You claim I make assertions and that I have no proof. Yet the entire time I have spoken with you no one has given me any proof that there is no God. Where is your proof that I am just making things up? If you really want proof read the bible and pray humbly. Make sure that your stance is right because you are gabbling with your eternal soul. Also Rob I don't play tricks.

The burden isn't on us to disprove your claims; you need to actually provide support and evidence for your claims or they are unbelievable by definition.

Quote:If you really want proof read the bible and pray humbly.

translation time again:

"Bow motherfucker"

I'll give you this Rek...the message of the scriptures aren't lost on you.......

(June 9, 2015 at 3:45 pm)Rekeisha Wrote: You claim I make assertions and that I have no proof. Yet the entire time I have spoken with you no one has given me any proof that there is no God. Where is your proof that I am just making things up? If you really want proof read the bible and pray humbly. Make sure that your stance is right because you are gabbling with your eternal soul. Also Rob I don't play tricks.

You're preaching not discussing. I couldn't care less but there's actually a rule against that on this forum.

As for our proof, we don't need any. We're usually not claiming absolutes. You on the other hand do nothing but. Also, may I point out, that I'm always amazed at the people coming here bible thumping and think they're the first one doing it. In many cases we've read the bible and were less than impressed.

If all you came to do here is missionary work, you may just as well leave now. You're not the first doing it.

(June 9, 2015 at 3:45 pm)Rekeisha Wrote: You claim I make assertions and that I have no proof. Yet the entire time I have spoken with you no one has given me any proof that there is no God. Where is your proof that I am just making things up? If you really want proof read the bible and pray humbly. Make sure that your stance is right because you are gabbling with your eternal soul. Also Rob I don't play tricks.

I'm not going to spend my life trying to disprove every supernatural being that anyone has ever thought was true. Even the list of gods people have ever worshiped in a doozy, and there are still active religions with their own gods. Neither you nor I need to disprove Vishnu before deciding not to worship that god, and neither I nor a hindu have to disprove Yahweh.

(June 4, 2015 at 2:58 pm)Rekeisha Wrote: @Secular Elf did you have a relationship with Jesus?
@Rob that was a weird video... God is a just judge and will judge our actions. He will separate those who follow him from those who haven't. He will reward those who have been faithful and punish those who have rejected him. We are God's servant wither you like it or not and we are responsible for the information He has revealed to us. We will all be judge for what we have done or not done on this earth.

Please explain to me how the hell one can have a "relationship" with a "person" who is also a zombie and his own father, that is invisible, cannot be felt, cannot be touched, and is supposedly up there in some realm called "Heaven"?  HOW??!!

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(June 7, 2015 at 8:43 am)robvalue Wrote: I got a question though.

If you were born in a Muslim country, then much more likely than not you'd be a Muslim instead of a Christian, telling me a completely different set of "truths".

Now how can that be? How the can the truth depend on where you are born? Why does god tell people different things in different countries? This sounds much more like there are several gods to me, with limited ranges of influence. If it's all the same God and just misunderstandings, why is God letting people kill each other over it instead of sorting it out? He sounds kind of a dick.

Also, I'm thinking of a four figure number. Please ask God to tell you what it is. If he does, I'll be impressed.

Exactly rob.  Your point reminded me of a myth that Joseph Campbell related that is from one of the tribes of western Africa.  It is a trickster story.  This trickster walked in the middle of a grain field and he wore a hat with one side that was red and the other side was white.  There were two farmers on opposite sides of the field and both saw the trickster walk down the field.  One farmer ran to the other and said "did you see the god with the white hat?"  The other man said no and asked did he see the god with the red hat.  One called the other one a liar and  then they began fighting.  Sounds very much like the history of Christianity.  I got the story from watching the Power of Myth years ago.

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(June 7, 2015 at 9:44 pm)Lek Wrote:

(May 28, 2015 at 6:51 pm)Secular Elf Wrote: Very good discussion here.  Very interesting.  I have noticed that our dear Christian friends keep beating a dead horse.

Having been a Christian myself once, I am quite familiar with the arguments the theists are presenting.  I am just not that impressed with them.

The reasons why revolve around facts and knowledge.  I have since my slow long de-conversion learned some things and my knowledge base has expanded.

What I care about are facts, not necessarily what the Christians claim is "THE TRUTH."  Truth is a dime a dozen.  Facts stick around and are solid.

