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Bor, if I lose my faith, I lose it completely. If I don't believe in God, Jesus, or the rest of it, there's no "well there's some buncha guys who went 'yes we agree with you that your former church was completely wrong about 90% of everything, or maybe 100% if we're one of the set that denies they were ever Christian at all in the first place, but this is the 10% we do agree is True and that you must and should believe', I guess I can switch to them" that will cajole me over to them. Because they didn't stumble across the True Original Gospels in a cave and read them for the first time, they broke away from the body which had handed on to them these things and which shaped them and which made the water in which they swam Christian.
If I become convinced "the entity that introduced the Gospel to me is all fake", why will I believe the "encounter with Jesus" is anything more than conditioning, brainwashing, self-deception, and some kind of cultural contamination where I convinced myself I had the 'burning in the bosom' to prove it all true? I'm not basing my faith on "well I like Gothic chasubles", dude. I'm basing it on "this is a truth-telling thing". If I don't believe it's truth-telling, I don't believe any shard of the wreckage is true. Why should I trust my warm fuzzy feelings about Jesus, when I can as easily find it in myself to have warm fuzzy feelings about Shiva or Buddha? Plenty of believers in those faiths have a personal relationship with the god, it's called bhakti. I am very fond of both Sun Wukong and Hanuman, that fondness has not convinced me to become a Daoist or Hindu.
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