Because of God's decision to respect our free will including the option of rejecting him, there will not be an authoritative apparition, sign in the sky or whatever proving without a doubt that He's out there watching us and that we must believe in Him. He doesn't want to force us to love him. The only authoritative fact will be the second coming of Jesus, but no one knows when that happens, and then it will be too late to change sides anyway.
Fun fact: the 2,000 anniversary of the Passion will be in April 2034. I sometimes wonder if Jesus will be paying us a visit then and what I can do to be a good Christian in the few years left. Having a deadline helps focusing on important things.
Faith is generally defined as deciding that a statement is true when there's "enough" rational arguments for it (i.e., no such thing as blind faith). Enough because we never get the "full" extent of information about something, so the basis of our beliefs (secular and religious) is always a limited set of available data. For me, I take the recognized Marian apparitions as true because my Church says so and I should trust it. On the other hand, my faith was recently consolidated by seeing the Holy Shroud in Torino and the Holy Tunic in Paris and learning what today's scientists can say about them.
Hydrogonian, I read somewhere that mass hallucinations don't exist (where the individual accounts of an event would match 100%), only individual ones do. So the accounts of what is seen by multiple witnesses should differ if they hallucinate. Look up the massive number of Portuguese witnesses at Fatima.
Fun fact: the 2,000 anniversary of the Passion will be in April 2034. I sometimes wonder if Jesus will be paying us a visit then and what I can do to be a good Christian in the few years left. Having a deadline helps focusing on important things.
Faith is generally defined as deciding that a statement is true when there's "enough" rational arguments for it (i.e., no such thing as blind faith). Enough because we never get the "full" extent of information about something, so the basis of our beliefs (secular and religious) is always a limited set of available data. For me, I take the recognized Marian apparitions as true because my Church says so and I should trust it. On the other hand, my faith was recently consolidated by seeing the Holy Shroud in Torino and the Holy Tunic in Paris and learning what today's scientists can say about them.
Hydrogonian, I read somewhere that mass hallucinations don't exist (where the individual accounts of an event would match 100%), only individual ones do. So the accounts of what is seen by multiple witnesses should differ if they hallucinate. Look up the massive number of Portuguese witnesses at Fatima.