This is part of what makes life exciting. It's why I feel sorry for the more dogmatic among us.

Feel free to be specific, if you'd like. If not, I won't try to guess.

Exactly. 

Many people will tout the phrase "The truth will set you free" but the rest of the verse is conspicuously missing. 

The fact is that the truth never set anyone free.

The truth needs to be followed not just acknowledged.

Sure. I said it was a search for truth. In contravention to the quote just introduced, I haven't seen anyone yet who's given me reason to believe that the "truth" they offer is complete and factual.

In fact, those who offer it generally will vary in the details at some level. So even taking them at their word, it'd be hard to tell which one offers the whole truth.

For example -

What would mean that they have self-authenticated sufficiently to be authoritative in an independently confirmed sense?

They way you have structured the requirement, I don't think the requirement you've laid down is even possible.

What/whose criteria will be used to determine that sufficient self-authentication has been done?  What will be acceptable?

What/whose criteria will be used to determine the independent confirmation?  What will be acceptable?

What fact(s) are you using to determine acceptibility?

What fact(s) are you using to determine that independent confirmation is necessary for something to be real?

Even if these contingencies are met you haven't said what value/weight you would apply to these, or that you could be value-neutral in doing so.
What will you do to correct for current bias?

"You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the Devil and his angels believe this, and they tremble in terror." James 2:19

I mean just because a scripture is quoted as being truth doesn't make it so. What establishes it as being the truth above all else, or that the event related actually happened?

At one extreme, a letter found dating to 31 CE to a rabbi stating, "I had leprosy and Yeshua cured me," would be something to seriously consider.

At a more tenuous extent, a letter from Pilate to a senator saying, "I had some Jew named Yeshua crucified as part of the day. My men told me that when he died, there was lightning and an earthquake. Isn't that interesting?" would be something to seriously consider.

Quoting from books that was assembled hundreds of years after the alleged events - and please don't say the assemblers didn't have their biases - merits less serious consideration. Unless, of course, it appeals to your faith. Then have at it, please.

We all make those judgments for ourselves, do we not? We can't agree that Obama simply had a tongue slip/brain fart when he said "57 states" or didn't know, as a Senator, how many states we have. Who's the authority to say what was on his mind? We're all the authority for the evidence, or lack of evidence, that we base our beliefs on.

Same as previous.

The totality of the evidence. The credibility and authentication of the sources. The bias or impartiality of those relating it to me. The consistency and reasonableness of the evidence presented. The same type of criteria that we all use in determining whether we believe a story or a person.

I think I laid that out in my little soliloquy. I state why I came to doubt what I came to doubt, and why I simply don't know what there isn't evidence to know. I'll use all facts that come to me. The weight of those facts will depend on the things listed above.

I'm sure I have bias, but I'm not aware of it, so I can't correct for it. If Buddha is the way to ultimate enlightenment, I'd want to find that out. If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the light, I'd like to discover that. If it's all a bunch of amplified hooey based on what were otherwise good teachings, I'd like to know that as well. If there is no way, truth, light, or enlightenment, I doubt that I'll ever know that, and I have no bias that tells me I should know.

I'm not saying anyone else should follow my path. I'm just laying my path out as I followed it. If it's interesting, feel free to discuss it. If it's hooey to you, feel free to disregard it - although if one wants to state publicly in this thread that it's hooey, I'd like to know why. Just for the sake of the dialogue.

Where's the document that James wrote, saying this? If there's no original document, how do we know he said it? How does he know what devils and angels believe, and whether they tremble in terror or not?

What's a primary document? 

- One that's written 1 minute after the fact 'explaining' that Obama meant X and not Y?  And another that he meant Y and not X?  (If only half of the 'original' sources survive into the future, image the implications to what people believe really happened in the past.)
- One that's written 10 years later using this as evidence to the conclusion he is/was a complete freaking moron? 
- One that's written 100 years later disputing he even said it? 
- One written 1000 years later disputing "Obama" even existed.

"Prove" Cleopatra was real.
"Prove" that the war of 1812 actually happened.

I didn't use the term. Whatever you deem to describe as a "primary document," it wouldn't be the singular source for validity.

I gave the type of things that I base my analysis on. Obviously and generally, the further removed from the fact the thing is, the lower the likelihood of reliability.

I'm no historian of the Julius Caesar era. I have no stake in the disposition of my hypothetical soul whether Cleopatra was real. If she wasn't real, that's fine. I'll adjust my amateur understanding of history accordingly.

