Just thought u guys might want to see it. it's on
www.ex-atheist.com so you can check it out. I am reproducing the article in its entirety. Please note I have no part in it but I agree with his points. May God be praised!
"My belief in God is based on a primary perception of Him, the perception of truth in His Word, a perception of my own true nature that came about through reading His Word and an intellectual conclusion based on these perceptions. It is true that we are subject to being deceived by our perceptions. We are also subject to being informed by them.
The first thing that brought me out of my disbelief was reading the bible in a way that allowed it to make sense within itself. In other words, I didn't start out trying to make it not make sense, which was what I had done previously. The story told me something about myself that no other book or person had been able to make me realize and I was struck with a very powerful conviction that I wasn't the good person that I had thought I was. I saw that faith in Jesus Christ was the only way to fix what was wrong with me and this caused me to delve deeper into the bible. I began seeing many truths in it concerning the nature of man and the nature of a god that could help man rise above his own condition. Every time I found fault with God's Word, I found a fault of my own. The key element in understanding these truths was being able to recognize the truth about myself.
VALIDITY OF PERCEPTION
After I had made a commitment to live my life according to the wisdom of Jesus Christ, I spent months trying to connect with God through prayer. I experienced what I think other Christians mean by 'the presence of the Lord', a perception of being one with Him. This feeling has risen and diminished in intensity at various times since I first felt it over three years ago, but it has never completely left me. There was also one very convincing immediate answer to a long-term problem, requested in a desperate, first-time prayer that strengthened my belief in Him.
I have no way to confirm that these experiences are accurate reflections of reality, but I accept them as such because they are powerful enough for me to think it unwise to ignore them. Sometimes, we have no information of which we are conscious, yet we end up having reached a verifiably correct conclusion concerning some matter. This type of thing happens only rarely with any one individual, but often enough with people in general that we should pay attention to it when it does.
Last year, I was at a party in the midst of a large crowd of people and I casually glanced over to a small group. A man got out of his chair and started walking to another table. I had never seen the man before and I only saw him for a total of 4 seconds or so, but for some reason, the thought entered my mind that he was a child molester. I have no idea what caused me to think this; I never knowingly had met a child molester before, but an alarm went off in my head. I wasn't aware of anything about the man that I had seen that would warrant thinking this of him - I had only seen him walk from one table to another, and I had witnessed no interaction between him and any other person. I chastised myself for thinking such horrid and unfounded thoughts about a person. The next day, I received a phone call from the host of the party. He said, "We're going to have to be careful with the kids. I have to tell you something about one of the people who was there, yesterday."
I blurted out, "Don't tell me! I know exactly what you're going to say!" He confirmed my initial suspicion.
A skeptic may read the above and immediately think that I am insinuating that I can identify child molesters on sight. This is not what I am saying. Also, had I been the type of person who sees a child molester in half of the people they meet, it would have been only a matter of time before I managed to identify the real thing. However, I know exactly how I felt, I know that I don't usually go around thinking such things and I know the amount of data to which I was exposed. Because I know that my experience was legitimate, and because I accept that other people share these types of experiences, I can only conclude that our brains acquire information of which we aren't even aware, and use this information in a manner that goes beyond our usual thought processes. It is the uncomfortable idea of not being able to intelligently give reasons for our perceptions that tempt us to reject them. Had my friend not brought up the subject, I would have never mentioned my experience for fear that people would think I was strange.
When atheists insist that we abandon our belief in God because we can't logically present objective evidence for it, it is like trying to convince a woman to turn the care of her child over to a person who gives her a creepy feeling. Motherly intuition may be without logical explanation, but it has been credited with saving many a child from harm.
In any case, I believe that my perceptions of God are intuitive ones, based on information that I have acquired, but that I am unable to identify. When I was a child, I had a vague sensation that God was real, but because I couldn't find reasons to support this feeling, I shut it out. I attributed it to parental and societal influence and, eventually, I no longer felt it at all.
When I try to explain the reasonability of my faith to a skeptic, it will fail at some point because I can't give him all of the information that went into my decision to believe in God. I can't download these experiences into his head. I can't show him all of the data that has been entered into my brain over the past 39 years that causes me to weigh evidence differently than he does, because I'm not aware of all of it myself! All I can say is that it was through Jesus Christ that I discovered truth about myself and about the world and that in addition to these truths made verifiable through experience, He also claimed unverifiable truths that I accept by faith. He earned my trust.
