Choosing a faith

Good grief, I really thought that would be assumed. Yes, that is your belief. I gotta admit, I was pretty happy to see the Blue Jays hammer the Red Sox last night. I assume that what you describe would be what you would see via a brain scan, but it is the thought of the vacation that spurred that action in the brain. Where did the thought come from?

It is just that I've been down that road before and and I'm not anxious to do it again. I primarily started this thread to try and convince some of the more fundamentalist Christians that God doesn't only care about Christians, and that Christianity isn't the only path to serving God.As I said earlier, if this thread comes to a conclusion we can try discussing the quality of the evidence in the Bible. My only point here is that it is evidence. You used to work hard at keeping people on the topic that was made at the beginning and then limit it to 300 posts or so. Yes, claiming that the Bible is evidence can lead to the question of the accuracy of the evidence but that wasn't the point of the thread.The point of the thread is that the doctrine that people choose to believe or reject isn't as important as the nature of the god they choose to worship. If a person be they Christian, atheist, Mormon, Muslim or anything has a heart that causes them to be willing to sacrifice for others then they are serving the God we see incarnate in Jesus of the Gospels.That is consistent with the Gospels and for what it is worth, CS Lewis.

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See my reply to Tangle. post 789

The advancements in science simply tells us more and more about How a cosmic intelligence brought about our existence.The fact that science gave us a natural explanation of lightening doesn't diminish God in the least. It does tell us something, in a small way, about the gift of intelligence that we have been given.

I don't see how that responds to her point which again was:

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There are implications for free will. If we are driven by our brains, then are we really free to make decisions or are we simply driven by the chemical reactions within? On these grounds, how can anyone be held responsible for their actions, good or bad?

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If we are just our brains then it takes us back to a closed universe. It is our consciousness that provides the variables of our existence. She is asking then, how can we be held accountable for our actions. She tells the story of a woman with a severe head injury that was completely comatose. Later it turns out that she knew who was in the room and heard all the conversations. She couldn't react but was aware. Yes, although no physical change took place.

Are you saying then that free will is an illusion and that what I will have for dinner a week from Monday is pre-determined, and that I am not really choosing what it will be? I was asked to put this into my own words and I did a poor job. Thanks you for the correction. She was suspected of being in a vegetative state but the MRI showed that she wasn't. Here is a quote.

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Her brain hit the inside of the skull. It pulled from its moorings. Axons stretched and blood vessels tore as ripples of shock waves lacerated and bruised critical regions far from the point if impact.

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Through all of that she was very aware of what was going on around her. Even with all of the trauma the brain had experienced she was still conscious.

In the end though it is all chemical reactions. If that is all our thoughts are then why do we believe that a murderer should be punished. How can he/she be held responsible for simple chemical reactions. That is correct. I without intention misrepresented her condition. If there were material effects, there were physical changes. But those physical changes might have been too small to easily detect.It seems to me that for a healing to take place from a placebo caused a physical change that the change would be large enough to detect. I suggest again that sounds like "science of the gaps".

Let's look at baseball. A pitch is thrown. Is it predetermined that the batter will swing? Doesn't the batter have a choice right up to the last split second? She had been totally non-responsive for 7 months. With the brain scan it was found that even though her brain had been very badly damaged physically she still understood all that was going on around her.This is all beyond me but it seemed important enough for this woman with a PHD in brain imaging to find it significant in the discussion of consciousness.

I contend that intelligence, emotions, altruism, etc are evidence . You guys say they're not. Where can we go from there?I contend that the Bible is evidence as well as other holy books for that matter.There is no evidence that can be repeated in a lab. Emotions can be positive or negative. It is my conclusion that all emotions exist because of an intelligent root. It is my subjective conclusion which forms my beliefs. You and others come to your materialistic conclusions. I am not trying to draw an equivalence between the alternatives as that would be impossible and irrelevant. OK, but it my guess would be that nobody on this forum has the level of expertise that she has with her PHD in brain imaging, so just maybe she can be quoted as an authority on the relationship between the brain and consciousness.

