Desert wrote:
Pointedstick wrote:
I apologize for getting a bit riled up, guys. I didn't mean for my last few posts to be so mean.
It's good to hear that if you heard God telling you to kill someone, you would assume it was Satan or mental illness or something and would not act on it. And no, I would not kill a devout Christian in some bizarro world in which it was legal and I had somehow deduced in a cold utilitarian way that it would make society better off (? ? ?). Murder is always wrong!
The explanation that Christianity ceased to be an evidence-based religion after Jesus died sort of makes sense, but at the same time, isn't that a little convenient? All the people profiled in the Bible didn't really have to have faith! They could see all around them that God was actually talking to people, blessing people, cursing people, killing people, etc. Not in book form, but actually like talking directly in their heads and smiting their enemies and doing stuff like that. That seems ironic to me, that the early converts had a much easier time being convinced of the truth of the matter because it was much less about faith back than it is today.
Now we just need to have faith that he exists and that stories about him are true, even though many of them are really bloody and don't seem to fit at all with the sort of world we inhabit. It's, like, odd.
I really understand what you're saying here. I used to tell my Christian acquaintances that probably nothing short of Jesus knocking at my door and physically introducing himself would ever make me believe in Christianity. As you said, the folks in the OT & NT days had a lot more going on around them. Now we just have a lot of
people, talking to each other.
Have you considered the idea that
maybe there were just a bunch of people back then too, and that human storytelling and folklore traditions simply had a tendency to add supernatural embellishments as mystical punctuation marks within a story to emphasize the important parts?
One thing, though, that has impressed me is how much unbelief there was even in the days when that evidence was more recent ... the Israelites building their stupid golden calf, when Moses was a bit late coming down from the mountain; and in Jesus's days on earth, even the disciples had considerable doubts about him.
Have you considered the idea that the reason there was so much doubt and skepticism in the Old and New Testaments was
because there were no actual supernatural events taking place, and that the supernatural elements grew up after the fact in the way they typically do when real stories are converted into folklore?
For some Christians, the Bible is very obviously true. They see it as a continuous historical record and revelation, that has existed since the beginning of humanity and has been passed down in written form and church tradition ever since.
To me, the only parts of the Bible that are obviously true are those parts that can be corroborated through archaeological discoveries or other historical records from the same period, and the moral and ethical teachings whose truth can be revealed through their application (e.g., murder, adultery and stealing tend to undermine stability in a society). The rest may be a good story, but it shouldn't be taken as anything but fiction.
The odds of the fulfillment of OT prophecies in the NT days would be infinitesimally small without supernatural intervention.
I'm surprised that so much is made of this point because it seems to me that if I want to match up someone's life to earlier prophecies, all I have to do is make the proper embellishments to his life story and--ta da!!--they match the prophecies.
The evidences of Jesus's resurrection are considerable.
Really? What is the evidence? Note that a well-crafted piece of fiction with plausible motivations and good character development is still fiction.
The Romans recorded
everything, and yet they somehow failed to document one of their executed prisoners coming back to life and flying up into the sky? That's hard for me to imagine. A person coming back to life and flying into the sky suggests everything that was previously known about medicine, biology, physics and spirituality may have been wrong. Wouldn't some secular authority want to write a thing like that down?
Much is made of a few vague references to a Jesus-like person in Josephus's writings. Wouldn't you think that Josephus would have added something to these references like: "And oh yeah, three days after they crucified him he came back to life and flew into the sky"?
Furthermore, the fruits of Christianity (Western culture, rule of law, morality, etc.) are far superior to what has been produced by most other religions.
I don't think that the rule of law came from Christianity. There is some good morality in Christianity, even though it conflicts with Jewish morality when it comes to the way God wants you to treat people you disagree with.
I don't know if I would say that Christian morality is "far superior" to Buddhist morality/ethics (just to cite one example from another world religion). Christianity seems to encourage legalistic rationalizations for doing awful things that a Buddhist might say was simply wrong, no matter how you try to twist the religious texts to support it. The Crusades and Inquisition were supposed to be based on biblical principles, right?
