It is subjective, as you have yourself put in conditions here that BOTH of Us are at boat basin Karachi, at the same place and same time. This defines our frame of reference towards an observation. If any of these conditions change, then our truths and realities will be different. Same is true for the story of Jesus Christ (PBUH). If you are not at the level of my understanding, knowledge and experience, then your frame of reference is different than mine. Is that hard to grasp?
Well even if I am in defence and someone claims that it is raining in Boat Basin, I can still confirm it by driving to Boat Basin and observing it myself. Also we can verify the pavements on Boat Basin and find traces of water to confirm it or check how dry they are. We live in the same reality, it cannot be the case Jesus is a prophet in your reality and not in mine, either he did miracles or he did not and we can verify it together with the evidence.
Personal experiences or testimony are not evidence unless they can be independently verified. If you tell me that you were in a cave and you saw an arch angel and no one else was there to see it. There is no way for me to tell whether you actually saw it, or your having a psychogenic episode or you are on hallucinogenic drug like many spiritual people have been doing for last few thousand years.
What if we see it the other way round? truth is the pathway to faith, as we have established. OK, if I take your argument for the sake of the discussion that my evidence of believing in Jesus Christ (PBUH) is weak, then do you have a stronger evidence to disprove/disregard my belief? I bet yours would be weaker than mine. Try it...
I did not say that, my statement is that faith is not a pathway to truth, evidence is. Faith is not based on evidence. If you want to find the truth you have to follow the evidence. Muslims believe in Allah based on faith, Hindus believe in Krishna based on faith. They both cannot be true in the same reality.
As for your request to disprove your belief, Ask me about this in your reply later on and I will share information with you as there is a consensus amongst Historians is that Jesus was not an actual person but a mix of different myths and legends put together by pagans. There is a reason why I am not directly disproving Jesus in this reply and that is, I want to make sure that you understand that you are making a logical fallacy here called
Shifting of the Burden of Proof. (hyperlinked)
Let me explain. As a rational person, you must always have a valid justification for your beliefs and it is the person who is believing who should provide the evidence not the person who is disbelieving. For example if I say I am superman, the burden of proof is on me to prove it, not on you to disprove it. Another example, in this unimaginably large universe, I bet no one can disprove there is a pink unicorn flying around in space (Its impossible to search every part of the universe to confirm there is no unicorn), but just because we cant disprove it doesn't mean it exists. This is why the burden of proof is on the person making the claim not on the one rejecting it. However if you want to talk about Jesus you can request me to start another comment about it as it will get long.
My dear, if we dig into the reality and truth of things, the generally accepted laws of gravitation, as defined by Newton were taken as correct by the physicists all around the world. However, only Einstein said they are not correct and he gave his own theory of gravitation. Then everyone said that what Einstein says is correct, but since his laws were complex, therefore we still read the Newtonian theory of gravitation and derive our formulas out of it.
Eventually, until the recent times, when we got our head into the particle physics and went on to the level of quantum mechanics, we found out that the Einstein's theory of gravitation does not work on particle level. So what good is the generalists theory of gravitation and their definition? We still do not know what is gravitation and how it works, but we still have satellites out there in the orbits, which are designed based on Newtonian physics. Hell enough to understand here about the general definitions.
Einstein and Newton being wrong is actually an argument in favour of science, not against it. When someone corrects scientists, they reward him and they update their knowledge accordingly, when someone corrects a religious person he gets beheaded. Science is based on the best known evidence we have, as our knowledge progresses we update our theories. Im not sure if it has ever happened that a theory got overturned, but in rare cases when new evidence arise, theories get modified. Theory of relativity was modified by Einstein when his observation of the Static universe was proven wrong by the expanding universe model.
Similarly, the definition of faith can not be generalized for everyone as the same. If people are saying today that faith is a blind alley, I and many others like me might not agree to it. Let us have our freedom of thought here. For people like me, faith is an enlightened path. For somethings, we can understand and explain, for somethings, we may not have a reasonable explanation yet, just like gravity, but we know it exists, it is true, it is only our limitation of time, space and ability to apprehend things which bars us from giving reasons of everything. However, as human knowledge and understanding is not absolute and keeps on evolving, then may be at some other point in time, we may be able to explain what we cannot do so now. e.g.
Many religious people that I talk to never define faith and almost every person I talk to has his own definition. In simple words define what the meaning of faith is to you and why do you believe something based on it? I want to get a better understanding of where you are coming from.
For a person who was born 100 years ago, this would have been nothing easy to understand, but as for now, when we know about the speed of light and time dilation, we can certainly define with reason that what Allah (SWT) means in the above quoted verse. Got my point? Likewise there are many other things which may not seem explainable at this point in time, but may be in the future, when the human knowledge further evolves and culminates into a support of our faith.
Trying to find the right words here to put it. There is a reason why I said religion thrives in ignorance. This statement has nothing to do with you and I do not mean it in a degrading manner. Ignorance is simply missing knowledge or information about a topic. There are many things that science had not answered thousands of years ago and there existed this ignorance in these issues, they included, how sun rises or sets, how earth quakes happen, how droughts happen, how the world came into existence, how big is the world.
Human beings are pattern seeking animals, when we cannot provide an answer to something we make something up just to deal with that pesky cognitive dissonance in our minds. They made up stuff like a bull balancing the earth on its horns and earthquake happens when it switches horns. droughts happen because of homosexuality. There are people in this forum claiming that storm in Makkah recently happened because of sins of Muslims and few years back an earthquake was blamed on a Canadian couple for taking topless pictures and they were arrested in Malaysia for causing the earthquake.
Every time we make a scientific discovery, big bang, evolution, the actual scale of the universe, lack of evidence for free will, no historic evidence for existence of Christ or Moses. Religion loses one belief after another. Recently the Pope changed the position of the Catholic church on Adam and Eve and said they were only metaphors and not actual people because Evolution disproved the existence of Adam. How many more things do we believe because of religion that will later be made redundant as our knowledge increases? It seems that knowledge and religious beliefs are at odds with each other. Religion thrives in ignorance, check any fact, the poorest countries, countries with lowest IQ etc are more religious in every scientific study that measured this. Although I admit that correlation does not imply causation, but those facts should still raise questions for us.