I see all emotions good and bad as evidence of a cosmic intelligence. (I use that term so that it isn't specific to any faith.)I contend it is all part of free will. Under the same circumstance different people have different responses. and any one individual can respond differently to the same circumstance from one day to the next.

OK, I'll try this again. I was reading through some of the posts on the forum. One post talked about the myriad of titles for god over the centuries to make an anti-theistic point. The thread in question was enormously long so I thought that I would start a new thread. I guess I could have come up with a better title.My point was that the title or name assigned to a deity isn't what is important. What is important is what you believe is the character and nature of whatever deity you choose, and how that choice impacts your life, whether it be God Allah Zeus etc.In most ways my argument is more with theists, and being a Christian myself most pointedly it is aimed at Christians.

I guess then it is me that is the problem so I'll try again. I only brought it up to make the point that it was evidence, not to try and say that it makes it strong evidence. Hopefully that is clear enough. I have never claimed that you called me a liar. You didn't and just the opposite in fact. There have been two posters on this thread that did and so I stopped replying to their posts. If you notice I'm still replying to yours.I'm old enough to remember when a man's word was his bond, and I raised my kids that way. I do take exception to being told I am lying. Being told I am wrong is very often a true statement. That is completely different. I think that can be a fair comment. I can however, assure you that it is not intentional. I'm simply doing the best I can. I don't know how many times I have to say this. I was not trying to make the case about the quality of evidence in the Bible, but simply that it was evidence to be considered.I suppose we could have a discussion about the quality of the evidence in the Bible in a another thread but we have cone that previously. It is not what I had in mind in starting this thread.​

It goes back to the question of "why". What is behind those chemical reactions in the brain? Is it just a series of previous chemical reactions or are the chemical reactions all the result of an external intelligence. We are free to form our own conclusions.
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Yes. I could have just as easily made my point by saying that Muslims have to start with Mohammed.I'll try and get this back on track. I don't know if you have read C S Lewis' "The Last Battle" or not, but there is a part of it that makes the point that I want to make. I probably should have led off with this.Emmeth was a follower of Tash who was an enemy of Aslan the Christ figure in the book. In the story Emmeth is a follower of Tash and then when Emmeth goes through the stable, (a portal if you wish) he comes face to face with Aslan. This is the exchange between them.

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Then by reason of my great desire for wisdom and understanding, I overcame my fear and questioned the Glorious One and said, Lord, is it then true, as the Ape said, that thou and Tash are one? The Lion growled so that the earth shook (but his wrath was not against me) and said, It is false. Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.

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There can be evil or good done in the name of any of our deities, and so again, it is the nature of whatever god we serve. A Bob Dylan line was that "you've got to serve somebody". That is why when I think of Chris Hitchens and when he attacked the Judeo-Christian faiths for the genocide, public stonings etc in the Bible. He primarily attacked the evil that can be taken from the Bible. My reply to him would have been that God speaks to us through those stories to warn us against the evil that can be done in His name.Bottom line it is what we choose as the guiding principle for our lives, regardless of which religion we choose or even if we reject them all.

An ugly weed is just an ugly weed and even that depends on who is looking at it. The beating is the ability we have to choose good or evil.In the case of the "Good Samaritan" I just want to point out that Jesus was making the point that is completely consistent with my point in this thread. It was a priest and a Levite that passed by the beaten man. Both of those were highly placed Jewish authorities. The one who helped the man was an outsider.Jesus was a Jew in a Jewish culture. The Samaritans and the Jews hated each other. Jews would usually take the long way around to get to Galilee from Judea to avoid going through Samaria.In my view that if Jesus was telling this story today it would be about the "Good Muslim' or just maybe even the "Good Atheist". AbE I thought I should add that the assumption there is that it assumes that He is telling the story to a Christian audience.

Edited by GDR, .