RE: I wasn't "discounting" Glenn's story or his questions

You choose your belief system. That is all there is to it. Every
one believes, even the atheist, but our beliefs may differ. You may
base your beliefs in "reason" but on the final analysis there is some
presuppositions that you make that are self-evident to you. That is
your set of beliefs.

I quote from C.S. Lewis,

        Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is
the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, in spite
of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your
reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Christian I
do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but
when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked
terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real
self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary
virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can
never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a
creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on
the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently, one must
train the habit of Faith.

        The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods
change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted
Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately
held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily
prayers and religious reading and church-going are necessary parts of
the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we
believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain
alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you
examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I
wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of
it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

        Mere Christianity, Chapter on Faith, page 123 in my copy.

Moorad

________________________________

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of ed babinski
Sent: Sat 10/23/2004 1:15 AM
To: Bill Payne; asa@calvin.edu
Subject: I wasn't "discounting" Glenn's story or his questions

Dear Bill,
Hi. If you read my reply I discounted nothing, in fact I began by saying
that coincidences CAN agree perfectly with one's beliefs and religious
assumptions, yet the question remains whether such a coincidence
constitutes "sufficient proof" of EVERYTHING that a person believes about
God, the supernatural, and the Bible. For instance, members of Jehovah's
Witnesses and other religions also have stories of coincidences to share.
(Heck, there's more Jehovah's Witnesses than Southern Baptists on the
planet. Surely the JWs have SOME stories to tell. )

Bill Payne <bpayne15@juno.com> writes:
>Glenn shared this story on this list some years ago. You should be able
>to search the archives for "translator" or "Turkish" and come up with it
>in a few. Sounds like you've already figured out a way to discount it
>though.
>
>On Fri, 22 Oct 2004 11:59:05 -0400 "ed babinski" <ed.babinski@furman.edu>
>writes:
>>
>> All I wondered about were more of the circumstances of the story you
>> alluded to. I am interested in testimonies. I read dozens of
>> testimony
>> books of Christians when I was born again, and read dozens of other
>> autogriographies of others who left the fold too.
>
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Received on Sat Oct 23 09:54:35 2004