I like tumblr’s simplicity but I just don’t like that no one can comment on my blogs. It makes me feel like I’m just posting into empty space. Also, WordPress allows me to link to other social media pages I have and generally provide more content.
So you can now find me there:
anthonykim021272
HI, I stumbled upon your video somehow and I would like to ask you some questions,
When you ask you decided to receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior, at an early age, was it just verbally or did you have the dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit when you realize that you are a true sinner and sincerely repent and ask God for forgiveness?
you said that you havent really read the bible until you had to debate your belif with some random guy you met online, how can this be true if you were really a born-again christain?
when you are truly borned again, dont you have an automatic hunger for the word of God and read and pray everyday?
also when you say you prayed everyday and every moment, was it just a prayer about certain things becuase most part of a prayer is about repentence and cleansing yourself to be right with God.
have you ever thought maybe, just maybe, you were able to de-convert because as you described, your personal walk with god was indeed a delusion or an illusion because it really was on your part because you were not really saved to begin with?
maybe you thought you really experienced the holy spirit and you didnt and you created an illusion that you really had a realtionship with god when you really didnt, it is possible for someone to think that they are saved even though they are not.
holy spirit doesnt just come inside you just because you ask for it, it is a gift from god.
will having a supernatural encounter with God reconvert you into becoming a christian again?
and just a minor thought while i was watching your video, have you ever really met the professor you were debating with online in person?
how sure are you about his claims of being who is really is-a person of high educational background, not that it really matters…
I apologize if I sounded rude, but i really want to understand and know the details of your realtionship with God if it really was sincere.
——
Evid3nc3
“When you ask you decided to receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior, at an early age, was it just verbally or did you have the dramatic experience of the Holy Spirit..”
It was a dramatic experience, yes.
”..when you realize that you are a true sinner and sincerely repent and ask God for forgiveness?”
Of course. That’s the essence of the sinner’s prayer: they make you feel guilty about the smallest, most innocent offenses (which are the only kind most 6 year old children could even be guilty of). In my case I had stolen a toy once.
“you said that you havent really read the bible until you had to debate your belif with some random guy you met online”
Nope. I never said that. That is entirely mistaken. I explicitly said that I tried to read the Bible cover-to-cover one year before meeting the Professor. I also made it very clear that I had read the Bible regularly for years before this, just never COVER-TO-COVER (which is quite different from never reading the Bible AT ALL, which is what you are accusing me of):
2.4 Deconversion: The Bible (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70SYwkoH_yc
“when you are truly borned again, dont you have an automatic hunger for the word of God and read and pray everyday?”
I did pray and had a desire to read the Bible every day (most likely induced by the promise that this book had all the answers I would ever need). And most days I did, especially in college. I just hadn’t read the Bible from cover to cover. I focused mostly on the epistles before taking up the task of reading the Bible cover to cover.
“becuase most part of a prayer is about repentence and cleansing yourself to be right with God.”
I repented regularly and constantly insisted that God show me his will for my life, multiple times a day, ESPECIALLY when debating the Professor. If that is not “cleansing yourself to be right with God”, I don’t know what is.
“have you ever thought maybe, just maybe, you were able to de-convert because as you described, your personal walk with god was indeed a delusion or an illusion because it really was on your part because you were not really saved to begin with?”
No. That is ridiculous. I have never seen any evidence that anyone on this planet could be more sincerely “saved” than I was. I see the desire of people like yourself to assert that, somehow, despite all outward and inward evidence that I believed and behaved exactly as they do, that I was somehow different than them, and that they are somehow “saved” in a way that I wasn’t, as wishful thinking.
“maybe you thought you really experienced the holy spirit and you didnt and you created an illusion that you really had a realtionship with god when you really didnt, it is possible for someone to think that they are saved even though they are not.”
Only if that is what all Christians are doing. The evidence of my life and my (EXTENSIVE, lifelong, and continued) interactions with other Christians allows me to see no other possibility as more justified than this: that is what ALL Christians are doing.
“holy spirit doesnt just come inside you just because you ask for it, it is a gift from god.”
You are presupposing that God exists in this statement. Your presupposition is unjustified.
“will having a supernatural encounter with God reconvert you into becoming a christian again?”
I still have all the same feelings I had as a Christian. Every single feeling that I formerly labeled as “spiritual”, I still have. Therefore, in order for me to reconvert, I would need more than just feelings. I would need evidence whose *only* satisfying explanation is that a God exists.
