D-P just dropped this on Rev777, thought it was worthy.
(April 10, 2014 at 12:11 am)DeistPaladin Wrote: I'm pointing out the stark contrast between the world of the Bible and the world we live in.
Read the Babble and you read about a world drenched in the supernatural. The god of the Babble is not a subtle character in the least. In the Old Testament, he routinely interacted with the other characters, even speaking face-to-face with Moses and giving a public speech to Judea. In the New Testament, you have not just Jesus but also people of faith able to heal and cast out demons, angels breaking people out of prison and booming voices from the sky.
Put down the Babble and look around. It's a natural universe, devoid of supernatural upheaval, governed by predictable laws and best understood by science and reason. The Christian god has retreated to become a subtle observer in events, barely able to muster the power to occasionally appear on a slice of toast. Christians who believe this god intervenes in human affairs can only point to natural occurrences like hurricanes or earthquakes, where divine intervention becomes indistinguishable from unfortunate turns of well-understood forces of nature.
The contrast between the dreamscape world of your scripture and the way the universe actually operates in reality becomes especially palpable when the apologists step forward to offer their best evidence for their beliefs. William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel, Habermas, et al, have no storehouse of holy relics like the magic handkerchiefs of Paul (see the Book of Acts of the Apostles 19:11-12). They can perform no miracles of healing as repeatable demonstrations performed under medical peer review (see Mark 16:17-18). There are no angels that can be summoned to strike dead the world's tyrants (Acts 12:23), nor can your god make a speech to the public (Judges 1:1-3) or shout from the sky (Matt 3:17).
They can offer no evidence of any kind even though the Bible depicts a realm in which this kind of evidence should be expected.
Instead, the apologists are limited to the arguments that should be expected in a natural universe. They bring to the table abstract philosophy, mental constructs and verbal slight-of-hand. Entire textbooks on logical fallacies could be penned using their arguments as examples but letting that go, one can't help but notice that when the reverberations of the noise they make fade away, there is not one shred of evidence, a single repeatable demonstration or the aid of any supernatural agent to lend credence to their fanciful claims. The only magic I ever see is the razzle-dazzle of the apologist showman.
It's a natural world we live in, my friend, and if there is some sort of god out there, It clearly has no interest in being worshiped by the microscopic beings on a pale blue dot that only came into existence in the relatively recent history of the universe.
"There remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking." ~Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great
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