Not so serious anymore

[phkrause]

Hi truthseeker; I haven't heard if you got my PM I sent you. I pray you're having a blessed day.

pk

[Guest truthseeker007]

You are right Lineman, I am wondering where God is going to take me.

Thanks Pkrause, actually i haven t received your pm. Have blessed day too...

[Lineman]

You are right Lineman, I am wondering where God is going to take me.

That's part of the fun. We can never guess how far or where He will take us, but it is always different (and better) than we expect.

Don't become discouraged if you fail, just turn your eyes back on Him and tell Him what you think and remind Him that He is incharge of you now.

Don't resist Him.

P.S. Keep thinking about God's universe too, but just know that we will never understand things like where God came from because everything we know of has a beginning. We cannot understand how Something can just be without ever having to "come from somewhere". We just know that it is true because the Bible tells us and we can prove our Bibles to be true.

Blessings

[Lineman]

Quote:

"God in His great love is seeking to develop in us the precious graces of His Spirit. He permits us to encounter obstacles, persecution, and hardships, not as a curse, but as the greatest blessing of our lives. Every temptation resisted, every trial bravely borne, gives us a new experience and advances us in the work of character building. The soul that through divine power resists temptation reveals to the world and to the heavenly universe the efficiency of the grace of Christ."

Thoughts from the Mount of Blessing, page 117

Hang in there!

[Lineman]

One of the sayings that I apply to my life is, "No Change is evidence of No Change." Another guide that I use is, "Be rigorously honest, do my best, and let go of the outcomes."

[Guest truthseeker007]

Thanks Lineman for your encouragements, but to be honest with you i don t take the bible literally anymore. I don t believe that Jonah was in the belly of some giant fish for three days, he wouldn t be able to breath or would starve to death. I have thought these things through and i cannot make a decision for a particular belief.

Think about this, across the world there have been religions. In the East we have Budhism, in the MIddle East we had jews, Christians and Muslims. In India we have Hindus etc. Now the bible is most clear concerning life issues for mankind, but does this mean that we have to take ever word literally? I believe that it is more plausible that different peoples across the world were under the influence of higher powers which they used to identify themselves and gave their thanks to. That the God of the bible is better and makes more sense than the other Gods, does that mean that he is the ultimate God? Maybe there is a God higher than any God we know on this earth and we don t know. Maybe this God has children who fight with each other over the earth. Maybe we are just a phenomenon for the universe because we are in the middle of a big game. Maybe someday the God of Gods comes back to see how his children have ruled the earth. I am confused. Anyway i don t believe in a pure biblical God. It s absurd. Where is the evidence?

I really appreciate your kindness in here. I wish i just knew the truth. If there is a God, and you are praying for me, please pray that he ll show to me that he really exists.

[Woody]

Quote:

If there is a God, and you are praying for me, please pray that he ll show to me that he really exists.

From my personal experience ... God is not into proving things. He is more interested in having us belief in Him by Faith. If there was proof ... then you would not need faith. Would you?

[Guest truthseeker007]

"If there was proof ... then you would not need faith. Would you"

That s not quite true. Jesus demonstrated miracles according to the bible, and yet people didn t believe in him. All i need is a miracle from God and i will believe him. Besides, believing implies more than knowing that there is a God. It also means that you have to believe he is righteous, mercifull, forgiving etc.

Also, Doug Batchelor advises people to pray to God to demonstrate to people that he is real. Doug experienced some things that he considered a miracle, just like Walter Veith, Ellen White etc. For the sake of fairness, why not give these kind of miracles to those who have been looking for him all their lives?

[Lineman]

Hey TS,

Good to see you and thanks for your own kind words. If you see kindness in me just know that it is only a reflection of the One I serve.

I have been praying for you and I will pray specifically that He reveals Himself to you, sure. Check out my thoughts on this subject here: Is there a REAL God?. You are wanting God to show you a miracle so that you can know that He is real, what did you have in mind? Keep your eyes open as He usually goes way beyond what is expected. He also expects us to use our heads.