“and just a minor thought while i was watching your video, have you ever really met the professor you were debating with online in person?”
I’ve never met him in person, no.
“how sure are you about his claims of being who is really is-a person of high educational background, not that it really matters…”
I don’t base my beliefs on the authority of any person and neither should you. This is called an Appeal to Authority, and it is a logical fallacy. As I show quite clearly in the series, I didn’t just “take the Professor’s word” for it. I went out and found his books and read them. I didn’t need to take his word because the evidence spoke for itself.
“I apologize if I sounded rude, but i really want to understand and know the details of your realtionship with God if it really was sincere.”
I understand. My experience was sincere and I have every reason to believe it was as sincere as any other Christian’s.
I haven’t logged into this youtube account in over 3 years.
The Bible is full of allegorical tales from earlier cultures. It doesn’t take a linguistics ‘Professor’ to know this. It seems that the ‘Professor’ feels like he has found some truth that only the “academic few” are aware of. This is not the case.
For you, the Bible and God are one in the same. Both you and the ‘Professor’ believed at one time that something written by Man is the ‘Word of God’.
When this no longer appears to be true, you discount God entirely as did the ‘Professor’. Try reading Bernard Haisch for a different perspective. You seem to have committed to a one track analysis of God’s existence, largely led by someone who may be looking for answers himself (reason he was reading the amazon reviews in the first place).
—
“For you, the Bible and God are one in the same.”
Ummm… nope! The blatant refutation of this particular statement occurs at 0:25 in this video:
2.5 Deconversion: Personal Relationship (Part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbXJC6KsYWs
Prejudiced and mistaken judgements like this happen a lot when people don’t watch the entire series before critiquing it.
-Evid3nc3
I saw your video by mistake
I saw your video in a search for something unrelated and it pains me to see what you have done.
Did you ever consider that Christianity is flawed but that God is real?
You should read this:
http://www.aish.com/ci/sam/48951136.html
Let me know if this at least makes you want to know more about Judaism….
Daniel
Jerusalem, Israel
—
“Did you ever consider that Christianity is flawed but that God is real?”
Yes, of course. It would be quite an illogical leap to consider God to be false simply because Christianity is false. You can see me make that final attempt at believing in God despite the fact that Christianity might not be true here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbXJC6KsYWs
“You should read this”
Ironically, I used this exact argument by this exact author (Gerald Schroeder) to defend my faith here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnTbkgcFi7k
In the end, it wasn’t enough:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQJrud71gL8
In short, you should probably just watch the series before thinking you have anything new to tell me.
“it pains me to see what you have done”
I understand why it pains you, but if it is the truth, it shouldn’t. If it is the truth, then this is a reality that we must face as a species no matter how painful it may initially be. If it is the truth, then understanding it will lead us to the best we can do with our lives and our future.
I know it may seem like a dismal existence without a God at first. But it is brighter than you think and just as meaningful once you allow yourself time to emotionally adjust to a new (more philosophically and scientifically rigorous) understanding of reality.
Best wishes,
Evid3nc3
This is a response to a blog entry warning youth leaders of the Assembly of God to watch out for me and my videos.
It’s called “Why The Kids in Your Assembly of God Youth Group May Not Really Be Saved” by David Shedlock and can be found here:
—
“he proselytizes not for his youth group or the Lord, but his most cherished belief: his atheism.”
Wrong: my most cherished *value* (not belief), is the pursuit of the truth, no matter what it is. That is what I am trying to promote with my videos.
“Here are eight fatal flaws in E3’s view of salvation.”
These “eight fatal flaws” are ludicrous. Why? Because you aren’t criticizing anything I *did* say about my Christian life. You are criticizing me for what I *didn’t* say. Your criticism rests on the assumption that just because I didn’t mention these beliefs, I didn’t have them.
In reality, I believed in every single doctrine on sin, repentance, and salvation you mentioned. I just didn’t mention these beliefs in the series because I didn’t know that I needed to. I assumed that since I SAID I was a Pentecostal Christian in the Assemblies of God, it would be pretty obvious that I believed in the basic tenets of repentance and salvation that all evangelical Christians believe in.
I didn’t know I had to lay it out for you that, yes, I obviously believed the basic doctrine of salvation from sin by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as told by the Gospel message that any 8 year old in the Assemblies of God could tell you about. I was trying to show the depth of my relationship with God beyond these basic tenets of salvation by focusing on the stories about speaking in tongues and my personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
I have heard the Gospel message repeated hundreds of times throughout my life and so have most Americans. If you really think that you can brush away the very real problems with the Christian belief system by ignoring them and repeating the Gospel message one more time, you are mistaken.
