My Epiphany
John Milton once said, “Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.” The epiphany I encountered happened during two experiences, once when I gained the knowledge, then again when my naive eye for the world really turned around. My epiphany is something I’ll never forget, mostly because it’s helped me with the ethics I choose to possess.
I was fourteen years old when the foundation of my epiphany occurred. I was never the kid who grew up in church, so for fourteen years I was clueless about anything referring to God, Jesus, or the Bible. A neighbor friend invited me to church, where I spent many Sundays and Wednesdays contently figuring out what it was that made all these people so happy. One Sunday morning I felt like I finally understood, so wanting nothing more than to claim Christ, I declared, “Jesus is Lord” on September 11, 2005. For months I was in this state of happiness, and I believed that there was an abundance of other Christians on the planet, who were also just as happy. And although oblivious to a myriad of things going on through humanity, this changed the way I felt in the world, I was content with being happy.
Did you know that in the baby boomers generation, only 35% are Bible-based believers? Did you know that that percentage drops drastically as the generations go on? When I was fifteen, I went to Acquire the Fire with my Youth Group. While we were entertained with a drama, and many Christian musicians, Ron Luce and Mike Guzzardo were there to speak to the youth. This event is what really turned my views on the world around and made me less naive to the things going on around us. They presented us with facts and numbers, showing the audience how much the worlds faith is decreasing. One thing that really impacted me was the future of my generation. For anyone born after 1984, only 4% are or will be bible-based believers, and still to this day, I can’t fathom this amount. However, since my eyes were really opened to the knowledge of the possible future of my generation, I’ve been more concerned about the faith of the people around me. I chose to really concentrate on Jesus helping me make better of myself so I could improve my witness to the lost.
I care about the future of my generation and lucky for me, an epiphany helped me care more. It’s been a sure battle for Christians living in this day, especially with media influencing everyone in an immoral direction. Although the trial can be tough, I’m glad I experienced my epiphany about Faith in Christ, without it, I’d still be lost in that 96% of my generation.
luvkat
I'm happy with my epiphany-less life without god, Christ, of Jesus. To each his own though, I am very glad that you could find faith, and a guiding light in this otherwise dark world. Do I envy your faith? No, I have my own opinion on religion that most would find unpopular, but nonetheless, I can respect the beliefs of others.
The bible for a lot of people just isn't cutting it anymore. People need more proof than words and promise of eternal bliss. Others are more logical, and since their is little to no logic in Christianity (no offense, but this is just my opinion on it, I don't see much logic in it, only faith) they don't go along with it.
Keep on truckin man. If you are right, more room for you in heaven. If you are wrong... then who cares because you'll be dead anyways. Just remember to have respect for others beliefs. Its find to tell others what you believe, just don't press that on anyone.
o man, i've always wanted to go to acquire the fire!
yeah... a lot of people think that christians are the majority, like 80% of the population or some number. disappointingly, most people are nominal christians, and they don't get much further than "words and promises of eternal bliss" as mikesta707 mentioned.
but just an encouragement, there is a lot of logic, reason, and debate in christianity. i go to a christian school and took a whole class devoted to these subjects. try "the new evidence that demands a verdict" by josh mcdowell for a big, fat book of logical, hardcore answers... if ur interested. if u already have ur mind set on religions, thats okay too!
peace out y'all!
Josh McDowell ?? :idk:
About the only person who writes as bogus claims about Christianity as McDowell is Lee Strobel. You need to read someone who actually asks questions and takes the answers seriously. Try Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, John Dominic Crossan, Michael White, Burton Mack, Gerd Theissen, or any number of REAL scholars
DB
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If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. - Anatole France
Times are getting harder and harder for those of all religions. Science has blow certaint things into question. But logistics cant prove everything wrong. Sometimes you just need to have faith in things instead of worrying with logic.
:dances:
i donno... what makes a real scholar? not too familiar with all the smart people you named... but i def. want to look into them! :-)
but i don't really think u need a degree to understand God... which mcdowell (and strobel) have anyways. so what makes ur references different from mcdowell's-- scholars as gleason archer, f f bruce, k a kitchen, john warwick montgomery, peter stoner, carl henry, tom neven...? idk... not here to debate but to really get information on these guys. i wanna know!!! :-)
thanks!
You need to hit the reply button, otherwise it is difficult to tell who you are replying to. In this case, I think it is clear that you are replying to me.
