(September 24, 2021 at 12:20 pm)ayost Wrote:

(August 22, 2021 at 11:09 am)Spongebob Wrote: That is another good point.  It certainly is not necessary.  I would say that it requires conscious choice and that must be grounded in some sort of philosophy.  It doesn't just happen by chance because humans are inherently selfish.  But there's ample evidence to demonstrate that adherence to a religious philosophy isn't necessary, although it can certainly be done through a religious philosophy.  Just happens that the message so easily gets lost and morphs into self-righteousness.

So the idea that "Christians don't live this way" so Christianity is untrue or unnecessary or whatever the conclusion is doesn't make sense.

1. "Christians" is a category, a group, so broad that it lacks meaning. It's like saying "white people". That's too broad of a category.
2. Does the OP know all Christians? Does he know the percentage of good to bad Christians?
3. Why choose to label Christians by the bad ones. I don't say "you know all of those murdering atheists" because Stalin was an atheist.
4. If you learned about and understood Christianity you would know the answer to this question. But you haven't so you don't.

But I think the more interesting idea is morality comes from conscious choice and should be grounded in philosophy. Can we talk about that?

I's certainly true that Christians is a wide scope, but after you've argued with about a thousand of them, generalization becomes pretty convenient because their arguments change only by minor degrees.

(September 24, 2021 at 6:19 pm)ayost Wrote: 40,000 is a dumb number only used by the most extreme people. No moderate person believes that number.

People who label and categorize varieties of belief use such numbers, as it's the product of their life's work.  It seems like a strange thing to even bicker about, like the numerous discontinuities and inconsistencies of magic book - as...no matter how many christian cults or hilarious fuckups we find in magic book...neither thing speaks to the existence of a god or of peoples reasons for not believing in gods...assuming they even have one.

Apologetics ends up seeming like a series of self inflicted wounds most of the time. Seeking to build credibility, it destroys it, instead.

(September 24, 2021 at 6:19 pm)ayost Wrote: It’s not an interpretation here, it’s translation. The original manuscripts were written in Greek. Not English, not Chinese, not Russian. They weren’t written by modern scholars. Scholars don’t determine what the Bible says. So the only thing that matters is the original Greek manuscripts. The original Greek manuscripts only say Friday. The rest are theories and they are theories that don’t hold water. I’m sorry but that’s demonstrably true.

Many people write about their own lives and the lives of others decades after the person is gone. What does that matter?

The problem is the people reading. The writings have no contradictions.

40,000 is a dumb number only used by the most extreme people. No moderate person believes that number.

I’m not responding to everything you posted. Like I said, these things have already been written about time and time again. The reason you don’t know the response is because you e never taken the time to look or you would know the response. That means you’re willfully ignorant. I’m not going to do your research for you. Besides, you’re not listening anyways.

A translation is an interpretation of a word(s). Stop doing the apologist two step. 

The amount of time, it matters because the amount of time between action/event and documentation allows for error. Every played the telephone game?

Nope, the no contradiction position is your assertion, nothing more. If the bible were all that you claim it to be then any literate person should be able to read it and come to the same or at least similar conclusions as everyone else, without anything additional. A book by (and I'm convinced you consider it the actual word of god) or about god should not need human intervention to be understood. We are, after all, talking about an all powerful, all seeing and infinitely wise god right? Would an entity with those attributes need to have his words and meanings explained?

I'll give you another dumb number, 1.............. get it?

Tell you what, I'll take the time to research if you can do one thing, provide concrete evidence that god(s) exist in reality, evidence that I and others will accept. I won't consider argument, anecdote or abstractions evidence. Until you can do that I will continue to consider god(s) a human mental conception, nothing more. That means there is nothing worth researching, the same as many many other mental concoctions. I could give you a list of them but my guess is that your response would be "but god is different" which I have heard before. Actually everything you have said here I've heard before in one form or another, for over 50 years.

