(January 16, 2016 at 6:40 pm)athrock Wrote: I mean, if you're going to be a REAL atheist, you've got to think outside the box of Western society and have reasons for rejecting more than just the nasty God of the OT, don't you think?

There are degrees of certainty, and correspondingly, degrees of uncertainty.  Russell's proverbial "celestial teapot" comes to mind.  It's not a "good god" versus a "bad", but inconsistencies in the thoughts of Christians, now and in the past, that lead to untenable conclusions.  After all, the OT genocides were, for centuries, accepted by nearly everyone; in fact, it was only in the 15th-century, with the advent of Jon Hus, that history records any type of "dissent" against the universal consent of capital punishment "in mass".  Showing a religion to be inconsistent with itself, IMO, strengthens the claims that it is intrinsically false and devoid of any revelatory truth.  You can certainly be a "generic monotheist" but if you are asked about god, you can assert absolutely nothing about him/her/it.

For me rejecting other god based religions was easy once I became an atheist because I didn't believe in gods.

(January 16, 2016 at 5:43 pm)athrock Wrote:

(January 16, 2016 at 5:17 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Or it isn't.  You sit on one side of the line and I sit on the other.  Ne'er the twain shall meet, eh?  I have to ask, though...would you advocate that we kill 70k people if our government failed to conduct a census properly?  Will you advocate for the execution of children for the incompetence of a census taker or the crimes of their parents?

Show me that you have the courage of your convictions.  Condone those actions.  Or...... are you a fraud?

You keep assuming that 70K died simply because David conducted a census. And maybe that was true, but maybe there were other reasons for God's punishment of the people with the census merely being the final straw, so to speak.

You question our understanding of the text, but you're the first to depart from it when it suits you. That's hypocritical.

(January 16, 2016 at 7:12 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:

(January 16, 2016 at 5:43 pm)athrock Wrote: You keep assuming that 70K died simply because David conducted a census. And maybe that was true, but maybe there were other reasons for God's punishment of the people with the census merely being the final straw, so to speak.

You question our understanding of the text, but you're the first to depart from it when it suits you.  That's hypocritical.

Par for the course I would have said.

(January 16, 2016 at 6:54 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I think we've reached the point where you can no longer feel comfortable defending your previous claims.  You do not agree with gods actions and would not engage in them yourself.  

So yeah...you're a fraud.

Have fun /w the thread.

:drops the mic:

Finally.

(January 16, 2016 at 6:56 pm)Cecelia Wrote: Actually it's quite simple as to why I've dismissed other religions.  Once I gave up my Christianity, I came to realize the one big question: Why would god choose a small subset of people to give his laws to, instead of giving them to everyone?  I saw much of the same sexism and homophobia in other religions as I did Christianity.  But more than that I saw that they were no different from Christianity.  A small group of people when the whole is considered.  One area among the hugeness of this earth.  Why give truth to a small group of people, expecting them to live by the rules you set, and then not telling the rest of the world what your rules are?  Most of those religions also require one thing to run them: Money.  They would not sustain if they did not have money.  None had an ancient set of morals that screamed 'too ahead of their time to be the values of the people who wrote the texts.'

Read Acts again...the early Church didn't have much money, Cecelia. Yet, it eventually overcame the mighty Roman Empire and then the rest of the world.

As for why God chose to begin with a small group, there are numerous possible reasons:

1. Ever notice how the the potency of bleach is diminished as it becomes diluted? The original church had much more "cleansing" power than what we see in the Church today.
2. God had spent a very long time preparing a small group to receive the Incarnation. This would have been difficult to accomplish on a global scale.
3. God has allowed the people involved in the Church to play a role in the salvation of the world. Just as he allows us to be co-creators when we procreate.


One more point - and this is one that you atheists CONSTANTLY fail to acknowledge: God is not going to send people to hell just because they have not heard the gospel. It just doesn't work that way. If your Baptist upbringing led you to believe otherwise, then blame John Calvin.

You might benefit from reading some basic Catholic theology.

(January 17, 2016 at 1:06 pm)athrock Wrote: One more point - and this is one that you atheists CONSTANTLY fail to acknowledge: God is not going to send people to hell just because they have not heard the gospel. It just doesn't work that way. If your Baptist upbringing led you to believe otherwise, then blame John Calvin.

You might benefit from reading some basic Catholic theology.

Quote:Unbelief may be taken in two ways: first, by way of pure negation, so that a man be called an unbeliever, merely because he has not the faith. Secondly, unbelief may be taken by way of opposition to the faith; in which sense a man refuses to hear the faith, or despises it, according to Isaiah 53:1: "Who hath believed our report?" It is this that completes the notion of unbelief, and it is in this sense that unbelief is a sin.

If, however, we take it by way of pure negation, as we find it in those who have heard nothing about the faith, it bears the character, not of sin, but of punishment, because such like ignorance of Divine things is a result of the sin of our first parent. If such like unbelievers are damned, it is on account of other sins, which cannot be taken away without faith, but not on account of their sin of unbelief. Hence Our Lord said (John 15:22) "If I had not come, and spoken to them, they would not have sin"; which Augustine expounds (Tract. lxxxix in Joan.) as "referring to the sin whereby they believed not in Christ." (Summa Theologica, II II, 10, 1)

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3010.htm

And there you go ignoring all the other problems I have with your homophobic, sexist, god. I said that once I dismissed Christianity (I'm reasonably certain that the Abrahamic God as described in the bible does not exist), I was able to dismiss other religions based on that line of reasoning. And Christianity most certainly fails the test of having morals that were ahead of their time.

As a woman, and a mother of five daughters, I could never worship a cruel capricious sexist god. You won't find many mainstream religions that aren't sexist. From Buddhism to Scientology, they all see women as something less. And I'm not something less. My daughters are not something less. And anyone expecting me to accept that I am, can kindly go fuck themselves.

(January 17, 2016 at 1:06 pm)athrock Wrote: One more point - and this is one that you atheists CONSTANTLY fail to acknowledge: God is not going to send people to hell just because they have not heard the gospel. It just doesn't work that way. If your Baptist upbringing led you to believe otherwise, then blame John Calvin.

You might benefit from reading some basic Catholic theology.

I see you've now revealed you're a monotheist and not just merely an "open-minded agnostic". No wonder you seemed too exposed to theistic and Christian materials/resources and did not pay much attention to secular ones.

What's the next thing you're going to tell us about yourself? You're a Catholic? If so, just say so now. Don't hide behind terms like "open-minded" and act like as if you don't have a definite view regarding God because you're being "objective". Very misleading of you.

(January 18, 2016 at 1:35 pm)Irrational Wrote:

(January 17, 2016 at 1:06 pm)athrock Wrote: One more point - and this is one that you atheists CONSTANTLY fail to acknowledge: God is not going to send people to hell just because they have not heard the gospel. It just doesn't work that way. If your Baptist upbringing led you to believe otherwise, then blame John Calvin.

You might benefit from reading some basic Catholic theology.

I see you've now revealed you're a monotheist and not just merely an "open-minded agnostic". No wonder you seemed too exposed to theistic and Christian materials/resources and did not pay much attention to secular ones.

What's the next thing you're going to tell us about yourself? You're a Catholic? If so, just say so now. Don't hide behind terms like "open-minded" and act like as if you don't have a definite view regarding God because you're being "objective". Very misleading of you.

You're surprised?