Again, I have no stake in doing so. But if I were interested in it, I'd start at the Library of Congress. They seem to have an impressive stack of original documents.

Ok.
In the first instance, that of being truth above all else, if you currently do not accept it as the word of God, then certainly.

In the second, what criteria makes you dismiss that an event happened or not?
That's not a value-neutral baseline to dismiss it simply because Scripture is the messenger.

Interestingly enough, we do.

Thallus wrote a history of the eastern mediterranean and writes about a darkness covering the land as well as earthquakes when Christ was crucified.
He says that "beyond reason" it had to be an solar eclipse. Beyond reason because astronomers of the time knew enough to know when eclipses would be, and this wasn't the correct date for one.

This of course did not stop anyone from dismissing it as an eclipse regardless of the astronomical facts.

Or more currently, the fact that the universes essentials numbers give the appearance of having been tampered with.  Some say finely tuned instead.
I know we have had this discussion before and that the textbook answer is that if it wasn't us it would be something else.

But that is just not true and begs the question.

These numbers, in many instances, if off by the smallest place, and there is no universe at all.

An excellent book on the subject is Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees.
The only thing I disagree with him on is that he believes in the infinite multiverse concept to explain it, because then our universe is a fait accompli, rather than a zero probability event, even though there is no evidence for the infinite multiverse concept whatsoever.

It is telling that removing an infinite God from the equation, leaves an infinite hole that must be filled for things to make sense.

As with all the texts of antiquity, religious and otherwise.
In truth, what you are arguing for is that we can know nothing contained in any written work that is not current.
This is a criteria bias, and one that there is no foundation to adopt aside from pre-adopted base assumptions.

Well there you have it.
As I always said, faith is incidental to any evidence.
It's a choice.

Indeed, there is sufficient evidence for those who choose to believe, and yet not so much as to compel belief.  The paradox of free will.
And yet, this is how we live the rest of our lives.

For most, the atheist or agnostic in essence is saying that unless they are forced to believe, the evidence does not exist that will allow them to choose to believe.

If I get on a plane to Dallas, it is an act of faith based on sufficient knowledge I have of the airlines record, aviation in general, perhaps even some small outdated knowledge of the controls.
Yet I, in faith of this sufficient knowledge, make the choice to commit 100% of my body and life to the plane as I step aboard.

And yet it is a personal choice, since presented one set of evidence, you may choose to say it is not enough, yet I say it is sufficient.

How can you be sure you have checked your base biases at the door?

Perhaps some self reflection is in order. It is the essence of being true to oneself that one rises above bias to view the universe.

Before one can discover such things, one must be open to possibility.

If you had facts you wouldn't need belief.

That's the whole point of religion - they require you to believe things where there is no proof, no facts, no evidence. Of course some try to claim they do have proof or evidence with claims that the bible is the actual word of god.

Cart before the horse. It's the criteria that would lead me to accept that it happened. If the criteria's not there, I don't accept it unless or until it is there.

It would be a value-laden baseline to simply accept scripture because it describes something, especially something supernatural, and especially given the progression of scripture assembly.

Yeah, but although that passage is intriguing, it's hardly dispositive, for the following reasons: 1. He wrote it well after the alleged fact, so his sources are unclear. 2. He doesn't put it with anyone named Jesus. And 3. He apparently writes of retold legends of the time, including a war with Zeus. I personally don't believe that Zeus existed, either - but of course, if Thallus says so, that issue remains open.

I've considered that argument before, and Thomas Aquinas has it in the Summa Theologicae, having to do with the presence of order in the universe infers an assembler of the order. It's a logical statement to make. It begs the question of could order exist without an assembler. I don't think our sense of logic is going to determine the presence of a singular creator, let alone the veracity of a given scripture.

I'm arguing for no such thing. I'm saying that bias goes into the multifaceted analysis of how much weight, if any, is given to a particular thesis.

Sure. The more reasoned and supported and unbiased the choice, the higher the probability it has for correctness.

You're supposing that I chose what to believe and then looked for evidence to support that belief. I understand this is what many humans do. In my case, I evaluated the evidence and came to what I felt was the best supported decision. A decision that's fluid based on whatever other evidence or analysis may be presented.

Given the well-documented frequency of flights and incidence of fatalities, the probabilities are excellent that you'll land safe and sound. Your faith is justified.

I don't know what you're referring to here.