You are right: your churches will become empty. Because the strategy of repeating the Gospel message over and over again to a society that already knows it by heart is empty and robotic. It’s like stubbornly using a hammer over and over again when what you need is a screwdriver. It is the wrong tool for the job. It’s tired, it’s overused, and it’s not convincing.
What our society needs is honesty. What our society needs is a real pursuit of the truth. What our society needs is real solutions. Regurgitating a dogma conceived by humans thousands of years ago in Iron Age Palestine is not what we need.
in response to cmgbeme:
“there are probably a million testimonies from people that you can read about online”
I don’t need to because I had the same experiences. You can see me talk about them in these videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOmSYHzeoNA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-q8WZ1Ibso
You can see why personal experience isn’t enough in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbXJC6KsYWs
“they were about 12 saints who went to oxford university and many other scholars and you are not smarter than any of them and they all believed in god”
It doesn’t matter who they are or how smart they are. What matters is why they believe. Kenneth Miller is a brilliant evolutionary biologist. I will never be as good at deciphering evolution as he is. But his reasons for believing in God are bad ones. It doesn’t matter how smart someone is in an unrelated field. That doesn’t automatically mean they have good reasons for believing in God.
“read about saint Augustine, saint Thomas Aquinas”
I have. Aquinas’s proofs are flawed and philosophers (Hume and Kant) debunked them centuries ago. Ironically, Augustine’s ontological argument was criticized by Aquinas. In short, none of their proofs are valid.
-Evid3nc3
Something cannot be what it is not. Nothing is defined by what it is not. When you say, “Atheism is the lack of a belief,” you’ve done it, right there.
Atheism is (atheism being something) the lack of a belief (the lack of anything is nothing). You’re right in saying that atheism lacks belief, but not about what atheism is, only what it lacks. I you use the definition “the lack of”, you’re saying something is what it is not.
—
Evid3nc3:
“Something cannot be what it is not. Nothing is defined by what it is not.”
I disagree on this point.
If it is normally expected that something should have a property and it doesn’t, then it is perfectly fine to define it as what it is not.
For example, if gas normally has lead in it and you have created a type of gas that doesn’t have lead, it is perfectly fine to define it as: unleaded (“gas that does not have lead”).
And if people are normally theists (90% in America) and you are not, then it is perfectly fine to define yourself as: atheist (“not a theist”).
So what makes atheists unusual is precisely that they don’t have a property that most people throughout history have had: belief in God. Defining them that way distinguishes them. It says “we know most people feel they need this property, but we don’t feel that way, so we don’t have it.”
If it ever becomes the case that most people in the world are atheists, then the term “atheist” will become meaningless because there will be no sizable percentage of theists to contrast them with.
Here are other examples of things that are defined by what they are not:
flightless birds
hairless mammals
fat-free mayo
topless dancing
nonpartisan organization
In other words, if in a particular context something is expected to have a property and it doesn’t, then it is noteworthy to point out that it doesn’t have that property.
People in the modern world, especially America, are generally expected to have the property of “belief in God”, so if someone doesn’t have it, then it is noteworthy to point out their lack of that property.
So I am an:
atheistic human (or “atheist” for short)
alan1507:
Hi, I PMd you earlier but then saw your guidelines for a provocative title and to keep it short, so heres a repost!
I enjoyed your videos and appreciate the gentleness and respect with which it was done. I have a similar background to you (PhD in Adaptive and Neural Computation). Im a Christian; I’m not here to preach, but would take issue with you respectfully over your use of Occams razor to eliminate God. I think this is a fallacy.
The reason Occams razor is true is not because the mind will naturally prefer the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions. This makes it appear to be a subjective belief. There has to be a rational explanation of why it’s true & there is: it is because the simpler explanation is more _probable_ . (See http://tinyurl.com/33fbmzx Fig 10.1 for an illustration of why this is so).
This is why, in your example of the fallen object in the closet (which I thought was a very nice example) you can eliminate the cat, because you can make an estimate of the probability of the cat slipping away scenario, and see that the object falling under gravity is much more likely. The reason you can make that estimate is that cats in cupboards are part of the natural world, obey natural laws etc.
However, if it comes to God, you are on different ground because God is not supposed to be part of the natural universe, but the creator of it, and definer of its laws, not subject to them. So you cant meaningfully assign a probability to God existing, and hence cannot meaningfully apply Occams razor to eliminate God.
