Happy anniversary! Today marks year number 12 since you first became a Sifter and the community is better for having you. Thanks for your contributions!

Happy anniversary! Today marks year number 11 since you first became a Sifter and the community is better for having you. Thanks for your contributions!

Happy anniversary! Today marks year number 10 since you first became a Sifter and the community is better for having you. Thanks for your contributions!

Happy anniversary! Today marks year number 9 since you first became a Sifter and the community is better for having you. Thanks for your contributions!

No, actually I was asking you to communicate in a way I can understand what you're saying in YOUR own words. Do you not know how to do that without scripture?

I think you are a prisoner in your own book.

Love is the truth. Don't dream it. Be it.

You asked, how does God give you ear to hear, eyes to see, and a heart that understands? You can get hearing ears, seeing eyes and understanding hearts from God by asking God for them. Ask Him to help you to understand what the truth is.

Were you raised in a Christian home? The solution to this problem is that no one is ignorant. That’s what I showed you when I quoted Romans 1:18-21. It teaches that it’s not that you are ignorant of Gods existence, its that you suppress the truth in unrighteousness and thus deceive yourself. You made the comment about the stupidity of the generation of Noahs day rejecting their own mercy, but that is exactly the same thing you are doing by rejecting Jesus Christ.

It’s not about being good enough to come to God. My heart was wretched when God found me but I did respond when He reached out to me. I didn’t respond perfectly but He used it and led me to faith in His Son. If you began to reach out to God He would respond to you in a way you will be able to perceive.

When the bible says God is good, it means He is morally perfect. That is Gods definition of good. No man except one has ever met that definition and therefore is unable to qualify for salvation without an atonement for their sins. The one who met that requirement is the man who never sinned, Jesus Christ.

Well, it’s a fallacy to say that the origin of the message dictates the truth of the message. A good message can be spoken by a bad messenger.

Secondly, it hasn’t been debunked. I know the atheist websites you visit tell you it has been, but it hasn’t. There are good reasons to believe in God that a reasonable person can and should believe .

When I say too difficult, I don’t mean by sheer human effort. Human effort is completely useless in achieving a good result as a Christian. That is why it is found to be too difficult because to come to Christ means taking up your cross and following Him. Yet properly understood it isn’t difficult in the sense that it can’t be done. We can get into a discussion about that in another reply.

You are also using fallacious reasoning to compare Jesus, a historical person, to Xenu, a fever dream of scientology or the flying spaghetti monster. All possibilities are not equal, neither are all Messiahs equally credible. The life of Jesus is a matter of history and not our imaginations. I gave you lines of evidence which you dismiss without even investigating them. Jesus is the prophesied Messiah of the Old Testament. Indeed He is the only possible person who could be the Messiah since He is the only one who fulfilled the 70 weeks of Daniel prophecy which predicted the year of the Messiahs death. Are you interested in talking about that?

When you say you’re a good person, what do you mean by that?

You bore me to tears. Way too much to read. I want your words.

If it was tears you wanted, you got it. I don't think that was the kind of tears you were looking for.

Please, dumb it down for me. Keep it simple.

Thanks in advance.

I will do that by giving you an illustration from the scripture. In Mark Chapter 9:17-24 we read about a man who came to Jesus asking Him to heal his demon possessed child:

17 Then one of the crowd answered and said, “Teacher, I brought You my son, who has a mute spirit.
18 And wherever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid. So I spoke to Your disciples, that they should cast it out, but they could not.”
19 He answered him and said, “O faithless generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him to Me.”
20 Then they brought him to Him. And when he saw Him, immediately the spirit convulsed him, and he fell on the ground and wallowed, foaming at the mouth.
21 So He asked his father, “How long has this been happening to him?”
And he said, “From childhood.
22 And often he has thrown him both into the fire and into the water to destroy him. But if You can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.”
23 Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.”
24 Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”

The cure for unbelief in the bible is to ask the Lord to help your unbelief. When you begin to ask God to change your heart so you can believe, He will begin to do a work in your life that will you be able to perceive.

We are all deaf dumb and blind without God bringing light to our understanding. This is how you will be able to comprehend spiritual truth. This happens only through faith in Jesus. Faith in Jesus is turning from your sins and turning towards God to be forgiven

How do you communicate God's words to the "dumb, deaf and blind." Please keep it simple for me. I am all three.

You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying

God gives people grace in many ways. One of those ways is by communicating His will through the preaching of His word. The hearing of the word imparts faith, which is a gift from God. You're wondering how you believe; when you listen to the word with a good heart God will give you the faith to believe it. He will also confirm His word with supernatural signs and wonders.

I don't know how true your appraisal is of those who have told you about the Lord, but your situation is better than those who have never heard. Plus you have me, newtboy, and I'm sure that makes you feel extremely fortunate. Yet scripture tells us that even if the messenger is bad it doesn't negate your responsibility. Faith and reason are complimentary. I think this quote is true: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found too difficult and not tried.

