Moonjuice
In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey
One of the things that I often think about when contemplating the worlds major religions is the idea that the message god wants to deliver to the entire world is often given to a single person, alone (Moses, Mohammad, Joseph Smith, etc.). It is up to that single person to deliver gods message to the world. We aren't even arguing about the content of the books, many of us are trying to understand if a god exists at all. Once that is settled, then perhaps we will be in a better position to examine which book is actually the book god wants us to follow. It should be easy, if only one of the religious text is actually from god.
I'm convinced that god didn't tell these people to write anything. I believe human authors of all religious books wrote it themselves and no gods had anything to do with it. This is true for every religious text. If you believe your religion has a doctrine or book that was actually written by or "breathed" by a God, I have a question for you:
Is there a single verse in that book that proves it had to be written by a God, because it could only have come from a God? If so, the evidence will force me to at least accept that a God does exist.
I'll give you an example of the kind of thing that the entire world would probably find convincing: A verse in the bible that includes anything factual about the natural world, that could not be known by a human at that time, and is too detailed to be a guess. It could have only come from an actual creator of the entire universe.
Could be something like "I have created vast pools of crude oil under the ground. One day, you humans will figure out how to extract it and refine that oil into fuel in order to operate machines you will build to travel. Those machines will allow you to move from one country to the next, across oceans, and even to travel through the air at hundreds of miles per hour." Or maybe it's something less obvious, but still completely convincing?
Does this exist in any text that is supposedly gods word?
I'm convinced that god didn't tell these people to write anything. I believe human authors of all religious books wrote it themselves and no gods had anything to do with it. This is true for every religious text. If you believe your religion has a doctrine or book that was actually written by or "breathed" by a God, I have a question for you:
Is there a single verse in that book that proves it had to be written by a God, because it could only have come from a God? If so, the evidence will force me to at least accept that a God does exist.
I'll give you an example of the kind of thing that the entire world would probably find convincing: A verse in the bible that includes anything factual about the natural world, that could not be known by a human at that time, and is too detailed to be a guess. It could have only come from an actual creator of the entire universe.
Could be something like "I have created vast pools of crude oil under the ground. One day, you humans will figure out how to extract it and refine that oil into fuel in order to operate machines you will build to travel. Those machines will allow you to move from one country to the next, across oceans, and even to travel through the air at hundreds of miles per hour." Or maybe it's something less obvious, but still completely convincing?
Does this exist in any text that is supposedly gods word?