What do you think? (More detail and courtesy in my other post!)
—
Evid3nc3:
Hi. Thanks for reposting.
I would say that, in hindsight, both you and I have defined Occam’s Razor in a way that isn’t quite accurate in respect to its real value to scientific thinking. After having a long and useful discussion with GoforBroke on his video, I have come to the conclusion that the reason Occam’s Razor is valuable is because of its methodological robustness.
To clarify this point, let me use the example of heart failure that GoforBroke used in his video. Initially, the scientists used the simplest hypothesis they could to explain the available evidence. This was chosen because of the Occam’s Razor principle. Now, after testing their hypothesis, they discovered it was wrong. Their tests produced new evidence that forced them to restructure their hypothesis into a more complex one (but still the simplest possible via Occam’s Razor). This new, slightly more complex hypothesis turned out to be correct, in that it could explain the new evidence and produce accurate predictions for new tests.
My point here being that Occam’s Razor does not necessarily produce a more *accurate* hypothesis on its first application. Rather, the value of Occam’s Razor is that it is a tool that allows us to methodically reach the most accurate hypothesis as more evidence becomes available.
If the team had started with a more complex hypothesis, there is no analogous heuristic they could have used to formulate it and there would also be no analogous heuristic to trim it down after it failed based on new evidence (unless the group was willing to revert back to the use of Occam’s Razor, of course).
So we can say nothing of a hypothesis’s accuracy before we test it. All we can say is that, when we use Occam’s Razor, we have produced a hypothesis that is likely to lead us to the accurate hypothesis. And we have empirical evidence that structuring hypotheses using Occam’s Razor is likely to lead to the accurate hypothesis based on the many successful ventures of using it in science, as the heart team pursuing the heart problem did.
Now, let me return to your use of Occam’s Razor on the question of God’s existence. The problem with the way you have formulated your hypothesis is that you are assuming the supernatural exists. We don’t have evidence that necessitates a belief in the supernatural. Until we do find evidence for the supernatural, one is not justified to formulate a hypothesis involving it, due to Occam’s Razor.
The supernatural may exist. And someday we may find evidence for it. But until then, we are using the hypothesis that is most likely to lead to the correct answer. And that is not assuming the supernatural exists until we find evidence. Because that accounts for the other possibility that it does not exist at all.
In conclusion, by not assuming the supernatural exists, we leave ourselves open to:
1) Someday formulating a hypothesis that includes the supernatural because we find evidence for it
2) Never formulating a hypothesis that includes the supernatural because we never find evidence for it
Thus, however the universe *really* is (including a supernatural or not having one at all), our hypothesis either matches it now or will match it someday when we find the right evidence. Assuming the supernatural exists before we have motivating evidence for it would violate the possibility that there is none.
The reason why I asked you what Christianity/Gospel were is because of the content of your videos. Each of your videos is riddled with logically fallacies and vain deceptions. Some of the fallacies found were; straw man arguments, equivocation, reification, bifurcation, question-begging epithets, faulty appeal to authority, irrelevant thesis, and so on Im afraid your Christian experience was based on a faulty and very subjective gospel, a false gospel which only produces false conversions. Chris, you defaulted to me to share with you what I think Christianity and the gospel are. So I thought since you and your 7K followers like videos, I have attached three short videos from Paul Washer that represents biblical Christianity/gospel. Please watch… Thank you, Paul
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A09uf03Yps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAS81NIg8Vw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8VqbT17Owc&feature=related
—
Evid3nc3
I watched your videos. These ideas are slightly different from the majority but nothing shocking and definitely nothing original that I hadn’t already thought of myself as a Christian.
Attempted revolutions within the church are nothing new. Almost every year, a new leader sprouts up within some denomination declaring that mainstream Christianity has the doctrine all wrong and that some new set of doctrines is the right way to live. This has been happening non-stop since Martin Luther. It is the hallmark of Protestantism.
That is precisely why we have 33,000 Protestant denominations. Because almost every year, some new person pops up thinking they are the next Martin Luther. They have ideas about why today’s Christianity is all wrong and they are going to break off from denomination X and create some new denomination Y. The story is as old as Protestantism itself and it is unimpressive.
What it amounts to is that there are an infinite number of interpretations of the Bible and someone somewhere is going to feel a conviction that their new interpretation is right and all others are wrong. There is no evidence that this is based on anything more than strongly-held personal convictions based purely on that person’s own subjective reasoning.
