I’m a Unitarian… so I’m a little more optimistic about our future fate …
George
I’ve looked you up before 
The material I’ve found on Universal Unitarianism seems ambiguous. Are there any links you can recommend to help me understand your beliefs? This is way off topic, sorry. Maybe you could send them to me privately.
Hi Wayne,
Personally, I believe Christianity is the truth because of Jesus. I am satisfied with the evidence that he existed, that he was who he said he was, that he performed miracles and that he rose from the dead.
There’s no other religion that gives me satisfactory evidence of being true.
Edited to add:
Although my personal conclusions have been formed over years and from lots of different sources -
some links to evidence for Jesus…
and a website that has some cool info & papers
I don’t need to send them privately. Maybe I can touch on the salient points right here:
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The Unitarians and the Universalists were distinct denominations relatively concentrated in New England. As you can imagine, Unitarians believed that Jesus was a mortal prophet (which parallels the Isalmic view of Jesus); and the Universalists denied the reality of Hell (which parallels the Mormon view of the afterlife).
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Over the generations, there was increasing overlap in the membership between these two “most liberal” branches of Protestants. The inside joke was that Universalists believed God was too good to send anyone to Hell… and the Unitarians believed humans were too good for God to want to.
(Not a great joke).
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Eventually the social goals (civil rights, hunger, war) became so identical that the two denominations united in the early 1960’s.
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The most salient aspects of the U.U. church today is: the only worldview the Church can’t tolerate is intolerance. Churches frequently have sermons about other religions or social causes, and an optimistic view of the afterlife.
We are used to the typical Evangelical view that once you see Jesus as Just Mortal … our status as a branch of Christianity is put in doubt. Some members react vigorously against such views; while other members don’t care about labels assigned to them by the Evangelicals.
George
P.S. I’m a direct descendant of Rev. Dean who was the last prominent New England Trinitarian who advocated Universalism. After him, the Unitarians and Universalists divided the >> increasing numbers << of those with unitarian views amongst their separate memberships.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but did that sentence mean what it appears to mean? Or was that an unintended arrangement of words?
Thanks for the link to the Clifton video. That was well done, and a good (“cookies on the lowest shelves”) critique of postmodernism. It provoked me to think though, and criticize in my own turn, her/our tendency to apply the law of non-contradiction everywhere; even to worldviews. I.e. a worldview begins to merit (implied total) rejection if it is found to have any incoherence or any inconsistency in it. This “all-or-nothing” approach gets everybody into trouble I think, and is a source of much of our squabbling about many things. It brings to mind the materialist canard that: "a particular religion is ‘right or wrong’ " (not even referring to any single assertions in it, mind you, but the entire religion!). It’s a ludicrous critique of religion and one that no science enthusiast would ever apply to any other arena in life, much less science. Seeing world views and religions as pretty much the same thing (in my own view), I take a bit of issue with the video to the extent that it promotes that binary approach. The law of non-contradiction is valid, of course, but only when you laser it in on extremely well-specified assertions with well-defined parameters. It doesn’t apply to large nebulous concepts like: either humans are “good” or humans are “not good”. The only correct [short] answer one could give to that choice is to say: “it depends what you’re talking about…”
I take it that the jews in Isaac put an end to sacrificing humans to God and this was a distinction to the tribes who still sacrificed humans, (see for example deuteronomy 12:30-31).
If you believe in a rational God you have to accept the law of non contradiction as an absolute law. f you do not, you postulate that God is irrational and you would have to justify why you would consider an irrational God worth of worshipping. That is usually the demand for omnipotence by atheists who demand that God would have to be able to do things against his will in order to be omnipotent whilst I argue that this would be an impotent God not worthy of worship as it would point to a God that can not create a rule that is good enough for himself to adhere to.
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Even though your post dates from many months ago, I feel compelled to reiterate how combat changed so many of us. I’ve known men who grew bitter towards God after seeing the horrors of war (and especially the death camps) but I’ve known many more who were drawn to God by the stark proofs of man’s sinful state. In fact, I look back on those years after the war as an exciting time where we were watching to see how God would use all of the people who were energized towards the Gospel and the Great Commission as a result of being changed by God during the war. Out of ashes came amazing things.