I have thought about the kinds of things you said above, about the "gods" other countries worship. It is my belief that some of these are the same God I believe in, but under a different name. I'm not talking about Budda or any of the men who are seen as being very special, but Allah seems to me to be the same God we serve, I just don't think that they know Him like we do. When Jesus told us that He has sheep that are not part of the current flock I think He could have been talking about those of other "lands" who do not know what God is really like. Ellen White tells us that there will be people in heaven who have never even heard of Jesus, but because of what He did for them they will be there. Evidently they are (or were) serving "other" Gods.

If you are saying that God looks at our principles rather than "who" we worship, yes, absolutely! The Bible does tell us that the heavens declare the glory of God. Who He is can be seen by everyone. There is no excuse for ignorance of the fact that there is a Being who made all this and controls it. It is also evident that this Being created all good things for us to enjoy. How can we hate someone like that?

Once you prove to yourself that the Bible is true then you can also believe what it says about God. He says that He is the only God there is, that there are NONE like Him. This tells us that there isn't a fight going on between a bunch of "big guys" to see who will get control of this earth. The only fight I know of is shown in the Bible and is between one who wants to be like God and God Himself. Adventists know this as the Great Controversy. You may already have seen my presentation on what Adventists feel a summary of the Bible might be, but if not click this link: Bible Summary (The Big Picture) (It might take 10 minutes or so to download, depending on your connection.) or Three different options and slightly different ways to say the same thing.

As far as Jonah goes, living for only 3 days without food is not a problem for anyone usually, but air would be a different problem. The Bible tells us that God "prepared" a big fish and part of that preperation may have been a special air chamber and a way for him to keep his head above the "water". If this big fish really was a whale it needs to come to the surface on a regular basis for air anyway. Someone commented about what Jonah must have looked like after being inside a stomach for that long; maybe all white from the stomach acids?

Anyway, I have come to believe that the whole Bible is true and tells us of a loving God.

My prayers will be for you to see that He is REAL and that you can see that His love for you is His motive for every thing He does.

Blessings,

Dan

[Lineman]

Hi TS,

Here's something I wrote a few months ago and thought you might be interested. Kind of goes along with what we have been talking about:

---------------------------------------------------------------------

One definition of “PROOF”: a formal series of statements showing that if one thing is true something else necessarily follows from it.

I would have to both agree and disagree with the statement that it is impossible to prove or disprove God’s existence. It is not possible to prove, beyond any doubt, one way or the other, but there are things showing all people that He is real.

I question if it is possible to totally prove or disprove that the car we drive did not just suddenly appear, or grow on a tree. (If we can prove that our car was made in an assembly plant maybe we can use the same arguments for God’s existence.) How do you know that it was built by humans?

My point is that we really cannot prove to each other that certain things did not just grow on trees or that someone actually designed them and put them together. Evidence suggests that such and such happened, that there was a designer, but you and I would be hard pressed to prove where these things came from.

Proving that God is real is kind of like that, except that there is one major difference. There is a way to prove to yourself that He really exists. Evidence suggests that He is real, like evidence suggests that cars are built by humans, but God has also told us about things that happened before all of us were born and about stuff that is going to happen in the future.

An example of proving something that happened before we were born is the story of the world wide flood (Noah’s Flood). The Bible tells us that there was a flood, but some scientists tell us that a flood of this proportion could not have happened.

They tell us that because coal is found in layers it proves that this has happened over millions of years. What they don’t tell us is that every now and then they find whole tree trunks extending up through these layers of coal. What does this prove? It proves that the layers we find did not “deposit” over millions of years, but that something had to have happened in a very short time period, like would happen during a huge flood.

Today we call what has been written down that tells what is going to happen in the future “prophecy”. It is logical that if someone can tell both what has already happened and what will happen years, or even thousands of years, in advance (with perfect accuracy) then we can know that the one who did so knows something that we do not.

The Bible claims to be God’s word. So if we can find something in it that tells us perfectly what was going to happen sometime after it was written and then see that it actually happened just as predicted (is verifiable), then we can have a pretty good idea (prove?) that what is in that book is not just made up.

Once we have proven to ourselves that the Bible is really what it claims to be, then we can believe what it says about God. We can know that He exists. Besides using prophecy to prove that God is real, the evidence of a Master Designer can be seen all around us too. More “proof”.

But how can we prove that these Bible prophecies were not written after the fact? How do we know that someone didn’t just take what had already happened and write it all down, making it look like a prophecy? We need a “time capsule” of some sort that contains these writings. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1948-1949, fits the bill! (They could not have been tampered with or they would have fallen apart.)