What makes a real scholar is a willingness to question one's beliefs and an honest effort to find out what is real and what is merely the result of your wants and desires.
Everybody whom you mentioned that I actually know is an evangelical. Their mindset is that the bible is perfect. They simply will not believe anything otherwise. But, anybody who has read it should be able to tell that is not the case. There are THOUSANDS, perhaps TENS of THOUSANDS discrepencies. Yet Gleason Archer has a book out in which he thinks resolves every one of them. The book is filled with ad hoc arguments. IF you allow the words to mean something other than they say then you can resolve any discrepancy by merely wishing it away. But that is not scholarship.
F. F. Bruce was of an earlier generation. He was not as bad as the others but still his religious beliefs do not allow him to accept obvious errors as errors.
John Warwick Montgomery, I remember reading a paper by him claiming that the evidence for the ressurection would be admissible as evidence in a court of law. Bullshit! Try to imagine a murder suspect's defense ... "I'm not guilty of murder, even though I did kill the guy ... because he came back to life. I saw him in a dream, a couple of his best friends claim to have seen him as well, and 500 unnamed guys saw him at the same time." Do you REALLY think the judge would even allow that defense?
Peter Stoner, I have heard of. I know he was a mathematician who has done some apolgetics that McDowell used. It was on prophecy if memory serves me correctly. I haven't read anything directly by him but I have checked into a number of biblical prophecies and I cannot find anything believable about the claims made for them.
K. A. Kitchen, Carl Henry, and Tom Neven ... I don't recall hearing or reading anything about or by them.
Doing a quick Google search Kitchen was an archaeologist who is an expert on the Egyptian empire specifically during the time of Ramesses II. It seems that he has written a book about that time. In it he seems to acknowledge that Ramesses reign was one of immense prosperity for Egypt. He also thinks the Exodus occurred during that time. How he can think both those two things is beyond me. IF Ramesses had 600,000 slaves in his kingdom that up and left one day then his economy would have been destroyed.
He also denies the Documentary Hypothesis, the leading theory amongst critical scholars, in favor of a traditional Moses authorship for the Torah (the first 5 books of the bible). The Documentary Hypothesis says that the Torah is an amalgamation of the works of at least 4 different authors: J, E, D, and P. J is the Jawistic source. This source generally refers to God as "Yahweh" (or "Jaweh" in German -- the Docurmentary Hypothesis was first proposed by German scholars). E is the Elowist source. This source refers to God as "El" or "Elohim". D is Deuteronomy which was written by an independent source. P is the "Priestly" source and deals a lot with the priestly rituals. It explains why there are often sudden breaks in the style of writing and why there are so many doublets (repeats of pericopes) with a different emphasis.
All I could find on Kitchen's claim against it, is an Egyptian writing that has 4 different "styles" but it to is attributed to a single author. That certainly sounds like wishful thinking.
The only data "for" Mosaic authorship of the torah is tradition. The torah itself does not claim to be written by Moses ... in fact Deuteronomy describes Moses' death. If Moses wrote that then that was quite a trick. Furthermore, there is no archaeological evidence that the Exodus as described in the bible ever took place.
The bible describes somewhat over a million Hebrews roaming around an area no greater than the size of New Jersey for 40 years. Yet not a single campsite has been found, and believe me ... they HAVE been looked for. This questions even Moses' historicity. How does Kitchen reconcile this?
Carl Henry turns out to be the founder of Christianity Today. I have read many articles from it. I have an RSS news feed with the search words "Evolution Darwin". They often print antievolutionary stories which have absolutely no backing from the available evidence.
Tom Neven has written a couple of books I have never heard of and has a blog. I skimmed his initial blurbs of about 10 of his blogs (I did not read any all the way through). They seemed ... bland. Mostly pithy observations about things of minimal importance.
So in any case, the problem with the authors you named is that they already "KNOW" the truth and are looking for things that support it. Unfortunately, that is a recipe for disaster if one is interested in reality. The world often isn't the way you "KNOW" it to be. That is why one has to look for data that contradicts your hypothesis instead of data that affirms it. These guys don't and when such data is presented they refuse to accept it.