The stories from veterans are so limitless in variety. I remember a radar technician who realized that the magnetron was patented by a German but the best radar technologies which helped win the war came from the Allies. To him, it was clear that God had blessed the inventiveness of the allies and used a German technology to win the war and defeat Hitler. He told me that he went to war filled with hate, and left the battlefield with even more hate—but God used what he knew of electronics to soften him and change his hate into a love for God and people. He became a lay evangelist and a pilot who flew evangelists on international tours.
‘In the absence of evidence to determine which religion is actually right, how can you reconcile all these divergent beliefs with science?’
Your question also relates to science. In ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, Thomas Kuhn gives several examples showing that progress in science is not as objective as many would let on. Max Planck said, ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ So, scientific ‘evidence’ can lead to divergent beliefs in science. Beliefs that are held due to personal preference.
But to answer your question: ‘Why should Christianity be the truth?’
Because the other systems are constructions by men - systems that fit within man’s reasoning. Christianity is God’s revelation to man - God declares who His is, who man is, etc. Jesus is central since His is God’s revelation in flesh.
Men don’t want to have to answer to God, so they made up ‘religions’ to justify themselves. They believe that if they hold up their part of the contract (the one they wrote out according to their own understanding) then God is obligated to honor their efforts. So, they make themselves equal to God.
You see, Christianity is not about knowing or discovering facts like science. It is about attitudes and motives in relation to God and other men first. In Christianity God reaches down to transform men because men cannot change themselves in their own power.
Science cannot make us moral beings because morality is not based in the mind but in the soul. Honest scientists do not honor honesty because honesty was discovered or proven by science. They honor honesty because they are moral beings first.
I wanted to open a new topic about it and just found this one. It is a really tough question.
Why are we so lucky to be in the right one among near 4000 religions in history ?
My reasons are the following:
1)The vast majority of those religions are based on a “national God” or more “national Gods”.So we have the Gods of Egypt, Gods of Vikings… Our God is an Universal one so His revelation is addressed to all humanity.
In this concept he is similar to Allah but in point 2 i’ll explain the difference
2)The Bible is written by lots of different people in different times that point to the same thing.
Bible is based on multiple revelations of God, not like in Islam where everything is supposed to be revealed to Muhammad. While in the Old Testament God could be seen as a National God like all the others(God of Israel) from the New we know that He is not like that.
3) Jesus Christ.
Christianity is the only religion (correct me if i am wrong) where God is not “in the sky and in the sky only” but He descended on Earth and become one of us to teach how to reach His kingdom and to sacrifice Himself for us.
4)The Apostles
Why telling the world He is resurrected risking continuosly to die if it was a hoax ? Christianity has been widespread around the world peacefully in its beginning, becoming a real danger for Roman empire values and religion.
5) Countless Miracles
You’ll not probably agree with this statement.
Being Catholic, I believe in Eucharistic miracles that have a strong scientific evidence(4 analysed, same AB blood group, bread using in Mass turned into miocardic tissue).
To this we can add lots of supernatural events that belong to the tradition of Catholic and non-Catholic christianity.
Catholic church has a great attention in evaluating them(for example from a pool of 7500 unexplained healings of Lourdes analysed by scientists of different views on religions from 1885 only 70 have been declared as “miracles”)
Because the best case God emerges from Christianity. Which has nothing to do with science, but from rationality applied to the premiss of God. Religion is in our genes. As is existential desire.
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For me the reason why I place my faith in our God as opposed to other gods us simply because I was born in a country where the main god mentioned is the god of Abraham. That’s a undeniable truth for me and I am ok with it. I can’t tell you what would have happened if u was born in Japan 1500 years ago or in Iran 200 years from now.