FOR OWLS ONLY - AN INTELLECTUAL CONCLUSION
The two questions that lead to God are simple ones. What is right and what is wrong? Is this all there is?
I considered the second question to be of greater importance than the first, because if this life is all there is, the answer to the first question is irrelevant. This isn't to say that an afterlife actually exists for us, just that in order to make this life objectively meaningful, there must be an after-life.
Logical thought tells us that there is no such thing as absolute moral truth. We can say that killing is wrong, but is it always absolutely wrong? We can give exceptions but quickly find that there are exceptions to the exceptions! Hence, the view of moral relativism. Yet none of us would deny that there is a right and a wrong concerning issues of human behavior. We simply disagree over what is right and what is wrong!
What is the truth about morality? If we say that no such truth exists because it can't be captured through logic, then we are hypocrites every time we demand justice and our entire legal system is the result of a delusion. Moral truth exists - we just can't seem to pin it down.
In asking the first question, I found that I could logically justify contradictory behavior. I could give logical reasons for divorcing my spouse and I could also give logical reasons for staying married. I could justify lying, and I could justify telling the truth, both for the same situation. If I could intellectually reason to equal and opposite conclusions, then I had to admit that moral behavior could not solely be determined through logic. If logic alone could not allow us to determine the truth about right and wrong, then perhaps logic alone could not tell us the truth about a god who is closely connected with morality.
When Christians make a distinction between a person's mind and a person's 'heart', this is the issue they are addressing. The logic of the mind can come up with any number of moral, rational options, but the 'heart', that part of the mind that is above logic, is what makes the decision. What allows the heart to make a decision for the 'good' depends upon the goodness that is present in it. While that sounds circular, I believe it is circular only because it is true. Consider the following example:
(Matthew 20:1-16) A vineyard owner hires 10 men to work in his fields from sunup until sundown and agrees to pay them $100.00 for their efforts. As evening approaches, he hires 10 more men to work the last several hours but pays them the same amount as the men who have worked all day. The first group of men is irked that the other group of men received the same pay. Judge the actions of the vineyard owner; was what he did right or wrong?
When I saw that parable, at first I thought the vineyard owner was unfair and I sided with the first group of men. The more I thought about it, however, I began to realize that my selfish nature was influencing my perception of the vineyard owner. Why couldn't I find joy in the idea that the other 10 men would be able to provide for their families as much as I could for my own? The vineyard owner had paid me what he had promised, so he had treated me justly. It was only my jealousy concerning his generosity that caused me to gripe. After going through countless paradoxes of morality in scripture, I concluded that selfishness (sin) is what blinds us to an accurate perception of what constitutes good'. Therefore, the only person who could know what was good would be one who was completely unselfish (sinless).
No man is without selfishness and so no man can tell us the truth about what is right or wrong. It is this dilemma that causes man to reach out to, or generate the concept of, a god or gods. The idea is that God is perfect and holy, without sin, and therefore only God can know the truth about right and wrong. But if no man is selfless enough to recognize that which is right and wrong, then man can't generate the concept.
Believing that such a Good Being exists, creates in our consciousness the idea of seeking its approval, realizing that we can't know right from wrong. We are actually seeking the approval of a personality, or the person of God. When we act within the context of a personality, we escape having to define moral absolutes because we can speculate on the personality's reaction to our actions. For example, I know my mother. I'm familiar with her as a person. We never discussed the issue of drugs, their legality or the morality involved in using them for recreational purposes. However, I don't need to hear my mother explicitly state her opinion to know that she probably wouldn't approve of me smoking a joint.
Knowing the personhood of a god would enable us to act in the spirit of the law instead of being bound by the law, which we can't adequately define. I think that we CAN, however, adequately define a personality through text alone, and I think that any writer who depends upon character development, in creating a story, will agree. This is why Christians place such an emphasis on KNOWING God, something that can easily be done by studying the words and actions of Jesus Christ. The spirit of the law, then, is loving a good God and seeking its approval in the way we live our lives.
In seeking a god's approval, we make it a judge and try to please it by living according to its standard. We know that the standard is higher than our own standards but we don't know what the standard is. How can we be judged fairly if we can't even know the standard by which we are to be judged?
Every time we encounter another person, we start forming an opinion about them. We discover that we can be very critical of the faults of others, but pretty lenient, or even blind, when it comes to our own. If God, being without sin, could be presented to us as a person, it would be interesting to see how we would judge the personification of God. In judging a good and innocent person, we would be establishing the criteria by which we ourselves would be judged. What could be more fair? This idea is summed up in Luke 2:34-35; "And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed."
