atheism is a mind-altering drug that leads..., page-30

86 you said
“This thread is really a waste of space as those who doggedly hold the view that there is a mystic being ,who incidentally has never materialised in any form nor conversed with anyone, are always at odds with those sensible amongst us who can see the greater picture quite clearly without introducing fabrications of any sort.”

86, you have really hit the nail on the head when you said in the above: “...a mystic being, who incidentally has never materialised in any form nor conversed with anyone”.

Let us assume there was a mystic being and ask the question “how would he materialise?” Would he just appear in human form and start walking around somewhere and telling people about himself? Would he fly around the earth visiting people? What would the people say who saw and conversed with him? Would they BELIEVE him? No matter what that materialised being said or did there is still the matter of belief in him and belief in what he said or did. If people rejected him then maybe he would need to set up shop permanently on earth and spend all his time on earth trying to convince everyone but there is always the problem of belief. But because of the way he materialised many might reject him because he was so different from normal people and people were not expecting him to come, out of nowhere. Would you believe someone who came up to you and said “I am God and I have come to bring you good news!”

Maybe a better way would be for this mystic being to reveal himself spiritually to someone and tell that someone that the mystic being was going to come and visit. Then spend a long time revealing what was going to happen to that mystic being when he came; then come as a normal human comes. Then endure all the things forecast about his time on earth. Then go. During his time on earth people would either BELIEVE in him or not. But to help their unbelief they would also have a record of what was said about him before he came and a record of what actually happened.

I suggest that however the mystic being revealed himself you would continue to have the problem of belief and not accept him. We cannot dodge the problem of belief, by our nature we have to believe something but it is important that what we believe is true because if what we believe is false then any actions we take based on that false belief can lead to bad results. Take, for example, the Christian belief in God. In early Christian centuries Athanasius said about the world, “it was created with reason, wisdom, and understanding and has been arranged with complete order”. Because of this, Christian scholars rejected the notions of spirits in the earth or water and rejected the Muslim idea of a capricious God who could act as he willed and not according to good order (“If Allah wishes to nullify what He said at an earlier time, He has every right to do so.”), and began the rational scientific study of the stars and the earth. Rationality is the foundation of the Scientific endeavour and rational thought the foundation of Catholic thought. If, instead, the idea of God was an irrational God (like Allah) then there is no way Science could have developed because one could never be sure one’s observations were true because God was not an orderly God. The idea of a rational God was essential to the development of Science.

Anyway, when you say the mystic being “has never materialised” you are, of course, wrong because that very being was and is materialised in Jesus Christ, it is just that you do not believe it because you reject the sources of evidence for the event, the Church itself and the Bible.