Yes its a fact Jesus existed. I believe Jesus is who his biographies claim him to be. So yes, I believe He loves me. As far as faith goes, with out faith it is impossible to please God. It is important to the christian.

Yes

Yes

so I guess you're not going to answer the "why you need faith question" ..

but anyway

so "Nubby" are you saying that you love Jesus and that you know that Jesus loves you?

I study to strengthen my faith.

I study to strengthen my faith.

Why dont we talk about the argument. I use scholarship to strengthen my faith, there is nothing wrong with that.

I like taco argument that krimsa presented. I am going to start to use that.

God by definition is uncaused, timeless, changeless. Premise #1 calls for everything that begins to exist.

No it was not. A video was pulled up from you tube that most people pry do not understand. I cant respond to that video, I will leave that to the scholars who defend the argument.

There must be a fist cause, the cosmological argument asks for anything that BEGINS to exist must have a cause.

22. Fact # 1: On the Sunday following his crucifixion, Jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. According to Jacob Kremer, an Austrian scholar who has specialized in the study of the resurrection, "By far most scholars hold firmly to the reliability of the Biblical statements about the empty tomb."{14} According to the New Testament critic, D.H. van Daalen, it is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions.

23. Fact # 2: On separate occasions different individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death. According to the prominent, skeptical German New Testament critic Gerd Ludemann, "It may be taken as historically certain that...the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."{15} These appearances were witnessed not only by believers, but also by unbelievers, skeptics, and even enemies.

24. Fact # 3: The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Jews had no belief in a dying, much less a rising, Messiah, and Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead prior to the end of the world. Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University, muses, "Some sort of powerful, transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was..."{16} N. T. Wright, an eminent British scholar, concludes, "That is why, as an historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again, leaving an empty tomb behind him."{17}

The argument of a First Cause is logically flawed, where did you study philosophy? You believe in g-d as an individual phenomenological experience from what I can gather. this is how most people come to believe in g-d. Not everyone believes in the Xian g-d.