God is real. He cares about you and loves you, but don’t take my word for it. You owe it to yourself, so prove it to yourself that He is real.

[cardw]

Quote:

I would have to both agree and disagree with the statement that it is impossible to prove or disprove God’s existence. It is not possible to prove, beyond any doubt, one way or the other, but there are things showing all people that He is real.

If you are talking about proof you have to at least follow the rules of logic. There are reasonable doubts and there are unreasonable doubts. There are also qualities of proof. To begin with, if you can't observe something directly, then any proofs related to an invisible entity are very poor proofs indeed. That is why quantum mechanics is still in the theory stages, because we can't observe quantum objects directly, only their effects. Any proofs within quantum mechanics are only contained within the theories and their assumptions. These are not universal proofs.

Quote:

I question if it is possible to totally prove or disprove that the car we drive did not just suddenly appear, or grow on a tree. (If we can prove that our car was made in an assembly plant maybe we can use the same arguments for God’s existence.) How do you know that it was built by humans?

You can't use the same arguments because a car is visible along with the methods of its construction. God has none of these. While we can have doubts about the nature of what we consider reality, there are no reasonable doubts about how a car is constructed within our assumption of reality.

God is not observable. God cannot be isolated for testing and any test regarding God cannot be reproduced predictably. Therefore God is not provable within any high nature of proofs. We have no way of concluding anything about God, God's plans, God's nature, or God's existence. Those things that Christians bring forward as "proof", such as the Bible, have far more likely human or natural sources.

Quote:

The Bible claims to be God’s word. So if we can find something in it that tells us perfectly what was going to happen sometime after it was written and then see that it actually happened just as predicted (is verifiable), then we can have a pretty good idea (prove?) that what is in that book is not just made up.

The Bible is not perfectly accurate. It considered the earth to be flat and that the sun went around the earth. Ps. 93:1, Ps. 19:1-6, Joshua 10:12-14 This was a big problem in the time of Galileo. There are also a wide variety of views on what the Bible tells us will happen in the future. These are far from perfect.

Quote:

Once we have proven to ourselves that the Bible is really what it claims to be, then we can believe what it says about God. We can know that He exists. Besides using prophecy to prove that God is real, the evidence of a Master Designer can be seen all around us too. More “proof”.

No we can't because we have many examples of writings that have some things right and some things wrong. There is no link, even if the Bible predicted the future accurately, between the ability to predict the future and the existence of God. It is entirely possible to have the ability to predict the future and not be God. Science does this in very specific ways all the time. We can take an object and apply an upward force to it and predict where it will land with almost 100 percent accuracy.

Quote:

But how can we prove that these Bible prophecies were not written after the fact? How do we know that someone didn’t just take what had already happened and write it all down, making it look like a prophecy? We need a “time capsule” of some sort that contains these writings. The Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1948-1949, fits the bill! (They could not have been tampered with or they would have fallen apart.)

The Dead Sea scrolls don't contain the whole Bible and many events occurred much earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. The OT was probably put together in about the 6th century B.C.. This is based on the cities referenced in the ancient parts of the Bible that didn't exist until the 6th century B.C.. And the Bible also claims that Josiah was the greatest King of Israel because he restored the "true" practices of worshipping God. This would be about when the OT was put together and this probable exaggeration and triumphal styled writing would be typical of ancient kings.

In terms of proof, there are far more typical explanations for the Bible that parallel other pagan writings of the time. There are many Babylonian and Egyptian religious practices and philosophies within the ancient Jewish traditions that it is highly unlikely for these to have some origin from a supreme being.

If you are going to talk about proofs, then you can't ignore the rules of logic and you can't take short cuts. And you can't ignore the many high quality evidence for an ancient earth, just because there is a whole log within a coal field. Earthquakes can happen without a world wide flood.

The most honest answer intellectually is that we simply don't know. Any statements we make about God are simply symbolic at best.

[Guest truthseeker007]

Hey Lineman thanks for your vision, but actually i kind of already knew what you were saying. I think i ve found a perfect video for you to strengthen your faith even more. It is from Prof. Walter Veith, he is specialised in zoology...

http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-...ssile&hl=nl

Card W, i partly agree with you. Actually there is a lot of evidence supporting creationism. On the other hand i agree with you. There is no clear evidence. It s hard to believe that the scientific community is totally wrong. What i do find interesting though is that science says that both the moon and the sun are 4.6 billion years old. If they are of the same age, it seems like they were put there in place...

