At one time I would have agreed with you and the world felt cold without absolute truth or specifically Christianity, but I can see myself living a fulfilling life without it (assuming its not literally true). I guess after reading a lot of arguments against Christian morality I would say my issue with it (if its not literally true) would be that it denies this world in favor of another. I have no interest in doing that if there isn't another world behind this one. I'd move deeper into both the pleasant and the painful and experience all of it more intensely if there is no God.
My hesitation here is that without Christ literally dying on the cross for our sins, and without there REALLY being sin and there really being salvation, its all absolutely meaningless to me.
Jaxon Brooks
I've actually watched the vatican catholic magicians video and I remember being incredibly spooked when I first watched it then looking up a bunch of the so called unexplainable magic and realizing many of the tricks had explanations easily accessed on the internet.
hmm, interesting. Well, as i have said, interesting but not really compelling. On a side note, can you explain me how that "plushie doll trick was made?" and the levitations? all special effects? just asking out of curiosity.
I remember looking up the face changers one and they just use wires to pull off ultra thin masks. For a lot of the levitating ones its video edited after the fact or really thin wires are used. He uses plexiglas in a lot of it. For the one where the guy crosses through the great wall of china he just goes inside the staircase and come out of it when hes on the other side. With the magician stuff its all illusions and tricks, but I see nothing supernatural being done there.
Now as for the demon stuff I do find it convincing, I've watched stuff on David Paulides work a good bit and its incredibly fascinating. At the very least I believe there are entities that exist out there beyond us and some of them are likely malevolent.
I'll elaborate on the apparition I saw in the woods that I mentioned in a post above. I did a ritual that was an actual ancient ritual given to me by an esotericist/occultist and went and did it after I lapsed from Roman Catholicism and had given up on religion altogether (this is back in november). I did an invocation to an ancient norse God and nothing happened. I turned around and when I looked into the woods behind me a 6 foot or so blue pillar of light was there about 20 feet away from me. There were no lights near by that looked anything like that. I said some expletives out loud in awe and it dissipated within 5-10 seconds.
I did 2 more rituals after that and nothing happened so I gave up and I sort of wrote off the first but it was incredibly spooky. Interesting that I've fallen even more completely away from religion in the past 5-6 months which my friends joke about often with regards to the rituals there, but I figured its of note given us being on the topic of demons.
Will read through the prophecies now and the thing on eucharistic miracles. Are you catholic by the way? and you linked MHFM are you sede?
Eli Garcia
sure. Btw christianthinkthank is pretty good and you should check the other articles as well. thinking of converting nah, i just thought it was interesting.
Oliver Watson
I skimmed a bit of the Daniel arguments there and im watching the eucharistic miracles clip
Lets say we assume daniel predates the stuff, what are the actual prophecies again, do you have a link to a list?
Juan Robinson
neverthirsty.org/bible-studies/book-of-daniel/the-amazing-prophecies/ Of course there are slighty different interpretations of what happens after alexander dies and his empire is divided, but the "greek empire" part is pretty obvious. There is a huge list of prophecies in the bible, i don't have a full list rn, but you can search it later
This narrowed it down to Christianity, add into that all of the correlating evidence for all of the religious practices of Christianity being the natural state of humans for them to be happy and the fact that the Bible is ridiculously complex and I simply can't believe that a human or group of humans thousands of years ago made a plan to make several of their books foreshadow another group of books and events that would happen thousands of years further into the future, i.e. Isaiah and the entire OT.
This sort of argument doesn't really do it in me given I'm not 100% sure of classical conceptions reason or things of that nature. For me it's not enough I see no reason why just because we assign a function to something that it was necessarily designed for that reason. I'd like to believe that, but I'm not quite ready to make the leap that the universe works in this holistic, sensical way. I feel like at this point nothing short of something really wild like a sign would really convince me, or something to prove to me the literal existence of the Christian God.
The arguments from Daniel above are interesting but muslims can point to similar spooky or weird stuff in their holy texts, a lot of it is too vague, with the exception of perhaps some of the writings about the greeks and maybe Jesus predicting the fall of the temple.
But yeah I'm not sure, I definitely think the bible is a "holy text" or guided by something, I'm just not necessarily convinced of the whole religion. Same with the demon arguments above, it doesn't prove Christianity in particular.
