Choosing a faith

This isn't relevant to the discussion but about that last thing you said, the cause of floods doesn't have to be heavy rainfall. As we were again shown just this week with Hurricane Ian, storm surges can cause floods. Busted dams can cause floods, too, something that happened in our tiny town about 20 years ago. Spring snow melt can cause floods.But you're missing the point. Mine was an absurd rhetorical question, and it was roughly equivalent to your own question about whether brain signals cause emotions or do emotions cause brain signals.But emotions are not tangible things that have a material existence that can cause things like brain signals. It's just the label we use for mental states caused by what's going on chemically and neurologically within the brain.I think I see things pretty much the same way as AZPaul3. In my own words and using happiness as an example, it can come from something external, maybe your favorite team winning a ballgame, or from something internal, perhaps thinking about the fun time you had on vacation, or maybe something chemical and experienced internally because it's injected and delivered to the brain via the bloodstream, like morphine. But there's no actual material thing called "emotion" that somehow enters the brain or exists within the brain that can cause brain signals to occur.--Percy

You and I were discussing evidence for the existence of Jesus, and if you're again stating your original claim that the gospel stories are evidence then you're ignoring the subsequent discussion illustrating how flimsy a claim this is. It seems that you don't really want to discuss your position. You just want to state your position as often as you can.
​ You're ignoring Ringo's point. You claimed that many people dying for the gospel stories lent them credibility, so Ringo rhetorically asked (the question was rhetorical because the answer is self-evident) whether Mormon persecution lent credibility to their books. You're trying to avoid the fact that if persecution of Christians lends credibility to their books, then the credibility of any religion's books is enhanced should they become persecuted.The extremely obvious conclusion that you're avoiding like the plague is that all the world's persecuted religions (and they're all persecuted somewhere and/or sometime) cannot all have credible religious stories since they're all internally inconsistent and contradictory, and they are all inconsistent and contradictory with each other.
​ That's not true. It's actually an unavoidable consequence of your argument.This post and the several before seem to be working hard at limiting the discussion to just the conclusions you'd like to draw and just forgetting the rest as beside the point. You're only fooling yourself - what you're doing is obvious to everyone else. Why not dedicate yourself to answering every question and then sticking with each position you adopt for the rest of the thread?--Percy

It's not true that this was already covered. Without reviewing that part of the thread, my recollection is that you just left things hanging by declaring that we each come to different conclusions. Appeals to address the evidence and the lack thereof were ignored in the end.--Percy

Well then, go ahead and use hate and rage and greed and vengefulness as evidence of God. I'd really like to see that.--Percy

You again inexplicably make a statement with obvious conclusions counter to your argument. Science can't explain everything, but what we can explain keeps growing.But what religion explains keeps shrinking as it is forced to give up more and more ground to science.--Percy

And the point *we* were discussing was whether the Bible is evidence that Jesus was real.The person who actually lived contemporaneously with Jesus and founded church's in his name never even met him. His sole experience of Jesus was in a vision. Paul's letter's are surprisingly devoid of details about Jesus's life, something you wouldn't expect were Jesus real, but years later when the gospels were composed many details have emerged, consistent with how myths arise.--Percy

Of Jesus? No. Of Jesus you only have belief.--Percy

What kind of evidence do you mean you keep getting asked for? Do you mean physical evidence, or material evidence, or real-world evidence, or whatever you want to call actual for-real evidence? Yes, we keep asking for that kind of evidence, because there is no other kind of evidence. If you think there are other kinds of evidence, as you argued earlier in the thread, then you have yet to make a case for it.Again, no one is challenging or attacking your spiritual beliefs. We're challenging your claim that you have evidence for your beliefs.About Dirckx:
​ If you can't argue it then you're just taking someone else's word for it.Your Dirckx quote is about free will, and then you go on to mention vegetative states and the placebo effect, but the point in question had absolutely nothing to do with any of that. The question was how the negative emotions are as much evidence for God as the positive ones.You're just doing more misdirection. Why don't you just answer the question? You've asserted that you could have as easily used the negative emotions as arguments for God as the positive ones, so go ahead and do that, please.
​ Your diversion onto Dirckx is a red herring.--Percy

