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Faith1960
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What about the people who had visions in the OT and NT? Since there were no psychiatrists then, how are we to know they weren’t having mental problems?
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St_Francis
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Look at how things turned out. For example, God told Joshua to go into battle with only a few men, and yet they won the battle. When the Israelites disobeyed God, things turned out badly.
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Faith1960
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Yes, but how do we know they didn’t have mental problems?
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Pieman333272
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The unconscious is only capable of fabricating ideas based on what we already know. The knowledge that people like Moses, Peter, Abraham, etc. gained is beyond the kind of thing one’s mind can spin out of already-known ideas.
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tonyrey
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Do you reject His teaching?
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Abba
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Excellent answer!
I think that it is also one thing to have a hallucination which is caused by drugs or schizophrenia and another to have an experience with God. In the former, the cause is usually evident and recognized for what it is, often time by the individual who may have taken drugs or understands that due to a chemical imbalance in their brain these things occur and also by their friends and family and doctor . In the latter too, the cause is evident, most especially to the person that was blessed with the experience. It’s like Pieman333272 notes it is an experience that is not a product of this reality nor of the imagination of the mind. It also involves two or more beings and when the other being is God, the soul has no doubt. It is for a priest of the Catholic Church to evaluate and confirm the experiences as genuine. A true mystical experience confirms with all the teachings of the Catholic Church which is the Church Our Lord Jesus Christ established.
I was doing a little catching up with Immanuel Kant this week and I ended up reading about the rationalists. I think is was in the Stanford Encyclopedia, but, I forget right now. Anyway, I was reading how the rationalists were taking it upon themselves to undermine spiritual experiences because they justified and confirmed belief in God and the ‘institution’ the Catholic Church and spiritual experiences is something that is out of the scope of reason to confirm or deny yet posed a threat or conflict to their objectives. So the goal was to undermine spiritual experiences and centuries later, I must say, they have been very successful. It may be inconvenient and a thorn on their side, for the scientism, naturalism, positivism movement but, it will never go away because God enriches and nourishes his Church through these experiences.
I also recall, last year, Father Benedict Groeschel getting upset in show because he had been informed that in the United States priests were being adviced to go see a psychologist when they had spiritual experiences. This was apparently happening at the seminaries and Groeschel had a thing and two to say about it.
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mgoforth
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t your default position that God doesn’t exist? You’ve said that you have no reason to believe unless God proves Himself to you in a manner that would be indisputable, right? Therefore, you do presuppose that God doesn’t exist. Your starting point is “no” and you’re not willing to change it to “yes” without evidence.
But consider how fallible the human mind and senses can be. Consider how small humanity is compared to the vastness of God’s creation - and we’re not even sure how big the universe is, or if there may be other universes that would be physically impossible for us to ever perceive. Try to wrap your head around the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics and then realize that they still don’t explain every phenomenon in our world completely. And that’s just creation, it’s not God. If we can’t even understand what God made, how could you possibly expect to understand God if he showed up at your front door?
Perhaps God doesn’t appear to you because you aren’t strong enough to stand in His almighty presence? I certainly wouldn’t want to try it in my current sinful form. Maybe God is actually being kind to you by not revealing Himself directly to your mortal senses.
Also, to answer the related question about why God revealed Himself to the patriarchs and the saints but not us, you need to understand His motive for those earlier revelations. He didn’t reveal Himself to Abraham to save just Abraham’s soul. Abraham was an instrument, a tool of God to accomplish God’s greater plan. God revealed Himself to Abraham in order to create the Israelite people, and he did that to prepare a group of people to receive Jesus. He revealed Himself to St Paul not just to save Paul’s soul, although that was certainly one result. But the larger purpose was to use Paul as an instrument to spread the Gospel to the Gentiles.
