No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you.
Then what exactly is going on here?
The point of looking at your belief's real weak points is that it's easy to find strong points to attack, and thus one can feel like they've engaged with their doubts when in fact they have avoided them.
Is asking us to find the weak spots of your particular flavor of Christianity attacking a weak point, or attacking a strong point? If you look back over your comments, you will note a number of times when you talk about not expecting people to understand, or pointing out that you don't believe the various things that people are pointing out as weak spots in other forms of Christianity. It seems to me that this allows you to claim that you have exposed your beliefs to attack and them have survived--when, in fact, that is not so.
To elaborate, consider the following:
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW.
Is this what it looks like to attack a weak point, or a strong point? Was the goal here to reach mutual understanding, or to show that LWers aren't capable of discussing religion?
Note that in the comment that started this all, you claimed that you had found some weak spots on your own. Why, then, are you not talking about those? Suppose you knew that at the end of this conversation you would be a convinced atheist, and you were trying to minimize the amount of time it would take to get to that conclusion. Would you have said the same things in the same way?
(I apologize for the Bulverism, but in this context it seems unavoidable. Just asking you to search your motivations doesn't seem likely to succeed, because I want to raise this specific hypothesis.)
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No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you. I don´t even want you to convert. I want you to walk your own ways in life and come up with your own conclusions. I am used to debate religion with christians myself. Many of the arguments used by people here, such as inconsistences in the Bible, are the same arguments I have used myself, when arguing with fundamentalists and conservative believers. The problem is, I am not one of those.
The male stereotypes of the Father and the Son and the lack of mother and daughter are to me, some of the strongest evidence for why christian churchs are the results of politics rather than divine intervention. Another is the fact that even amongst many protestant christians, Paulus is considered a higher authority than Jesus himself, or in other words, some christians assign the gospels lower priority than the interpretations of a mortal man who never met Jesus. (A teacher I once met actually said that the words of Paulus was such a good explanation of what Jesus most probably meant, that we therefore should disregard the words of Jesus himself to some extent.)
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
Where I was raised, people rather looked down on christians and not the other way around. I can honestly not imagine how it is to live in a place where people look up to you if you say that you are christian.
I value critical thinkning and I understand that this is impossbile if you are not free to think about whatever you want. I read all kinds of science and I love physics. That passion has been with me longer than my outspoken christinaity and I have come to respect ordinary scientists alot more than I respect someone who tells me that she/he is a rationalist. Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister and Alber Einstein was a hardcore theist and none of these guys are famous for that, because they did not waste all their time arguing religion with atheists.
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW. But I am used to that people harass you just because you tell them that you are christian. Still others value reason more than compassion.
I believe in a God that willingly exposed himself to the same evils that we face and who sacrifaced his life for us, because he loved us. I believe in love and compassion. I believe in forgiveness and an open mind. *I share the same values as many atheists, the difference is that I believe in a God that share those values aswell. * For monotheists it is not a question of which God to believe in, it is about that we try to learn about that God and who that is. The most important messages Jesus tried to teach us, whether he was mortal or not, is that we should love each other and that children are the saviours of this world. I believe in a God who knows us, our shortcomings and our doubts, who knows our fears and our pain better than we do ourselves, becuase "he" knows what we are missing. God is not a male, but rather genderless, the ultimate power, who will stay with us, alwyas, in love. I believe in love, that is my personal and universal God.
Can you please explain why you believe in your God, and not all the others?