Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="smother" data-source="post: 16801469" data-attributes="member: 166532">5. Evil: The tried and true returns. If you are a Christian you  are probably rolling your eyes because you've heard it time and again.  Why don't we atheists understand that: [A] God works in mysterious ways,  God gave us free will which allows us to commit evil and good, [C]  the world is in a fallen state, and [D] Satan represents a real presence  in the world? No, we don't understand because: [A] clearly God doesn't  work in ways that are too mysterious for you to be unhesitant in calling  something "He" did "good" and asking him to do "good" things in the  world on your behalf. You can either use moral qualifiers to describe  God's actions or you cannot; you can't have it both ways. Not only  does this point not jibe with argument "A" (if God works in mysterious  ways we couldn't claim that free will is a "good") it is difficult to  see how, if free will is good, the using of free will to take away  another's free will (i.e. murder) is not intensely problematic in God's  eyes. Hitler used his free will to take away the free will of 10 million  others. Thus, if, in 1919, God flipped the "become an artist" switch in  Hitler's mind, the result would have greatly added to the net amount of  freedom in the world. [C] This is a non-starter if the Old Testament is  not accurate but, even if it is, a God who holds great-great-great...  grandchildren responsible for their ancester's actions does not pass  even the bare minimum test of human morality. Without a defined concept  of desert, morality is a completely empty concept. It seems God is  playing fast and loose on this count. [D] If this objection is forwarded  seriously, then it is little more than ditheism (dual theism).  Otherwise, in the Christian universe the only power Satan has is that  which God lets him have. If you believe in the traditional Christian  conception of God you must believe that, ultimately, everything is His  fault. Everything. This in a world where rocks fall out of the sky onto  innocent people and babies are eaten by dingoes.4. The Bible is Not Consistent: Many, if not most, Christians  would say that the Bible is inerrant. Well, they are wrong. Saying so  doesn't require an appeal to history, science, and/or archaeology; it  only requires a demonstration that the Bible is incoherent--that is, it  contains claims that cannot be true simultaneously. In such instances  either one claim is false or they are both false--there is no other  possibility. If you wish to throw rationality out the window and claim  that a contradiction is possible, then you can just take your ball and  go home; you are now playing a game that you can ask no one else to play  with you. One example of many: Matthew (1:1-16) claims that there are  27 generations between David and Jesus, Luke (3:23-38) claims 41  generations. These cannot be reconciled. The Bible is not inerrant. QED3. Christianity Cannot be the Religion that Jesus Preached: The  story of Christianity is the story of the beliefs that Jesus professed  developing into the religion that professes Jesus. In other words;  dogma. It is pure folly to believe that Simon Peter, Thomas, Mary  Magdalene et.al followed Jesus because, when he died, they would be able  to absolve their sins by believing in him. This later theological  construction was created by believers who were searching for a meaning  to the seemingly pointless execution of their leader and teacher. Those  who originally followed Jesus did so because of his life--because he was  an exemplary teacher who radically reinterpreted the Law in favor of  inclusion rather than exclusion. Those who now follow Jesus do so  because of his death. They turn a man's poignant teachings--his life's  work--into a secondary and near meaningless preface to the panacea of  his death. We primarily have Paul and John the evangelist (two people  who did not know Jesus in his life) to thank for this inexcusable  dumbing-down of Jesus' life. With Paul and John's help, what  Christianity would become is embodied in the Nicene Creed. Take a look  at it. Dogmatic fiat has expurgated everything the man stood for.2. The Gospels are not Historically Reliable: We need not  demonstrate Biblical errors solely through appeals to internal  consistency. Doing so only tells us that something in the "word of God"  is awry--but not necessarily which word is wrong. In order to perform  Biblical analysis that actually broadens our view of what is true and  false in the "good" book we need to bring in external sources. From  these external sources we learn that the Bible makes claims that cannot  stand up to even the most cursory historical examination. In the Gospel  of Luke the story is told of a census enacted by the governor Quirinius  (Luke 2:1-7). The census, according to Luke, required everyone to return  to their ancestral homes to be counted. Thus Joseph, being in the line  of David, travels from Nazareth to Bethlehem where--after unadvisedly  traveling ninety miles with a woman in the final days of pregnancy--Mary  gives birth. The Romans, being meticulous record keepers, did take  censuses. However, because of this meticulous record keeping, we know  that the only census conducted during Quirinius' governorship took place  in A.D. 6-7--a time over ten years after Herod was king of Judea (Luke  claims they are contemporaries). However, aside from this fact we can  use common sense to realize that the story is totally unbelievable. Luke  invents an empire-wide migration for a simple tax registration:  millions of people traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to go to  their ancestral home of a millennium past (David predates Joseph by  approx. 