In other words, every time that God revealed Himself to someone it was for God’s glory, not the recipient’s glory or salvation, although that was usually a side effect of “direct” revelation. So your premise is false when you ask “Why doesn’t God reveal Himself to me if He wants to save my soul?” That is not the primary purpose behind direct revelations. God has established a Church to accomplish the salvation of our souls. You’re asking God to use a spiritual “hammer” to do the job of a spiritual “saw”
God knows His own tools and He knows what will work on you - without denying your free will, which He will not do - because He created the tools AND you.
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PJM
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=jmoneyideas;8598688]If you were asking if God sat down next to me and had a general conversation then thats a NO. That being said there is a feeling, a weight on my chest, hairs standing on my arm and a sense of calm. It is hard to explain when to some one who has not experianced it and maybe has never truely looked for God other than using the Big Foot premise, I gotta see it with my own eyes to know its true. It goes back to Faith and making a commitment and turning from your own preconcieved notion of what YOU believe and open your own thought process. I feel for you if you have such a hardend stance on this but maybe one day you will come around, I will pray for you
***GREAT Post! Thanks!
I would futher add that because EVERY; I repeat; EVERY Good thing is from God. That my friends is the evidence that you seek. God is PRESENT! We simply have to be humble enough to acknowledge it***
God Bless,
Pat
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SGWessells
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Me neither (though I am a huge Lewis fan). Everybody leaves out the fourth option: legend.
The argument also depends on the Gospels reporting accurately what Jesus actually said and did, which needs to be established before basing any conclusions on it.
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SGWessells
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Since the subject of evolution is banned in this forum, it is unfair to make assertions like this because those of us who have actually studied the evidence for evolution and found it convincing cannot present it. All I can say is that there is abundant evidence, for those who want to know, that all the anatomical features you mention, and many others, not only can, but did, evolve. Whether God directed the process or not is an open question, but the evidence is sufficient either way.
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tonyrey
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To equate “anatomical” with “personal” requires a great stretch of the imagination! It doesn’t even work with mindless forms of life…
NB No discussion of evolution is required here> it is a question of the power not the origin of the mind…
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tonyrey
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The term “legend” applies very precisely to the notion of “pristine mindless reality”…
On what **facts **is it based?
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tonyrey
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“are”…
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Abba
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Not really.
Catechism of the Catholic Church:
The Church and non-Christians
839 "Those who have not yet received the Gospel are related to the People of God in various ways."325
The relationship of the Church with the Jewish People. When she delves into her own mystery, the Church, the People of God in the New Covenant, discovers her link with the Jewish People,326 "the first to hear the Word of God."327 The Jewish faith, unlike other non-Christian religions, is already a response to God’s revelation in the Old Covenant. To the Jews “belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ”,328 "for the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable."329
840 And when one considers the future, God’s People of the Old Covenant and the new People of God tend towards similar goals: expectation of the coming (or the return) of the Messiah. But one awaits the return of the Messiah who died and rose from the dead and is recognized as Lord and Son of God; the other awaits the coming of a Messiah, whose features remain hidden till the end of time; and the latter waiting is accompanied by the drama of not knowing or of misunderstanding Christ Jesus.
