Thursday, August 21, 2014

Christians Feeling The Spirit in Face of Atheism

I have been actively engaging a few friends of mine who are repeatedly yelling about the lack of proof for the existence of God.

What has been fun is to see all those Christians who attack Mormons as irrational because they base their testimony upon spiritual experiences, now have to use their own version of spiritual experiences as their ultimate proof.

Let's face it, all Christians remain Christians because they feel better being a Christian.  They leave because they don't feel the Spirit.  This is true of Mormons and non-Mormon Christians.

But when non-LDS Christians try to engage Mormons, they attack the "burning in the bosom" as self-delusional wishful thinking by Mormons.  Something Mormons "hide behind".

I have gone to Christian book stores for many years, and you could always find books on receiving answers to prayer, spiritual experiences, personal revelation and the like.  But critics of LDS beliefs conveniently ignore those members of their own faith traditions.  Instead, they try to substitute historical or scholarly information, as if you could study your way into knowing Christianity was the only true faith.

That is an exercise in self-authentication.

Only through experiencing the Holy Spirit can you realize that ultimate truth is not a set of hypotheses which you can ever completely test.  It is not something which can be studied and arrived at without divine assistance.  Jesus is truth, because God alone can know all things, and therefore can know all truth.  He can confirm our faith.

I have been blessed with a few spiritual experiences which have provided actual proof to me of the life after this life.  I was informed of the passing of a relative in a dream, told my family of the message, and then got the phone call 20-minutes later that it had happened.  The message was delivered by three of my deceased relatives, and a voice spoke to me, audibly but in my mind while sleeping.

I don't know the truth of all things.  But I know their is a God who knows the past, present and future, and there is a life after this life.  That is enough to know that atheism is false.

I was accused of suffering from cognitive dissonance the other day because I accept science yet have faith.  But the basic premise of cognitive dissonance is that you have two philosophies which take you in opposing directions, and therefore require you to irrationally avoid information which conflicts with one of the beliefs, and you eventually become so uncomfortable with the dissonance, you eventually reject the view which makes you uncomfortable.

I can tell you I am perfectly at ease with faith/supernatural existence of God, and science.  I don't believe there is a God or a life after this one, I know there is.  So my discomfort, were I to have one, would actually be striving to get the theoretical world of science more in line with ultimate truth, that there is a God.

Because I know God cannot be found in a telescope or a Petri dish, the lack of scientific proof for God is about as important to me as calculus is to a dog.  Because the world cannot understand it does not make it untrue.