1000 years) in order to sign a simple form. Imagine this  happening today. Imagine the cataclysmic disruption of societies  resulting from the masses of people crossing boarders and oceans in  order to sign a form. This, of course, supposes you could even find your  ancestral home of a millennium past. No, something is wrong here and it  isn't that the Romans liked to periodically enact sadistically  cumbersome legislation. No, I think our evangelist needs to go back to  history class. But wait...1. The Gospels are not History: This may seem like a paltry  excuse for the number one spot on a list that makes such a grandiose  claim. This reason, however, is the lynch pin. The historicity of the  Gospels represents the most crucial element of Christianity--for either  its truth or falsity. Christianity claims a specific historical  relationship between God and man. If that relationship is historically  inaccurate then Christianity is wrong. Or, as Paul memorably put it, "if  Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your  faith." (1 Cor. 15:14).As we've seen the Bible is often contradictory and the Gospels are not  historically accurate. However, the Christian mistake is compounded by  believing that the Gospels are even history--that is that they were  written or designed to accurately portray historical truths. The  evangelists did not intend their writings to be taken as historical  truths. If they could see modern Christianity they would be shocked at  the millions of Christians interpreting their writings as historically  authoritative. Please don't misinterpret what I am saying. I am not  saying the Gospels were entirely made up. I am saying that they were  primarily written as myths that forego historical truths (but use many  of them) in favor of conveying larger, theological truths that the  evangelists believed about Jesus of Nazareth.The evangelists poured through the Old Testament and found "prophecies"  that predicted Jesus' life. After all, there had to be grander reasons  why their great teacher had been executed like a common criminal. In the  pages of Jewish scripture they found those reasons. They then  consciously wrote their gospels in order to retroactively fulfill  prophecy. That this happens at all is beyond dispute. Sometimes, while  stumbling over themselves to "fulfill" prophecy, they get it horribly  wrong: Mark (1:1-3), using shoddy sources, begins his gospel with  "prophecy" that mistakenly conflates two Old Testament versus; Isaiah  40:3 and Malachi 3:1. Matthew (1:20-23) uses a mistranslated Old  Testament, in which the Hebrew almah, (meaning "young woman") was  changed to the Greek parthenos (meaning a physical virgin), as a  justification for the immaculate conception. Matthew (21:1-7) so wants  to fulfill a "prophecy" from another shoddy source that has combined  Isaiah 62:11 and Zachariah 9:9, that he misinterprets the passage--which  only speaks of one animal (with subsequent qualifiers)--and has Jesus  ride into Jerusalem, in some bizarre act of balance, on two animals.  (The other gospel writers are quick to correct this grievous error.)  Thus, we begin to see that not only is it a manifest absurdity to  believe the Gospels are history, it becomes tenuous to believe they are  even accurate.Each evangelist had his own interpretation. The theology of the  evangelists--and specifically their Christology (the nature of  Christ)--developed into more grandiose claims as Jesus' life moved  further into the past. If you wish to discover this for yourself, I  advise you to successively read the Gospel of Mark (almost universally  agreed to be the earliest Gospel written between A.D. 65-70) and the  Gospel of John (agreed to be the latest Gospel written between A.D.  90-100) in a single sitting. Ask yourself this question; are they  telling the same story? In Mark's Gospel, Jesus largely speaks in  parables and evasive third-person proclamations about someone called  "the Son of Man." In John's Gospel, Jesus tells no parables and spends  most of the time talking about himself, his godly status, and what the  future will bring.So, here is a brief lesson in the development of the concept of Jesus as  God - the transition from focusing on what Jesus said to focusing on  who he was. We will only look at the beginning and the end; Jesus' birth  and death. Changing the birth and death of Jesus is the most direct  route to altering Jesus' status from one contained within a life to one  transcending it.First the birth narratives. In Mark there is no birth narrative. Jesus'  higher metaphysical standing begins when He is chosen at his baptism.  