Authority

Good stuff! You have very clearly explained your position. Well done! Here are my thoughts…

You said:
“I think it (Pascals Wager) more or less comes across, at least to me, as an expression of the perceived futility of non-belief. Does that make sense?”

Absolutely. I would tend to agree with you.

You said…

"I'm a pragmatist, Jason, mostly because my lack of pragmatism has been violated more than once. I accept what works, and reject those things that I see as not working, mostly just simply because I don't know how to do otherwise. Here is an example of my pragmatism: If someone were in a fairly pragmatic way able to show me that christianity provides a more accurate conception of reality than anything else, I'd accept it as true. Here is another weird result of my pragmatic idea. If someone's christianity leads them to make choices in how they interact with their environment that helps them and those they love flourish in that environment, it doesn't matter if the christianity(or any other religion or worldview or personal philosophical construct) is correct or not. It may even be a character flaw on my part that I can't be like that(flourish as a christian while knowing that christianity isn't real, simply because it'd be a good way to cope with a very christianized environment), but I don't know how to be other than what I am."

Here are a few thoughts in response:

I guess my first response is that Christianity is not pragmatic. I think I would do a disservice to the truth of God by trying to make it so, and so would anyone else. If someone were to do so then they would probably strip Christianity of its truth in order to do so. So my first hope is that no one ever tries to convince you that from a pragmatic standpoint Christianity is a “more accurate conception of reality”.

Secondly, my hope is that you never accept Christianity as true for pragmatic reasons. Now I know that this might at first sound bizarre to you, but it is true. To me this appears to be a simple choice between two authorities in the thought world. There are only two. One is rationalism, the other is revelation. Rationalism is trusting in unaided human reason for the standard of knowledge. As I read your words I thought them to be an almost perfect functional definition for rationalism. Herein lays the rub. I would not want you to accept or believe in Christ because your rationalistic mindset has told you that it is true. This is simply because you would still have the same authority, which is your unaided human reason, and at any time when something else appears more true then you might change. So, though I believe Christianity to be the only accurate conception of reality, I would hope you never believe it because it is. No, I believe in the end that this is truly a question of authority, and as much as I like to debate with you, it comes down to whether we trust in our own reason or in revelation. What is my ultimate authority and what is yours. Does any of this make sense?

You said…
So if you tell me that prayer works, I want to see it work in a way that is clearly, obviously the result of prayer, and not the side effect of some other process. Sorry, but at this point I don't think that you or anyone else can do that in any meaningful way.

I guess the problem here is that it sounds like you believe that God cannot use His creation to answer prayer. I believe that God uses creation and human will and “scientific means” in order to answer prayer. In other words, he uses what he created to do what he wants to do. I really don’t see a problem with that and can’t find fault in Him using what is His to bring about His will. It sounds as if this is unacceptable to you, but that God must answer prayer or move in a way that you cannot explain in another manner. That doesn’t bother me at all, but I do think our two ideas show forth our pre-scientific worldviews that color our views of reality.

You said...
If you say that your god is real, and that it/he loves me, I'm fine with that, but I want to see consistent evidence of that, that I can point to, and see as working in a consistent manner. Hasn't happened so far, hehe

I would think that you would be able to point to the historical events of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus as consistent evidence that God loves you, but that is obviously because I do. I guess it all goes back to that authority in the realm of thought thing again huh?

Anyway, I am off for another week of fun in Edwards! Have a great week!
Jason