Questions For God

When I was a child in the 3rd grade, I had a classmate named Steve - he was my best friend. I remember going to his home several times on a few Saturdays. We would have a blast. In my memory he either lived at the edge of a junk yard, or his family just collected a lot of stuff on their several-acre property. I remember they had a few old school buses parked side by side. Steve and I would climb onto the hood of one bus, then up to the roof and then jump from one roof to another, like miniature stunt men in a movie. It was such fun. Another thing about Steve's home that I really liked was the fact that he had an older brother and sister, like high school age. It was so cool. His sister was pretty, with long late 1960's blond hair and his brother was tall and interesting. All I had at home was a younger brother and sister - that's no fun. I was jealous of Steve because he had all this neat junk to play around and his family was different than mine - so - I made u...

One of my hobbies is doing genealogy research on my family. I have managed to trace my ancestry back hundreds of years. Another hobby is to use my genealogy skills to track down old friends from my youth, and from the time that I spent in the military. Often I will hit a dead end, only to come back a year or two later and find some recent information on a long lost friend. Recently I was researching what I could find on a family that I had known in the mid 1970's while I was in my last years of high school. Let's call them the Johnson family. The daughter was my age, and I remember going on one date with her, which was just a walk on the beach, as best as I can remember.  Her father, Jim, was in the US Navy, and I think I had encountered him only a few times during the several years that I knew the family.  The mother was the leader of my church "youth group". She was a very kind woman and a devoted and honest Christian. She had a great impact on me in the early years...

  " What Evidence Would Convince You?" I have had Christians pose this question to me on occasion. Fair enough - I actually don't know what evidence would convince me of God's existence, but as I have heard others respond, I'll know it when I see it - and besides - God should know what evidence will convince me, shouldn't he? Perhaps a better answer would be simply -  EVIDENCE - That is what has the best chance of convincing me - EVIDENCE !!! Just give me some actual evidence that God is real. If God is real, don't piddle about asking me what might persuade me - just give me some ACTUAL . . . EVIDENCE Don't ask me " How do you explain the existence of the Universe coming from nothing ".  My gosh, do we really have to speculate about what happened 13.5 billion years ago to determine if God exists?  If the existence of God is so obvious to you - right now - why not just give me some RIGHT-NOW evidence ? " We have heard talk enough. W...

  This is Jack Hyles. Allow me to relay my memories from a single day back in the mid 1980's: I was in the US military stationed in North Carolina. I was also a member of an Independent Baptist church. A group of us in the church drove to the town of Fayetteville, NC - a largely military town - to visit a small Baptist church that Jack Hyles was going to be speaking at that day.  My only knowledge of Jack Hyles was from a few men in my church. They had mentioned that he was the pastor of the largest congregation in the US - First Baptist Church of Hammond Indiana - with a regular attendance of somewhere around 20,000 and a membership of around 100,000. In many congregations, numbers are both important and impressive, though I never understood this mentality. This particular church that Mr. Hyles was to be speaking at was not terribly large, I think it would seat perhaps 150-200 at most, and I don't think that it was a packed house on this day. I think there was perhap...

I have asked dozens of Christians to offer their single best example of an obvious supernatural intervention by God as a direct result of a prayer that they have uttered. This request has largely been met with the sound of crickets: 1 - They usually ignore my request. 2 - Some will preemptively claim that I will mock or minimize their examples of answered prayer ~ and / or ~ say that they will not cast their "pearls before swine" (gee thanks). 3 - I have had exactly one (1) Christian (in his mid 30's) offer his example: When he was 4 years old, his grandmother prayed that God would remove a wart from his head. When he awoke the next morning, the wart was gone . I had to give him credit for at least answering my request for an example - but his example was from 30 years earlier, and wasn't even a prayer that he uttered, and his example relied on the memories from when he was age four, memories that have been influenced by the retelling of this story over and o...

When did the Genesis flood occur? Estimates of about 2500 - 2300 BCE seem to be agreed upon by those who have offered a date: Creation of Adam – 4026 BCE The Flood – 2350 BCE Birth of Jesus – 4 BCE Since you sure can't arrive at a date for the Genesis flood using science , t he only way to arrive at a date appears to be an examination of the record of biblical characters - how old what's-his-face was when he begat so-n-so, all the way from Jesus back to Noah.   Christians who hold the biblical literalist viewpoint believe it was an actual world wide flood that destroyed all life on the planet except the humans and animals that were on the ark with Noah.   There is so much wrong with this entire story, but below is just one point to consider: History :  Egypt was continually governed by pharaohs / kings / high priests for approximately 2500 years until it was conquered by the Persians in 525 BC. Eventually Rome took over just before the time of Jesus birth. The...