But I will say that I never quite saw the picture how I just described it above. I am more these days, because I enjoy studying the evidence for Christianity. But in my lost years, I could develop a pretty convincing argument that the God of the Bible didn't exist, and more importantly, if he did exist we were all screwed. Looking back, I think it was more my dislike for what I had seen of Christian culture that led to my eventual complete unbelief. As Pascal said, "People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive." I recognize that in myself now. I didn't at the time. I basically associated Christianity with the quite broken a-holes I grew up around. Then I looked around and saw other people I strongly disliked, like Jerry Falwell or Joel Osteen. These people were the face of Christianity to me.
I'm not suggesting that it's unreasonable to adopt a set of beliefs in the absence of evidence, but it seems to me that when it comes to Christianity one should just admit that there is no evidence whatsoever for the resurrection, and there is only a little evidence that a person names Jesus ever even lived, and there is certainly no evidence that he was born of a virgin named Mary.
I think that your Pascal quote is right on the money--I think that you find a belief in Christianity appealing, and that's why you believe it.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is a single "solution" for every person. As "they" say, God works in mysterious ways (I always hated hearing that). Matthew 7 says: "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it."
Any belief system that involves a God who makes his point by killing children and offering up women to be raped, and then offers his highest truth to mankind in the form of a story in which he supernaturally rapes a virgin, and then allows his half-man/half-God son to be ritualistically slaughtered in the most violent way imaginable is a "mysterious" belief system indeed.
It works not because of peer pressure or brainwashing, but because that's the method God has chosen to deliver the good news.
It clearly does work for you and many others, and that's a good thing. I think that spiritual joy is something everyone should experience.
In my case, I just found that the whole belief system left me feeling bad and exhausted. You can say that maybe I wasn't in the right church, or wasn't interpreting the Bible correctly, etc., but I've said many times that the words of Jesus speak to me in a meaningful way, but at the same time I just can't overlook the moody, brutal and vindictive God that is presented throughout the Bible, and whose nature is utterly at odds with the nature of Jesus. I can't believe more people don't have trouble with the dissonance I am describing that ought to leap off the pages of the Bible to even a casual observer.
A God whose "son" says to love your neighbor as you love yourself simply cannot be related to a God who would kill every human being in the world (except one family led by an old drunk flasher patriarch) to show them that he was unhappy with them, and then sentence them to an eternity of suffering just to drive the point home for anyone else who might be thinking about displeasing him. Where is the love in that?
Ok, I've gotta go run off to church. I still can't believe I go to church. I wish you guys had known me as an agnostic. Fred and I would have been fast friends.
I've been where you are at now. It sounds like Fred was there too. I wish all of the things you are describing were true (though if I could change something I would have sent God to charm school the very first time he decided to kill a large group of people because they displeased him), but I also wish that Santa Claus would bring me everything from the Apple store, plus an annual luxury vacation. The problem is, that type of belief in Santa Claus is unrealistic, and I find the same is true of a promise of immortality in paradise with no supporting evidence of any kind apart from an earnest desire for it to be true, and eternal suffering in Hell as a consequence for failing to believe it is true. That seems pretty coercive for something that ought to be self-evident.
What would you think about someone who bred puppies, and every time one of the puppies peed on the floor after being told not to it was placed in a torture device that would inflict the maximum amount of suffering on the animal without actually killing it, and that suffering would continue for the puppies entire natural life.
When asked about the practice, what would you think if the puppy breeder said: "Well, I told the puppies not to pee on the floor, and some of them listened and they reaped the rewards, but for those who chose not to listen, or for those who maybe didn't hear me say not to pee on the floor, their suffering is justified, and I like that the rest of the puppies can hear their endless howls of agony because I feel like it serves as a constant reminder of what I am all about."
How could you think anything other than the puppy breeder was a complete psychopath, and yet the puppy breeder's approach is basically the way God deals with humanity in the Bible at every turn.
faith based Christianity is tough to understand, its a bit like having a map, believing that map tells you something important, then sitting in one place getting all gushy and emotional about the words and pictures on the map demanding that all passersby join in their gushy and emotional reaction to the map (under threat of eternal suffering if they don't) but never leaving the spot or following the map because they interpreted it to mean they just need faith???? 
