Why The Judaeo-Christian God Makes No Sense to Me

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Thank you. It expresses my frustration when dealing with people like the Gnostic Bishop, people who are either unable or unwilling to consider the possibility that they may actually be wrong about something. That can be said about most internet atheists (especially the ones on YouTube), but it can also be said about most people (ex. people who are actually proud to call themselves Christians) who have taken it upon themselves to define who they are by a set of core beliefs they believe to be unassailable. Nothing should be considered to be so sacrosanct that it cannot be questioned, and if it turns out that what I myself happen to believe at this point in time is proven to be false, then I will have no choice but to abandon those beliefs and move on. It won't mean the end of the world for me. Life is too short to waste one's time with nonsense.

IOW, please make me a hero, please, please, whine some more, please, please, please, please and on and on.

You make Jesus a whiny little b***h.

Shame on you.

Regards
DL

All the arguments for a supernatural God are garbage and the ancients knew that.

If any of the arguments would have been good, Christianity and Islam would have grown by those good arguments instead of Inquisitions and Jihads.

The older and more intelligent sages knew better but idol worship ruined the search for God and became just plain old idol worship.

We need to go back to the old thinking as it brings peace instead of the 2,000 years of war that idol worship has gifted us with.

http://bigthink.com/videos/what-is-god-2-2

That link shows a better way. Right?

Regards
DL

Read my first commandment.

viewtopic.php?t=353899

I love to change my mind on something because then I actually learn something new and valuable. Learning something new is one of the greatest pleasures in life.

I am quite willing and able to accept that I am wrong on something, in fact I am eager to grow what I know, but many like you, especially idol worshiping literalist theists, cannot change my thinking due to poor arguments or just having the wrong ideas which they hang onto without the logic and reason to back them up.

That is why the meanest pricks on the internet are the theists. That is what Sadhguru says in that link you saw and I believe him because Inquisitions and Jihads prove it.

Regards
DL

There is no such thing as god. There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support this. God is a laughable, primitive ignorant, human construct.

There is nothing left to be said, the end.

There is plenty left. Atheism is not the end of the journey, it's a common stop along the way. When you realise that you have no more knowledge of God than I do and what you just said was actually:



Then the journey begins again and you have to ask yourself why you are so desperate to believe there is no God and no judgement.

Even though I was brought up in religion, it was a little more open-minded than the regular fundie/Methodist/US Public school types appear to be. Indeed, we were encouraged to question doctrine that didn't fit with the world around us. Creationism (as per bible), for example, was simply considered just one origin story of the of the many found in cultures worldwide. Perhaps if I continued down that path I would have ended up at Bahai'sm (a religious idea worth knowing about).

The two things I couldn't get though, first was the idea of "one" God. Surely that which allows a god should allow more entities?

Second was the obsession with some final judgment / end of days / completionist thing (like wanting to flip to the last chapter of a novel). It seemed both an implicit threat and to express such profound disregard for creation that Christians couldn't wait for their creator to shut-up shop. Also this idea that a great judgement is to happen at an arbitrary future date? Why can't an omnipotent, omnipresent God just decide at our death and get it over with (unless this God is a committed consequentialist and really needs to know the long-term effects of all our actions, well that would stand against fatalism).

It was the arguments of evangelism that finally convinced me the whole thing was a sham, by attempting to convince me that certain ideas could not be "true", but if so God as described in Christianity could not exist. (Actually, even the evangelical respones to this thread remind me of the very reason God can't 'Be').

I take a consequentialist view of religion as a social institution, that does both harm and good, and an agnostic view of the possibility of any god/s. This has been a pretty stable view of mine for about 15 years.

I had a very similar childhood, camping, hiking or just spending a day playing at a creek crossing way out in the bush. Nature to be is (beautifully?) haphazard. When I came across Darwin (rather than the pop-science "survival of the fittest") it made so much sense for specialisation to occur on the population level,
and evolution to be a process of mutation subject to trade-offs and long timescales (relative to any individual).

["quote="DarthMetaKnight"]
What I would expect: Don't most fundies believe that diseases come from the Devil? Shouldn't bacteria have something besides DNA? Why would God and Satan use the same sort of code?
Reality: Bacteria and harmful parasites have DNA, which we also have.
[/quote]

Lol, "disease from the devil"? I've never heard that one, would have disowned the religion altogether if I had, the most common response to a disease was fatalist "it's all part of a greater plan (not that you didn't try to cure it with medical science or pray for intercession...).

Overall, Christians believe that God is simple, orderly and caring. Nature is completely different. Nature is complex and uncaring. Nature doesn't give a damn. Religious people are supposed to avoid sin. Meanwhile, wild animals only believe in pragmatism.[/quote]

Agree with most of that, the last point however... from a pragmatic point of view, the actions of animals (and humans much of the time ) appear positively stupid. It's another reason I don't buy into "intelligent design" whatsoever.

No argument on your first but I do not like your last.

Knowing the truth of your first statement, what are you doing to fight the mainstream religions that are doing so much damage to our societies with their homophobia and misogyny?

Regards
DL

When you can say the reverse, the question is moot.

It is normally styled as "Judgment" not with a capital "J", not to be confused with lowercase judgment. A person passing Judgment is strictly forbidden. An aspect of the faith often forgotten by many a religious zealot.

The real question is if such a God is deserving of our respect? I would say definitely not. If there is any test in any of this, it is not to follow such deplorable doctrine.

A cursory look at the archeology will tell you the Israelites were a Canaanite offshoot (not slaves from Egypt), which where originally a polytheistic sect. They only became monotheistic after the Babylonians attacked, and it was a very different concept of monotheism. These were local gods and they didn't want their enemies god's worshiped, as simple as that. Yahweh even had a wife called Asherah, which was conveniently edited out of later versions.

Not moot, atheists just avoid this question like the plague, because it leads them down uncomfortable lines of thought. Why do Christians want to believe? It's pretty easy, a chance at an afterlife, see old friends and family again. The very human desire for Justice and Judgement, especially for those who escape imperfect human justice. The reverse question can be somewhat disturbing. Why do atheists not want an afterlife? More importantly, why do they not want Judgement? Rather than answer the question, they reject the very idea that they have made a choice. No free will for atheists in choosing their religious worldview it seems, something I really believed at one point.



Not the real question, this sort of rhetoric (and its believer equivalent) is all just post-hoc rationalisation for a choice people have already made.



I know, it's very interesting.

A judgement I agree with.

Careful buddy, you are getting dangerously close to thinking like a Gnostic Christian.

Good for you. You show decent morals as compared to Christians.

Regards
DL

They exercise their free will and end in rejecting a God that all moral people would reject. Those are not Christians though as evidenced by their adoring a satanic genocidal son murdering Gods.

Regards
DL

I'm sure we've covered this, you are reading things too literally. When was the last time a Christian stoned an unruly child to death? Or a fornicator for that matter? To understand Christianity by reading the Bible literally is to try and understand the ocean by looking at a cup of water. You chided me (rightly) for attacking a straw man Gnostic in the other thread, physician heal thyself.

If secular law had not brought Christianity to heel, they would be stoning people.

Even as we speak, they continue to victimize women and gays.

It is not I that needs healing and repenting. It is Christians.

Why are you more protective of the evil ones than their victims?

Regards
DL

This is fanciful, you cannot claim the last 2000 years of tradition, law and social organisation as secularism taming Christianity. Christianity is an evolving faith. The secular ideal, legal and moral, inherited almost everything it has from Christian predecessors. The arguments and battles were Christian vs Christian, not Gnostic cape-wearing hero vs evil priest.