Hello I am an older, American born, straight male, with deep knowledge, (notice I did not use the word belief), of Jesus Christ. I had a near death experience at the age of five that I subsequently related to a Catholic nun the following year. She immediately scoffed and told me "you have a very active imagination. I had failed to mention that I had been at the very edge of deaths door after a sever blunt drama injury at the hands of my own father. I thought that surely the priest would react differently but as I being only six at the time didn’t see the necessity of the near death account, he also scoffed and reacted in a like manner to the nun. I deduced that these people who had given their whole lives in service to God their faith didn’t include a God real enough to aid a severely injure innocent five year old. I had made a very common mistake–I had confused God with religion. Religion after all is mans concept of a Being far past mans ability to conceive. Our ability to conceive God is described as “seeing through a darkened window” more and more quantum theory is pointing to His existence and many physicist has said “it’s getting harder to deny Gods existence”. You will notice there are no judgments or fear inducing statements made here just personal experience. Some of you have said you will take no mans word for this and looking at all the mistakes made by “religion” in the span of human existence, I can’t say as I blame you–there is an old saying that “personal testimony is the hallmark of the charlatan” God reveals Himself to those he chooses, so if He has not revealed Himself to you perhaps you should seek Him out and prove it , one way or another, to yourself. I recommend the Bible as a place to start that seeking and for those of you who scoff and say that men (fallible humans) wrote that book I suggest you consider under the premiss that their is an all powerful being who directed even the stars in their course, He could control humble men to write as He willed it. I have written this out of love for you all, even as He loves you all.
Welcome RL,
I have a good friend who believes/has knowledge, very closely to the same as you. He also claims personal knowledge of god as in personal experience with god. The one thing we could never get settled were the definitions of words like knowledge, faith, evidence, and supernatural as opposed to natural. The part that was trickiest was understanding the difference between knowledge and faith, two very different things, as knowledge is evidence based and faith is no longer faith if it becomes knowledge. Faith only exists in the absence of evidence. That is my understanding of how those two words are defined in regards to whether there is or is not a god or gods, or any other religious thought. May I ask your understanding of the difference between knowledge and faith? I am obviously a non-theist but it never kept me and my freind from being able to enjoy each other’s company and conversation. I hope we can have a freindly interchange along the same lines.
Be well,
Danny