Itâs weird that the âsmartest man in the universeâ would verify and not trust when dealing with his money but trust and not verify when it comes to life ever after.
Discussion
This guy is the smartest âââ
Why do you assume Jesus Christ cannot be verified as God? Because you haven't done the work.
In The Case For Christ, a former atheist investigates Jesus's divinity through interviews with experts, examining scientific, philosophical, and historical evidence.
There are dozens of books like this, but you have to put in the hours to question your NPC assumptions.
#ToChristAlome
https://blossom.primal.net/4d7fdade49f8bcd7c90c0f2e47fc4366cc34dc298777acf3d4707f3e76825de9.webp
Some things are more important than money.
Yes for sure! That is the irony I was highlighting. You would think that securing a place in heaven would be more important than money, hence the highest level of verification would required (not a âtrust me broâ level). đ
Belief is a matter of character. Faith comes out of fear. Fear of dying. You can be the smartest person in all universes but still be a coward.
Many many people have verified, it takes a lot of work, but itâs all there.
If you can get to the bottom of Bitcoin, you can find sufficient verification that Jesus is who He says He is â and just like with Bitcoin, your old worldview was based on unverified lies until you discover the truth. With Bitcoin you learn what money is and the lies of the modern economy, with God you learn what truth is, goodness, beauty, not to mention meaning and purpose â verifiable answers to fundamental questions that the modern world obscures just like it does with money.
Belief is a matter of character. Faith comes out of fear. Fear of dying. You can be the smartest person in all universes but still be a coward.
Thatâs a bit too neologic for me.
belief is how one makes sense of the world around us â everyone believes (has a worldview) and very few can articulate what they believe. But itâs revealed by their actions.
Faith is best understood as faithfulness, we still have the meaning for marriage (a faithful marriage) but religious faith has in modern times been misconstrued as an intellectual affirmationâ which is completely incorrect and ahistoric. Faith is about commitment to something bigger than yourself and your vanities.
Christians donât fear death and are willing to die for their faith â speaking truth even if it means death. Because what they fear is not nihilistic death, they fear the judgment of God based on the morality written on their heart.
You lost me at the beginning âbelief is how one makes sense of the world around usâ. Totally not true.
We use supernatural beliefs to make sense of things we canât explain yet. Give it a few years in every case and we always change belief for knowledge.
Sorry, I meant that by definition â thatâs just a simplified definition of âbeliefâ, whatâs true (whatâs real) and whatâs not. Thatâs just the standard definition of âbeliefâ, it can be supernatural or natural or mundane or axiomatic or whatever, belief is just a belief.
Knowledge is not self justifying, belief is required. You canât have knowledge of something that you donât believe in, what Aristotle defined as âjustified true beliefâ.
Psychologically, the source of what you think of as knowledge is effectively your god, that is, the first principle (or the God archetype if youâre into Jung). For naturalists this is reason and empiricism â but thereâs a reason (pun intended) that naturalists only exist in Christian cultures.
For some simple examples, there is no natural explanations for truth, goodness, beauty, or even numbers nor mathematics â we refer to these as transcendent categories. Theyâre real, and we can have knowledge about them, but only with Christian presuppositions about knowledge, outside of a Christian epistemology itâs all just word games (as postmodernists are want to point out). Our cultural bias is so thoroughly shaped by these Christian presuppositions we donât even see it, like water to a fish, we just act like these things are obvious (but thereâs a reason this only emerges through Christendom)
You tried really hard but none of that offers proof of a god, not even a justifiable theory of a god.
Trying hard is irrelevant. I could just as well be describing a mathematical proof, the soundness doesnât rest in persuasion.
Youâre directly assuming you understand what proof is, what truth is â while demonstrating you have no idea and couldnât even explain what I just said.
In your worldview, what is truth? What is justification for knowledge? Or heâs an easy one, what is good? How do you know something is good or bad? Right or wrong?
My point is that you do have one, but you have no idea what that is and clearly have no idea what people mean by God.
Haha you try too hard to convince yourself of âyour truthâ. When you tell people they have no idea you are really talking to yourself haha. Youâre so afraid haha.
There is no âyour truthâ or âmy truthâ
There is only THE truth
And truthfully, the thing I fear most, and fear so deeply that itâs the only thing I do fear is God at the day of judgment.
âMany will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.â
~ Matthew 7:22-23
There is no first hand (check the blockchain type) verification for Christian salvation. This is the essence of the âfoolishnessâ of the message, the fundamental nature of what a âsaving faithâ is. Verifing his credentials is not the same as waking up in heaven. Unless I have not read the message of Christ correctly, it is salvation by faith.
Epistle of James is pretty clear on this (and this will upset many modern Christians), but âeven the demons believeâ, faith without works is dead, and âa man is justified by works, and not by faith only.â â this is the line that Luther famously tried to remove from the German translation of the Bible.
Man is saved by faith thru grace, but more specifically in Scripture man is saved by Christâs perfect faith, not our own.
Faith is best understood as âfaithfulnessâ (as in marriage) and not mere intellectual agreement (which is what James is clearly dismissing).
Thereâs a ton of verifiable historical evidence for the person of Christ as well as fulfillment of what He said would happen, as well as the miracles of his ministry and around the church. And plenty of saints such that we can have assurance are âin heavenâ, but youâre right that the deeper mysteries of salvation as it effects you personally is not as clear, although in the negation it is â everyone knows what kind of life they could lead to not be saved. And if weâre very honest with ourselves we know the kind of life we should be living, what weâre called to, and that Christ is knocking.
The point I was trying to highlight was that there is no independent verification mechanism available to the believer, in contrast to Bitcoin. Assurance is not the same thing as verification. To point to interpretations of scripture or spiritual âmanifestationsâ as assurance to something that will happen in the future is not the same as waking up in heaven after you pass. I am suggesting that the reason a believer chooses to express their dedication to a âChristian lifestyleâ is because there are portions of faith, trust and hope in play. If I understand you correctly, you are highlighting Christian conduct as an expression of faith (faithfulness). What I am suggesting is that has nothing to do with the ability to verify the claims of Christ. Implying that they are true is not the same as independently verifying that they are true. Hope that makes sense đ
It does, but go deeper for an answer â where does your definition and understanding of âtruthâ come from? How do we *know* what is true?
All ancient cultures understood âtruthâ as a deity. Veritas, the Latin word for truth, was a pagan goddess.
The Greeks got a little closer but Aletheia is also a pagan goddess. Socrates had his daemon. Plato a demiurge. Aristotle had a profound insight that there must be a first principle (a first cause that cannot be explained) and that it must be the logos (the divine word) of what he called the unmoved mover. But this was ultimately transcendent and unknowable to us mortals.
The Hebrew thought of logos as creator with a radical notion that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, and Christianity innovated with Christ as logos made flesh, connecting us mortals to the transcendent, to the spirit of truth (made flesh).
The presumption of objective and knowable truth is entirely born of Christianity. It is one of many âfruitsâ of Christendom than we tried to preserve but without the tree from which it grew.
We question Christianity with an implicit Christian ethos, exactly at a time when that ethos is disappearing in the west. And the consequences is that truth itself reverts to its old pagan relativism. We become playthings of gods (ideologies), and canât even answer what a woman is.
But if you want actual epistemology, the radical view that humans can know truth, then you have Christianity, and only Christianity, as the source.