If we can be judged fairly, then there should be justice. I won't repeat the argument that I give in 'The Games Skeptics Play', but there should also be mercy. If justice and mercy, then reward and punishment.
I arrived at these conclusions independently. In other words, I didn't have to rely on the bible or any other sacred text to TELL me these things. I'm not saying that my reasoning was not influenced by my knowledge of religion, only that these arguments stand logically on their own. My argument is similar to that given by Immanuel Kant.
FAITH WITH FUZZY LOGIC
So far, I have only given reasons why the CONCEPT of god - specifically, the concept of the Christian god, which contains all of these elements - makes sense, but I believe that the Bible describes a very REAL God because of the way in which it was revealed. It wasn't as if the prophets sat down and decided which elements would go into making a good god model. It's as if they were given the parts to the model and, with no understanding of how they would fit together, accurately described them. The parts of the model were delivered over a span of 1500 years and through over 40 different authors, yet they come together to make sense when they are viewed in the light of their entirety. That's why the Bible is said to be authored by God, because the writings were designed and directed by one source. The model isn't a product of reason, but a product of alleged perceptions that result in a reasonable model. In other words, I don't think that Christianity is true because it works, but that it works because it is true.
I consider the gospels to be accurate and honest documentation, because the logic and nature of men who would knowingly create a false god, would not have included so many ambiguous passages, which could have been misunderstood to indicate that Christ wasn't God. It is man's nature to tell, "I am God." It is divine nature to allow a person to arrive at that truth on their own; "Who do you say I am?" I don't get the impression that this is fiction.
The words of Christ also indicate that He knew the effect that His resurrection would have on people. How could any man think that to be crucified would result in him being glorified unless he also knew that he would be resurrected? Yet His words carried Him confidently to Calvary. Christ knew that faith in Him as God was the answer. I believe that He knew the things He knew because He is who He alluded to being.
THE FALLACY OF CONSPIRACY
When you hear arguments against the validity of the gospel accounts, what you are being asked to believe is a conspiracy theory. You will be given speculation and conjecture, but very little evidence. The conspiracy argument usually goes like this:
"Jesus died and then was resurrected."
"Oh, I say, that's odd. Couldn't have happened. People don't rise from the dead, you know. The gospel writers must have lied. Or they were tricked, yeah, that's it. Or maybe Jesus didn't really die on the cross, have you thought of that one? Better yet, the original documents were tampered with and all of the miraculous stuff was added. Christ didn't say half of the things the gospel writers quote him as saying. Don't ask me for evidence because the evidence was all burned in the library fire in Alexandria in 390 AD."
I find it easier to believe the documentation. There is a great deal of scholarship in action that is trying to make Jesus a myth based on other myths. This was the area that I promoted because I thought that it would be the most effective in breaking a person's faith. This knowledge didn't even come into play that day when the truth of God knocked me right out of my socks. It did occur to me as an afterthought and, when it did, my own faith suffered. I didn't have time to research the matter from a Christian perspective as I had researched it as an atheist. That's when I discovered J.P. Holding's Tektonics.org. (See 'A Man Called J.P. Holding'). I found out that there is a shallow level of scholarship that supports the pagan origins theory, but a higher level of criticism that effectively dismantles the idea.
WHY THE ISSUE OF ERRANCY IS IRRELEVANT
After I started reading scripture from a new perspective that was generated from my changed self-perception, I found it to be flawless and perfect in the truth it intended to reveal. I never knew what that truth was until I saw it, and after being hit with a truth that powerful, I couldn't care less about how many angels were at the tomb or how Judas died. These things were rendered meaningless in light of the more important.
If I'm sitting in a chemistry class and the teacher is using ground up maple leaves to explain the properties of acidity, but mistakenly refers to the leaves as oak leaves, he is still telling me the truth about acidity. No one would say that, because the teacher is mistaken about the type of leaf, he must also be mistaken about the principles of PH.
