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The fact that Jesus was crucified is one of the most undisputed facts in history even amount atheists.
I would say there are much more undisputed facts of history however, even granted your statement, it means NOTHING insofar as validity of the bible being God's word.
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I think the fullfilled prophesies of Jesus hit the mark.
This is rubbish. There are far more easier parallels to draw even with Nostradamus. His "prophesies" are far more numerous. All that tells us is that vague references in prophesies can easily be contorted to fit in with future events and played off as "dead accurate" to a non sceptical crowd. I used the same lines as you do when arguing atheism and it made sense to me at the time because I wanted to believe it was true. Desire of what is true plays a big role in what seems reasonable to us.
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The second piece of evidence can only be experienced by getting alone with the Bible and seeking to understand the meaning of the chapters and verses vs a casual reading. When I do this I find that my sin is exposed as I'm confronted with the Holy character of God. It's uncomfortable and no other book I've ever read has this ability.
Try reading a biography on a famous highly motivated and productive person like Elon Musk. When you compare yourself to people that you believe to be much better at doing the things you wish you could do, you get quite uncomfortable when the person you are reading about is one of the best in the world at it. It's not a religious experience, it's simply recognizing that you are not living up to your potential and feeling shame.
The Bible authors are brilliant in this. Create a perfect human for all humanity to strive to live like. Of course anyone that reads about him will feel shame that they are not anything like that. That shame is the tool that religions use to shape better societies. Christianity, being the best at doing that, spread like wildfire and was endorsed by powers such as Constantine because of the good it brought to society.
Just because believing in something brings about better results does not make it true. If a random group of people that formed a community all believed they were blood related and thusly treated each other as family, it would bring about great improvements in their community, however it doesn't mean that they are in fact all blood related.
Having studied more Carl Jung at the behest of Professor Jordan Peterson who has been all over social media and youtube, and also listening to a lot of Peterson's lectures on the bible and religious archetypes I have come to understand their twisting the meaning of "truth" and how moral archetypes can become truth if they reflect what is true about human nature.
What this means is that we can find moral truth in what brings about the best in humanity. So we, as a society, want to encourage that moral truth and we want to shame those who do not follow it. Now keep in mind there are subsets of societies which exist as communities within society that further narrow down to what their moral truth is.
When raised in a community that pushes certain moral truths you naturally will feel guilty when you come short of these. It's not a built in human response, it's programmed in through upbringing in a community. Meaning, it's not just what your parents teach you as morality but also what you observe as the axiomic morality in your community growing up.
So, naturally, growing up in a society with christian based values such as this you will feel guilt when you do not live up to the example set by the fictionalized story of Jesus. That is not to say that the real Jesus was not a great person. He probably is responsible for changing the world through his own value system he passed on. However, I do not think he was a perfect human. He could have been, but that still doesn't mean the Bible is truly the word of God or even fully accurate on what Jesus said.
My mom lived in China for 3 years about 10 years ago with my step dad for his job. She got involved with a christian charity over there for orphaned and underprivileged kids in a large city. Of course the charity had to pretend to be secular. As she worked with many different chinese people and trying to grow the charity she noticed that it was pretty common among chinese people, at least in the area she was in, to be completely confused as to why humans would spend their own time and money to help people that are perfect strangers to them. She insisted that as she got to know these chinese people that they were very nice people, they just had never been taught to help strangers with their own money or volunteering their time. Several of them were interested and would question my mom as to why she would do such a thing. Not that they thought it was a bad thing to help, but that there was no real rational reason to do it.
These people did not feel shame when they saw the charity helping others who were less fortunate while they, themselves did not. This christian value was not inherent in their hearts. However, more and more chinese are coming into the fold of christianity because they see the benefits and they enjoy the love that they receive from strangers and in being part of the community in giving love to other perfect strangers. Now, as they raise their children in these communities where charity and caring for those less fortunate are essential, they will grow up having similar guilt when they read stories of more charitable and giving people who are more "moral" than they.
This is a good thing. But it doesn't make the bible God's word.
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Also, when reading through the gospels and examining the character of Jesus we have to ask, is He trustworthy? If He's not we would be a fool to place our faith in Him.
This is a silly question to ask. Unless you can prove not only that Jesus truly the son of God but also that the Bible is an exact recount of what he taught, then what you are really asking is can this book, that has been passed down from vocal tradition, written by authors who claim to be writing for apostles, controlled and manipulated for years, translated and retranslated, cherry picked out of hundreds of other texts and finally given to you, can be trusted.
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The first thing a person must realize if they want to be saved is that they can do absolutely nothing on their own to be saved is pretty unique. God saves sinners who cannot save themselves.
But still sends countless lost souls to be eternally in the dark with no hope of ever coming out.
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However life, history, and God teach us that there's a moral law above what mankind conjures up trumps man's laws.
This is the archetypal type morality I mentioned above. It does not need to come from a message from some god.
When arguing that a god is needed to set a real morality, you will always be trapped in the argument of what God really thinks. Even when you have a book such as the Bible that tries to lay out what God thinks is moral you still get thousands of different viewpoints on what exactly it is saying and means. On top of that it is still, supposedly, what God "thinks" and "says". That still is a subjective morality because who's to say, intellectually, that God can never be wrong?