Once I got older and begin to study my faith more and more in depth I begin to see how beautiful of a book it is with patterns echoed again and again. Things like the tree of life in the garden to the trees Noah cut down to build a arc to the tree whose branch was used by Moses as a staff all the way to the Messiah killed on a tree. I see the patterns of Cain killing Abel in the field and God asking ,” what have you done” to Jesus being taken from the orchard and crying out to God, “ they don’t know what they hVe done” and so on. It’s a beautiful story and I have no reason to cast it aside.
So for me there is not a scientific or solid social answer to why I am a Christian. I am, and I place my faith in it and I don’t see it ever dissolving away. For me, even if it all turned out to be fake, I lost nothing. At worse I learned my ethics and morals from the greatest book I have ever read hanging out with my best friends in the book club. Even if God is fake, I have so many blessings in life attributed to the belief in him from myself and others. But I don’t have any real doubt. I do believe and I share it.
There are 18 different interpretations of Quantum Mechanics listed on the Wikipedia article and 14 of the most common are compared in a chart. Why should one of these be the truth? Most physics professors explain three or more to their students and do not insist that only one is correct. Why? Because most are attempts to explain the same facts, and there are no objective facts to show that one is correct. The lesson here is that without demonstrable facts we cannot insist one way of thinking is correct over another. This is particularly true of religion. Does this mean I think there are many ways to God? No.
Light is composed of waves. No, light is composed of particles. Wait! Particles and waves are so fundamentally different it would seem impossible that both can be true. And yet it is accepted that both are true. The lesson here is that we cannot trust seeming contradictions. Thus a common insistence in most religious points of view (including atheism) that they cannot all be true doesn’t follow.
This at least is one of the things we learn from science. But science is one thing and life is another. Religion is primarily about life and life doesn’t wait for demonstrable facts and proof. You have to live now and so you have choose how you are going to live – such are the questions of religion. So you choose one and you live by it.
I wasn’t. I wasn’t raised Christian. Anything but. I was raised by two of the most extremely liberal people that most can imagine with ready criticisms of the Christian establishment all my life. And those criticisms are valid, so I am not talking about a bunch of propaganda which I later learned to be false.
But I am Christian now. And I don’t see how it can be just luck since I considered quite a number of different religions growing up.
So what are my reasons for choosing Christianity? Because I will tell you right now, not one of the reasons ylsalvus gave does anything for me (though #3 comes close).
- I was quite a bit surprised how much of the Bible consists of criticism of religion. Christianity is not blind to the problems of religion – far from it.
- Because of the doctrine of the Trinity, this is not a God made in the image of man. And yet this is not a God who is in any way less than we are.
- Christianity teaches both that this life is not all there is, but at the same time we have to get the most out of life while we can.
- What I see taught in Christianity is that there are no ways to God. We cannot do it. This is the gospel of salvation by the grace of God – not by religion or religious knowledge but by the work of God in our lives. Which is not to say that God does not use different religions to teach people.
- The God I see in Christianity is one who chose love and freedom over power and control.
Philippians 2:5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross.
To be sure there are many notions of God in Christianity I do not believe in: meglomaniac, purist, hard hearted, unforgiving, controlling, wrathful, and sadistic. And I reject all of these. But there is also another uniquely Christian idea of God which I can believe in: the humble God, who is gentle and lowly in heart, who not caring anything about being God, set aside all His power and knowledge to become a helpless human infant, and after growing up perfectly blameless to show how we should live, He was mocked and whipped before being executed on a cross. This He did this in order for us to get past all the lies and misunderstandings, to show how much He loves us and thus to heal our relationship with the infinite God in whom we can find eternal life.
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@ylsalvus; @Bernadette_Carri-Dea
I entered this life as a ‘Cradle Catholic’, and even though having chosen a career in science (70 yr. ACS member), I have served over 20 yrs. as a Eucharistic minister in the local St. George parish. The privilege of distributing the Sacred Host to parishioners and seeing a simple Faith shining in their eyes, was crucial in my retaining some meaningful Faith of my own. But if I could choose my ‘patron saint’, it would be the Apostle, ‘Doubting Thomas’.