If Thallus had said, "At the time of Yeshua's death in Judea 80 years ago, there was a sudden darkness across the land and an earthquake," that would have a higher probability of authenticity regarding Jesus than Africanus saying that Thallus said, "On the whole world there pressed a fearful darkness, and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down." (We'll leave the Zeus part out of this one.)

I don't have a base bias that I know of.

That's what I've tried to do my adult thinking life and much of my teenage years. In fact, during my of that time, my bias was to reinforce belief rather than make objective findings. It was when I checked my bias that I came to a more reasoned, unemotional conclusion about the probabilities involved.

I'm open to the possibility. As told in my soliloquy, I'm open to any kind of supportable spiritual possibility.

I think we got that.  If heaven and earth open up you'll be a believer but anything short of that and not so much.

I'm not going to try and follow this entire thread as it grows, but I do want to say that I empathize with your position strongly and appreciate you taking the time to lay it out the way you did.  I'm all for productive.

Certainly, if God exists and were to distinctly write fiery letters in the sky and say, "Here I am," I'd take notice.

I see the possibilities of spirituality, as I mentioned in the OP, and am open to a supportable explanation. I don't know that it takes a divine voice, although I acknowledge the difficulty of trying to find an explanation for the possibility of spirituality in a material world. That's one reason why those referred-to events of mystery remain mysterious to me.

It would be unevidenced bias to simply reject scripture because it describes something.

Well after the fact is a value judgement that carries no weight unless you have some provable argument that this destroys credibility.

Twenty years = well after?  Hardly.

But he isn't the only one, Phlegon also talks about it and does tie it to the time Christ died.

how else to do so for we surely cannot step outside the universe, or back in time.

Begging the question, they may have had their biases, but there is no evidence they exercised them in any way that was deleterious to doctrine.

Yes...begging the question when it comes to assessing that criteria.

Sure. The more reasoned and supported and unbiased the choice, the higher the probability it has for correctness.

Define GOD, or yr idea of it.

I think this question is generally counter-intuitive to someone who doesn't believe in god.

I don't "simply reject" it. But it would be biased to say I accept it simply because it's told to me.

If I'm to accept the scripture that's presented to me, I have a lot of scripture around the world in many different belief arenas to accept. Any one of them, in any of their iterations, or none of them, could be correct. It's not bias to say, "Hm, I think I'll need support for that one." It's just being rational.

Twenty years is one interpretation, isn't it? The most favorable one. Thallus' history covered into the early 2nd century. He just as well could have written it 90 years later.

That's a stretch and again would require a bias to believe that someone said something that someone else wrote a hundred years after the fact was correct. Sure, that possibility exists. It's a stretch of bias to call it confirmation.

Every time we look at a star, we're looking back in time. We look at see star formations in various stages, and we can infer what star formation for different-sized starts looks like.

When it comes whether we can logically determine the existence of God, seeing order begs the question of an assembler. Theorizing an assembler begs the question of whether an assembler is actually needed for order.

You've determined the answer to that to your own satisfaction. I haven't, but I haven't dismissed any possibility. I don't think our puny intelligences is determinative.

So everyone pretty much has a bias except them? A lack of evidence of a bias (and we disagree there) presumes that no bias existed?

Is there evidence of a bias of the writers of Vedic hymns? The Tao? The Qur'an? If we don't see evidence of a bias, are we to accept them on face value?

Yeah, those guys at Nicaea and Hippo had lots of criteria to assess - but they had no evidence of bias, so we can't infer that they did have it.

Let's clink our glasses, toast in the new year, and cherish this one.

But your characterizations of my process are suffused with the implication that I reached a decision, with bias.

If I have a bias, I'm open to its exposition. In consonance with the presumptions up above, what's the evidence for it?

I'm unaware of the data that generates that probability, and I've been immersed in the body of pronouncements earlier in my life.

I'm not catching this one at all. What I set forth is consistent with what I've already said.

The farther away from the source, the more retellings are involved, the higher the probability for increased error.

That presumes my criteria is changing, but it's not.

Do you mean because I left Zeus out in the second reference. That's was setting aside a factor that argues against Thallus. Here I thought I was being overly fair to the pro-Thallus proposition.

I think we're generally talking about the creator, prime mover, preserver, assembler of all order, who theoretically takes an interest in the goings-on of human beings on this planet, and who also theoretically has sent an emissary, or emissaries, here.

