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Thank you for sharing this conversation!

@Practical.Wisdom

7 ай бұрын

Thank you for your interest! Is there someone in particular you would like to see next on the podcast?

@Anna-mc3ll

7 ай бұрын

@@Practical.Wisdom Thank you very much for offering me this opportunity! May I suggest you some questions I have been thinking about for quite a while …? For instance, since there are numerous denominations within the Christian world, how shall I know which of them is “the right” one? Secondly, as there are many who deny the concept of the Trinity on the basis that it is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, and that there are even no hints to it in the Old Testament, how can we believe (and trust) that this doctrine is actually correct? Moreover, there are several different-and partially contradicting-notions of the Trinity itself, which makes it even harder to decide whether it is at all true (and trustworthy). I would honestly appreciate if you could discuss these issues in your future podcasts! Thank you very much for sharing on your channel all the interesting conversations with different Christian thinkers! Kind regards, Anna

Beautiful conversation once again. I was reborn in a powerful way at the age of 57 - an epiphanic event which began with the realization one day that I didn’t only believe in Christ - in all that is written in the Gospel and therefore the entire Bible - and all that that implies - but that my desire for Christ to be true had superseded just about everything else I could ever have wished for - because the One gave light to all else… Life took off and all made sense for the first time… Once I knew that Christ was absolutely true in every detail as written then everything else that could ever exist in the entirety of my life was shifted into the brilliant sunlight of such a realization and I feared nothing other than disappointing God. I wish others could see the Truth and feel the benefit of the paradigm shift in all reality - and live in the full awareness of the grace of His daily blessings - because it is all True… Christ is our Saviour - and He is the way, the truth and the light to the Father, our Creator in heaven. Perfect justice awaits - and God is love. C S Lewis was and is for me the icing on the cake… explaining so much to us so adroitly. Chesterton, too… Thank you gentlemen here, as well!

@Practical.Wisdom

7 ай бұрын

Thank you very much for sharing this beautiful testimony!

everyone seems to assume satan is going to be horrid. if i go to hell then GOD is "punishing me" for my sins, but why would satan want to punish me too? satan hates christians. if i'm being punished by satan, then satan is doing god's work - that makes zero sense. hell is more likely to be eternity having WAY MORE FUN than you ever could on earth, this is what god hates, god wants you to suck his toes forever, satan is SAVING you from singing amazing grace for eternity. i see no reason why hell wouldn't be a great place to be, no mind control, no ten commandments to follow, just eternal life that you can probably quit if you get bored with learning guitar from hendrix or trying to grasp relativity from einstein. why would hell be undesirable? why would satan want to torment me - he hates god and christians, not sinners.

People abandon theism because we learned what reliably indicates truth (evidence), _and noticed (especially post-internet) that we had that for every true idea, but not gods._ So it wasn't a pursuit of newness, but a realization that theism was indistinguishable from falsehoods. (It even goes beyond that to exploit several well-known vulnerabilities/biases of the human mind, like how prayer exploits confirmation bias. Because we see those traits in religion, it appears intentionally designed by humans to exploit other humans.)

@Practical.Wisdom

7 ай бұрын

This is an interesting way to look at things, but I think this is only one side of the story. We have been saying since the 1950s really that religion would be extinct in a few decades as science has replaced God and we know from evidence (empirical, of the narrow sort) that DNA neither cares not knows, and we dance to its music. I don't think prayer exploits confirmation bias, any more than drinking water does, and the idea that religion was 'designed' to exploit other humans is rooted in identity politics. Marxism and Fascism, two of the major plagues of the last century are deeply rooted in Atheism and have tried to remove religion from our culture by force, exploiting others. I would say Christianity in particular, is a religion centred on otherness, loving the other, rather than the self.

