DiscussMormonism.com

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Ezias wrote:Be honest. This is intended for believers, and please keep it intelligent.

Nothing like poisoning the well to start one's day.

...because I don't believe in emptiness.

"Evolution has been proven false"?

It's one thing to deny the fact of evolution. It's quite another to claim it's been proven false. That takes a special kind of stupid.

I would add a couple more...

I've had strange things happen to me that I can't explain, and the only rational explanation is God did it.

There are too many things that science can't explain. Our only options are that science can explain it, or God caused it.

I'm terrified that when I die, I will blink out of existence. I cannot fathom myself not existing, therefore there MUST be an afterlife, and God must rule this afterlife.

Joseph Smith correctly prophesied about the Civil War, therefore God must exist.

Hoops wrote:

Ezias wrote:Be honest. This is intended for believers, and please keep it intelligent.

Nothing like poisoning the well to start one's day.

LOL! That made me smile!

Some reasons I believe in God:

• I don't find atheism compelling. At the end of my crisis of faith I was deciding what I was going to do and sorting out what I believed. I reviewed Nietzsche and saw him in a new light. It was a new light because reading him as an active committed Mormon was more or less play time. I "knew" he was full of it, so it was mostly entertainment from a witty writer. However, now that my worldview was annihilated, I read Nietzsche existentially, that is he was now a live option for me. In my mind there is not a more honest atheist than Nietzsche. I didn't like the conclusions he came to and I think the post-belief-in-God world he describes is not one that many people would embrace.
• I found Jesus to be very compelling, both as man and as God. In my crisis of faith I kept coming back to the New Testament, and especially the gospels. One of the things that really surprised me was that even after learning all of the arguments against believing the gospels, I still found them compelling.
• I think Christianity, despite all its flaws as a movement, has been a net positive influence on the world. I think that the ideas of law in the Hebrew Scriptures and love in the Christian Scriptures provide key ingredients in the success and stability of the West.
• I do have personal/subjective experiences which lead me to think there is a God. Many of these happened while I was a believing Mormon. I think these experiences are a valid component to belief, provided they are not the only component. I think part of the problem in Mormonism is that these experiences tend to get over-interpreted to give more evidence to the truth of LDS claims than they actually do.

Ezias wrote:Be honest. This is intended for believers, and please keep it intelligent.

Oxymoron?

Aristotle Smith wrote:Some reasons I believe in God:

• I don't find atheism compelling. At the end of my crisis of faith I was deciding what I was going to do and sorting out what I believed. I reviewed Nietzsche and saw him in a new light. It was a new light because reading him as an active committed Mormon was more or less play time. I "knew" he was full of it, so it was mostly entertainment from a witty writer. However, now that my worldview was annihilated, I read Nietzsche existentially, that is he was now a live option for me. In my mind there is not a more honest atheist than Nietzsche. I didn't like the conclusions he came to and I think the post-belief-in-God world he describes is not one that many people would embrace.
• I found Jesus to be very compelling, both as man and as God. In my crisis of faith I kept coming back to the New Testament, and especially the gospels. One of the things that really surprised me was that even after learning all of the arguments against believing the gospels, I still found them compelling.
• I think Christianity, despite all its flaws as a movement, has been a net positive influence on the world. I think that the ideas of law in the Hebrew Scriptures and love in the Christian Scriptures provide key ingredients in the success and stability of the West.
• I do have personal/subjective experiences which lead me to think there is a God. Many of these happened while I was a believing Mormon. I think these experiences are a valid component to belief, provided they are not the only component. I think part of the problem in Mormonism is that these experiences tend to get over-interpreted to give more evidence to the truth of LDS claims than they actually do.

Thank you. that was quite interesting, and much of it I can agree to, even though I'm just a stinky TBM.

Scottie wrote: There are too many things that science can't explain. Our only options are that science can explain it, or God caused it.

Classic false dichotomy (not sure if you were being serious or not).

What about a third option of "science can't explain it (yet) but that doesn't mean it has no natural cause"?