The history of Christianity, of which I have familiarized myself with, is full of interesting facts:

1.  The Torah (Old Testament), a product of First Temple Judaism and the Babylonian Exile, was influenced by Sumerian and West Semitic culture.  Clues from the Torah and from recent archaeological and DNA studies indicate that the Hebrews and Canaanites were from the same root stock of people and culture.  The Hebrews were originally polytheists or at least henotheists.  Monotheism evolved in Israel/Palestine with the ever growing power and influence of the priests of Yahweh (this was the second independent evolution of monotheism, the first was in Egypt ca. two centuries earlier by the Pharaoh Akhenaton, before the "Conquest of Canaan" ).  It was during the Babylonian Exile period that Jews adopted and adapted certain myths from the Assyro-Babylonian religion and weaved them into their own (Adam, Eve, and Trees story, the Great Flood story, the confounding of one
language into many story, Nimrod is a play on words of Enmerkar, the King of Kish--all have their origins in the original Sumerian mythology). The Hellenistic Culture also had its
influence on the Jewish Culture of the 1st Century BCE and 1st Century CE.

2.  The Early Christians, first and foremost before the Gentile influx into the religion, were Jews, thus, Christianity in its very beginnings was just another sect of Judaism, which grew
out of Second Temple Judaism.  Second Temple Judaism during the 1st Century CE was influenced not only by its direct ancestor of First Temple Judaism, but also by the pagan
cultures of the Greeks and Egyptians.

3.  The earliest Christians were not monolithic.  From its very beginning there were many groups that evolved over the first 100 years of its existence, all had variations in belief.  The
named groups include Nazarenes, Ebionites, Elkasites, Nicolaitans, Naasenes, Ophites, Carpocratians, etc., etc.

4.  Early on there were three different varieties of the sect of the followers of Yeshua ben Yusef: Elkasites, Ebionites, and Nazarenes.

5. The Christology (nature of Jesus) was divided into several varieties, depending on which Early Christian group you were talking about: Jesus as a Davidic Messiah, or as a reincarnated being, or as a Messiah who was not divine (all of which were among the Jewish Christians); or even more complicated among the Gentile Christians: Gnosticism (the material world is bad, created by an evil god [the demiurge] of the Hebrew Bible, and that Jesus was the Savior spirit sent from the true god of light to liberate the souls trapped there through secret teachings); Adoptionism held that Jesus was born human and became divine only at his baptism when God adopted him; Docetism held that Jesus was pure spirit and did not have a body, his appearance in human form was thus an illusion and Jesus could not physically die.  Pauline Christology held that Jesus was both divine and human at the same time.  This Pauline Christology became the view of the Proto-orthodox Christians, who held other opinions of Christ's nature as heresy, later became the predominant theological view among Orthodox Christianity through both argument and force of arms.

6.  The Nazarenes believed that Jesus was the Messiah that all Jews had been looking for.  In the Jewish context, a messiah (Hebrew: mashiach, “anointed one”) is a king or High Priest traditionally anointed with holy anointing oil.  He was never considered by Jews to be God or a pre-existent divine being or Son of God.  In its native Jewish context, the messiah was meant to be a future Jewish king from the royal Davidic line, who will be anointed with holy anointing oil, to be the king of God’s kingdom and rule the Jewish people during a Messianic Age.  Belief in the eventual coming of a future messiah is a fundamental part of Judaism even today.  

7.  The Elkasites believed that Jesus was a simple prophet who had been born before many times and would be born again frequently in the future.  This belief in reincarnation indicates that the Elkasites were evolving towards a Gnostic direction.

8. The Ebionites regarded Jesus as the Messiah but did not consider him divine.  They also zealously followed the Law of Moses and revered Jerusalem as the holiest city.  They restricted table fellowship only to Gentiles who converted to Judaism.

9.  Christianity began splitting away from Second Temple Judaism around 70 CE and was completely a new religion by 135 CE, all the while Second Temple Judaism evolved into Rabbinic Judaism.  The split was due to continuing tensions between traditional Judaism and Greco-Roman Culture as well as the Roman-Jewish conflicts (three wars) of the eastern Roman provinces.

10. In 144 CE Marcion, the founder of a somewhat gnostic Christianity known as Marcionism, was the first Christian to formulate a canon of scripture, called by the followers of Marcion the Gospel of the Lord.  Today it is known as the Gospel of Marcion. It initiated the formation of the New Testament.  Marcionism proved to be a great rival of the Proto-orthodox Christianity of Rome, which had excommunicated Marcion and declared his brand of Christianity heresy.

11. As Christianity continued to be spread it also continued to be more diverse.  In the Roman province of Phrygia in Asia Minor Montanism sprung up.  A charismatic prophetic movement of Christians led by Montanus and his associates Priscilla and Maximilla, it was well noted for its emotionalism.  Called the New Prophecy, it was declared heresy in 177 by the Proto-orthodox Christians.