841 The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. "The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day."330
842 The Church’s bond with non-Christian religions is in the first place the common origin and end of the human race:
All nations form but one community. This is so because all stem from the one stock which God created to people the entire earth, and also because all share a common destiny, namely God. His providence, evident goodness, and saving designs extend to all against the day when the elect are gathered together in the holy city. . .331
843 The Catholic Church recognizes in other religions that search, among shadows and images, for the God who is unknown yet near since he gives life and breath and all things and wants all men to be saved. Thus, the Church considers all goodness and truth found in these religions as "a preparation for the Gospel and given by him who enlightens all men that they may at length have life."332
844 In their religious behavior, however, men also display the limits and errors that disfigure the image of God in them:
Very often, deceived by the Evil One, men have become vain in their reasonings, and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and served the creature rather than the Creator. Or else, living and dying in this world without God, they are exposed to ultimate despair.333
845 To reunite all his children, scattered and led astray by sin, the Father willed to call the whole of humanity together into his Son’s Church. The Church is the place where humanity must rediscover its unity and salvation. The Church is “the world reconciled.” She is that bark which “in the full sail of the Lord’s cross, by the breath of the Holy Spirit, navigates safely in this world.” According to another image dear to the Church Fathers, she is prefigured by Noah’s ark, which alone saves from the flood.334
“Outside the Church there is no salvation”
846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers?335 Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:
Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.336
847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:
Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.337
848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men."338 scborromeo.org/ccc/p123a9p3.htm
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SGWessells
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As usual, you are not reading the post I wrote or the one I responded to, but one you imagined. The portion I quoted specifically mentioned cells, brain, hearing, and sight. Unless you are prepared to put all these in the “spirit” category, they are anatomical features. Nothing was said about “personal.” He followed his anatomical list by saying, “It is inconceivabl[e] that we can or do exist by luck, by evolution ALONE, or by chance.” If by “we” he meant something spiritual that transcends our bodies, his objection is irrelevant. Otherwise, it is not only conceivable, it is considered a fact by millions, that we came into being by evolution.
As long as the objection is that our “bodies” make evolution ALONE inconceivable as the method by which we came to be, the only way to refute that false assertion is to show exactly how evolution can, and does, explain how our bodies came to be, which requires some detail. Nor did he mention “mind,” only “brain.”
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SGWessells
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I would say no, unless you eliminated from plausibility every other possible scenario, according to the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There are several possible explanations for the empty tomb; one, that Jesus was buried in a shallow pit as a disgraced criminal, and the empty tomb story was invented later, a claim defended in Kris Komarnitsky’s book “Doubting Jesus’ Resurrection;” another, that an attempt to steal the body was discovered by the Romans, who buried the body in an unknown location because they didn’t know whose it was. I’m not claiming either of these is fact, only that they could be. Some say that Paul teaches only a spiritual, not a bodily, resurrection. Others point out the susceptibility of highly credulous and emotionally high-strung people to believing in hallucinations, or others’ report of hallucinations (which may account for the alleged miracle of the sun at Fatima). So Jesus being raised from the dead would not be the only explanation possible even if the Gospel versions could be reasonably reconciled, which is doubtful.
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SGWessells
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This is a common apologetic claim, but it is false. If you read the actual prophecies in context in the OT, most of them don’t refer to the Messiah at all, and hardly any to Jesus. The few that are plausible could easily have been written into the Gospel accounts afterward to make it look like he had fulfilled them, or deliberately engineered by Jesus to verify his claim, as at the entry into Jerusalem.
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Flyingg
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“End of days”, a movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger was the hero.
We don’t believe in souls, God, angels, demons, heaven , hell. So of course we don’t believe that we are risking our souls.
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SGWessells
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A lot of people I have read on this and other threads pretend to know the mind of God, as you do when you say: “God has a plan and the author can not pretend to know it.” How do you know God has a plan? Because he is loving? How do you know that? Well, look at how he saved Jane Roe from that plane crash. Well, what about the other 29 people that died in it? Why didn’t God love them? If God’s love is why he saved somebody, God’s lack of love must be why he didn’t save others. Oh, but I’m forgetting; he had a plan for them, too, right?
How do you know God has a good reason for little Katie’s cancer or little Johnny’s spina bifida or the tornado that destroyed John Doe’s house but left the one next door untouched, or so on and so on? People who claim God is incomprehensible suddenly acquire a detailed knowledge of his intentions and motives whenever they need to, the same way everybody else does: by assuming them, because life is too unbearable otherwise. But that doesn’t make them true, just useful.
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Pieman333272
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Yeah, people hallucinated based on something they totally weren’t expecting. See my points above on the nature of hallucinations before you push THIS one any farther.
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