Out of body religious experiences

[Rhabbi]

Staying on the art comparison; how do you know which is original work by the artist and which are fakes?

Again. not my field, but there is apparently some debate about that. I know there are paintings that were thought to have been done by Rembrandt that are now classed as 'school of' Rembrandt. I would imagine it has something to do with technique and brush strokes, but I would be guessing.

What you're basically saying is that the number of dots you need to connect between you witnessing anything supernatural and the following the morality as taught by the Bible is so staggering that there's no point to even bother? At every leap of faith the nodes that connect the reasoning have an almost infinite number of connections both to and from it? or what? How does that strengthen any case for the supernatural? You're basically saying that because we can't use logic we shouldn't, and just take the leap of faith anyway, right?

What I don't understand is why this seemingly compulsive need to connect the belief in an omnipotent god with the moral rules of the Bible. Why not treat them as two different entities? Why not judge the moral system as one unit on it's own merits and the supernatural claims as a separate unit? Are they in any way connected? Is the only reason to follow the commandments of the Bible really only the fear of punishment in the after-life?

edit: hmm....after some pondering I'll have another go. I think that the logical error you are doing is that you seem to assume that you have to have a faith. It's not like there's insulated areas of faithlessness between theories. There isn't. It's possible to use your approach if Christianity is a cohesive logical system that is connected, and if you remove parts of it the whole theoretical structure collapses. In instances like that finding enough evidence to support part of it can be used to support all of it. But there's nothing cohesive about Christianity. Each and every part is a separate statement only supported by itself. An example is the creation. The Bible said that god created the universe. Ok fine. This can be correct and the rest of the Bible wrong. Or the rest of the Bible can be correct and that could be wrong. Rejecting part of the Bible doesn't mean you have to reject all of it. In the same way. Just because you accept a part of the Bible doesn't mean you have to accept the rest of it. We all know that the Bible is quite a compilation and has been heavily edited through the ages. It's not like the Koran which origins we know.

Why not keep Christianity as one of your favourite theories? You where the one putting all that effort into agnosticism. As you so vigorously defended, picking one specific faith is not only a huge leap of faith but defies logic. Why not have a few favourites? Why not pick the parts that you think make the most sense to you and drop the parts that you find are ify?

I studied many religions, comparative religion has always been a hobby of mine, one I still indulge in.

The basic choices come down to two types of religion, monotheistic and polytheism. (I am including pantheism under polytheism here though there are significant differences.)

Polytheism has numerous Gods, none of whom seem to claim responsibility for creation. Quite often the Earth was a byproduct of something they did, or even waste product. This did not appeal to me for obvious reasons, if I was going to actually believe in a God I wanted one that at least cared about people.

This leaves monotheism. There are three basic monotheistic religions in the world, listed in the order of appearance they are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Doing a comparison of these three we see that they all claim the same roots, Judaism. I studied Judaism and found it quite interesting, perhaps the most intellectual of the three. The average rabbi knows more about the history of religion and the various debates surrounding it than all but the most scholarly of Christian preachers.

Then I looked at Christianity, which center around the claims of Jesus to be the Son of God.

Looking at Islam, it focuses mostly on Mohammad as being the last of the prophets, and trying to bring the teachings back inline with what the earlier prophets taught before the Bible was corrupted by man. According to Islamic scholars, the Bible was rewritten by Christians to support the claims that Jesus was God, and even the Old Testament was rewritten to support this. Interestingly enough, Islam still revers Jesus as a prophet.

Studying the words of Jesus leads you to one of four inescapable conclusions. Either this man was a liar, insane, a demon from the pits of Hell, or he was who he claimed to be, the Son of God. Looking further at his life, a reasonable man would rule out that he was insane or a demon because the impact of his life was spectacularly on the side of good. I suppose he could have been a demon, but that seems unlikely also.

Also, a thorough study of the texts of the Bible that survive, some dating to before Jesus, show that the changes that Islam claim as necessary to their faith are impossible to support. This leads a thinking man to reject Islam as based on a falsehood. It also leads a thinking man to look more closely at Christianity.

In a lot of ways Judaism is more of a set of rules to live by then anything else. You could look at it as the first rules that a parent gives a child. don't touch this, don't go there, etc. These rules do not change when that child reach adulthood, they just become unnecessary. The adult sees that the rules were there to protect the child from unknown dangers.

Christianity is about living those rules as an adult. It does not replace the rules, it fulfills them because we, as adults, now know enough not to do those things. This is why I settled on Christianity as what I believed. It was not a blind leap from going to not believing, then choosing Christianity at random after I had an epiphany and realized God existed. Before I believed in God I knew that Christianity made more sense than any other religion out there.

This does not mean the Christianity that you find today, it means the Christianity of the early church. I guess this does mean that I pick and choose, because I have to try and figure out what that is for myself.