Someone's got a problem with simple English, and while I may not be God's gift to communication, it ain't me. How in hell are you separating in your mind credence and evidence? I have now twice mentioned the "Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong" fallacy, and all you can do is repeat yourself without once addressing or even acknowledging that you're committing a fallacy. Should I be keeping in mind Mrs. Blue's question to Forrest, or is it just that you're still rushing through posts trying to answer everything in a timely but woefully inadequate fashion.At one time most western people believed the world flat. How much evidence did all that credence lend that view? I didn't understand what dwise1 thought was a lie, but I didn't start out calling you a liar. It was you who accused me of calling you a liar before I ever used the term. I would much more likely have said things like that I thought you were dissembling and attempting to manipulate the discussion by deflecting and being evasive.You took that and somehow translated it into an accusation of lying. By that time you'd said you didn't care about the animosity directed at you, directly contradicting what you said in sentence one of Message 1 that that was the reason you'd stayed away, so I capitulated and agreed that lying was the right term for what you're doing.But I note that you have again successful deflected discussion by accusing others of mistreating you because they're calling you out on the unprincipled way you're conducting yourself in this discussion. There are several issues I've raised several times each that I have received no answer on. That's evasion. Of course I repeated it, because it's the same answer I give every time you repeat your claim that author intent matters more than evidence. You repeated your baseless claim, I repeated the answer. We can do this all day or you can try to support your claim. Come on, display some sanity. No, that is not true. Again, you repeated your baseless claim that author intent matters more than evidence.When you comment on the discussion it is unrecognizable. It's like you're having a completely different discussion in your head than the one that is taking place here. Either that or you have an extremely bad memory that you don't bolster by reading back in the thread.--Percy

I thought "heavy rainfall" was your sole real-world reference and that "myriad of other possibilities" was the woo side of things that you usually include. Sorry for the misinterpretation, but I wasn't expecting that you'd miss that what I said about floods causing water to gather was intentionally ridiculous in the same way as your emotions causing a brain response. It's not just my belief but what the evidence supports. Do you have other evidence indicating that emotions have existence independent of the brain? Thoughts are signals within the brain. No brain, no thought. If you have evidence of thoughts independent of brains then please present it.You believe that immaterial things have actual material existence independent of the medium in which they exist. It's like believing that waves or floods exist independent of water.--Percy

Maybe I misunderstood what you meant at the outset in Message 1. When you said that "As Christians we have to start with Jesus" I assumed you meant Jesus as a fact since your thread's title was about choosing among faiths. Did you just mean Jesus as a matter of faith?
​ But if you really did mean belief in Jesus as a matter of faith rather than evidence in Message 1, and that you just want to talk about pathways to God, then you don't want to talk about evidence at all. Right? Prior to moving to an SQL database in 2004 we needed the 300 post limit because messages were kept in text files. Once we moved to the database then thread length no longer mattered. The longest thread has over 5000 messages (Gun Control Again). Okay, so let's drop it, call it off-topic. Discussion of Bible and Bible-related evidence belongs in The Bible: Accuracy and Inerrancy.
​ Now I'm confused. Why is your thread called Choosing a faith if it's assuming Christianity is the right answer?--Percy

If you write [msg=789] then you'll get Message 789, which is a link to that message.Reading that message, I don't understand why you think it's an answer. You argued that good is evidence of God, and that free will providing the ability to choose between good and evil is also evidence of God. That makes sense to you? And looking at Tangle's response in Message 805, he didn't see it as an answer, either.To you both a beautiful flower and a good samaritan helping a little old lady across the street are evidence of God. But what are an ugly weed or beating up a little old lady evidence of?--Percy

You can only believe in a "cosmic intelligence" as an article of faith.
​ No one said it diminishes God. If you choose to see it that way that's your business. But it does reduce the number of natural phenomena that can be attributed to God.--Percy

I don't think anyone here is saying that intelligence, emotions, altruism, etc., are not evidence. I think we're saying that they're abstractions of processes that do have a material existence. For example, intelligence is an abstraction that you can try to measure, but we have a lot of trouble even defining intelligence. At heart it can only be an emergent property of brain activity. Without a brain there is no intelligence, no emotions, no altruism, etc.
​ I thought you wanted to avoid discussion of evidence. I'll help you do that if that's what you really want to do.
​ Historical events are never repeated in a lab. That isn't the way history works. We don't accept the Napoleonic Wars because they were replicated in a lab. We accept them because of the massive amount of evidence they left behind, physical, documentary and narrative.--Percy

Yeah, me too, but being behind is not a bad thing. You shouldn't be feeling any pressure to respond in a timely fashion. There are no rules about how fast you have to respond. The longer you take to respond the slower the discussion will proceed. People will quickly get used to the slower pace.--Percy