Final thought: You state that you came here to learn, but your initial post, and behavior following, indicated something else. I believe what you really want is for atheists to validate your beliefs as reasonable and/or rational and somehow based in fact. When I told you that I believed that they were not, you began the apologist justification/rationalization dance. Quite frankly I don't really care what you or other christians believe. The only time I get bent out of shape with christians (or other believers) is when they tell me that my atheist (no god) position is wrong or that I need to validate and/or accept their belief. I'll accept that your belief exists but don't accept the belief itself.

I don't consider you a bad person for believing. And admit that christians do a lot of good things, things that might not get accomplished without their community. You just have that one bad motivation that I've seen, coming to an atheist and insisting on validation. You should realize that you're not the first or different.

Again, there is a difference between interpretation and translation. I see that you don’t get it, but it’s there. And you’re confusing the two. The article you gave me used a bad translation. That leads to bad interpretation. It’s not a dance, it’s a fact. Interpretation and translation are not the same thing.

As far as Gods involvement in interpretation that again just demonstrates your ignorance. The Bible never claims God works like a puppet master, controlling everything. In fact, it’s quit the opposite. God is working in and through his people in spite of who they are. Gods word gets through to who He intends it get through to.

As with my original argument, the problem is not the evidence, it’s you and how you interpret the evidence. You aren’t looking for God. You’re looking for a reason for there to be no God. I did come here to learn but you have nothing to teach. You don’t even know the opposing view. You said it yourself: you don’t care what I or other Christians have to say.

But that’s atheism: ignorant, not self reflexive, arrogant, inconsistent.

It’s the same everywhere I go.

(September 24, 2021 at 9:40 pm)ayost Wrote: Again, there is a difference between interpretation and translation. I see that you don’t get it, but it’s there. And you’re confusing the two. The article you gave me used a bad translation. That leads to bad interpretation. It’s not a dance, it’s a fact. Interpretation and translation are not the same thing.

As far as Gods involvement in interpretation that again just demonstrates your ignorance. The Bible never claims God works like a puppet master, controlling everything. In fact, it’s quit the opposite. God is working in and through his people in spite of who they are. Gods word gets through to who He intends it get through to.

As with my original argument, the problem is not the evidence, it’s you and how you interpret the evidence. You aren’t looking for God. You’re looking for a reason for there to be no God. I did come here to learn but you have nothing to teach. You don’t even know the opposing view. You said it yourself: you don’t care what I or other Christians have to say.

But that’s atheism: ignorant, not self reflexive, arrogant, inconsistent.

It’s the same everywhere I go.

Go forth and do more research to prove your theory. We'll wait.

Your insults certainly aren't very Christian nor are they winning converts.

(September 24, 2021 at 9:40 pm)ayost Wrote: Gods word gets through to who He intends it get through to.

god doesn't exist until you believe god exists. What a bunch of horse shit.

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(September 24, 2021 at 9:40 pm)ayost Wrote: As with my original argument, the problem is not the evidence, it’s you and how you interpret the evidence.

The problem is that you have no convincing evidence and this ^^^ is you making excuses and passing judgement. False superiority and entitlement.

Stop whining and put up or shut up dickweed.

(September 24, 2021 at 9:40 pm)ayost Wrote: But that’s atheism: ignorant, not self reflexive, arrogant, inconsistent.

It’s the same everywhere I go.

Ah, I see, so this isn't your first excursion.  What do you think every place you've gone had in common?

Hello @ayost!
As this is a forum, we can have more than two people posting on any given thread, so I thought I'd chime in.

(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: I am looking to challenge atheists as well as be challenged.

Challenge accepted!

As far as I'm concerned, my atheism came about after looking at the world and concluding that, with or without the gods that people believe in, it would be the same. Mind you, I was basically a kid back then, in my early teens or so...

Allow me to elaborate.