I can't speak for the myriad of pretenders but there has only ever been one man who died for your sins. Jesus Christ is the promised Messiah that Moses and the prophets wrote about in the Old Testament. There are exact prophecies like the 70 weeks of Daniel which predict the exact date of His death for our sins. I believe what I believe because I have been changed by His grace. That's my only motivation in telling you or anyone about this, because He is real and you can know that for yourself. You can know that by putting even a slight intellectual effort into understanding the problem. You will find that there are good reasons to believe that God is real and good reasons to believe Jesus is who He said He is. I am a flawed vessel but I serve a God who doesn't need me to prove that He is real. He sends me because He is inviting you to seek Him and be saved.

"Warned about"....by Noah, not God, right? So Noah failed to convince them it was true, no? If they knew it was coming because they KNEW God was real and had warned them himself...good riddance, they must have been incredibly dumb or suicidal.

I've been warned that Zenu is coming back too....I've been warned that Vikings will pour over a rainbow and murder the world, or many other tales that existed far longer than this Jesus guy's been heard of. I've only been warned of these things by humans who were clearly delusional (or liars), never anyone trustworthy. When the message is unbelievable, and so is the messenger, and the proof is "believe", and there are dozens of contradictory messages with exactly the same level of proof, the idea that a person should choose correctly or suffer eternal punishment is the definition of evil.

If God withholds judgment capriciously out of fickle mercy based on no discernable pattern or rule, and just as often punishes the righteous and rewards the wicked as the reverse, how is that different from random chance?

Why do you stubbornly deny the undeniable existence of El and his son Ba'al, though you see their works daily? Their tales, which predate even the earliest Hebrew scriptures or stories, prove their hand in your existence, yet you refuse to give your devotion and would unfairly discredit them and hand all credit to this Johnny come lately deity. Mot shall have you if you don't repent.
Sounds silly, doesn't it?

When I die, I expect I'm going back to where I was before I was born....nowhere.

Obviously this "evidence" is not undeniable...I, and hundreds of millions....actually many billions deny it.

Religopolitical propaganda has no bearing on real life unless you make it. Christian scripture is political, compiled and edited by men with an agenda to make people more easily controlled. That is simply an undeniable historical fact.

You do realize that there are other "undeniable" scriptures from other religions that contradict your chosen dogma, right? You deny all of them, I just deny one more than you do.

I must be really special, because God has made no such thing evident, in fact he gave me the ability to reason which makes evident the fallacy of supernatural entities and powers and makes any creator totally unnecessary, superfluous, and infinitely unlikely.

It's reason that lets me see what "God" is....a tool for civil control and a soothing but baseless answer to the questions of the unknown.

I've told you many times, God is free to reveal himself at any time. He has not done so in any way shape or form, but his fans have offered mountains of proclaimed evidence that was all self referencing circular logic, stone age tribal nonsense, and fantasy fables, and nothing more. If he exists, it's his will to have me not believe. Plain and simple.
My heart is as opened to Jesus as anyone else....but he has to show up and work his way inside. So far he's a total no show, and I'm not holding a table reserved for anybody and pretending they're present. Mot has made more of a substantial showing than Yahweh...should I be serving him?

Romans 10:9-10

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved

When you do that, believing that Jesus died for your sins, God will save you and make you a new person. You're good if you don't care where you are going after you die, if you leave it as you believe up to chance. Yet the evidence that God exists is undeniable, and the coming of His Son Jesus Christ was predicted by prophecies going back thousands of years. So you're not really leaving it up to chance because the scripture tells you that you have no excuse for ignorance.

Romans 1:18-20

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, 19because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse

You would say, I am sure, that you haven't seen any evidence for God but the scripture says you have and you have suppressed the truth about it. I believe scripture and in our conversations I am sorry to say you are always poisoning the well of reasoned debate with mockery and ridicule. What is behind that is a heavy bias and angst which keeps you from seeing who God is. Being obstinate against the truth of Gods word is foolish. Why not give God the benefit of the doubt and at least ask Him to show you if what I have been telling you all of these years is true?

No, it wasn't Noahs failing. The scripture says he preached righteousness, so the message was endorsed by God. The reason no one was converted was not due to a failure on Noahs part, or Gods. The message wasn't misunderstood, it was rejected by a wicked generation, which was their free will choice to do so. Because they rejected Gods message they weren't prepared when the flood came. The choice to reject God doesn't eliminate the consequences of rejecting God, in this case being unprepared for the impending global flood which you were warned about for 100 years. In the same sense you are unprepared for the impending second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, which you have been warned about your entire life.

When God withholds or suspends judgment out of mercy, ironically it has the opposite effect on the callous hearts of men:

Ecclesiastes 8:11

Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil

Because you don't see God out and out punishing people when they do evil, you feel free to live how you want regardless. That is how the pre-flood world felt, and that is why they were swept away. In your ongoing effort to put the worst possible spin on everything in scripture, you neglect to understand the fundamental narrative of the story. The reason for that is your stubborn refusal to say God did something good even when it is integral to the narrative which you use to unfairly discredit Him.