Don’t leave me to think by myself. Its not good.

I recently had the floor fall out from under me (metaphorically) as some things that I believe and others that I want to believe were challenged almost violently (not in the physical sense). The events in question felt almost as if my spirituality itself was being accosted. It wouldn’t have been the first time, but it made me think much deeper than I had before because of some of my own feelings involved. This reflection and introspection brought up the many questions that I have, questions that stop me from being the perfect Christian.

Here is a thought, more for the atheists and non-Christians: would you believe in Jesus Christ if He presented Himself to you and told you His truth? I think that deserves another question: how would Jesus need to present Himself to be convincing?

God made me to be a logical being. Of course I’m emotional and sometimes excessively irrational, however, most of the time I think in very cold logic, which does (conveniently) remove emotion from thought processes. It may come as no surprise then that I had no solid spiritual beliefs until, I believe, God presented Himself to me. Before this very odd experience, I found it impossible to believe in something I couldn’t prove to myself to exist. I couldn’t throw my faith blindly at something even with so many people telling me that I was only damning my own soul to an eternity of pain (by the way… threatening someone with eternal damnation is NOT a good recruiting method). I couldn’t, and can’t, just jump off a cliff and hope God would catch me. This, perhaps defiant, quality of my personality presents many other questions of faith for me… most still unresolved.

Read on if you wish to be tortured by my thought process.

Presumptions: God is perfect; God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; God is all powerful. I don’t take issues with these presumptions; in fact, I accept them and believe them. Many interesting ideas can be derived from this… unfortunately I don’t take them to imply many of the things that Christians as a whole do.

Logical truths (ideas derivative the axioms of logic): The absence of a known contradiction does not prove a statement true; the absence of known evidence does not prove a statement false. [In both of the preceding, it must be rigorously shown, in all possible cases, that no contradiction or evidence exists before a statement can be shown true or false – impossible in almost all matters of God.] A statement (or body of work), if true in part, is not necessarily true in whole; A statement (or body of work), if false in part, is not necessarily false in whole. Circular logic is, by definition, false.

Biblical truth: God gave mankind free-will. That means the right to think, act, and live as we choose, absent from our lives any plan of God.

Let’s start with the biggest question that I have, one that goes to the foundations of Christianity. When asking a Christian a question about their faith they will likely (and rightfully) quote a scripture… if not more than one. This makes, in my opinion, a tragic error in logic. First it assumes that the Bible is true in its entirety and second that it is the actual written word of God (the first actually implies the second, which I’ll get to in a minute). I take huge exceptions to these assumptions. Ask a Christian how he/she knows the Bible is true and you might get an answer similar to, “the Bible tells me so.” Which is true, the Bible does say that it is the inspired living word of God. That is where we get entangled with circular logic… In English, we don’t allow a word or derivative of that word to be used to define itself (usually) because a word inherently has no meaning (save basic ideas that are accepted as such, similar to axioms of math/logic). Furthermore, in math/logic proofs, it is actually pointless to equate something to its self because we’ve said nothing useful. As an experiment, write on a piece of paper, “This is the inspired, living word of God,” followed by something not relevant to Christianity, even blasphemous if you wish, and see if the paper spontaneously combusts… really… I’ll wait… The logical error here is that you have to accept the authority of the Bible to believe those words, so using those words can’t make the Bible authoritative.

Pointing out the above fallacy to a Christian might then prompt something like, “Would God allow the Bible to exist if He didn’t want it to exist?” At this point, ask them if they believe that God lies to His people. Then ask if God ever makes exceptions for His people. Then ask if God gave his people free will. Then ask if God would stop someone who had the money from publishing the antithesis of the Bible. For fun, you can go a step further and ask if God would stop people from translating this new text. By now, they have either admitted a contradiction or admitted the possibility the Bible wasn’t inspired by God…

The real point of the above is this: how can we logically discern the authority and authenticity of the Bible? Especially considering its history: the Council of Nicaea, the earliest gospel being written 30+ years after Christ’s death, the many translations which most definitely include a conservative bias, and of course the books that the Catholic Church has intentionally withheld for unknown reasons.

If someone can answer the above for me… all that follows needs no answer, but it would still be appreciated as most of my other questions concern the philosophical nature of God.

Why did God create a people with the sole purpose of worshiping him? If you think about the wording of the Bible, they key to Heaven isn’t your good works or the kind of life you lived, the key to Heaven is whether or not you ever accepted Christ and chose to worship Him. If there were some mad scientist running around genetically engineering creatures with intelligence and then told them if they didn’t worship him they would die a horrible death… I think we might call the scientist a narcissist. Obviously, since God is perfect He doesn’t NEED exalting, so what is the real point? To further this thought, since God is all-knowing the idea is further complicated since God would have to know everyone who would and would not choose to worship Him, this can’t be a mass experiment in choice so perhaps the question could also be worded: what does God get from our worship?

Another interesting question… why does God need to punish His creation for disobeying His word when we can’t in reality confirm it is His word? More, why would a loving, forgiving God punish those who were raised with beliefs that can’t possibly allow them to convert? Worse, why would a loving, forgiving God punish those who never had the chance to hear the name of Jesus much less receive His word? God created this world and created everything in it. The things we see, the things we think, the way we think are all by His design… and we’re being punished for it? And please don’t talk to me about the evil one… the Bible says that nothing would exist but for the Grace of God… and that includes Satan and his works.