But I'm open to other definitions. Toss me a bone.

I'll accept reasonable data from any source.

Please explain how I am to conclude that 1. Jesus was authoritative on the subject and 2. said this and 3. what he said is the fact.

Wait.... are you trying to impress me?

(That was lighthearted.)

Well. As one of my Catholic teachers said, "It would be a little jarring to arrive at the pearly gates, get asked, 'Who is God?' and you reply with your best Baltimore catechism, and it gets thundered down at you, 'There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet!'"

Tellya what. I think I've done right by the people around me, I've striven to acquire the knowledge that I reasonably and rationally can, and if there is some divine evaluation coming up, I'm serene about it. I've been close to death before, and it held no terror or panic. We're all going to cycle through, and I've had a good life already.

Apologies, but I've redacted some of your comments because they're pronouncements and not discussion fodder.

Thank you, and a happy and prosperous new year to you as well.

I've addressed this once, but I wanted to add to it, and an "ETA" would be buried.

As I've said repeatedly, I'm open to spirituality. Let's say that I've directly observed someone have sudden and convincing knowledge of a death that's just occurred some distance away. How do I process that?

Coincidence? That would be a huge stretch. It would imply that this person often has these revelations, and this one happened to be right. But I know that's not how this person operates. Or that some flash of inspiration coincidentally happened at the same time as the occurrence that's the subject of the flash. I can't give that a very good probability at all.

Some empirical means that I'm not perceiving? OK. Now, what is it?

I had a psychological need to believe in extra-normal phenomenon, so I've imagined it or misperceived it? Well, that's a possibility, but my perception then and memory now is pretty darn clear, and if I'm making stuff up without knowing it, I guess I'm not going to know that I did.

The decedent's essence changed (soul was released, however you want to put it), and this person perceived it at that essential level? Sure, I'm open to that, too. How do we determine that that's what happened?

Telepathy? Same answer as the immediate previous one.

I'm open to any of those possibilities, or more possibilities. I can't make a convincing case for any of them, but again, I'm open to doing so.

Now, if a person senses a death a distance away at the time it happens, different people would have me believe that it means that:
1. Jesus is God from God, sacrificed for our sins, and is the key to heaven.
2. There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the prophet.
3. The Buddhist concept of reincarnation and ultimately karma is at play here.
4. (Insert doctrine of choice)

It would take a severe bias toward a particular doctrine to link one to the event I described. Build me a bridge to that one.

I'm looking for knowledge. The more factual, the more verifiable, the better.

After reading the thread's topic, I thought 'I believe in faith, hope, love, etc... Now how can I prove them 'factually?'" Please share how you would 'build that bridge.'

I don't know what you're asking. If you want me to explain how to support your own beliefs, I don't think I can do that.

LOL You're asking people to prove their beliefs. It's just more eloquent and long winded this time.

Please explain the logic path that would be acceptable/agreeable to you where a belief could ever be factual in your mind.

If you want accurate knowledge start with Genesis and an impartial mind.

Have a wonderful day!

Bluefire wrote:
LOL You're asking people to prove their beliefs. It's just more eloquent and long winded this time.

I'm asking nothing of anyone. I've repeatedly said what anyone wants to believe, proof or not, they're welcome to it.

Aren't "belief" and "fact" separate entities?

To jump off SKPhoto's flight of faith, if I get on a plane to San Francisco, I believe I'll arrive safely at SFO. That's based on the physics and safety record of air travel.

Of course, my belief could be incorrect, and the fact of a crash could prove me wrong.

If I'm being impartial, why would I focus on Genesis over the Enûma Eliš saga?

Have a wonderful day!

Well, sure. You, too. I hope we all do.

the universe is one, everything is interconnected

I dont think a doctrine is needed

I agree I could have all the head knowledge about God that I wanted. But nothing changed in my life until I put him at the front of my life. And really decided to follow him and live as scripture calls me to live. And when I really began to trust God to lead me and to provide for me. That is when I saw things change and when I had really been set free.

  That statement is the biggest oxymoron I have read in any of these debate threads in a while! 

An impartial or open mind is the antithesis of Christian belief.  "Question all you want, but in the end you must believe what the bible says," is how it's usually explained.

Tell us WHY christianity is a better religion than any other?  WHY is Christianity's "truth" a better truth than that of Hinduism, Buddism, Shinto, Islam, or any other belief system?

Please do not fall back on the argument that "The bible says so, " or some such circular argument.