@matthewstokes1608

7 ай бұрын

People are actually not abandoning theism quite as much as you seem to hope! Christianity is growing on Earth - not depleting, even if in western countries it has almost seemingly dwindled away in favour of the dim cult of darkness and death which is atheism… Still, there are now approx 2.5 Billion Christians on Earth… Only about a billion atheists… But for those who ‘know’ that God, through the light of Christ, is real, there is only a matter of time before the Faith flourishes once again even in the satanic culture of the brainwashed west. Though we hope for the salvation of as many souls as possible, you must realize that Christ’s message is quite clear and uncompromising: - not everyone will be saved and become Christians. He said “I have not come to unite - but to divide”. Sometimes i think it is not so much whether you choose to believe in God - or not - but whether He chooses to believe in you. You are not the one hunting after all! Still, we are all given free will… One thing is clear to me - about the big questions, men still know absolutely nothing. The Bible is the only font of Truth. It radically transfigures the lives of all who cone to it in the Light of Faith. It is beyond beautiful - and nothing can be done by the unbeliever to darken this beauty because the Holy Spirit lives and is at work! God Bless.

@majm4606

7 ай бұрын

@@Practical.Wisdom 1. *"They're being irrational too!" isn't a valid excuse.* Nobody in the 1950s had data justifying belief "religion would be extinct in a few decades". In fact 1972 to 1992, Pew Research data shows Christianity flat at ~90%. But even recently 2002 (~81%) to 2022 (~63%) that's still _seventy more years_ of Christianity if the rate remains somewhat constant. 2. *Pray to leprechauns daily.* What you'll notice is _sometimes good things happen._ So then if you've convinced yourself leprechaun prayer works, you'll interpret that as evidence of leprechaun prayer working (ignoring the fact that no actual change happened in the frequency of good outcomes). One of the clearest pictures of this is the largest-ever prayer study, the 2006 STEP Project, where over 1800 people participated and we saw the prayed-for group didn't recover from surgery complications any better than the non-prayed-for group. Yet the ones who had safe recoveries clearly would've been under the impression it was prayer that protected them, right? That's why it's confirmation bias: because those believing it are left with the false impression something works, but the data shows it doesn't work. (In fact the data in this particular survey showed that (a) the group who was prayed for _and told they were prayed for_ had slightly more complications (a worse outcome) than (b) the group just prayed for and (c) the group with no prayer at all.) 3. Cold Case Christianity doesn't establish reasonable evidence of a god existing. In fact it basically works extremely hard to lower the bar of acceptable evidence. We're talking about people who think a god (a) created gravity, (b) and that includes all the evidence conclusively showing us gravity exists that we experience nonstop, but (c) this same all-powerful god somehow failed to provide reasonable evidence they exist? Well that's the reason people like Wallace need to lower the quality bar: because all they have is "some people thought something was true". But if he used that method, he'd believe that Peter Popoff (a faith-healer scammer of the 1980s) actually faith-healed people, because Popoff's followers would've likely gone to their graves saying he healed people, if they were pressured; they saw it for themselves after all! Turns out when it comes to supernatural claims (like faith healing or gods), we need stronger evidence than mere testimony. That wouldn't have been an issue for an all-knowing, all-powerful god. But it's apparently an issue for the God Christians believe in , and that contradiction (between (A) the claimed attributes of all-knowing, all-powerful, and (B) the lack of reasonable evidence) is why we have good reason to believe Christianity in particular is wrong. But what matters most is our lack of evidence it's _right._ That's what's needed to justify a belief: evidence an idea is truth; that it matches reality. We don't have that.

@HarryNicNicholas

7 ай бұрын

@@Practical.Wisdom all you can ever do is show that things have a natural origin, you cannot show that god had a hand in making or designing anything, god, if he were real, has spent the last 2000 years preserving my free will by hiding - do people like meyers and tour think they can over ride god? what do they expect? "here is proof of god where's my nobel"? the BEST they can hope for is to look stupid. god is hidden, he won't let you find him. it's HIS rules sillies. (and he's mainly imaginary).

@HarryNicNicholas

7 ай бұрын

@@Practical.Wisdom marxism and communism have nothing at all to do with atheism, you make yourself to be totally dishonest with that old chestnut. atheism have no ideology, it's purely the fact that gods don't exist, it has nothing to do with communism, my being a socialist has zero to do with my atheism. still you keep making crap up, you're the reason people are realising that religion is populated by insecure liars and that's why they no longer sign up to the bigots club.