RE: What makes your faith true?
November 4, 2017 at 10:45 am
(This post was last modified: November 4, 2017 at 10:47 am by Fake Messiah.)
(November 4, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: He chose a method that put a premium on human freedom and was merely adequate to the task rather than something so compelling that you would have had to be in a deep state of denial or otherwise deluded to reject it.
What? His method was to whisper into the ears of crazy people, hermits stuff that are historically unprovable and non existent like Moses, Samson, Adam, Daniel, Noah etc. That were later re-written in all sorts of versions. Even today Catholics don't read protestant Bibles and so on. I mean if some deity wanted us to follow some written word why not write it on some non destructible monoliths on some place where no one can't live for long (so that no one can claim the land) so that everyone can read it as it is meant.
(November 4, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: Atheism certainly attacks other religions beyond Christianity, but Christianity has always been the main impetus.Hey atheism exists long before Christianity. Just remember what Epicurus said: Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
And yet he was right, even by your account because he was talking about Olympian gods which everyone now knows don't exist.
(November 4, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: Every document is open to this kind of behavior, and that speaks to the nature of human beings, which the Bible describes quite accurately.Not really. Bible is hardly a document considering that it's written, like I told you before, as poetry and metaphors which is open for interpretations. Some parts are straight but contradictory elsewhere. Like divorce, in one part Jesus says people can't divorce and in other that divorce is OK if woman is caught in adultery and that's why some denominations allow divorce and some don't.
(November 4, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: Slavery in the Bible was nothing like chattel slavery in America.I really don't understand how you can say that considering that Bible lets you beat slaves, rape their wives and if they were not from your Jewish tribes there weren't no constrains you could kill them and do what ever you liked.
(November 4, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: Yes, there were some who used the Bible to defend the American institution of slavery, though anyone who has studied the Bible knows how illegitimate that interpretation was.Some?! Only the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who claimed to follow what the scriptures said: "[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God ... it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation."
While on the winning side leaders were mostly deists, not very religious although most of the soldiers and people were Christians and they clearly were not guided by the literal words of scripture but by their own interpretations and innate senses of a higher good.
(November 4, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: Where Christianity has had a deep and abiding influence, widespread slavery of the type you’re talking about is virtually unheard of. So while I take your objection seriously, I’m afraid it is historically and factually misplaced.Take Popes and other fathers of the Catholic Church who owned slaves as late as 1800. Jesuits in colonial Maryland and nuns in Europe and Latin America owned slaves. The Church did not condemn slavery until 1888, after every Christian nation had abolished the practice.
(November 4, 2017 at 4:50 am)Odoital77 Wrote: If everywhere human civilization existed on the planet at that time was affected, saying that every mountain top was covered isn’t a hard thing to understand.Bible claims that God said he'd kill every living thing so it's hardly local and even if it was local then it would have been very stupid of Noah to spend 100 years building a giant ark when he could have just moved away to the "unaffected parts" of the world that you claim existed.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"