God Exists

These "eyewitnesses" mean nothing. Joseph Smith had "eyewitnesses". Imagine that I tell you the following story: I was in my room one night. Suddenly, my room became exceedingly bright. Next thing I know there is an angel in my room. He tells me an amazing story. He says that there is a set of ancient golden plates buried in the side of a hill in New York. On them are the books of a lost race of Jewish people who inhabited North America. These plates bear inscriptions in the foreign language of these people. Eventually the angel leads me to the plates and lets me take them home. Even though the plates are in a foreign language, the angel helps me to decipher and translate them. Then the plates are taken up into heaven, never to be seen again. I have the book that I translated from the plates. It tells of amazing things -- an entire civilization of Jewish people living here in the United States 2,000 years ago. And the resurrected Jesus came and visited these people! I also showed the golden plates to a number of real people who are my eye witnesses, and I have their signed attestations that they did, in fact, see and touch the plates before the plates were taken up into heaven. Now, what would you say to me about this story? Even though I do have a book, in English, that tells the story of this lost Jewish civilization, and even though I do have the signed attestations, what do you think? This story sounds nutty, doesn't it? You would ask some obvious questions. For example, at the very simplest level, you might ask, "Where are the ruins and artifacts from this Jewish civilization in America?" The book transcribed from the plates talks about millions of Jewish people doing all kinds of things in America. They have horses and oxen and chariots and armor and large cities. What happened to all of this? I answer simply: it is all out there, but we have not found it yet. "Not one city? Not one chariot wheel? Not one helmet?" you ask. No, we haven't found a single bit of evidence, but it is out there somewhere. You ask me dozens of questions like this, and I have answers for them all. Most people would assume that I am delusional if I told them this story. They would assume that there were no plates and no angel, and that I had written the book myself. Most people would ignore the attestations -- having people attest to it means nothing, really. I could have paid the attesters off, or I could have fabricated them. Most people would reject my story without question. What's interesting is that there are millions of people who actually do believe this story of the angel and the plates and the book and the Jewish people living in North America 2,000 years ago. Those millions of people are members of the Mormon Church, headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The person who told this incredible story was a man named Joseph Smith, and he lived in the United States in the early 1800s. He told his story, and recorded what he "translated from the plates", in the Book of Mormon. If you meet a Mormon and ask them about this story, they can spend hours talking to you about it. They can answer every question you have. Yet the 5.99 billion of us who are not Mormons can see with total clarity that the Mormons are delusional. It is as simple as that. You and I both know with 100% certainty that the Mormon story is no different from the story of Santa. And we are correct in our assessment. The invalidating evidence is voluminous. Another example Imagine that I tell you this story: A man was sitting in a cave minding his own business. A very bright flash of light appeared. A voice spoke out one word: "Read!" The man felt like he was being squeezed to death. This happened several times. Then the man asked, "What should I read?" The voice said, "Read in the name of your Lord who created humans from a clinging [zygote]. Read for your Lord is the most generous. He taught people by the pen what they didn't know before." The man ran home to his wife. While running home, he saw the huge face of an angel in the sky. The angel told the man that he was to be the messenger of God. The angel also identified himself as Gabriel. At home that night, the angel appeared to the man in his dreams. Gabriel appeared to the man over and over again. Sometimes it was in dreams, sometimes during the day as "revelations in his heart," sometimes preceded by a painful ringing in his ears (and then the verses would flow from Gabriel right out of the man), and sometimes Gabriel would appear in the flesh and speak. Scribes wrote down everything the man said. Then, one night about 11 years after the first encounter with Gabriel, Gabriel appeared to the man with a magical horse. The man got on the horse, and the horse took him to Jerusalem. Then the winged horse took the man up to the seven layers of heaven. The man was able to actually see heaven and meet and talk with people there. Then Gabriel brought the man back to earth. The man proved that he had actually been to Jerusalem on the winged horse by accurately answering questions about buildings and landmarks there. The man continued receiving the revelations from Gabriel for 23 years, and then they stopped. All of the revelations were recorded by the scribes in a book which we still have today. [Source: "Understanding Islam" by Yahiya Emerick, Alpha press, 2002] What do you make of this story? If you have never heard the story before, you may find it to be nonsensical in the same way that you feel about the stories of the golden plates and Santa. You would especially feel that way once you read the book that was supposedly transcribed from Gabriel, because much of it is opaque. The dreams, the horse, the angel, the ascension, and the appearances of the angel in the flesh -- you would dismiss them all because it is all imaginary. But you need to be careful. This story is the foundation of the Muslim religion, practiced by more than a billion people around the world. The man is named Mohammed, and the book is the Koran (also spelled Qur'an or Qur'aan). This is the sacred story of the Koran's creation and the revelation of Allah to mankind. Despite the fact that a billion Muslims profess some level of belief in this story, people outside the Muslim faith consider the story to be imaginary. No one believes this story because this story is a fairy tale. They consider the Koran to be a book written by a man and nothing more. A winged horse that flew to heaven? That is imaginary -- as imaginary as flying reindeer. If you are a Christian, please take a moment right now to look back at the Mormon and Muslim stories. Why is it so easy for you to look at these stories and see that they are imaginary fairy tales? How do you know, with complete certainty, that Mormons and Muslims are delusional? You know these things for the same reason you know that Santa is imaginary. There is no evidence for any of it. The stories involve magical things like angels and winged horses, hallucinations, dreams. Horses cannot fly -- we all know that. And even if they could, where would the horse fly to? The vacuum of space? Or is the horse somehow "dematerialized" and then "rematerialized" in heaven? If so, those processes are made up too. Every bit of it is imaginary. We all know that. An unbiased observer can see how imaginary these three stories are. In addition, Muslims can see that Mormons are delusional, Mormons can see that Muslims are delusional, and Christians can see that both Mormons and Muslims are delusional. EVOLUTION 10:15--Humans are cousins to every creature on this planet, that means all creatures on earth share a common ancester. This is NOT science fiction, or pseudo science in anyway, this is a proven fact, as true in science as any truth we know :) LOVE 8:14--What does a stalker do, that the character in the bible does?....They put you on a pedestal, but then once they're rejected, its anger, and rage :)