I simply don't think that written accounts have to be 100% accurate in everything in order to demonstrate the truth for the purpose for which they were written. Take any group of people and ask them to give an eyewitness account of a concert or a play and you will find contradictions and omissions, along with the similarities, even if the events are recorded hours after they occur. Eyewitness accounts can be as varied as the people giving them, but all contain enough truth that we consider them reliable enough to be used in court. The teaching, miracles, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ were historical events that did not lend themselves to forensic evidence, but relied upon the eyewitness testimonies of those who witnessed them. I disagree with Hume who thought that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The term 'extraordinary' is too subjective to have any meaning, but its implication also goes against logic. Any claim should only be subject to the type and amount of evidence that we could expect to find. If any claim is subject to extraordinary evidence, then its legitimacy is being based on an unrealistic standard. If the events in question took place 2000 years ago, we shouldn't expect to find a great deal, since written accounts disintegrate along a biodegradable paper trail.
I'm not saying that there are errors; I'm merely stating that, outside of proving the gospel writers to be blatant liars, any perceived errors would be irrelevant to my faith.
IF GOD, THEN WHOSE GOD?
I think that the majority of religions are an attempt to describe the one real God and establish a spirit of the law - that default position that motivates us and gives us strength to do good in the absence of any other compelling reason to do that which is good. In my subjective opinion, no religion does this better than Christianity. You are welcome to disagree with my opinion with your own subjective opinion.
I feel that the spirit of God is the personification of love, justice, and uncompromised, selfless truth. I feel that this spirit, although fully represented in Yahweh, is more clearly defined in Christ. I also perceive that the New Testament authors, especially Paul, were selfless men, made that way through faith in Jesus, and that their writings are also representative of truth.
In the Bible, we see a god who doesn't change, but whose revelations progress from the law to the spirit of love that allows men to keep it. I see Islam as a regression away from the spirit of the law and back to the law itself. In reading the writings of Mohammed, I don't get the impression that he was a loving man. I see him as more of a self-righteous, vindictive man, one who would compromise his perception of God in order to benefit himself. Oh, it's just a feeling I get. Don't take my word for it, read the Quoran. Especially surahs 33:35-38, 33:50 and 66:1-4. It doesn't take a degree in psychology to see what is going on here.
When a Christian kills people because they believe differently, it is hypocrisy, but when Muslims do the same, it is jihad. Paul informs us in Ephesians that our war is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and the spirit of evil, but the idea of spiritual conquest appears to be absent in Islam. Instead, there is only provision for physical conquest, but no one can physically force another into spiritual acceptance. I am not saying that all Muslims are prone to act violently against 'the infidel'. Fortunately, it is a rare individual who follows through on any philosophy, taking it to its ultimate end. I AM saying that those who fully devote their minds to the God of Mohammed cannot be called hypocrites when they act according to Mohammed's revelations. There are no mitigating verses in the Quoran with which to dispute the morality of jihad. You won't find the words, "Love your enemy" anywhere in the sacred writings of Islam. Its scriptures generate a harsh religion, completely different than the spirit of Christianity. It's easy to see this harshness reflected in the modern laws of Islamic theocracy when compared with modern laws that stem from Judeo-Christianity.
In addition to this, Islamic texts attempt to rewrite the events concerning Jesus, such as his death and resurrection. I would expect that documentation closer to the time period of the events it attempts to describe would be more accurate than documentation that didn't appear until hundreds of years later.
Hinduism tries to break down godly attributes into different gods. Some of them are good, others not so good. The idea of there being only one God is to create a standard and polytheism thwarts this basic concept.
Buddhism teaches a person how to directly experience God, but it doesn't define Him. It does generate a kind spirit of the law, but in the same instant, relies on over 250 spiritual laws to obtain the spirit of the law.
It is my belief that people of any culture who have been made aware of their own nature, would intellectually recognize Christ as the better choice of god, if they could overcome their society's influence and their own psychological attachment to the traditions of their heritage. This is even made apparent in the fact that modern Buddhism does recognize Christ as one of its models, and that Hinduism accepts Christ as one of its many alternative deities. Of course, I wouldn't expect many Muslims to recognize Christ, since the penalty for doing so would be death. That's quite a societal influence! I managed to recognize the truth in Christ when my own disposition was anti-Christian, but at least I live in a free society that doesn't hold a gun to my head in order that I lower it to God.
Why do I believe that ANY of the religions present today reflect the reality of God? We are not born from the womb complete in our understanding of quantum physics. We have to take an effort to learn the subject, and I consider it to be the same with the subject of God. Our thinking and our discoveries usually rely on the works of a few inspired men; the majority of us, mediocre in our intellect, build upon what was revealed by others. As I already stated, Kant's Christian model for God logically stands on its own. I just feel that Christ is the highest standard, and the most historically based in reality, of any other god from which I have to choose."
