Mormons need to spend more time defending their bosoms.

[Mars]

I think the internet term 'pwned' came from being owned by Pahoran.

Just a thought.

[44Foxtrot]

I think the internet term 'pwned' came from being owned by Pahoran.

Just a thought.

I am actually waiting for Mr. Price take possession.

Shouldn't be long now. It appears to me that he has made his point with the willing (if unintentional) help of many who have responded so far.

[Montgomery Price]

Because those who seriously want to know whether or not God is there have a tendency to abandon their own reasons and understandings in favor of God's. The journey and the experience is what gives you the answer, not a logical inquiry. I don't find much use in ontological proofs.

I see six possible choices:

a.) There is a God, and it is possible to know Him

b.) There is a God, and it is impossible to know Him.

c.) There is no God, and it is possible to know this.

d.) There is no God, and it is impossible to know this.

e.) There may/not be a God, and it is possible to find out.

f.) There may/not be a God, and it is impossible to find out.

For the purpose of discussion, I'm going to define "personal spiritual experience" to be the way one discovers God, His nature, and His will concerning us. Any other external source of information would be of non-divine origin and would rob the investigator of personal choice. Robbed of personal choice because if one does believe in God but one did not chose to believe, one has been "proven to" and must accept the truth independent of desire or will. The converse is also true: If one does not believe in God but one did not choose to, then it logically follows that one was "proven to" that there is no God and now faith has become an iota of empirical data and nothing more.

Laboring under the impression that "personal spiritual experience" - in whatever form one wishes to describe it - is the way to discover God, one must begin by believing a, c, or e. It would probably help to believe that God exists but that one wishes to know His nature and His will concerning the investigator or that God could exist and so forth (a and e) otherwise there is no motivation to disprove God's existence. I suppose this is possible, but I judge it unlikely.

So if one wishes, one can strike out on a journey to discover God without knowing everything up front. You can begin with even a desire to believe and let that desire work in you until your faith is full. As you undergo the spiritual experience, you can judge of yourself whether or not to accept it as from God. What does it make you think? How does it make you feel? Is this something that makes sense to you on a deep and fundamental level?

Abandon reason?

It helps to believe God exists when one is attempting to discover whether God exists?

Let an irrational desire influence your investigation of the truth?

How does the search for truth make me feel?

What makes sense at a "deep" level?

What in the world do you mean by any of this? How is any of this relevant to a logical evaluation to discern what is likely to be true? Why are we accepting in advance that the most reliable and useful methods of discerning truth are robbing us of personal choice, and therefore dismissed? How does this make them ineffective at discerning what is likely to be true? If we abandon reason, on what basis do we assert that we have actually found the truth?

People like you dismiss the best tests by which we can determine whether a personal spiritual experience is reliable... then you must claim that personal spiritual experience is reliable, but can offer no proper substantiation because doing so would require the tests you've dismissed in advance. When such substantation is asked for, because it is needed, how can we test whether personal spiritual experience is reliable if you've thrown out every method of testing except the personal spiritual experience itself? How can we possibly rely upon it, if we can't know whether or not it is reliable by any standard you've proposed.

[Minos]

Automatic generated message

This topic has been closed by a moderator.

Reason: OP has been answered multiple times. This is where the fighting begins.

Thank you,

Mormon Dialogue & Discussion Board Staff