[Guest truthseeker007]

Please copy and paste my link...

[Lineman]

Thanks, TS, for the link to Walter Veith's Bones in Stones above. I even added a link on my site to this. I love it. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Actually I am still listening to him right now, but what I keep thinking in the back of my head is why doesn't TS believe this stuff? This is about as plain as it gets. What's it going to take? How could a miracle from God make any difference? You know the truth already.

Here is a man who was an evolutionist and says that God was totally out of the picture for him. His studies proved to him that none of this could have happened by chance. That proved to him that there is a Creator.

You have been wanting to know if there really is a God. I think you just sent me a link that should prove to you that there really is.

He's real!

But, just so that you know my friend, I will keep praying for you just as I said I would.

[cardw]

Quote:

Actually there is a lot of evidence supporting creationism.

Actually there is very little. Most of it is supposition. In a proof based model, creationism has yet to provide a framework for a theory that can be investigated. Evolution, on the other hand, has continued to predict many of the things we are finding within the fossil record. Many of the old anti-evolutionary criticisms have been refuted and every year we gain a deeper understanding of the great mysteries of our origins.

Evolution has little to say about the origin of first cause or the origin of the physical laws that govern our universe. As a science, it doesn't have the tools to determine these and it is not so arrogant to claim to know these with certainty.

On the other hand religion claims certainty with no quality evidence. It claims to know what God wants, what God is thinking and feeling, and what is going to happen in our future even though it has been so wrong in the past about significant aspects of human development.

The Christian religion specifically creates a world view that deprives many of the motivation to create a better world now and instead has them stay dependent on a god who's best idea for ultimate reform is violence and destruction.

You claim to believe that the SDA church has the best take on the last message to be given to the earth and by your name you claim to be looking for truth. I don't believe truth is what you are looking for. I think it is far more likely that you are looking for peace and comfort.

[John317]

The Bible is not perfectly accurate. It considered the earth to be flat and that the sun went around the earth. Ps. 93:1, Ps. 19:1-6, Joshua 10:12-14 This was a big problem in the time of Galileo. There are also a wide variety of views on what the Bible tells us will happen in the future. These are far from perfect.

Those things about the sun are given from the human point of view and are not intended to be a scientific, objective analysis of the way the world is. It would be the same if I said something about the beautiful sun-set. Or the sun's setting was gorgeous tonight. The Psalms are poetry, for one thing.

The fact that there is wide variety of view of what the Bible means cannot be taken to prove that the Bible is not clear. If you give practically any piece of writing to a class of students and ask them to talk about it, they all give you different opinions on what is being said. Even in the law, which is supposed to be written clearly and carefully, there are often as many opinions about it as there are lawyers.

Different people have different perspectives and different backgrounds in terms of understanding language. There is also the motivation and the fact that some people have more knowledge of the text than others. So there are many ways of explaining the different views people have of the Bible text and its meaning, without the necessity of concluding the Bible is unclear or wrong.

Quote:

The Dead Sea scrolls don't contain the whole Bible and many events occurred much earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Virtually the entire Old Testament is represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Certainly enough to draw some important conclusions. Such as that the Bible has more manuscript evidence in its support than any other ancient book. If we can't trust the Bible to be what the writers originally wrote, then we can't trust a single ancient book. Not only do we have more ancient manuscripts of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, but they are much closer to the time of their having been authored. Most ancient books only have 2 or 3 manuscripts in their support, and they're fairly young compared to the ancient texts of the Bible. Some of the New Testament's early manuscripts date from only within a hundred years of the time when they were originally composed.

What the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown is that the Old Testament manuscripts were copied with incredible accuracy and care, resulting in books we can trust.

I would encourage anyone to study and compare The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, the oldest known Bible, over 1000 years older than any previously discovered biblical manuscripts. It is published by HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

[cardw]

Quote:

Those things about the sun are given from the human point of view and are not intended to be a scientific, objective analysis of the way the world is. It would be the same if I said something about the beautiful sun-set. Or the sun's setting was gorgeous tonight. The Psalms are poetry, for one thing.

