Quote Originally Posted by TomOfSweden View Post
You seem reluctant to share with us your “intensely personal” reasons that permitted you to make a rational leap of faith, so I won’t push it. I’ve so far never seen or heard an explanation for belief in God that is in any way supported by anything rational. I always get this “secret club” vibe, where the key isn’t to understand anything, because there’s nothing to understand, only to convince oneself that one does, without testing it as much as you really would need to. Somebody saying that “you’ll understand it when it happens to you”, doesn’t fly with me. In this case, it to me implies that there’s nothing there.

I guess I was not clear enough here. I described the event that caused me to believe in the existence of God despite my doubts. This event is the part that is personal, not the chain of reasoning. I am willing to lay it out for you, though not to debate it because I will admit that I cannot prove God's existence. I just learned a bit about a few different scientific disciplines and decided that "Random Chance" has no more validity as an explanation than anything else. This is what opened the way for God to step in and prove his existence to me in a personal manner.

Sorry, I don’t think I was clear enough. I was wondering about the link between God and the Bible. What phenomena or religious experiences have caused you to give any validity to the Bible? People have all through out history had religious experiences and only in recent times in geographically limited areas have they drawn the conclusion that it must be the being described in the Bible. This I would have thought would make it a lot more difficult to accept that any supernatural phenomena be linked to the Bible. It would need a very strong connection. So where is this connection? When God appears, does it refer to passages or something? What makes you so sure that your experiences can be linked to a specific book? Couldn’t the God be another religions God? Or as in the case of Buddhism, can’t the God be you?

This is a bit shakier to explain. I know that when I read the Bible I get closer to God. does this mean that this is the only way for God to interact with man? No. I never made that claim, and never will. God is capable of doing whatever he wants as far as talking to His creation. I believe a lot of His communication comes from the very foundations of creation. The Bible actually talks about this process in a few places, and this is why I make the connection between God and the Bible, not between God and the "Christian" interpretation of the Bible.
Our discussions have taught me a lot about Christians and Christian perceptions of the world. But it has admittedly caused me to understand Christians less, because I still don’t see how somebody as enlightened as you manage to draw the conclusions you do. I still have a fair bit to go I think.
We all do. going from my education and reading to a belief in God was not an easy one. First I had to learn that science did not have the answers. The more I studied the details of creation, even of a simple cell, the less that I was able to believe in the concept that the long string of improbable chances could occur. Having blind faith in science is as silly as having blind faith in anything else. This did not immediately lead me to believe in God, but it opened the door to the possibility of something else.