It's so frustrating...

[Whack01]

All the mass murders in the old Testament have the "God told me so" justification. For most of the genocides it is supposed to be because the victims believed in a different God and would infect the Chosen People.

Bingo

 

[Robin]

Bingo

As a justification it certainly covers all squares - minimally plausible - maximally evil.

 

[ExMinister]

In fact this nonsensical justification is given by Dr Norman Geisler in Lee Strobel's Case for Faith. He suggests that in fact God is doing the kids a favour by sending soldiers to murder them along with the rest of their people because if they grew up they would become evil like their parents and go to hell, whereas killing them in their youth would ensure their place in heaven.

I completely agree with Civilised Worm about this obscene idea.

Yeah, stick with Jesus' teachings - after all he said that not a single letter, nor the smallest part of a letter will pass away from the old law.

That's where I first read it, too. I'd expected more from a former atheistic/skeptic and was disappointed in the drivel (as above) he was willing to accept by way of explanation.

Is it just me or does much of the writings of the Old Testament prophets, especially Ezekiel, read like the ramblings of modern-day middle eastern terrorists?

 

[Complexity]

Thanks for reminding me of how vile christianity really is.

 

[Aitch]

What a perfect example of a dichotomy that is not false! It is indeed a fact that theology and logic are polar opposites and mutually exclusive.

Not necessarily - theology can be very logical. It's just that the premises the logic is based on can be a bit out.

 

[Undesired Walrus]

For the OP, don't worry. Relax, smoke some luckies, kick back with some of that hentia! It is nobodies business but your own.

If you were in Iran, you would be worried about the Quran. If you were in India, you would be worried about multiple armed Gods with awkward positioned legs. If you were in Israel you would be worried about not sticking with God's chosen people. If you were in Ancient Greece, Zeus would be frowning down upon you from his cloud. If you were in Northern Iraq, you would be worried about Melek Taus, the bird who gave birth to the universe in the form of an egg. If you were in the Viking tribes, you would have to offer up human sacrafices to please the Gods. If you were with the ancient Egyptians, you would be worried about the weight of your heart.

We do not believe in those religions, or at least the last four versions. Why not? Because we know they are utterly ridiculous, regardless of their aesthetic potential.

You may argue that Christianity is less absurd and more respectable than these strange, implausible Gods.

But let us remember that no matter how much modern Christians obfuscate this fact, their God believes that the universe was created in 6 days and original sin came into being because of a talking snake. Think of this for a moment. It's just simply a fantasy, nothing more. No matter how much modern christians make excuses for this verse, the highly more likely situation is that this was a story written by ignorant people who never believed they would be caught out by science.

If you need a religous story to base your morals off, the story of Prometheus is as finer than anything in the Bible. Why? Because he stole fire from the Gods and gave it to his fellow mortals. Because he knew we are as good as the Gods if not better.

The fire is within us. Just us. As Humans.

 

[Edmund Standing]

Dear Jonathan,

I hope some of this helps.

Okay, most of the arguments I had against Christianity have been reconciled by Christians.

Seriously?

I've been reading the bible and I'm almost finished Deuteronomy.

Ah, Deuteronomy. Such a beautiful book with so much wisdom.

'When the LORD you God gives you victory in battle and you take prisoners, you may see among them a beautiful woman that you like and want to marry. Take her to your home ... Later, if you no longer want her, you are to let her go free. Since you forced her to have intercourse with you, you cannot treat her as a slave and sell her' (Deuteronomy 21:10-14).

'Suppose a man has a son who is stubborn and rebellious, a son who will not obey his parents, even though they punish him ... Then the men of the city are to stone him to death, and so you will get rid of this evil' (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).

'If two men are having a fight and the wife of one tries to help her husband by grabbing hold of the other man's genitals, show her no mercy; cut off her hand' (Deuteronomy 25:11-12).

If reading stuff like this is starting to convince you that the supposed 'god' who authored these commands might actually be true, I'm quite worried.

I'm getting really frustrated and depressed because I'm starting to wonder if Christianity isn't true...

You were right originally. It isn't true. Wonder and worry no longer.

I've gotten on my knees and seriously begged God for understanding...

You could be there for some time. As Plath put it: 'I talk to God but the sky is empty'.

Begged him to give me the spiritual fortitude to want to change... To want to follow his laws...

Be careful not to take laws such as Leviticus 20:13 too literally. Nowadays we call that murder and a hate crime.

I don't want to be a Christian

The above, unfortunately, suggests that actually you do.

I don't want to go to hell either.

Aside from the face that 'hell' is an irrational and twisted concept used to scare children, even if heaven and hell were real, as Nietzsche put: 'In heaven, all the interesting people are missing'.

Plus, don't forget, if you make it to heaven this is what you'll see. I'll stick with the sinners, thanks.

Whenever I try to think of a way that their arguments don't work, I get this feeling that I'm just making excuses not to believe...

