I think what you said basically amounts to: God is testing whether you have faith in Him.
But where do you get that idea from? The idea that God wants to filter out those who have faith and reward the true believers comes from religion. You seem to be first assuming that religious claim is true, and then reasoning from there. If that claim is not true, then the only support that I have heard of for faith being valuable disappears.
Religious people need to ask themselves what they care more about: finding the truth, or having faith. If their goal is to find the truth, then using faith to do that will produce terrible results. Faith has been shown time and time again to be a terrible mechanism of gaining knowledge about the universe. If that is your goal, you should instead use the best procedure humanity has found so far: the scientific method. If you did, you would find reason to not believe in most of the physical claims made in the Bible (or really any religious text). All that would be left are metaphysical claims (which are by definition unfalsifiable) and moral claims (normative statements telling you how you should behave). And I claim there is no reason why one should feel compelled to adopt these particular claims made in the religious texts as true (especially since the physical claims being false shows the texts as a whole are not infallible).
Now maybe you don't care about the truth and only care about having faith. Or maybe you are okay with using the scientific method to evaluate physical claims, but you choose to use faith when it comes to accepting metaphysical and moral claims. In either case, you should ask yourself, "Why?" Why do you value faith? What good does having faith add to your life? Could it be that valuing faith or using faith as a basis for how to live your life is in fact harming you?
Science limits itself to the observable and repeatable. It can tell me nothing about that which is not observable and repeatable. Thats a BIG limitation. But we routinely use eyewitness accounts to gain knowledge of that which is not observable or repeatable. To say we can know nothing that we can't repeat and observe ourselves is to say that a courtroom can never use eyewitness testimony to get to the truth of what happened beyond reasonable doubt.
So that's what I have done. Those eyewitnesses convinced me that Jesus is who he said he is. Therefore I take what they say he said seriously.
Jesus said, "You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me... If you believed Moses [scriptures], you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?"
So therefore I believe the rest of the scriptures, because I believe Jesus, because I believe the eyewitnesses who observed and reported what he said and did.
No way I'm going to miss out on what Jesus is offering just because science can't address His supernatural field of expertise.
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But why you are missing all other religions? There are thousands of other doctrines that require faith to some supernatural being(s). What makes you think that everybody who has non-christian faith is totally wrong and only christians have the right kind of faith?
And you are also evading the fact that there are many different ways of interpreting what Jesus and/or God said. Which one of them is right? They are so different that not everyone can be right at the same time. How do you evaluate what is the right or at least most correct view of the faith?
Try to think about this from atheist point of view. There are millions of people who claim that they have witnessed the existence of and/or message from a supernatural being. How can we decide what is the truth if we can't use science?
"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." – Stephen F Roberts
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Because every other religion teaches what man has to do to reach God. Christianity is the only case where God condescended to reach down to man.
Look, I'm an analytical person that one would expect to be as skeptical as you. I studied the Bible and found it convincing. I credit God himself for that stroke of good fortune.
The Bible tells us that man cannot save himself, he need's God's help - specifically what Jesus did for us. It explicitly states that no other religion can be right, because they all require their adherents to do something on their own to earn God's favor. And they contradict what Jesus Himself said: "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me." Show me another belief system that has better evidence. Where is your proof that what you see is all there is?
My OP allows for the fact that others can read the Bible and not be convinced. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
That's pretty much the whole point.
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When you said you study the bible and found it convincing, do you mean parts of the OT and all the NT? The OT is muddled with lots of cookery, poetry, history, man made laws, same as we have. It is an encyclopaedia. Some may or may not be accurately true, eg, history is written by the winners. The NT on the other hand is the word of God.
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In other words, the unfalsifiable.
I don't see how any reasonable person can consider the writings in the New Testament to be a reliable enough source to be used as evidence in a trial, much less as supporting evidence for extraordinary divine claims. There isn't any hard evidence I know of to show that the people who actually claim to have seen these events themselves are the ones who wrote it down (and that their writings were preserved unchanged). More likely this "testimony" was gossip passed down verbally before eventually being written down (and then translated again and again), and any preschooler can tell you how a game of telephone can mangle the original message. And that is generously assuming that the original message was a genuine and authentic reporting by a sane observer and also that those writing it down didn't take creative liberties with their writing or outright decide to fabricate lies (which makes sense when you consider the great political power that be gained through religion).
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To believe in the Jesus of the Bible is to believe it is possible for a being that appears to be a man to die, rise from the dead, and then literally ascend to heaven, or to walk on water, or to turn water into wine (and if you don't believe in any of the divine claims about Jesus, then what basis do you have to take any of the metaphysical claims supposedly said by him any more seriously than any political dissident out on the street today). These are extraordinary claims that appear to violate our known laws of physics. The evidence for such claims has to be incredibly compelling for any reasonable person to bother taking it seriously. I wouldn't accept video evidence of such events as something that makes it worth looking into (since it could be easily doctored with modern technology) much less the written down gossip of people.
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I will never give up Christianity too
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I sure wish Dan was a Christian I wish everyone is Dan is Brilliant. Maybe what he needs to hear is a scripture so clean so powerful so unmanipulative so pure and so true and trusting is "when you seek Me you will find Me when you search for me with all of your heart" It doesn't say you must do this or not do that go here not there it just requires you to seek with all your heart. all your heart. God is so able to reveal Himself when you seek for Him honestly with all of your heart He will meet with you. The guy who sounds and acts more like Jesus than anyone I ever heard is a Chinese guy names Francis Chan, author of crazy love. I hope enough people begin to listen to him to understand what real Christianity is,
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If the truth were out there, then you could be content with finding it. You would not require any intelligence, it would hit you in the face. There is a miriad of truth of course, some relevant to your search, some not. But we don't actually know everything, so you cannot find all the facts. Fortunately, we have a brain that can link points together and arrive at a picture. Unfortunately we have desires that are not condusive to recognising the leaps of faith needed in linking the points. Too much reliance on fact will not lead to the truth. Consider the Big Bang, first put forward by the Very Rev. George Lemaitre, not Prof. Hubble BTW, he confirmed it. Now an examination of this, the first happening, will lead to the truth that there is a supernatural being. There is a sequence of logic that will take you from that point to Jesus but that is only half what is required. Why are we here is not included. The hand of man is too often mistaken for the work of God. Polarisation of ideas separate the less than perfect from the less than perfect.
Don't give up.
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