And yet the church, during the time of Galileo, took these serious enough to declare Galileo a heritic. The topic I was discussing was the issue of proof. If these points are poetic, then the creation story is poetic.

Quote:

Virtually the entire Old Testament is represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Certainly enough to draw some important conclusions. Such as that the Bible has more manuscript evidence in its support than any other ancient book.

But this doesn't prove anything in regard to the truth of the Bible's content. It just indicates that people could copy fairly well. The archeology indicates that the earliest collection was probably composed around the 6th century BC because the cities mentioned and the stories contained within the Bible heavily reference Babylonian and Egyptian mythology known only in the 6th century B.C.. This is a higher quality evidence in terms of proof than the ability to copy.

Quote:

The fact that there is wide variety of view of what the Bible means cannot be taken to prove that the Bible is not clear. If you give practically any piece of writing to a class of students and ask them to talk about it, they all give you different opinions on what is being said. Even in the law, which is supposed to be written clearly and carefully, there are often as many opinions about it as there are lawyers.

This just illustrates that writing, an invention by humans, is not a reliable means to determine the existence of God. Interpretation, cultural assumptions, and other drifting have been demonstrated to have floated their way into the biblical accounts. Women who became men, doctrinal points that needed more proof, and even altering of Josephus to try and prove that there were extra Biblical mentions of Jesus. This is far from reliable evidence for a supreme being. A far better form of evidence would be the actual appearance and dialog with God without all the "blessed are they that have faith" dodge and the condemnation of "doubting" Thomas who, in fact, was the only one brave enough to actually leave the upper room. I see no down side of asking for reliable evidence on such an important matter.

No matter how much religionists claim that the Bible is good evidence, it still remains special pleading, because most believers in the Bible are unwilling to put the same standards of truth they apply to those gods they don't believe in to their own god.

Quote:

Some of the New Testament's early manuscripts date from only within a hundred years of the time when they were originally composed.

You see, this is what I don't get. You would think that the almighty, all powerful god of the universe could manage to find someone who actually was alive and knew Jesus, to write a gospel. Yet we find that Mark, a Greek man, who never met Jesus composed the source gospel for all the others.

Or, better yet, it would seem that Jesus, being a Rabbi, and seeing the future, would have spent at least a little time writing out his philosophy and teachings for himself and pass these down to his followers.

The convoluted mental gymnastics required to keep the Christian religion true would simply not be tolerated in any other search for truth.

[John317]

Quote:

Those things about the sun are given from the human point of view and are not intended to be a scientific, objective analysis of the way the world is. It would be the same if I said something about the beautiful sun-set. Or the sun's setting was gorgeous tonight. The Psalms are poetry, for one thing.

And yet the church, during the time of Galileo, took these serious enough to declare Galileo a heritic. The topic I was discussing was the issue of proof. If these points are poetic, then the creation story is poetic.

The narrative in Genesis is not told in poetry per se, but the Psalms are clearly poetry. They are songs. This doesn't mean they aren't true but it is just that they are full of metaphor, etc. It's like the difference between narrative/history/ prose and poems.

[John317]

Quote:

Some of the New Testament's early manuscripts date from only within a hundred years of the time when they were originally composed.

You see, this is what I don't get. You would think that the almighty, all powerful god of the universe could manage to find someone who actually was alive and knew Jesus, to write a gospel. Yet we find that Mark, a Greek man, who never met Jesus composed the source gospel for all the others.

Or, better yet, it would seem that Jesus, being a Rabbi, and seeing the future, would have spent at least a little time writing out his philosophy and teachings for himself and pass these down to his followers.

The convoluted mental gymnastics required to keep the Christian religion true would simply not be tolerated in any other search for truth.

I understand what you are saying. You are trying to avoid "faith." You want absolute certainty or something close to it.

But faith tells something of the heart and the mind. It tells whether we want God.

What if God were to come to you or to every person on the planet-- which He could-- and show Himself personally in a way that you could not deny? Would that be a good thing? Why doesn't He do that?

He could just dispense with the middle man. He could just overwhelm you with proof and make it so you have no choice but to acknowledge His power and existence. Sound good?

