and effect. There's only effect. I'm very much a practical person. And for someone to say we came from nothing, and to say that everything is just a mutation is not practical. So I say, something far above us, who CAN make something out of nothing, made us. And you know what, that's the cool thing about our God. There's nothing He can't do, there's no end to Him, He is not limitless!
LukeF said:
the same way you wouldn't feel any risk about going to the Hindu's equivalent of Hell... you just don't worry about it because it seems so odd...
Hinduism is just...weird.