People around the world who are unbelievers are having visions about Jesus! Wait.. are they really visions?

subjective evidence yes but objective evidence no. Subjective evidence gives great reasons for the one who experiences this to believe, but it provides no reasonable expectation that others should agree.

I have no reason to doubt this because things from God given to a person privately is for them alone and not for everyone.

Because belief in God is not God’s highest priority. His interest is in our well being, and it is demonstrable that a belief in God is not in everyone’s best interest. I believe this is the nature of the separation between man and God from beginning.

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Actually that’s not my problem. That’s like if I said maybe some people are just very gullible and have faith so fragile that they need these things to be true.

What I said was that I simply don’t believe it. I don’t go around telling these people they are liars or delusional. I said I listen, and it holds no value to me and I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it because of several reasons that have been discussed before.

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Yes, that’s the way I was thinking. Sorry, I wasn’t clear. Thank you!

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And some folks still wonder why early Christians “cast lots” to pick a replacement for Judas.

There’s your clue. Imagine a room full of atheists having the same vision of Jesus. Think they’d all agree that they saw him? I don’t think so. On the other hand if you told me that that happened to a room full of atheists, I’d say that you’re making it up. Could the vision have come from God? IMO, God doesn’t “do magic tricks”.

I think you need to read the stories in the Bible again. Tell me where I can read those stories.
The only thing Paul saw when he was on the road to Damascus was a bright light: He didn’t see Jesus.

Because they aren’t biblical.

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I think this is the point that makes me hesitant about accepting stories like this, because that has been one of the primary places I’ve encountered them – in evangelistic stories designed to “sell” someone on Christianity or in apologetic materials mixed up in the same bag with young-earth teachings and other attempts at intellectual “proof.”

So it does make more sense from a relational perspective, in the sense that one person’s love for someone in their life is personal to them and not a performance intended for everyone else around them.

But I can also understand why someone would ask why some people seem to have such clear and encouraging messages from God while others do not. Unlike human love, God’s love is powerful enough to manifest equally to everyone.
[Edit: but I also understand the futility in asking why God does something]

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And, if we all live in glass houses and those houses are important to us, maybe no one should be picking up rocks … or making disparaging comments about the settled basis of only their beliefs.

There is never, as in never, ever, any evidence for these claims. Even if they are all, utterly, absolutely true. They’re useless. I’m willing to grant all good will, as to the NT sources. And just like them, these claims, with complete good will toward absolute integrity of the claimers, could be and are even more likely to be, by as many sigmas as you need, pious creations.

Even John Piper doesn’t believe it.

My husband is a Christian because he experienced what he described as a vision of Jesus. It happened when he was a teenager reading the Bible to find something to prove to his friends that it was rubbish. It was pretty terrifying actually – he saw an incredibly beautiful being who seemed to be right in his room, and knew it was Jesus. Looking at Jesus caused him to be hurled out into darkness with a sense of terror, but then he felt a strong arm reach out and grab him and pull him back. This was his genuine experience. He doesn’t talk about it but has never doubted the reality of it or doubted his faith since. So it can happen.

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Nobody needs to explain this stuff away. How does believing the Holy Spirit unites you to God the Father through the death and resurrection of Christ, which easily deconstructs to we know God through Jesus and the Spirit, require you believe some weird supernatural stuff? Unless that knowing is it. How does desiring that orthodoxy, which I do, obviate why it is such a leap to believe God communicates with people in dreams and visions? I had a dream of Jesus for the first time in my 68 years last night or the one before. It was pretty obvious I was stoned out of my head on endogenous opiates being metabolized. God was not communicating with me. But He’s on my mind. I wish He would. I’ve asked Him to. Inspired recently by William Lane Craig, of all people. That faith is a gift and work of the Spirit.

Claims of these claims remind me of Matthew 24:26.

The criteria I use are the criteria of credibility. You know, the fool proof ones Paul used for tongues.

We don’t have to go round deciding what is true or necessary with other people’s testimonies that involve claims of ‘weird supernatural stuff’. They’re not true. They’re not necessary. We don’t have to prove or disprove people’s stories of faith that involve claims of ‘weird supernatural stuff’. They’re not proven. No adjudication is necessary. And they’re not actually stories of faith.

As even John Piper says, faith comes by hearing. Not by hearing claims - another degree of separation - of claims - on top of a hundred.

PS The only way the claims can be accepted is as a counterfactual matter of religion. Despite the fact that Islam is outgrowing Christianity by demographics. Another fact is that in the US conversion between Islam and Christianity is a net win for Islam, as will be the case throughout Christendom. The fact that 10.2 million (a very suspicious number) Muslims are claimed to have converted to Christianity in 22 years, averaging less than half a million (0.025%) a year is offset by the fact that ‘Islam is expected to gain a net of 3 million adherents through religious conversion between 2010 and 2050’ 75,000 a year, linearly. That net is very mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. From Christianity. So 11.85 million Christians have converted to Islam in the same 22 years, can just as spuriously be claimed.

Rohan…I have heard of those things too—that is, people in nations that have no strong Christian heritage or presence having “visions” of Jesus or so forth. Technically visions are visions…and maybe it is hard to say that a vision in and of itself is “evidence for Christianity” or not. For a vision to be “from God,” it has to conform to biblical teaching. …And a vision that is “Jesus” is hard to argue against, unless this vision included comments from Jesus that are opposite from biblical teaching (for ex if someone said "I saw Jesus and He said ‘I am not God and there is no god’), then I am happy to hear of them. If they come off with physical descriptions of Jesus and His colorful horses, angels with moulting wings, etc ---- I am inclined to roll my eyes and walk away. If these visions lead that person to seek Christianity and/or to be comforted in a bad moment of their lives – then that seems to me to be of God.