It is one of the supreme modern ironies that so many modern Christians (and Muslims) are under the illusion that their own subjective convictions are “objective” and that other people’s subjective convictions are “merely subjective”. They can recognize subjectivity in everyone’s opinions but their own.
“Show me evidence for God, please, GoForBroke, and I will gladly believe in him. “
Hmmm, okay, so if God is by defintion supernatural, why do you only accept scientific or naturalistic evidence of God?
Or are you willing to accept other forms of evidence/logic?
If so, there’s a philosophy major I am subscribed to called Telemantros, who may be able to give you the logic/evidence you’re looking for. I really do suggest you take a look at his videos: starting with “Religious Experiences: Introduction (Part 1 of 5)” The whole series is about 10 videos long, and explains a LOT better why religious experience should be counted as reliable form of evidence a lot better than any of my videos. (please disregard his videos where he ventures into abiogenesis and evolution because it’s obvious that’s not his are of expertise)
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Evid3nc3:
Okay. I watched Telemantros’s arguments.
Here is one of the most important places the argument falls apart (though I can name one other hole, if you like):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-iSYDf_Wsk#t=3m39s
Telemantros claims that “if they object to religious experience, they do so arbitrarily”. Meaning, if we accept sense experience (e.g. sight) but reject religious experience, we do so arbitrarily. Meaning, we are picking on religion.
Because, if you can see natural things (like bears), why can’t you feel supernatural things (like God)?
Here is why we accept the former and reject the latter: the former is *independently verifiable*. The latter is not.
SIGHT
Let me solidify this with an example. Let us assume that you claim to have *seen* a bear. Now, under normal conditions, I would have absolutely no reason to reject your claim. Why? Because I’ve seen bears too. I’ve seen them at zoos, I’ve seen them in pictures, and anyone else with access to these things (which is the majority of people) can verify that they have seen them too. So bears are an established entity.
But let’s say I have some reason to reject that you really saw YOUR bear. Well, then I could require a photograph. Even this could have been photoshopped, though. Or it could have been another bear at another time. So we can never truly prove that you saw the bear. But, with a photograph, you at least have strong evidence that I should provisionally consent that you saw a bear unless I have strong reasons to believe otherwise.
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Now, let’s return to religious experience. Let us assume that you claim to have *felt* God. We immediately have problems because I’ve never had an experience where I think I “felt” God. And what is worse for having me personally as an audience is that I personally had experiences where I *thought* I had felt God but later rejected that claim. Further, a large percentage of the world population has never had the same experience you have and also don’t have any reason to believe it.
You can’t take a photograph. You have no way of measuring, quantifying, or recording the experience. Your claim, in comparison to the bear, is very weak. All you have is your emotions. But you have no way of justifying that these emotions came from a supernatural being.
DIFFERENCE
So these are entirely different experiences.
Bears can be justified through the thousands of experiences of them that we all have had. The existence of bears is *independently verifiable* by all human beings on earth. If anyone doesn’t believe, you can quickly show them a photograph or even take them to a zoo if you have to.
Religious experience has none of these properties. It isn’t independently verifiable. Therefore our rejection of it isn’t arbitrary.
—
GoforBroke4:
“a large percentage of the world population has never had the same experience you have and also don’t have any reason to believe it.”
There’s not a valid reason to reject an experience. Surely because some percentage of the population has never experienced does not make an experience you have invalid.
“you can’t photograph it or quantify it”
The religious experience can be photographed and quantified using a functional MRI machine.
Also, I think Telemantros elaborates in another video why he believes you would have to reject sensory experience if you reject religious experience in another video.
—
Evid3nc3:
You can quantify the emotions using an MRI but you can’t quantify *God* using an MRI. My point is, the person was claiming to have experienced *God*, not brain activity.
In the case of bears, I am claiming to have experienced seeing a bear and the existence of the bear *itself* can be quantified in the form of a photograph of *it* (rather than a photograph of the *brain activity* I had when *I* was seeing it).
Upon being presented with that photograph, another person can *immediately* have the experience of seeing my bear *themselves*. They don’t just have to look at an MRI of *me* having the experience.
In other words, using an MRI as evidence of God would be like using an MRI showing brain activity in my occipital lobes as evidence that I had seen a bear. All you would know from that situation is that the neurons in my occipital lobes were firing (which could happen for thousands of reasons that have nothing to do with bears), not that I’d seen a bear. The same is true for MRI evidence of God.
