Crossgeared Viking
New Member
"...I must admit, however, that such conjecture is futile." (Virtual brownie points to those who can reference the quote without googling 
)
Many Christians grow up Christians because they're parents were Christians or their community was Christian. I think I can safely say that many Christians are Christian simply because that is the environment they were brought up in and hence the one they are comfortable with. I have been a Christian since a young age. I offered my life to Jesus I think at the age of nine (oddly enough, my favorite number) but it was only when I entered mid-adolescence I started to take my faith seriously, and in taking it seriously I began to question it, to test whether or not what I believed was the truth, and more to the point, whether or not it was worth believing. Very rarely was I ever able to answer the questions. I often found myself going in circles in my line of reasoning trying to remain as objective as possible. Now several years into college, I find the questions even more demanding and abhorrent to look upon, for they threaten to shake the foundation of my entire life's direction and purpose, a paradigm shift nobody wants endure. Yet I find myself unable to sleep unless I face those questions, continue to search for the truth of the matter, even if I have to run in circles for the rest of my life. As a physics major, I am being conditioned to except no proposition, or very few anyway, without supporting evidence, and this directly ties into my test of faith. The question that bothers me is, oddly enough, not whether or not God exists. As a scientist, albeit an inexperienced one, I find it impossible that the universe is self existent. Everything I observe follows the principle of cause and effect. The reason many scientists reject the idea of God is because it would be impossible to measure him. Scientists do not like things they cannot measure, so they simply ignore them or contrive some explanation that's even crazier than the idea they run away from. My issue is not with God's existence, but his identity. How do I know that my God, Yahweh, is the true God as opposed to Allah, Zeus, or Odin? My only basis for my belief in Yahweh, comes from the Bible, a revelation that he supposedly wrote. How can I know for certain though? How do I know that Moses wasn't simply hallucinating or making the whole thing up, or the prophets for that matter? I mean, it's not like Moses had the best credibility. You have prince, or rather ex-prince, of one of the most powerful empires of the era who kills one of his own subjects in defence of a slave, runs for his life into the middle of the wilderness, finds himself herding sheep like a commoner, then receives a "revelation" from God in the form of a burning bush which does not burn, rides back to Egypt, looking like a mountain man and likely smelling like the animal he rode upon, and proclaims to the people: "God's sent me to set you free!" From that rather crude but fairly accurate description, the man would pass as clinically insane by today's standards. Why should I trust him? Apart from the miracles he supposedly performed (he could have made those up in the writing of the Torah, or hero legends rose up around him stemming from real, but less than miraculous events and the story was gradually changed over the centuries by scribes with no objective supervision), Moses credibility as a prophet of the true God is just a few levels above Mohammed's, which isn't much.
As such I have often wondered why, if Yahweh is the true God, he chose such an obscure and, at least from our finite mortal perspectives, inefficient form of communication. I'm often tempted to believe that the Old Testament was written for Hebrews, in a Hebrew tongue, with a Hebrew mindset, conditions that we cannot accurately emulate and is of no relevance today, but what else do I have to go on? It seems to me that God's message would have been better written in a book fallen from the sky, or multiple books for that matter, around the world, in each succession of historical eras, each in the tongue of the people who received it and written with their culture, history, and attitudes at heart, that all could read and understand without having to endure the problems of translations and vague ancient text that only go so far back to the originals.
Thus I find myself speculating where that hypothetical book might have landed and admitting reluctantly that such conjecture is futile. I realize my apprehensions might never be allayed and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending to this mystery has not yet been written.
)Many Christians grow up Christians because they're parents were Christians or their community was Christian. I think I can safely say that many Christians are Christian simply because that is the environment they were brought up in and hence the one they are comfortable with. I have been a Christian since a young age. I offered my life to Jesus I think at the age of nine (oddly enough, my favorite number) but it was only when I entered mid-adolescence I started to take my faith seriously, and in taking it seriously I began to question it, to test whether or not what I believed was the truth, and more to the point, whether or not it was worth believing. Very rarely was I ever able to answer the questions. I often found myself going in circles in my line of reasoning trying to remain as objective as possible. Now several years into college, I find the questions even more demanding and abhorrent to look upon, for they threaten to shake the foundation of my entire life's direction and purpose, a paradigm shift nobody wants endure. Yet I find myself unable to sleep unless I face those questions, continue to search for the truth of the matter, even if I have to run in circles for the rest of my life. As a physics major, I am being conditioned to except no proposition, or very few anyway, without supporting evidence, and this directly ties into my test of faith. The question that bothers me is, oddly enough, not whether or not God exists. As a scientist, albeit an inexperienced one, I find it impossible that the universe is self existent. Everything I observe follows the principle of cause and effect. The reason many scientists reject the idea of God is because it would be impossible to measure him. Scientists do not like things they cannot measure, so they simply ignore them or contrive some explanation that's even crazier than the idea they run away from. My issue is not with God's existence, but his identity. How do I know that my God, Yahweh, is the true God as opposed to Allah, Zeus, or Odin? My only basis for my belief in Yahweh, comes from the Bible, a revelation that he supposedly wrote. How can I know for certain though? How do I know that Moses wasn't simply hallucinating or making the whole thing up, or the prophets for that matter? I mean, it's not like Moses had the best credibility. You have prince, or rather ex-prince, of one of the most powerful empires of the era who kills one of his own subjects in defence of a slave, runs for his life into the middle of the wilderness, finds himself herding sheep like a commoner, then receives a "revelation" from God in the form of a burning bush which does not burn, rides back to Egypt, looking like a mountain man and likely smelling like the animal he rode upon, and proclaims to the people: "God's sent me to set you free!" From that rather crude but fairly accurate description, the man would pass as clinically insane by today's standards. Why should I trust him? Apart from the miracles he supposedly performed (he could have made those up in the writing of the Torah, or hero legends rose up around him stemming from real, but less than miraculous events and the story was gradually changed over the centuries by scribes with no objective supervision), Moses credibility as a prophet of the true God is just a few levels above Mohammed's, which isn't much.
As such I have often wondered why, if Yahweh is the true God, he chose such an obscure and, at least from our finite mortal perspectives, inefficient form of communication. I'm often tempted to believe that the Old Testament was written for Hebrews, in a Hebrew tongue, with a Hebrew mindset, conditions that we cannot accurately emulate and is of no relevance today, but what else do I have to go on? It seems to me that God's message would have been better written in a book fallen from the sky, or multiple books for that matter, around the world, in each succession of historical eras, each in the tongue of the people who received it and written with their culture, history, and attitudes at heart, that all could read and understand without having to endure the problems of translations and vague ancient text that only go so far back to the originals.
Thus I find myself speculating where that hypothetical book might have landed and admitting reluctantly that such conjecture is futile. I realize my apprehensions might never be allayed and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending to this mystery has not yet been written.