Cheers,
DB
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If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. - Anatole France
oooohhhh, sorry new progressive user here! haha :-}
anyways, thank you for responding and looking into some of these people! it really helps me to understand your view more, and i totally see your points.
i like how u work... looking "for data that contradicts your hypothesis [or the accepted truth] instead of data that affirms it." like you said, evangelicals believe that the bible is infallible... so do "your" scholars point out the alleged faults like the prophecies and all? def. want to get unbiased sources... from what you tell me about the Hypothesis, makes sense... def. want to research that, too!
but, yo, lee strobel started checking out the case for christ while he was an atheist (he is no scholar... he's a journalist. donno if that is a respectable source... guess it depends on how thoroughly he researches...). and as for the exodus... there are chariot wheels at the bottom of the sea of crossing. and they've found records and standing stones from alleged camp locations. but you're right... there's still so much missing, especially with tribal cultures that were smaller, more easily conquered, etc. archaeology is always sketchy business... detective work, almost... guess we'll see as archaeologists keep searching, scientists keep analyzing, and scholars keep thinking REALLLY hard. :-)
as i hadn't heard of those scholars, i was quickly googling them... and from just a glance, it seemed like they refer to gnostic sources... written over 100 y. after the disciples' deaths... idk, still will def. check, but that kinda threw me off. then again, from what you say about the peeps i mentioned, they weren't entirely thorough either.
but anyways, i'll get on my homework! this intrigues me! thx for faithfully researching all this!
I am a scientist. I will tell you right now that no investigation is done in an unbiased manner. I don't think it is even possible to do such a thing. So you will never find an unbiased source. What you need to do is recognize YOUR biases. Whenever anything falls in line with what you want to believe, red flags should be the first thing that arises. Don't accept it right away. Look at it ... ask yourself what are other possible explanations for it ? ... then see how that piece of data fits in with the overall picture. How strong is it? Does it stand out as something that goes against everthing else? Out of all possible explanations what is the most likely and why do you think that? After you have done that for a wide variety of evidences then you begin to understand what the problem is.
I read a book by Earl Doughtery (sp?) in which the premise was that there was no historical Jesus. I read it at a time that much of my other readings had caused me to doubt whether or not we could trace anything to an historical Jesus. My intial reaction was that if Jesus was a myth then that could explain why there was such a difficulty. But Doughtery's relied a lot on speculative "could have beens" evidence. For example, the Pauline epistles do not specifically say WHEN Jesus died; He COULD have been a myth from several hundred years earlier ... etc. Well "could have beens" are the exact type of data I am so critical of in Christian apologetics ... "evening and morning, the first day" doesn't mean a 24 hour day, it COULD mean an unspecified period of time that last for millions or billions of years. So when I thought about it, I was not nearly as impressed with the hypothesis as my initial impression of it was, even though it is something that would naturally fit in with my biases.
That is the type of thing that evangelicals do not do. You mentioned Lee Strobel as being an atheist. I have read his book, THE CASE FOR CHRIST. If memory serves me correctly he described himself more as an agnostic. My guess is that he was always a Christian, just not a very religious one. He was never an atheist, that much I am sure of ... even if it should turn out that he did indeed claim to be.
If he was an atheist who set out to disprove the bible he would have been the world's most inept atheist. He didn't interview a single critical scholar. He ONLY interviewed evangelicals. He was absolutely accepted everthing they said without any fact checking. For instance, there are many inconsistencies in the birth narratives of Jesus between Matthew and Luke. If one reads one and then one reads the other it is quite obvious they are two completely different stories. Apologists say that Matthew writing for Jewish Christians was stressing some points while Luke writing for Gentile Christians was stressing others. For instance, that is why Matthew quotes Jesus' genealogy through Joseph which includes all the Kings of Judah, while Luke quotes Jesus' genalogy through Mary who is his birth mother (Joseph would be his step-father and therefore not so important). Well, the fact is BOTH genealogies claim to be through Joseph.
But let's ignore that obvious contradiction for a moment. There is another one. Matthew says that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great. Herod died in 4 BCE. So if Matthew is correct then Jesus must have been born on or before 4 BCE. Luke says that Jesus was born when Quirinius the Governor of Syria called a census that required Joseph to go back to Bethlehem the home town of David, his ancestor. Quirinius WAS Governor of Syria and he did call a census (there is no indication that he required people to go to the hometowns of their ancestors to register and indeed such a proposal would have been the height of stupidity since what mattered was where the person's hometown, not his ancestor's hometown). However, Quirinius' census was in 6 CE .... 10 years AFTER Herod died.
So you can't have it both ways. If Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great, then Luke is wrong. If Jesus was born during the census, then Matthew is wrong. Simple as that.
