christian responses please...?

Question

Can any christians give me an honest rebuttal (or at least an opinion) to the points made in this video?

Please don't pre judge the video. Just watch it, it's interesting and it asks some valid questions wtihout profanity or personal attacks.

How can you spread your faith to others if you can't answer their questions and concerns?

click the link:
http://www.godisimaginary.com/video7.htm

too the people who refused to watch, what are you afraid of? I gave you an open forum to debate an atheist?

Nikki & papa vero: I find it odd that you both mentioned "brainwashing". Are you so insecure in your ability to form your own opinion that you have to worry about others brainwashing you? Brainwashing only works on very weak minded people.

So some of you will sit in church for an hour and listen to a person tell you that an invisible spirit in the sky made man from dust? A woman from a rib bone? talking snake? but you won't listen to 9 minutes of an opposing view with some important questions about your faith?

pontiuspilates: you have displayed your ignorance. The video IS NOT just about mormons!!! It discusses mormons 1st, then muslims, then christians. You didn't even watch. How can you comment on something you didn't even watch?

EXACTLY what I thought, not one of you will even listen to the points or questions in the video and give a response....Yet you cram bible verses down everybody's throat on yahoo q&A and expect them to listen.

vegta94: so because it's a popular belief it's correct??? Do you realize the 100% of the people used to believe in a flat earth???

Answer 1

As my father used to say about the closed minded, "Don't confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up."

As logical and thoughtful as this video might be, it will not change the minds of those who have come to accept these myths as absolute truth. But the more power to you for trying!

Answer 2

If this is the best arguments that atheists can come up with to prove there is no God then they should go back to pre-school. I did not find it the slightest bit thought provoking nor earth shattering as they claim. I could do a better job than that by far and I am a firm believer in God.

Also this is talking about the Mormon religion which is not Christianity. And he don't even have all that right, it is magicall spectacles not two rocks.

I did not watch the whole thing, I lost interest as soon as I seen that their info was wrong (the Mormon thing). How can people like yourself and the video makers expect respect and attention when they don't make sure that the facts are right. you criticize Christians yet you value the opinion of someone who doesn't research out the religions that they are criticizing. I gave it a chance and they proved themselves to be uneducated and untrustworthy. No different than the church goers you complain about.

Answer 3

gino_ggg,
You probably mean well, but the video was one of the worst examples of why a religion is false that I have ever seen. I have seen better videos debunking Mormonism and Islam. As far as the Christian side of the video, it has the typical blind notion that one must absorb in order to not believe in the truth of it.

The production of the video is fine. It's sound quality was excellent compared to a lot of things that I've seen on YouTube. And the video portion of it was a little 3rd grader, but acceptable, easy to watch. But the complete lack of scholarship, the predetermined acceptance of fallacy must already believed for anyone with an ounce of depth on the subjects.

For example, the opinion of the writer of the words being spoken in the video, was to call everything he or she isn't able to explain as "MAGICAL." And the attempt at pier pressure or authority is not explained or reasons ineptly given. Scientific study of prayer, unreferenced. No depth to the accusations of invalidity of scripture was given.

So this video was for the weak minded. And the lack of sources made it elementary in its delivery. Perhaps you have enough interest in that site to let them know that they are dealing with deeper issues than what they had brought up? Oh yeah, and let them know that using the word magical ad nauseum doesn't help them with explaining their case. The right word in my opinion is "Miracle." To which one is left to decide, as it's always been, to the individual. Magical sound too much like a propaganda speech against, it doesn't sit well and takes away from the case that the author is trying to preach.

Answer 4

I have to admit, your video brought on a giggle. All those poor people stuck in a bubble. But they can't see it.

You must feel lucky to know that you escaped bubble entrapment. Unlike the other poor saps who merely think that they are bubble free.

Jim Carrey did a movie a few years back called the Truman Show. He woke up, went to work, and lived his life. Can you imagine trying to convince him that he lived in a television-stage-bubble? To convince him that no matter how confident he was in the facts that he thought he knew, his life was a television sitcom, a fairy tale.

