Sorry, but your analogy isn’t quite accurate. If there’s an accredited university that teaches something I want to learn I have no problem whatsoever investing in the tuition and years of study required to gain that knowledge. Unfortunately what you’re asking is for me to invest the tuition and years of study just to obtain evidence that the university and its curriculum is even REAL. If your god has insights he has to reveal to me I’m all for paying the ‘tuition’ and investing the years of study… but you’re telling me that first I have to invest tuition and time JUST to get evidence that your god exists. I’m NOT asking your god to snap his metaphorical fingers and completely enlighten me to all he has to teach… ALL I’m asking is some verifiable evidence of his simple existence BEFORE I invest all that time and resources.
I never suggested that that you invest years of study just to obtain evidence that God exists, but if you want to know you have to invest some time doing some investigation. It varies by person how much they need to investigate in order to believe. Aside from reading what God has revealed through the Messenger the only other way you could know is if you prayed to God for a sign and got one. I know three former atheists who did that and now they are believers, but after that two of them embarked upon a study of the major religions. Without a religion you cannot know what God’s will is for you, so what is the point of believing that God exists?.
Verifiable evidence that God exists? Do you understand what you are asking for? Nobody has EVER had verifiable evidence that God exists, and you expect God to provide you with that? If God had wanted to be verified He would have made Himself verifiable, but obviously that was never His intention.
No, it’s more like I’m not interested in a relationship in which the other individual insists that I prove myself ‘worthy’ before they’re even willing to prove that they exist. If god doesn’t need my belief, I certainly don’t need to play his silly head games.
In other words, you want special treatment, what God has not provided to anyone else, custom-made proof sent special delivery right into your mailbox.
You do not have to prove yourself worthy, all you have to do is something if you want something, rather than doing nothing and expecting to get something for nothing.
God does not need your belief because God has no needs. The only reason to believe in God is for your own benefit.
Actually I’ve never said I’m not going to look at the evidence. In fact, I’ve told you before that I’ve spent endless hours reading over texts that people have claimed would ‘open my eyes to god’, but to no avail.
I am sorry that I did not recall you ever telling me that. What texts were those?
I’ve asked you to please provide me with what you felt was the most convincing evidence your faith has. You sent me two, one was a rather vague account of how a temple would be built on a hillside and the other was a rather accurate prediction of WWI. And though I found the predictions about WWI to be impressive, there was nothing about them that is any different from someone making an accurate prediction and certainly no reason to believe that the prediction was divinely inspired.
If you do not believe the Bible is divinely inspired then Bible prophecies are not going to be meaningful for you. If you believe that anyone can make the predictions that Baha’u’llah made then that won’t be meaningful either. Those predictions are proof for some people but not for others.
Not only did Baha’u’llah know things He did not learn in any school, He also predicted many things that later came to pass. In this book, which can be read online, is a list of 30 specific things Baha’u’llah predicted that later came to pass:
The Challenge of Baha'u'llah
I just happened to have one of these predictions in a Word document
The coming dawn of the Atomic Age was writ large in the prophecies of Baha'u'llah and 'Abdu'1-Baha.
Nuclear Terror
Prophecy 21: The development of nuclear weapons.
In a Tablet entitled
Words of Paradise (written shortly before His passing in 1892), Baha'u'llah noted the rush by Western civilization to develop ever-more-deadly weapons of war. Explaining the urgency of His call for world unity and peace, He declared:
Strange and astonishing things exist in the earth but they are hidden from the minds and the understanding of men. These things are capable of changing the whole atmosphere of the earth and their contamination would prove lethal.141
This reference to 'strange and astonishing things' aptly describes the twin processes of fission and fusion by which we obtain nuclear energy. The reality of such a power was again affirmed in 1911 by 'Abdu'1-Baha:
There is in existence a stupendous force, as yet, happily, undiscovered by man. Let us supplicate God, the Beloved, that this force be not discovered by science until spiritual civilization shall dominate the human mind. In the hands of men of lower material nature, this power would be able to destroy the whole earth.142
'Abdu'1-Baha spoke these portentous words to the Japanese ambassador to Spain, Viscount Arawaka, for whose country the warning carried grave implications.
An ironic coincidence? If so, it was not the only one. In 1920 'Abdu'1-Baha wrote to a group of young students in Tokyo: 'In Japan the divine proclamation will be heard as a formidable explosion .. .'U3 (I am aware of no other explosion metaphor in the Baha'i writings.) A quarter of a century later, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vaporized in the first wartime use of atomic bombs. Today the world's nuclear arsenals contain enough firepower not only to destroy humanity many times over but to alter climate and atmosphere so drastically as to render the planet uninhabitable.
The Challenge of Baha'u'llah, pp. 85-86
It sounds to me like what you mean by ‘really caring’ is to START OFF accepting that god is real and then start searching for texts that appear to support your assumption. That’s not how it works for people who are natural skeptics. I can’t just ‘pretend’ like I think it’s real. I can’t just ‘pretend’ that an accurate prediction must have been divinely revealed by some god being. And I can’t ‘pretend’ that the girl on the dating website is real and try to prove myself worthy of her BEFORE she actually provides evidence that she’s a real person.
I understand what you are saying, but I am not suggesting that you to accept that God is real BEFORE you have proven that to yourself, I am only suggesting that you are open to the possibility. I never believed in God before I became a Baha’i. I never gave it any thought at all because I was not raised with a religion or belief in God. I accepted the religion was true before I really believed in God as I do now, based upon what I read about the religion and based upon what the central figures of the Faith wrote. I assumed God existed but only many decades later did I think about it seriously. It was at that time that I read the Writings of Baha’u’llah and came to understand what a Messenger if God was and how He is related to God. All that is in Gleanings and I read that book at least five times starting about seven years ago. After that I knew for certain that God was real but since then I have been on a journey trying to find out what God wants of me and trying to understand why God does what He does. My searching is far from over.