Strobel asked his evangelical expert about it. His evangelical expert said that a coin with Quirinius' name had been found and the date on the coin was 15 years earlier than the known Quirinius governorship of Syria. From this he thought that Quirinius must have had a previous stent as governor of Syria and called a different census at that time and that is when Jesus must have been born. Strobel accepts this as obvious evidence that that is exactly what happened.
First of all, that strikes me as another "could have been" argument. Quirinius COULD HAVE BEEN governor earlier. So I didn't find it convincing at all. I decided to check out the story for myself. It took me perhaps 5 minutes on the internet.
The coin was "found" by Larry Vardaman, an archaeologist at a small university in Mississippi. Vardaman is now dead, I believe. He never published anything about it in any peer-reviewed journal, he only leaves a story of it in some of his papers he left behind ... and the story becomes absolutely bizarre.
First of all, THERE IS NO COIN. Nobody can find it. Vardaman doesn't even have a photograph of it. He does have a line drawing of it. Vardaman claims that Quirinius' name is TOO SMALL TO BE SEEN with the naked eye. He claims that the name was inscribed by a diamond tool. There is no evidence that anyone actually HAD diamond tools back then, nor for that matter is do we have them now that could be reliably used to inscribe a name too small to be seen with the naked eye. Furthermore, why would ANYONE even inscribe a name that could be seen with the naked eye back then. Certainly microscopes were not invented.
This evidence is simply NOT credible on ANY level. Yet Strobel (and Strobel's evangelical expert) use it unquestioningly to dismiss an obvious error. This is NOT the action of a person with a built in bias to question the bible.
The next thing you mention is chariot wheels in the Red Sea. Those were "found" by the late Ron Wyatt. Ron Wyatt was a nurse anesthesiologist turned archaeologist for Christ. He claimed to have found Noah's Ark, the Lost Ark of the Covenant, Jesus' burial tomb, and all sorts of other things. Unfortunately, Ron Wyatt was a liar. The chariot wheels found in the Red Sea were put there by Ron Wyatt. Yet many Christian apologists still unquestioningly quote him ... even when other Christian sources present the evidence against him (and some of those Christian sources are from wingnuts just about as bad a Wyatt)
http://www.tentmaker.org/WAR/
http://www.tentmaker.org/Dew/Dew7/D7-AGreatChristianScam.html
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v21/i2/ark.asp
Finally ... almost everything we have from Christianity was written over a hundred years after the disciples deaths. The earliest thing we have is a 3X5 notecard-sized piece of papyrus that contains fragments of 4 verses from the Gospel of John and that dates to 125 CE, and I am certainly skeptical of that dating. It was not done on the basis of carbon dating (to do that would have required the whole fragment to be destroyed). The dating is based on the style of writing. I don't think that can be all that accurate ... especially judging from how long it took before a consensus was reached that the inscription "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" on the James ossuary was a modern forgery.
The reason we don't have originals is because it was standard practice that after a better copy was made, the older copy was destroyed. So very little of the old stuff is available to us. But the copies are copies of books that date much earlier. So the real question then is how far back does the tradition that the sources we do have date from. And that is a question that is subject to a lot of speculation.
It is true that most scholars date much of the non-canonical materials much later than canonical stuff. I think much of it DOES come from later traditions. However, I'm not convinced that all of it does. The Gospel of Thomas may be as early as any of the canonical gospels. The Gospel of Peter may also date from an early tradition as well.
The Didache, a text on rules by which an early Christian community was to treat itenerant Christian prophets, almost certainly dates from a very early time. But in any case, if you are interested then you need to read some of them, find out the reasons, that people give for their dating and then determine for yourself what is most reasonable. My conclusion was that there is a great deal of uncertainty inherent in any date, so any conclusion that is drawn that requires a specific date for a Christian tradition should be viewed with a lot of skepticism.
Cheers,
DB
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If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. - Anatole France
wow, what is your scientific specialty?
but never mind; i have so many more thoughts and questions from what you've shared...a lot of this stuff is news to me! but nevertheless, time is precious, and i've taken up much of yours in our correspondence. it seems that we could investigate this subject forever. (we could make the record for the world's longest blog! :-)
the reason for my departure is my end-of-quarter projects before i graduate... i'd rather be researching and talking with you, but unfortunately, i must focus on school for just a bit longer. (boohoo!!!) thank you for sharing and teaching me so much! your reasoning has inspired an interest in these new sources and analyzing truth. perhaps i'll run into you on another blog...
peace out! k