Are you sure you're not a Christian troll? If not, why would you need to make excuses to not believe in something for which there is no evidence. Do you feel that you are making excuses when you say that Father Christmas is made up? After all, you never know, he may actually exist! (Plus I saw him at a shopping centre last Christmas, so that seems like pretty damn good proof to me)

I've been trying my damnedest to seek God and the truth, whatever that might be, but it just feels like I loose no matter what I do.

Given you're chasing something that doesn't exist, you will obviously lose. Here's my motto: 'There is no God, life is meaningless, death is the end'. Once you've accepted that you can move to embracing it, and then you can truly get out there and LIVE.

IF I DO believe and it's not true, then I waste the only life I have for pleasure by deleting my hentai collection and and giving up my possessions.

What sounds more likely - there is a place where 'sinners' are tortured for eternity by a psychopathic deity, or the fact that getting rid of the pleasures in your life means you are a loser who squanders their one and only chance to enjoy themselves?

Whenever I say that I don't want to be obsessed with God, I.E., Heaven, There's always this irritating feeling that's telling me that I'm being selfish and wicked or that it's "Satan talking".

Satan is just a word the religious drones give to every instinct that leads you towards self-fulfillment and pleasure. The 'voice of Satan' spoken of by the superstitious is all too often the voice of reason, incidentally.

I just want to be able to fantasize about being a ninja or a wizard without feeling guilty about it.

I hear there are plenty of other discussion forums for that sort of thing. Seriously, if that's your worst 'vice' you have nothing to worry about. Embrace your fantasies!

I want to be able to look at women without feeling shame. I want to be able to enjoy sexual pleasure. But then it's almost like there's a voice in the back of my head saying "It's now about what you want!"

And, your point is? As long as you don't take it to the extreme and become a sociopath, go for what you want. Nothing wrong with that. It's the believers who are totally screwed up - actively avoiding things that would make their lives enjoyable. Sad.

It just makes me wonder why Yahweh, if he exists, would be so cruel as to put us in such a situation...

Yahweh is the all too human deity of a group of Semitic tribes that wandered around the Middle East thousands of years ago. He's no more real than any other primitive tribal god. If you're wondering about Yahweh's cruelty, well, it's actually because he's one sick [rule 10].

Before you waste any more time trawling through the Bible, you might like to check out my article 'Brutality, War Crimes, Genocide, and Rape - Should Children Be Reading This Book?' Hopefully that will set your mind at rest over your concerns that the Bible god might be real.

After that, my suggestion is that you pour yourself a drink, forget all the fairy tales that are needlessly troubling you, and go get that ninja outfit! Preferably get laid too. Life has so much to offer, don't waste any of it on imaginary beings and the silly stories made up by ignorant men of the past.

Best wishes,

Edmund

 

[I Ratant]

"Suppose a man has a son who is stubborn and rebellious, a son who will not obey his parents, even though they punish him ... Then the men of the city are to stone him to death, and so you will get rid of this evil' (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)."
.
Sometimes, the old ways are still the best ways.

 

[DoubtingStephen]

"Suppose a man has a son who is stubborn and rebellious, a son who will not obey his parents, even though they punish him ... Then the men of the city are to stone him to death, and so you will get rid of this evil' (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)."
.
Sometimes, the old ways are still the best ways.

God Hates Brats

Proverbs 23: 13-14
"Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with a rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with a rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell."

Proverbs 20:30
"Blows that wound cleanse away evil; strokes make clean the innermost parts"

Leviticus 20:9
" For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood [shall be] upon him."

 

[I Ratant]

Watching a couple of young punks scrawl some illiterate crap on a US Post Office van a day or so ago, I wanted to take up the rod of righteousness and beat them .. couldn't beat them senseless, they already are.. beat them some how. But two gangstas against one old guy, no, caution sez no.
Wait for the thunderbolt of retribution.
Big Sky Daddy does do that, doesn't he?

 

[DoubtingStephen]

But two gangstas against one old guy, no, caution sez no.
Wait for the thunderbolt of retribution.
Big Sky Daddy does do that, doesn't he?

A wise choice!

I think there was a part somewhere in which Sky Daddy picks certain people to act as his agents, distributing condemnation and collecting contributions. I think it might involve UHF and cable TV stations that nobody in their right mind would ever watch. But operators are standing by to take your "prayer offerings" (VISA, MasterCard and American Express).

 

[I Ratant]

I'm wondering..
My g.f. asked me to give her some nail clippers.
So I did.
She complained about them being so small!
Tough, that's the clippers I have.
The very next morning, on my morning constipational stroll out in the desert, I took a slightly different route than usual.
And... there, lying in the middle of the dirt trail was this perfectly good set of -large- nail clippers!
I said to myself, I said, "You (BSD) gotta be s******g me!"
"50 people are dying today in Iraq over religious differences, and You give me a doo-dad anyone could live without perfectly well!"
And, it didn't get me laid anyway, when I gave it to her!