Let's start with "looking at the world" and automatically being pragmatic and eliminating solipsism from the equation.
The world around us is pretty much as we see it. Instruments exist to aid us in seeing it in far greater detail or with different perspectives, so I'll consider these technical devices as extensions of our senses - what they see is the world as it is, whether its just a long exposure camera that allows us to see the far depths of the Universe, or a technique that lets us attribute an age to a particular rock sample, or a huge particle accelerator that lets us peer into the ultimate constituents of matter.
All these observations have allowed us to build a concept of the world which begins in what we call the Big Bang. The Big Bang somehow produced the basic elements and Physics is the tool we use to describe our observations of how they interact with other similar and dissimilar elements. These elements come together to form complex structures with larger scale behaviours - some of these we gather into Solid State Matter (for crystals mainly) and some of these we lump into the category of Chemistry.
There's a particular element, Carbon, which is abundant enough and "flexible" enough to interact with others in a huge number of ways... we call the branch of Chemistry that delves into the structures containing this particular element Organic Chemistry, because we've also noticed that living, or organic, things are mostly comprised of these structures. Organic chemistry gives you the building blocks of life and another field which we called Biology.
I'm pretty sure you're mostly aware of all these words, so I'll skip on defining them much further.

Observations in the Biology field have led us to postulate that life on this planet originated as simple microbial life which then evolved and evolved and evolved and scattered and evolved and scattered and evolved over millions and millions of years into the myriad lifeforms we see today, passing through some of the ones we find as fossils which no longer exist.
At some point along this chain of living organisms, our ancestors appeared. For hundreds of thousands of years, again according to observations of things left behind, these humans lived in what we call the Stone age - mostly nomads, hunters, gatherers, taking shelter where they could, using ever more sophisticated stone utensils. Eventually, other more specialized instruments were developed from different materials, copper, iron... and writing was invented.
With writing we nowadays can peer into the minds of those who lived long ago and it seems that, by this time, people already believed in the supernatural and the divine. The origins of the belief in the divine are barred from us. We can thus only make educated guesses into how mankind went from a tree dwelling ape (which we can assume had no conception of the divine, much like the apes we have nowadays), into the believers we see existing in the first writings.
One can point to some ancient structures and burial remains and infer that some were of some spiritual/religious nature. The earliest date for such artefacts is 50,000 BCE. At some point, after, say, one million BCE and before 50k BCE, mankind developed the notion of the divine and it has since stuck around. Why would it stick around? Probably because it provides an explanation to many questions which were unanswerable and allowed people to keep working towards the tribes' common goal, instead of delving into thought and contributing nothing. In many places, this notion probably became somewhat dominant, leading to a selection pressure for people that have an inherent tendency towards belief in the supernatural, possibly hijacking the sense of trust.
Perhaps this is what theists nowadays appropriate as the "sense of the divine", or something like that?

All this information can be gleamed (with a few educated guesses) through observation of the world around us.

Let's now say there is a god. What would be different about the unchronicled past? Would our observations and conclusions change? Perhaps they would if we would try to find out what happened in the far far unobservable and unevidenced past, that which happened prior to the Big Bang (if prior is a wor dthat can be used). How did that Big Bang come to be? Don't know. But, ever since it happened, things have progressed fine with no apparent need for any divine intervention.


The bible appears fairly late, in a population with an already rich history of conflicting and coexisting religious beliefs. While it carries some worthwhile tales of morality, it also has obviously many references to the divine entity and its alleged interactions with mankind. Worthy of note is the absence of this divine entity in any writings prior to anyone believing in it in that particular region of the world. If this divine entity does exist and is as interested in the affairs of mankind as one would be led to believe by the followers of the religion, I would expect it to have manifested itself in a much more obvious fashion and equally spread all over the world. As it is, it seems to be nothing more than an evolution of prior belief systems, with its also evolving clergy in a quest to control the populace in order to keep themselves in a position of power with little or no contribution to the affairs required for survival. I'll grant you the long standing psychological benefit of relief that believers can achieve, mostly when faced with mortality.

(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: I am not hiding my thoughts on atheism. I think atheism is inconsistent and absurd and I think no atheist lives consistently with atheism.

Do you think the outline provided above is inconsistent?
If yes, how?

