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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: The Philosopher who wrote (40371)	6/13/1999 4:18:00 PM
From: marcos	Respond to of 108807

I know for sure that the War of Northern Aggression was fought because a friend of mine has a genuine nylon Confederate flag. And Caesar - well, if you don't take his word for it, whose are you gonna take - promo.net .. but kidding aside, you have a point and i see where you're going - evidence filtered through the belief structure of the observer ... which is of course what we Radical Agnostic Proselytisers like to hoot and holler at in those tackily religious belief structures .... i'll go meditate on this in the garden for the rest of the day .... and if i can't come up with something meaningful, i'll just go for the yuks, ok -g- ...... cheers

To: The Philosopher who wrote (40371)	6/13/1999 6:21:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

>You will believe Julius Caesar existed because people you have never met and cannot question say so. But you will not believe God exists even though people you can talk to and question say so.< Easy there Chris. As for the Civil War, we have accounts told and written down. We have artifacts from the period - and maps of battlefields. You can still go to these battlefields and retrieve the odd Minie bullet after a good hard rain. That story has numerous corroborating elements of physical evidence that in aggregate make it hard to dispute. The existence of Julius Caesar is tougher because it's been longer. But monuments with his mark on them and good historical documents exist describing his person and his power. The God thing becomes much harder because we do not have an empirical chain of objects or events that we can reasonably agree on. There's not enough secular history to even conclude when and where Jesus was born and buried. Our primary document is a religious text. Mind you some call it God's word but I'm sure there are those who'd pay BIG money to have an autographed copy. :-) If I understand - you've described your faith in God to be very personal and not something easily told in "objective" terms. And people bring stories all the time that, while told with complete sincerity, don't form a clear aggregate picture. Just think of the current crop of UFO abduction tales. Sincere and believable - they don't entirely line up here. We are so hampered by the storytelling nature of faith and the God-experience. I don't know what you experienced ... and I accept that there is no way short of a naked Vulcan mind-meld for us to communicate it. Let's just say that the picture I get is of a God who is so completely Other that our typical human mores might be inapplicable. This suggests that your faith and any recognizable Christian faith (those all posit a personally engaged deity) are different. How'm I doing?