I had a teacher who grew up in a European country during World War 2. She had a few tales of extraordinary things — visions etc — that followers of Jesus experienced during that era. So God does not simply visit “the far off” in unknown lands. As for “why doesn’t everyone in similar situations have such a vision”? Good question. Guess what? I am not the Creator of the Universe. Only He knows why He does what He does when and where He does it. When I was a child, my mother’s only response sometimes was “Just to make little girls like you ask questions…”

But the Bible does say that humanity is without excuse as far as basic evidence for God goes…

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It said that to its ANE constituency. Was it speaking to me now?

The statement that I actually was paraphrasing was/is in the letter to the Romans. Rome was the superpower of the era, inhabited by people from various parts of the “world” as it was then known and extended its influence even to the “sceptered isle.” (yes, I know…Shakespeare was not yet born.) When Jesus told His disciples to “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations,” this phrase is interpreted to mean “all the world” — despite the reality that His listeners knew barely the half of it.
The ANE was not the only region that God was/is concerned about, but it did not include Rome. See wikipedia definition below

The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria),[1] ancient Egypt, ancient Iran (Elam, Media, Parthia and Persia), Anatolia/Asia Minor and the Armenian Highlands (Turkey’s Eastern Anatolia Region, Armenia, northwestern Iran, southern Georgia, and western Azerbaijan),[2] the Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan), Cyprus and the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient Near E

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Now that evokes, you evoke, my sympathy. Paul’s visions, like Peter’s, were formative, within one, two degrees of separation of Jesus. They just aren’t qualitatively comparable. Whatever a tiny proportion - beyond the actual 0.025% a year - of Muslims are experiencing, anecdotally, is certainly not transformative of the Ummah. It has no influence whatsoever in the eight countries where apostasy from Islam carries a mandatory death penalty. The claimed visions are making no difference. Where are the thousands of martyrs? There are no questions. This is a pious delusion, a desperate fraud, propaganda, a counterfactual tenet of folk Christian belief. Like claims of healing that don’t break the statistical surface.

Well said. An ANE Jewish Roman citizen was writing to Jewish and ethnic Romans all surrounded by ANE, PIE derived, penis power fixated religion, over 1500 years before Galileo. He wasn’t writing to me. 400 years after. Although fundamentalists see Paul invoking the C6th BCE concept of evolution in Romans 1:23, 25 as causal of LGBTQ+ sexuality vv 24, 26-27. So he was writing to me!

??? The assertion was that evidence for God is sufficient in the natural world around us (including that part of the natural world that is Africa, North and South America, Polynesia, Europe and so forth) — so that “humanity is without excuse as far as basic evidence for God goes…” If the evidence of God’s existence was obvious to those in the ANE, I should not want to say that the rest of the world is incapable of discernment on this.

Paul’s ANE assertion was about the immediate post-Axial world. Which of course I couldn’t question for 50 years, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, which I never did. Now the mere assertion doesn’t work at all. Nothing whatsoever about what I see is evidence of God. I wish it were. But it isn’t. Tilt your head and it’s gone and it doesn’t come back. Reality, evidence, nature questioned me. Reality, evidence, nature stared me down. If Paul were here, I could easily make him understand. I really, really rate Paul, with all good will. But he is so easy to deconstruct. From his conversion - which I want, desire to be true - in his ANE worldview, onwards.

I can imagine Paul responding to you with something like this:

Hey - I got nothin for you, man! No wisdom, no clever proofs or evidences to impress smart people. I’m the easiest person in the world to ‘deconstruct’. The only thing I’ll offer up is … the crucified God I serve. When you’re done having fun with me, turn your attention to that Living God. Anything you fancy you’ve “deconstructed” there will just be your own imaginary figments of your homespun gods. But when the real God takes hold of you, … you won’t be the one doing the ‘deconstructing’!

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I don’t see that at all Merv. Not in Romans 1:23, 25 (=Ps. 53.1). That is the fallacy of incredulity, infinitely forgivable in the pre-scientific age. And I’m not in to having fun by mocking, deriding. He was a humourless, serious man, a deep end genius. So he’d have no trouble in catching up with science. The deconstruction of him is by nature with good will. I don’t doubt his sincerity, his yearning, his profound reaching for inclusive love. He was transcending his culture, leading in that, Jewish Greco-Roman culture. I want to believe it was Jesus who struck him down on the road to Damascus, but it is very easy to deconstruct that as a crisis of conscience, a life changing moment of cognitive dissonance resulting in hysterical blindness now known as conversion or functional neurological symptom disorder. I have no imaginary figments of homespun gods to deconstruct. None that you or anyone else here can identify. And I wish the real crucified living God would take hold of me and deconstruct me. I pray that. Now. Again. Amen. In tears mate.

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Thanks, Klax. I think the concept of an Axial Age only works if you are YEC. You did ask, originally, if the Bible were thus speaking to you now? And if the other philosophers of the Axial Age can speak to people now, so can the Bible. But we digress …as is so common on this site…The Book of Romans (plus other areas of the Bible) makes this assertion. And if the biblical text is not enough (in saying that evidence of God’s existence is obvious), you have to wonder what sort of “obvious” someone would need to think otherwise when reading things like “if the rate of expansion [of the universe] one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million millions…” see the rest of the quote by Hawking, not by someone out of the Axial Age. To get around stats like that, we have Crick and others suggesting that, well yes, maybe all came from multiple universes …elsewhere.

Thanks for introducing me to a new term — the Axial Age — but I suspect that the wisdom “seen” from that period of time existed in humans (that is homo sapiens sapiens and maybe – who knows? – heidelbergensis and some others)…from further ages past.