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RE: Why my God is only true God.
How can you say with any confidence that this phenomenon "appears" to have have need with "two of the most well-known religions" and not with others, including your's? By what means are you able to differentiate/know with confidence the "truth" of your religion and the falsity of their's?
I don't want to start a food fight here so I won't say anything specific about the other religions, or mention them by name.
One big difference is whether they were created on the testimony of a single individual, whether that individual got any temporal power, wealth, and glory, whether he granted himself special privileges, and whether there is evidence of him contradicting himself or getting caught telling false tales. There's also the nature, quality, and quantity of any signs the individual performed and who witnessed them. Finally there is the availability of confirmed prophesy to validate the individual.
Obviously, there are degrees of credibility for every one of these things, so it comes down to weighing the evidence.
The point of this post, was simply to provide a key insight on the things a seeker should be looking for. You eliminate the religions that are admittedly founded by merely wise men. Among the rest, you apply the tests I mentioned here and see if one stands out as far more credible than the others. Then you ask yourself whether that leading contender has crossed your personal threshold of belief.
If you set that threshold at 100% proof, you are requiring the true Deity to come prove to you personally that He is who He says He is. To me, that seems to be an unreasonable expectation and I assume such people simply don't want to find the answer.
No, I don't concede that all faith is blind.
between the facts you have and 100% proof.
I say all beliefs require a certain amount of faith because there is little that can be proven 100%. Even evolution requires faith in the technical details from scientists that claim to "know".
My original post had a very narrow focus: "The characteristics of a True Religion are that they have been revealed and if that ever happened, there would probably only be a single consistent set of facts that would be revealed."
From that observation, we can draw other conclusions, such as the belief that "all religions are interchangable and people can safely pick whichever brand they like" is manifestly false.
Because, God wants people who want to find Him. If there is no leap of faith for people to take because they want to find Him, then a lot of rebels will wind up believing while continuing to reject His authority. That last leap of faith separates those who will become members of his family from the demons - "who also believe, and tremble"
I have backed away from nothing. I have doubled down on it. It is entirely possible to arrive at belief in two stages - first by rational skepticism and then by a leap of faith. Some, like children, only need the leap of faith. Those of us gifted with greater analytical skills are burdened with the difficulty of not knowing when to let go and take the final leap. Those who stubbornly, desperately, hold onto their skepticism to the point of demanding 100% proof with zero faith will never know anything - and that is what I am saying needs to be overcome.
They were the fathers of the Age of Enlightenment, the inventors of the scientific method, philosophers of the highest esteem, and an old rocket scientist. We have far more archeological evidence than they had that the Bible is correct. We have the Dead Sea Scrolls. And we have DNA - the Prime example of design if there ever was one. Natural selection is not in dispute. Natural creation of designs to select from is in dispute.
Anyway, my reason for mentioning them is not to imply they knew everything. It was only to point out that they were (a) brilliant and (b) rational. Two of the characteristics that unbelievers often try to say are missing from believers. That was my only reason for bringing them up.
My "complete non-discriminator" comment was stated to mean that you cannot look at an individual's intelligence and tendency to indulge in rational thought to predict whether they will be a believer or not.
I am specifically not saying that, "absent personal direct revelation from God himself, there's simply no amount of evidence that would cause rational persons to believe" On the contrary:
As far as I know, none of the people pictured in that post ever had any direct revelation from God themselves. But they all spent a LOT of time studying the writings of others who did claim to have had such revelation.
Based on their rational analysis of the credibility of those who had such revelations, they all became believers and devoted much of their lives to further study of those revelations as being the best use of their mental gifts.
Hmmm. I'm totally confused. The only answer you could have given to the question in my comment above that's rationally consistent with your original post above would be to have answered "blind faith." You've conceded that all faith is blind. Presumably this includes faith as to which religion is the right religion. Yet instead of appealing to blind faith as you did in your original post, you now appeal to "evidence" and reason.
So, your faith isn't blind after all? And it is actually possible, via reason/evidence/logic, to differentiate the authentic faith from imposters?
Fair enough, perhaps your original post did. But your subsequent comment ("thought experiment", as you called it) went much further. Specifically, as part of showing how any "true" religion must be "revealed", you demonstrated (pretty conclusively, I might add) that "[r]ational thought and skepticism are complete non-discriminators in who will be a believer." Your reasoning on this was compelling--absent personal direct revelation from God himself, there's simply no amount of evidence that would cause rational persons to believe, on your word alone or on some small group's word alone, that things they know from experience to be impossible actually happened. In other words, pure "evangelism" is, by your own acknowledgement, insufficient to overcome rational skepticism. Consequently, "rational thought and skepticism are complete non-discriminators in who will become a believer."
"Complete" is a strong word. And it's your word. I'm holding you to it, because you were actually right. It's disingenuous to now back away from from the rightful conclusion of your thought experiment and instead fall back on "evidence" as the means of discerning the "true" religion from the false ones.
What an utterly insane, arbitrary way for God to sort the wheat from the chaff! Why in God's own name would he proceed as you suggest? And who would want to follow such a God anyway?
Regardless, your attempt to back away from your prior claim that faith is blind is just digging a deeper hole. You were, in fact, very clear in what you meant. Read your quote above again. According to your own theory, the geniuses of faith that you seemingly so admire didn't come to Christiantiy by evidence or reason but rather by overcoming their "rational skepticism". Again, why would God demand that only those who can overcome rational skepticism will be saved? Wouldn't it make sense for him to demand, if anything, that they overcome only irrational skepticism? But, even this requirement makes salvation "earned" rather than freely given.
And in any event, your geniuses of faith didn't know what we know today. They didn't know about genes. The didn't know, for instance, that order can arise from disorder (or less order) via "natural selection." They didn't know about plate techtonics or the dinosaurs. And they knew almost nothing about other religions (except maybe Judaism and Islam). In short, while geniuses of their age, they knew less about the world than today's average sixth grader, and they came to their conclusions from that dark place of ignorance. In short, they had an excuse. You don't.