[Guest truthseeker007]

Lineman i am looking for truth, not for comfort. Personally i think it would be even better if there was no God. WHen i talk about evidence, we both mean the same thing. But i don t think the interpretation of the evidence by evolutionists make sense and therefore is not the right one. On the contrary the interpretation of creationists make wayyyyy more sense.

[Marc]

blah blah blah... sorry u feel that way.

[cardw]

Quote:

The narrative in Genesis is not told in poetry per se, but the Psalms are clearly poetry. They are songs. This doesn't mean they aren't true but it is just that they are full of metaphor, etc. It's like the difference between narrative/history/ prose and poems.

And by what criteria do you determine that the Bible creation story is not metaphorical?

Do you really believe talking snakes should be taken literally?

[cardw]

Quote:

I understand what you are saying. You are trying to avoid "faith." You want absolute certainty or something close to it.

I'm not trying to avoid faith. Faith is simply not something one can rely on to provide proof. It has many other valuable functions, but I don't choose to use faith as a means to make decisions that require specific information.

Often faith and emotional security are one and the same thing. If I need to tell myself a story to feel secure, that is one thing, but to insist that my story is actually true for everyone is simply misinformed at best.

Quote:

But faith tells something of the heart and the mind. It tells whether we want God.

I think people mistake a need to be loved with a need for god. I think many of the functions that a loving community can provide, are really what people need. And churches often provide this and people give it the name god and it may be based partially on faith in a mythical god.

Quote:

What if God were to come to you or to every person on the planet-- which He could-- and show Himself personally in a way that you could not deny? Would that be a good thing? Why doesn't He do that?

Isn't that what Christian's claim that god does? Isn't he supposed to come to every person so that none can deny him?

Quote:

He could just dispense with the middle man. He could just overwhelm you with proof and make it so you have no choice but to acknowledge His power and existence. Sound good?

God doesn't have to overwhelm anyone. Restoring a missing limb or providing and implementing resources for everyone so that poverty and class distinctions would be removed would work for me. If they can do it for a family on Extreme Home Makeover, I don't think it would be too hard for God to repair the infrastructure of most of our cities. There are all kinds of things God could do that aren't threatening that would at least provide proof that He can create things. God can't prove that he created the universe since we can only live within the universe, so that point will remain unproven, no matter what some being demonstrates since demonstrations of power only tell us that the being is simply more powerful than us.

If god is there, it is highly unlikely that god is like the god described in the Bible. I'm more inclined to believe that it is up to us to do the best we can with what we have and belief in some god that is going to make it all better is preventing people from engaging in what we need here and now.

[cardw]

Quote:

Lineman i am looking for truth, not for comfort. Personally i think it would be even better if there was no God.

Well, if you believe there is a God, how can you call yourself an atheist?

[Lineman]

Lineman i am looking for truth, not for comfort. Personally i think it would be even better if there was no God. WHen i talk about evidence, we both mean the same thing. But i don t think the interpretation of the evidence by evolutionists make sense and therefore is not the right one. On the contrary the interpretation of creationists make wayyyyy more sense.

Not sure why you would think it would be better if there wasn't a God, would you care to explain it? Seems to me that if there was no God then we would not even be alive to question it. I like the ability to think and do. I like the ability to feel and sing. I love to see and hear. I love to dream of what will be someday when all of sin and its results are gone.

It's interesting that when I was watching Walter Veith's testimony yesterday I could see you in his story. I don't know much about you, but it seems to me that you have gotten some very wrong ideas of what God is like (kind of like Walter) and because of that you have not been willing to let Him do what He wants in your life, yet you can see that some of what you have heard about Him is not really true and so you keep looking for real truth. You keep looking for the REAL God. You can tell that He is real, just not sure about what kind of God He is.

I can tell that you are not really an athiest, but that you are totally confused by what you have learned about God. You have a lot of conflicting "teachings" going on in your head and you don't really know what to believe yet. Am I right?

I think that if you take the time to really put the pieces from the Bible (as seen on my timeline site) into an understandable picture of who God is you would come to love Him and be more willing to let Him do whatever He wants to do with you.

Ellen White wrote that "To know God is to love Him." I am suggesting that you get to know Him. Start with what you know to be true and go from there. Start with the Creation Nuggets found on the timeline site maybe. They can tell you a great deal about God without even using the Bible, then when you start reading the Bible again you will be able to see even more of who He is.

Blessings,

Dan