The attempt to prove that the ‘transubstantiation’ said to occur at Mass can be given ‘scientific proof’ by an analysis showing AB blood group or miocardic tissue, is, IMHO, simply repulsive, and has an effect totally opposite of what was intended–limiting Catholic Faith to those totally ignorant or totally misinformed. How can I say this when I did not personally participate in the purported ‘analysis’? Easy. I have Faith in Science. I personally did not perform any of the experiments that show the hydrocarbon, benzene, to be best depicted as a 6-membered ring with a special form of unsaturation. After reading the accounts of dozens of respected chemists who DID the necessary experiments, and my own success after relying on the results, I can have confidence in using the depiction of the benzene ring as I do. What are the odds that repeatable analysis of the consecrated host by reputable scientists show it to actually consist of heart tissue? Certainly not the kind of favorable odds that I would like the ‘fate of my eternal soul’ to depend upon.
But what about the healings of Lourdes, 70 of which are claimed to be miracles (by scientist of repute?) I don’t claim to have an answer–other than that no one has yet proposed a workable “Theory of Everything” and God’s Ways may be more mysterious than we will ever know.
Al Leo
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There is a scientific committee in Lourdes that evaluates the miracles and from 1885 cases of unexplicable healings are thousands. Catholic Church only recognized few of them. I agree with you that rationality of a faith must not only be based on miracles… It is for this reason that I put it as my fifth reason and not my first one. About the 4 miracles I am talking, more than one group of scientists for each one has revealed the same results. Is this the proof for transubstantiation? Obviously not but I don’t see any scientific explanation and also them couldn’t provide. Before they tried with an attack of the bacterium serratia marcescens that explained a supposed miracle in Bolsena,1278, but they couldn’t explain the miracle of 1996 in Buenos Aires, like those one of 2006,2008 and 2013 in Tixtla, Sokolka and Legnica. They said there has not been any bacterial activity and that it scientifically unexplainable. Are you a chemist(is acs chemist association?) Sorry I am not American…
So for this reason you’ll know a lot of things more than me about reactions, I am an engineer, more related to process…
I was just surprised about the fact that now we can analyze miracles, that in the past was not possible… And having reported a tissue of a suffering man, with same blood group in 4 different miracles, to me it is incredible…
Amen, Mitch.
I recently heard it said: “Jesus did not come here to change God’s mind about people. He came here to change people’s minds about God.”
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Yeah most at least start out that way including Yahweh, God of Israel, but then it spreads beyond national boundaries to other people. This is certainly the case with all the major religions… Hinduism and Islam as well as Christianity.
You are wrong. Hinduism teaches that God became man a few different times… like Krishna.
Huh? If He wasn’t resurrected then He didn’t tell anyone any such thing.
Correct… I do not agree that there is strong evidence for any miracles… this is a contradiction in terms as far as I am concerned.
I was talking about the Apostles and not about Jesus.Why would they risk their lives to preach His gospel if the resurrection is not true (what the vast majority of non-believers think).
What do you mean by evidence ? That if science cannot explain it then in the future there could be an explanation ? I know that science must not declare a “miracle” and can only study a phenomenon without religious bias but here there is a problem of what can we trust more… Science or God ? I think that we must trust science in everything that is natural but when we find something unexplained God may be an answer(or maybe not, atheists could accuse me to talk about the ‘God of the Gaps’ 
).
It is always a pleasure for me to talk with you about huge issues…
that’s not one more question to ponder, that’s four.
The question isn’t should it be the truth, the question at hand must be, is it true.
If there were, in fact, no evidence to determine which is right, then I would not believe Christianity to be true,p (or any other religion). If there were truly “no evidence”, then all religions would be equally shot-in-the dark speculations created by human imagination, and all should be discarded as such. But I of course don’t agree with that claim. Do you consider Jesus’s life, claims, and especially his resurrection from the dead, not to be “evidence”?
To borrow the words from my favorite Christian writer…
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.
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