Thinking about God, Jesus and The Big Questions

Here is my top 7 list of BAD reasons I've come across over the years for not believing. I'm all for freedom of choice of anything (including religion), but I have yet to find any atheist arguments that do not fall into any of the following categories below: 'I'd believe in religion if God came down and said "Hey, I'm real"'. Hmmm. Jesus, as Son of God, did that about two thousand years ago. Not everyone believed him. 'I could believe in the Bible if it weren't for the Virgin Birth. That's just too much to take'. If we had a choice about how he got here, would you think it so much more natural for Jesus suddenly to pop into existence out of thin air as a fully grown man? It might be a more comfortable idea to some of us, but, as C.S. Lewis argues in his book Miracles , God planting the embryo in Mary's womb that was to become Jesus incarnate, is the most 'natural' way He could have got Jesus here in human form. 'I...

One of the things that is the most consistent throughout the Bible is that we have Free Will. This is not something I had given much thought to previously. The things I found out were: God so valued free will that although He could have made us automatons, he didn't. As an example, He told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of a particular tree in the Garden of Eden. He could have 'built us' so that it was impossible for us to go against His wishes, but He didn't. He let us choose, even though in the end Adam and Eve disobeyed His wishes. God also allowed his enemy to have free will. Satan was an angel that disobeyed God. Although God could have destroyed Satan then and there, he allowed him to make his own decisions. This is not to say that God will never intervene (or has never intervened!) - just that God seems to value free will highly. In that case, why is there ever an argument for predestination? I think the main argument for predistination is based on two ...

Good question. In the past couple of years, I've been trying to untangle some of the 'big picture' things in life. By the way, I am Christian. One of the ways I started on my recent journey of re-discovery of Christianity was by reading the Bible, starting at Genesis, and trying to have no pre-conceived notions of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and other big questions. Would I discover anything new? Would I be able to get more insight into Big Questions? The answer is that I did make some discoveries that were new to me, and wanted to record these somewhere. Hence this blog. I welcome comments and insights from others.