 

[DoubtingStephen]

I Ratant, there simply is no justice.

Which desert? We live in the northwest corner of the Sonoran desert.

Obligatory thread-related comment:

Just say NO to fact-free belief systems

 

[I Ratant]

Mohave Desert.
I've found cell phones, lots of tools, cash, the detritus of civilization.
People use it as a dump.
There's one new trash site which looking at the contents is probably the result of a messy divorce. Lots of useable children's stuff, which normally wouldn't be tossed.
I keep hoping to see the local mountain lions that have taken up residence near by.
It's a good place to commune with nature, overlooking all the trash. Just the sheer number and variations in the wild life is awesome.
Contemplating why so many?
And some are not that "nice", in human terms.
Tarantula Hawk Wasps, Ichneumon wasps.. chose some poor doofus spider and lay their eggs in the spider, without killing it. The eggs hatch and the nymphs eat their way out, which does the spider no good at all.
Did Noah HAVE to collect a breeding pair of those?
The black and orange is the Tarantula Hawk. It's at least 2 inches long. The other is the Ichneumon.
The "creator" with his inordinate fondness for beetles could have skipped these two, for sheer ickyness, but I guess for the overall balance of nature, Mother won out!
She also won this close encounter with man.
Someone whacked this Yucca stalk before it was fully grown. It recovered and turned around and grew up like God intended, and flowered.
Plucky little thing!

 

[streamlet]

You know, I always wanted to believe that when I was a christian, But it seemed as though the only thing I really cared about wasn't going to be in heaven... And that just broke my faith.

You don't mean your hentai collection do you?? 'Cause teh naughty has its place in life but...

More seriously, that's what turned me off from Christian-type religion. Some of the people I love best are headed straight down. And I'd rather be with them than with any god who'd hate them. In the end I decided that any gods that exist are, well, they're gods and therefore not DUMB and will understand that I'm an imperfect little person doing my best and if they want me to believe something in particular they know how to let me know.

Maybe that's a flavor of faith in the Intelligence of God. Or maybe it's a dumb simplistic idea, but it still makes sense to me.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Yeah - because they don't cherry pick using their own interpretations.

A contradiction is a contradiction. An instance of cruelty and violence is an instance of cruelty and violence.

And, you are wrong. Every citation you pull up from the list takes you to the full passage.

I take it you've never used the SAB yourself?

 

[I Ratant]

Considering that most of the people that have lived, and most that will live will have never heard of the Judeo/Christian/Islamic Sky Daddy, condemning these ignorants to eternal damnation wouldn't be logical.
But as J/C/I SD is presented as totally illogical, no matter how the texts are parsed, eternal damnation thru a lack of knowledge would be in tune with the rest of the silliness.
And there's all those "souls" instilled at conception, with mammalian conception/birth being the 50% or greater failure that it is added to those who do survive birth, there has to more "souls" out of heaven than in.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Not necessarily - theology can be very logical. It's just that the premises the logic is based on can be a bit out.

If you are looking at theology as a means of rationalizing behavior it is very logical. It's a very logical means of taking the natural guilt one feels from having evolved as a human (a gregarious species) when you want someone else's land or whatever.

Man to self: "God told me I could have it, and he said to kill the people except keep the virgin women for myself. I'm guiltless."

Very logical indeed from that perspective.

 

[Elizabeth I]

Well, if worst comes to worst, you go to hell. It cant be that bad.......

Yeah, all the most interesting people will be there.

"Suppose a man has a son who is stubborn and rebellious, a son who will not obey his parents, even though they punish him ... Then the men of the city are to stone him to death, and so you will get rid of this evil' (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)."
.
Sometimes, the old ways are still the best ways.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

I'm wondering..
My g.f. asked me to give her some nail clippers.
So I did.
She complained about them being so small!
Tough, that's the clippers I have.
The very next morning, on my morning constipational stroll out in the desert, I took a slightly different route than usual.
And... there, lying in the middle of the dirt trail was this perfectly good set of -large- nail clippers!
I said to myself, I said, "You (BSD) gotta be s******g me!"
"50 people are dying today in Iraq over religious differences, and You give me a doo-dad anyone could live without perfectly well!"
And, it didn't get me laid anyway, when I gave it to her!

I was hitchhiking with a friend in my college days. We had traveled across half the US, up into Canada and we were trying to get a ride out of Banff. It was difficult because there was competition so we headed on down the long lonely country road on foot. Quite a while later and a few miles away my shoe fell apart. The sole fell off, there was no hope of repair and it was not going to be pretty going barefoot to the next town or until we got a ride. When low and behold right there on the side of the road in the middle of the forest within minutes, nay seconds, of the shoe disaster was a perfectly good pair of PUMA tennis shoes that were a perfect fit.

They were my favorite shoes for more than a year after that, until they completely wore out. No gods involved, just a very incredible but very nice coincidence.