Many people believe in such things as Asphaulta. My Grandma was one. I found it silly, but she loved it and I honor her for it. I'm not a religious man though. You must remember that, while Jesus may have walked this earth, he was also a believer of a book. He was given his position by other believers. He was destined to live the life he did because of written prophecy which people then followed because they were believers in the said prophecy... Prophecies that are put into writing are interesting things. They have a tendency to either be interpreted by their believers to have transpired, or they are facilitated by their believers and made to transpire.
There is nothing more than oral, and later written lore, to back up the god concept. All gods are conceptual. The interesting thing is that even when the nature of the concept is spelled out it still seems to survive... I illustrated this in telling you that there is a little part of me that wants to believe Asphaulta really does make a difference. In reality I was creating the "grace" of Asphaulta by putting the pieces together as I hoped they would be. It is an interesting thing, the mind.
I have read a good portion of the bible... I have also taken comparative religion courses. This neither validates or invalidates my authority. Authorities are often wrong. The belief in the bible is authoritarian belief. You believe it because you are told it is true. There is no solid real world basis for the belief so you are left with faith.
I see religion for what it is. I don't waste my time trying to disprove scripture. The god of the bible is limitless and leaves little room for dispute only due to the nature of the character. Religion altogether is an ideological cultural phenomena. It has a strength in that it gives us a sense of protection and, in religions with afterlife myths, a cure for that horrible problem of mortality. It also draws strength from empathy because parents have an urge to tell their kids that everything will be OK. In the end though it is only philosophy. A philosophy that has survived for a long time because no other better philosophy has been accepted. There are many philosophies about god. Most of them are similar because of the nature of the concept. Based on the nature of reality and the physical world that we actually can know most of them are extremely far fetched and delve into the world of metaphysics. Metaphysics are conceptual, for they can currently not be shown to exist.
The likely truth is that all of our concepts of our origins are flawed in some sense. The major flaw in the god concept is that it requires an assumption; God exists. In science we are to only gather data, make an hypothesis, test the hypothesis and either accept the findings or throw them out for a new hypothesis. Since I can't obviously convince you of the conceptual nature of god I will give you this question and obvious nature of the only answer. If everything that exists needs to have a creator, who created god? Endless regress is what we come up against with this hypothesis. There can be claims made about it, though with only speculative basis. You may even say that faith is necessary, and we all know about the problem with faith. You are left with an assumption. A grand speculation...
The following is only to illustrate my point further:
"There is nothing to indicate the god you hypothesize about when you pull into a parking place – nothing."
There is nothing to indicate the god you hypothesize about when you read your bible - Nothing.
Clearly there is something that I can give you to indicate that Asphaulta exists. I get parking spaces up front all the time! All the time! But you wouldn't believe me. You have to know the love of Asphaulta to understand. You have to experience it for yourself.
Jesus is your parking space.
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