This is a story that Jews would have known well. The Old Testament is  replete with God adopting servants - sometimes even called "sons" -  during a communicative moment in their lives. Mark did not believe  Jesus' status differed greatly from God's chosen sons of the past;  David, Elijah, Moses, Elisha etc. In fact, in writing for a Jewish  audience, he thought it important to strongly align Jesus with the  prophets of old. Mark's Christology is thoroughly earthly and - when  judged against later alterations - mundane. However, this aspect of Mark  is of paramount importance; the earliest Evangelist, the one least  removed from Jesus' life, did not know what Christians now "know." It is  simply absurd to believe that, of all the things Mark knew about Jesus  and with all the time he took to compose and disseminate his gospel,  Mark just didn't know that Jesus' birth was a once-in-an-eternity  miraculous event. While Mark certainly plays up the figure of Jesus, he  was not willing to go that far. When Mark is taken by itself--a gospel  lacking a birth narrative and a resurrection narrative (the last twelve  verses are almost universally agreed to be later additions), fraught  with a persistent "messianic secret" in which no Apostle is able to  completely understand Jesus' status, and Jesus' constant, oblique, third  person references to a figure called the "son of man" (almost assuredly  a reference to Daniel 7:13)--no interpretation even remotely resembling  Christianity can be culled from it. Instead Mark fits squarely into  well-known traditional Jewish stories of chosen prophets instructing the  Jews as to God's will.For Matthew and Luke this "Jewish Jesus" would not do. Rather than  taking a modern viewpoint that the earlier source should be trusted  (that is, if you care about historical accuracy which, as I've said,  they clearly did not), Matthew and Luke (written c. 80-90) decide to  insert important "facts" into Mark's general narrative that raise the  status of Jesus to a figure whose scope extends beyond Judaism. With  this in mind, doctoring what he said was not as important as doctoring  who he was. Thus, they go back to his birth and tell incompatible,  incredible, and clearly manufactured stories of Jesus' miraculous birth  to a virgin. In doing so they both establish Jesus' higher ontological  status than the prophets of old, and - by bending over backwards to  place Jesus in Bethleham - they make sure that Jesus satisfies the  prophecy that the Messiah was to come from the "city of David."Looking at the differences between the Synoptics, we are also able to  see the solution to the oft-mentioned "problem" of Jesus' missing years.  Other than Luke's small story of a twelve-year-old Jesus teaching in  the Temple, we have no other (canonical) stories of Jesus between birth  and baptism. By comparing Mark with Matthew and Luke, the obvious answer  presents itself; such stories didn't exist because no one cared about  Jesus until he established a ministry. Jesus' "missing years" are no  more bothersome than the "missing years" of the majority of Hebrew  prophets.But John would change everything and one-up all who came before him.  Jesus wasn't merely "chosen," "adopted" or created from a miraculous set  of circumstances. No, Jesus is something else all together. Feeling it  wasn't good enough to go back the the beginning of His ministry or the  beginning of His life, John decides to go back to the beginning of time  (John 1:1 "In the beginning was the word...") to establish the nature of  Jesus. Thus, Jesus has been raised to the ultimate heights; dizzying  heights that would have confused and shocked Mark.Likewise, the death of Jesus changes dramatically throughout the  Gospels. The changes (of which there are many more than these) can be  summed up in the three different accounts of the last words of Jesus:  Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46 "My god, my god, why have you forsaken me."  Luke 23:46 "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." John 19:30 "It  is finished." The development of Christianity is encapsulated in the  move from the utterance of pain, ignorance, nonacceptance, and suffering  seen in Mark and Matthew to the statement of acceptance, foreknowledge,  and peace that is seen in John. These are incompatible interpretations  of Jesus. The character in the gospels may have the same name but it is  not the same man hanging on the cross.The Gospels are guides to belief written by believers. This is a  horribly unreliable way to learn accurate information. When you already  believe "The Truth," distortions that you consciously engage in - that  you see as promoting "The Truth" - are not seen as lies, but rather, as  efficacious ways of getting "The Truth" to the hearts of readers. We  don't know why the evangelists believed as they did, but in the gospels  they don't give us the reasons they believe, they give us reasons to  believe; an entirely different matter. But we do KNOW they invented  things. We KNOW that the theological conception of Jesus changed as the  believers grew more distant from his life. What Christians believe most  fervently (i.e. Jesus being God, appearing after he died, dying for the  sins of the world) are concepts that were developed later. They are  concepts that did not exist in the earliest generations of Christian  belief. They certainly did not exist when Jesus was alive.Early Christians invented myths to overcome the "stumbling-block" (1  Cor. 1:23) of the cross. Paul knew that, for the Jews and Gentile  Greeks, the execution of Jesus represented a major problem. The "king of  the jews" was not supposed to be an executed lowly peasant. The "savior  of mankind" was not a common criminal. Over time, theological concepts  developed that explained this hang-up. Thus, an executed traitor was  turned into a victorious Messiah. By <a href="http://trevorburrus.newsvine.com/" target="_blank">Trevor Burrus</a> <a href="http://trevorburrus.newsvine.com/_news/2008/03/05/1345329-10-reasons-why-christianity-is-wrong" target="_blank">Source </a></blockquote>

Verification: Haya warak paha keeyada? (haya wadi kireema paha)

Top Bottom