(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: When I say atheism is inconsistent and absurd that isn't an insult to the people, that's a comment on the belief system that is atheism.

"the belief system that is atheism".... how cute!
As the Grand Nudger told you, atheism pertains to simply not believing in the existence of a god.
There is an alternative definition that goes further and states that there are no gods at all and some people do follow this.

Most atheists, however, stick to the more intellectually honest position of simply not believing in the existence of gods.
As it turns out, the concept of god is sufficiently vague for reasonable doubt to exist about it s actual existence.

(September 24, 2021 at 1:17 pm)ayost Wrote: When I say no atheist lives consistently with atheism, that is a comment on the people, sort of like your comment on Christians. Not an insult, just an observation.

Care to explain how an atheist can live in a way that is inconsistent with atheism?
Does he not believe in god, but worships god? Is this what you observe?

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(September 24, 2021 at 1:25 pm)ayost Wrote: Ok, so it feels like your first statement is assuming that there was a time or people or civilization that had no concept of God and then all of the sudden theists started making up gods to explain things. Fine hypothesis, I guess, only I would challenge you to show me the people or culture or time where there was no God and then someone made it up. That's a strong assumption you can't prove. In fact, all of the evidence seems to point in the other direction: that man has always had a relationship with God, even though that relationship can get messed up.

Above, I outlined a scenario where this happened. I think it's a believable scenario. Do bear in mind that it wasn't something that happened overnight. It took many many generations and refinements to the concept of spirits. Some of the initial spiritual beliefs were probably animistic, where natural phenomena would take on some anthropomorphic features.
I think "God said, Let us make man in our image" is the ultimate subversion of how religious beliefs started and represents how the believers nowadays have the whole notion backwards.

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(September 24, 2021 at 2:22 pm)ayost Wrote: Are you a humanist? Meaning without theism or other supernatural beliefs, man has the ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good?

Those are a lot of big words and high order traits that sound good, but...
Mankind is just another animal on this planet. Our ability to reason and philosophise has provided us with tools to ascertain long reaching consequences of our actions.
We generally judge actions that lead to less suffering as good and those that lead to more suffering than reasonable as bad. In between, there's a grey area where ignorance and practicality rule.
For example, when we started using Internal combustion engines (ICE), burning fuel drawn from pockets within the Earth, it seemed to be good to help make people move faster and connect with one another more efficiently. But things turned out somewhat different, so nowadays we are striving to do away with ICEs. Now we know better.

Christianity provides a series of rules that lead to a humanity that propagates itself indefinitely, while keeping the clergy class around. Clearly, this was a working set of rules for pre-industrial humanity, but we can foresee how it can fail in the face of worldwide overpopulation. Because of this, some of Christian morality is clearly not aiming to "the greater good" and is thus clearly not handed down from an external super powerful entity which would have foreseen this and provided much more specific rules.
This alone rules out the claim that the christian god is the one true god (if one exists at all).

(September 24, 2021 at 9:40 pm)ayost Wrote: As with my original argument, the problem is not the evidence, it’s you and how you interpret the evidence. You aren’t looking for God. You’re looking for a reason for there to be no God.

And what about those who look for God through evidence and find Krishna or Allah or Ganesha or Xenu?

Of course, it’s easy for us with our 21st Century, materialistic minds to dismiss the Bible as a load of rubbish. But in the actual analysis, that is exactly what the Bible turns out to be---a load of rubbish! It is a book of nonsensical, fantastic stories about talking animals, talking bushes, mythical creatures, people rising from the dead, magic and pseudo-history. It is the creation of ignorant, fallible men, reflecting the prejudices, superstitions, bad theology and fears of the times in which it was written. It promotes slavery, ethnic cleansing, race prejudice, wars of conquest, the subjugation of women, child abuse and genital mutilation. It promotes the worship and celebration of a god who is little more than an egotistical, homicidal, fear-mongering tyrant. It is a book which any reasonable, intellectually honest, and intelligent person should heartily dismiss as bad fiction.