What Benefits Are Only Available Through God?

A self-serving anecdote? I wouldn't put it past him.But he is a religionist and will see what he wants to see regardless of the reality.

quote:

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I had believed in Satan and demons since my conversion fourteen years earlier ...

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So he was already predisposed to irrational thinking. Typical.I note that in this writeup there is no further information on the girl. What was her diagnosis?

Anecdotes are evidence of nothing

I'll ask you the same thing I asked in the other thread when an opponent demanded evidence. How precisely would one go about gathering evidence for God?Believers insist that existence itself is proof in that if something...anything exists it exists necessarily.But I think it really is a faith decision. Without evidence. I think it was set up(designed) to be that way. You yourself said that if God(as we describe Him) really existed and you met Him face to face you would (attempt) to punch Him in the mouth for the atrocities that you yourselves deem that He has made.But getting back to two questions.
1) Evidence. How precisely would one go about obtaining evidence for God?
2) Alternative View. A universe without God. (as defined by humans on this dust speck at this moment) How can we know and what is our responsibility moving forward? One wag once said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Comments?

No one, particularly believers, has ever provided any idea of how it might even be possible to find evidence of God.Question two has absolutely no meaning and so is impossible to answer in any way that does have meaning.

Oh get over yourself! Even I can answer this question using what you have quoted before.Q: 2) Alternative View. A universe without God. (as defined by humans on this dust speck at this moment) How can we know and what is our responsibility moving forward? One wag once said that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Comments?A: Even if all the stories about Jesus are only tales told round the campfire the message is still of value. (...) When you pray, the best you can hope for is advice on what YOU need to do.See? Was that so difficult? Now one further question. Is God even necessary? I await the response from you, a Christian. Is the wag right? Or do we simply need to go and feed the hungry clothe the naked and comfort the sorrowful as any good secular humanists would do?

God may have been "necessary" as an early hypothesis to explain thunder and lightning, much as phlogiston was an early hypothesis to explain combustion. But when better hypotheses are found, the old ones diminish in importance.

Answered in Message 729 but quoted here to make it easy for you.

If you believe spirituality comes from God - of course.
But then the question remains - how do we compare if Stile's spirituality from God or Stile's spirituality from other sources is 'better?'I propose that it's by judging the power in the sensing of spiritual ideas that one feels: happiness, comfort, peace, solace...
If you'd like to provide another method, feel free to make a suggestion. I don't think so.
Sounds to me like Boyd has very little experience with trauma-victims and/or the resulting mental states it can cause and/or mental illness even.
I don't have a lot of experience myself - but even from my little experience, I don't find the situation suggesting demons or Gods in any way.Just trauma, victims, coping mental states and/or mental illness. Have you researched trauma, victims, coping mental states and/or mental illness at all?I'm not attempting to make the point that it's one or the other.
My point is that one can just as easily explain it as the other - and if you're focusing on one over the other - it's telling about your bias more than anything else.

Good people do good things, more or less, and bad people tend to do bad things.But to convince good people to do bad things, you need a strong, irrational motivator such as a religion or millennialist political ideology.

Or just about any motivation. Jobs, economy, color, religion, hair styles, ethnicity, peer pressure, advertising ...It's easy to convince good people to do bad things.

Which would you claim to be harder? Sinning or Doing Selfless good for others?You claim that the knowledge of good and evil was a great gift---it forced us to be responsible at any rate. And lets define sin, for the record: Based on that, I think it would be easy to simply try and be good and think soberly of myself than it would be to sin.The apologists claim that none are righteous...(without Christ) and that all have sinned. Do you agree?

Do you think it was a gift?

I think it is just a stupid meaningless carny spiel. And the carny pitch about having Christ is simply another bottle of snake oil.For example you definition 2b is another meaningless carny spiel.Edited by jar, : appalin spallin

When lo and behold look who shows up! Happy New Year Ned! That's actually a good question. The story says that this tree was in the garden, so there would be no reason to put a poison plant in the garden now would there? This point of view adds support for the argument that knowledge is a great gift and yet must be used wisely. A&E were never taught to use it..thus they got expelled from class...but some argue that even that was supposed to happen. ringo would equate it to kicking college-age kids or mature young robins out of the nest.

I would say the teacher was incompetent.