Think if you could go back and watch a brilliant twelfth century astronomer at work, talking to his peers about how the stars and planets interacted. We might laugh at his misconceptions, because we would know that his view of science was a mere bubble of misconceptions, given our current knowledge of physics and astronomy. I’m curious if you could suddenly appear before that twelfth century astronomer given your knowledge of astronomy (and I’ll confess mine isn’t great) could you convince him that he lived life in a bubble of scientific misconception?

Alternatively, can you see yourself driving down a Kentucky backwoods road? You come across this amazing sculpted figure. From its quality, you realize the marble must come from the Henraux quarries near Pietrasanta. So you ask the local hick standing nearby, “Wow, where did this amazing sculpture come from?”

And he says, “Just always been there.”

So you shake your head, “Someone must have made it or brought it here.”

“Nope,” he says. “Always been here.”

You would want to shake that guy out of his bubble. Tell him that things don’t just come into existence without a cause. Someone must have made that statute or at least dragged it here.

Oh well, thankfully you know you are the one outside the bubble. Because if Atheists can be confident of one thing, it is that they know they are right.

Answer 5

I listened to the entire thing and I have to admit that it has a nice flow and the logic used is very good. However, it fails for a number of reasons.

The first contention is that Christianity is a delusion because we “have no evidence of any of the claims”. This claim is false. We have many proofs as to the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. We have both Christian and non-Christian sources including Josephus, Pinly, and Augustus as well as early Hebrew, Greek, and Roman philosophers who wrote numerous critiques of Christianity.

Second, the claim about superstition. I will grant that there are many who have bought into the notion of “name it and claim it” Christianity that borders on witchcraft. However, the traditional view of prayer is not what the author of this video supposes. Prayer is meant as a means of changing YOU, not the world around you and certainly not God.

The contention that Christianity radically devalues human life makes absolutely no logical sense when viewed in the context of the Scriptures. Human life is shown as being very valuable, in fact intrinsically valuable. Christians do not say that if you die in battle you go to heaven, we say that when you die (by whatever cause) and you believe in Jesus you will go to heaven. Also, the author claims that Heaven is a fairytale fantasy. But let me ask this, how do you know? What proof do you have? Since the atheist wishes to claim the non-existence of Heaven, it would be incumbent upon them to prove the negative. I as a Christian have proof of my claims that Heaven is a real place, I await the atheist proof to the contrary.

The claim of the slowing of scientific process is yet another leftover form the Dark Ages. It ignores the fact that it was the Christians who maintained most of the knowledge from the ancient world by keeping written documentation. It was the Christians who advanced science, especially medicine. How many hospitals were started by atheists? Most of the ones in the US were started by churches.

I wholeheartedly disagree that my faith means that I have to disregard rational thought. My faith has a very strong rational basis. In fact, it is commanded in Scripture that we test all things in light of Scripture. My perspective and differs from the atheist’s in only one substantive aspect; atheists reject any notion of the supernatural. This is an assumption based on a faith proposition that the supernatural does not exist. Since they reject the supernatural, anything that involves the supernatural must be false. There is no basis for this position other than “I don’t believe”.

I would further is agree with the position that the author is not criticizing my faith. On the contrary, he spent the first several minutes of the video doing just that, considering anyone who does believe in the supernatural as delusional.

In the last section, the author asks the question: why is it that every scientific study shows that prayer is a superstition? First of all, this is not true. In 1988, a study was published in the Southern Medical Journal showing that there was a measurable effect from prayer. In 2001 another study published in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine (46:781-787) found similar impacts. http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/coronary.html
But this statement I found interesting. How does science and scientific study determine if something is a superstition? The data certainly does not draw conclusions, only the reader of the data can do that.

The next question is how can a rational being believe in an imaginary place like heaven? This of course presupposes that heaven is in fact imaginary. That assumption is a statement of faith, no less or more valid than my statement of faith that it is a real place. The only difference is that I have evidence to support my position, whereas the atheist does not.

