Chyron, your presupposition, and refusal to elaborate on said presupposition, that God’s existence is completely evident and unquestionable can be frustrating. Your strong faith is quite admirable, but your behavior in this thread today is baffling.
IMO the danger of any mixed-company religious conversation is failure to couch terms appropriately, and that goes double for text-only formats. This whole “true for me” and “true for you” is ultimately sorta bullshit, but useful bullshit. Chyron knows there’s a God. He’s 100% certain of this. I know there aren’t any gods. I’m 100% certain of this as well. You don’t have to wade very far into a conversation with this level of un-couched honesty before you reach the obvious conclusion that one of us is wrong.
But that’s not a useful conclusion to any religious discussion. It neither helps nor informs anyone. Unless you’re in the conversion racket, I suppose, which I’m certainly not. So instead of saying “I know”, people say “I believe”, which ratchets down the conflict a bit. But really, for some people it’s the same damn thing. Chyron and me, we both know, we’re both certain. But to facilitate a more fruitful conversation, it’s “belief”, which is suitably equivocal, albeit sometimes less accurate.
Now sure, many/most have room for real doubt, and I’m not trying to downplay that. I think doubt is far more theologically interesting than certainty on the faith end of the spectrum (whereas hardly anything is theologically interesting about my end). I think the story of Doubting Thomas illustrates this quite well, how lack of certainty/evidence is precisely what gives value to faith. I’m not exactly sure how to approach absolute religious certainty in that respect, but I’ll keep reading and listening.
At risk of re-starting the same shitstorm I started last time, this is nevertheless topical to the “truth” discussion.