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God knowing how we will act does not mean that He determines how we act.
No but knowing how we would act and still choosing to create a doomed people is pretty evil.
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God does no tempt us to sin but we sin when we give in to our own lusts.
No He just puts us in a world that the default is temptation and our default is sinners. We lose before we even start the game.
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I believe that God knew mankind would sin from the creation of the world however He also knew that He would send His Son Jesus before the foundation of the world to absorb His rightous wrath for all of those sins we as humanity committed.
Does his son Jesus save everyone? Or does he allow those that found another "truth" to fall into his father's evil wrath that sends them to damnation?
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If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one's work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth;
What a loving father, one that we should obey out of fear. He created us into this existence to fear him. To be sure to acknowledge how much greater he is and how lowly we are.
This is the thought process of people thousands of years ago who lived in feudalist type view of religion and society. Those that are your betters better be shown respect and you should constantly say how much better they are than you and how much lower you are than they are. So naturally they would create a god that demanded the same.
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To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, 9 and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God who created all things; 10 so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord,
Yes, it's beautiful so long as you believe. If you do not, well you have no idea the hell that God prepared for you to suffer eternity through. And, well, of course that is just because..... well God is so holy....
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What does the Bible teach on these topics?
Judgement will be porportional to revelation. (It will be worse for some people than others)
There's a host of OT people who will be in heaven who never knew the name of Jesus but exercised faith in God.
God will also judge each person according to their deeds.
Other than that, I don't think we have much information on how God will judge those who never hear the name of Jesus, we only hear that it's our resonsibility and duty as those who have heard to tell them how to have a relationship with their maker.
This is called filling in the blanks. You fill in the blanks so that you can keep a congruent vision of God as just and loving.
I ask you though, further inspect the ridiculousness of the situation that children are put in, in this scenario. Stop filling in the gaps with "well God is just and holy and we should trust that anything He does is just and holy".
What happens to newborns that die? They go to heaven? Surely you must believe this, even though there is no true scriptural support. Otherwise you are ok with a God that sends innocent babies' souls to hell.
So if they die and get a ticket to heaven, how is it not better for them to die as babies than live on as potential future tenants of hell? How is that remotely fair to those that did go on to earn that fate and were not given the blessing of dying as babes?
How would I not be more merciful and loving than God if I killed thousands and thousands of babies, insuring their eternal reward in heaven and removing any risk (which is pretty high in non western countries) that they would die as an adult that did not believe in Jesus? I would be likely sacrificing my own soul for the sake of thousands and I would be paying an eternal price in hell, as opposed to going down for a few days then going back up to heaven to spend the rest of eternity. That would be a higher price than Jesus ever paid.
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Many scientists believe that we are only matter and energy reacting or a bag of cells responding to chemical reactions. This is called determinism. This deny's justice, personal responsibility, and freedom of choice which all contradict reality. We believe there is a real thing called choice, justice, and personal responsibility.
God desinged mankind to be free and make choices. We are responsible for our actions. We freely choose sin. God freely knew this and sent His Son.
This is not a pertinent point to our conversation. Just because you would rather be free willed than determined by your chemistry doesn't make it so. And it does not require only 2 outcomes of either eternal happiness or eternal misery in order to have free will.
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Wrath is God's righteous anger towards sin. We are created to bear His image and when we sin, we are not representing that image as we should. God being perfect does not change His perfect nature in response to our failure to meet the perfect standard of righteousness.
A truly loving father has no wrath towards his children, no matter their actions. Correction, punishment in order to impart better behavior to give them better lives. That's all fine and good, but never should "wrath" be a participant.
Wrath is something that is derived from being wronged in some way. It is a vengeful emotion devoid of love towards who you feel it towards. It is nothing I would desire in a god I worshiped.
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He also does not change the perfect standard of rightousness. Instead, He send His Son to meet that perfect standard of rightousness and absorb His rightous justified wrath towards us. God did this our of love for all so it's not about God not loving us it's about us not loving God back.
Again, what wrath did Jesus absorb? Being physically tortured and verbally assaulted for a few days? Die and go to hell only to come right back out victorious and exist along side God in heaven for the rest of eternity?
I think human souls destined for hell suffer an infinite worse fate than Jesus of the Bible did.
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Intellectually we can understand what God has clearly revealed.
So clearly that there are thousands of denominations....
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We cannot understand what He has not revealed. The Bible claims that now we know in part and not in fullness. Claiming to know what God fully and all of his ways would arrogant of me and intellectually dishonest. Trusting what we can know is wise.
An intellectual cop out. Justifying a lazy response to a justified question.
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Intellectually it is evident that we all have a sin problem and it changes the discussion from an intellectual issue to a heart issue.
No. There is nothing intellectually evident about that statement. It is an emotional claim by a believer who is refusing to activate reason and logic.
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Think about the religious leaders in Israel first century who had the law, the knowledge, the intellect, the covenants, the heritage, scriptures, they eye witness miracles of Jesus yet didn't have their heart in the right place.
You are trying to make an intellectual argument by citing a story that has no proof of historic reality.
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