Finally, the question is asked why we can believe in a being called God without empirical evidence? To this question, I ask “what do you mean by evidence?” To this, it is likely that the atheist desires that which is measurable by the senses. However, Greg Koukl ran into such a difficulty with an attorney that wanted such proof:

The attorney in this particular case had made a fundamental error. He assumed that anything "real" must be physically measurable. That's an odd statement, coming from an attorney. If that same attorney attempted to convict a criminal, he'd have to show that the defendant had a motive. But a motive is not a physical thing. It may be inferred from physical circumstances or from physical evidence, but the motive itself is not physical.
Would this attorney consider it a legitimate response if the defense said, "Counselor, if there really is this invisible thing called a motive that you attribute to the defendant, please show it to us. Where is it? Put it on the table so we can label it 'Exhibit 1.' If this motive exists, as you say, if it's part of the real world, then we should be able to measure its existence."
Do you see how I've taken the objection the attorney raised about the existence of the soul and put the exact same objection in the context of law? By this attorney's reasoning, something like a motive would be impossible to prove. Clearly this isn't going to do. The attorney's entire livelihood depends on being able to prove as a matter of fact in the real word a whole host of things that can't be measured physically.
This teaches us that there are different ways to prove a thing's existence. If a thing is physical, then some physical test should be able to reveal it, at least in principle. But if a thing is not physical--like a motive, a soul, an idea, or a host of other things--then a person has to infer its existence by different means. Attorneys do this all the time. They infer the existence of a motive by other means of reasoning. Why can't a soul be demonstrated to exist, at least in principle, in the same way?
Even a crime can't be measured the way our attorney friend is demanding. A crime is not a physical thing; it's an historic event, a relationship of individual actions that happened in the past and is gone forever. Corporate lawyers face the same problem because a corporation is not physical. A corporation may own physical things like buildings or machinery, but it isn't physical. It is real, but it's not physical.
Frankly, I'm hard-pressed to think of anything an attorney deals with that is principally physical. Even a contract is not physical. The paper and ink are not the contract. Rather, the contract is the invisible information tokened by the markings on the paper. You know the contract is not physical because that same contract can be on ten pieces of paper at the same time. It can also be on your computer disk. Physical things cannot be in more than one place at one time. The contract, therefore, is real, but not physical..
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5484

In conclusion, when all is said and done the atheist is left with one simple proposition: God cannot exist because I do not believe in the supernatural.

I on the other had conclude that, given the evidence at hand, I am reasonably assured of the existence of God. Can I prove it to absolute certainty? No, but then again neither can the atheist. All I can do is go where the evidence leads and it leads me to conclude that there is a God.

Answer 6

If anyone watches that video and believes it must be ignorant. Nearly 6 billion people believe their is a God and you don't? Hmmmm. Let's do the math here and see what the odds are that you could be wrong.

Answer 7

i listened to it a little, soon realized it was anti God. if you want to listen that's your privilege, i do not agree with it.Salvation is the gift of God (Eph. 2:8) and "faith" is given only in that God produces and provides that which man must believe and act upon.Romans10: 13for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
14How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? 15And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"
16But not all the Israelites accepted the good news. For Isaiah says, "Lord, who has believed our message?" 17Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ

Answer 8

I don't click on Links.

Debate? I would not debate you 3 seconds.

You will have your debate first hand, in time.

Now. Go chew the bark off a tree and relieve yourself, of stress.

.

Answer 9

OK i have been a christian my whole life.
does that video honestly sound rational to you ? if i wasn't so mad at the fact that that video just said that i was stupid about 100 time!! i would be laughing at you right now. oh! and NO PERSONAL ATTACKS MY FOOT!!!

Answer 10

My thought is that 4 billion people are lost..... Plus the ones in the {M}=bubbles.......and everyday when I pray this is what; [[I pray for that everyone will see eye to eye oneday with peace in the hearts.....]]

My thought is just a thought......