12. Between 150 to 160 the school of Gnostic Christianity called Valentinianism was founded by its namesake, Valentinian.  He wrote The Gospel of the Truth.  After his death Valentinianism became a major movemnt that seriously challenged Proto-orthodox Christianity.  Valentinian Christology involved a godhead that was divided into three parts.  This trinitarian concept is recognized by modern scholarship to be influenced by ancient Egyptian religious thought, as Valentinian was an Egyptian from Phrebonis who taught in Alexandria.

13. During the Crisis of the Third Century (235-284 CE) Christianity underwent stress through being persecuted, which led to internal strife.  The Decian Pesecution of 250-251 resulted in Christians criticizing and accusing other Christians, mostly clerics, who gave in to imperial demands of citizenship.  These were called lapsi, “those who have lapsed/fallen away.”  This caused a rival papacy (anti-pope) and two schisms within the Church.  The anti-pope was Novatian, who founded Novatianism.  The Novatianists took a hard position against the lapsi when the Roman See sought reconciliation.  Novatianism was considered by the Roman Church to be heresy.

14. In 301 Armenia became the first nation-state to adopt Christianity as its official religion during the reign of King Tiridates III the Great.  A Christian community had been estabished there since the 1st Century CE but had largely reained a minority religion amidst the native pagan Armenians.  Gregory the Iluminator was the missionary who convinced Tiridates to convert to Chritianity.  Thereafter the King adopted a policy of aggressive conversion of his people, which resulted in a civil war that ended in his victory and the foundation of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

15. As a religion Christianity is like any other human institution in that it is subject to the same environmental forces that shape it and the same perspectives that study it.  Christianity in its very beginnings was a Jewish sect, and had inherited some qualities it still shares with Judaism, mainly monotheism.  As it gained more converts from the Gentile populations, it was also influenced by its surrounding cultural environment.  Christian beliefs were shaped, either through direct borrowing or indirectly influenced by other pagan religious ideology and mythology.  Directly from Zorastrianism or indirectly from the Essenes came the dualistic notion of the cosmic struggle of good and evil.  The idea of Satan had been changed in its native Judaic environment as the right-hand angel of Yahweh to the Christian enemy of God.  The idea of an immortal soul evolved first in Judaism as well as being influenced by Greek Platonism.  The finality of death and the tarrying of the shades of the dead in an underworld Judaism shared with Assyro-Babylonian mythology.  The Greek ideas of Hades as both a god and a place for all the dead as well as the myth of the imprisonment of the Titans in Tartarus and the Egyptian lake of fire of the underworld translated into the Christian idea of Hell.  Nearly all religions have a class of spirit beings of some sort, so Judaism and Christianity have their angels.  Depictions of angels as winged humanoids did not appear in Christian art until the 4th Century, but ideas of winged spirit beings from the iconography of Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Assyrians no doubt had their influence.  And ideas of the Apocalypse evolved from Hellenistic Judaism.

You stated that what you care about are facts, so why are you presenting the above as facts.  You are presenting a bunch of "facts" that in no way disprove orthodox christianity.  The earliest christians were not monolithic?  What other gods did they worship?  What does christianity starting out as a Jewish sect have to do with whether or not it's true?  Of course it was a Jewish sect.  The whole story of the bible is based on the promise that the messiah would come to the Jews,  What else would the first christians be?  Why would novatianism cause you to leave christianity?  Christianity is not true because some christians gave in to the demandsd of the government?  I like how how you've thrown out all this extraneous information and then drawn these crazy conclusions.

Willful ignorance is nothing to be proud of.

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(June 8, 2015 at 6:57 pm)abaris Wrote:

(June 8, 2015 at 6:22 pm)Rekeisha Wrote: He did come down to us and walked in the mud with us. He suffered with us and for us. He experience everything we experienced and died for us.

Your sig states, you believe in the trinity, so you can continue your sermon from here on to eternity without anyone even being remotely impressed.

But from a believer in the trinity, there's the obvious and mandatory question to be asked: There's god, there's the holy spirit and there's Jesus. They're all one spirit and so they are all god with all the powers god is attributed with. So Jesus can't die by definition, since it's in the job description of an omnipotent, eternal being that it can't perish. And since we can establish, again going by the idea of the trinity, that he pulled his dying trick for a sin, he, in his other persona, has created, it's even more ludicrous. And nevermind the fact that he was talking to himself when pleading to take this cup away from him.

So we can also establish that you're simply talking out of your ass, simply assembling a string of kitchen theology you grew up with.

Color me unimpressed.

Having read much on the history of Early Christianity, I submit some notations from my own essay on the subject that I wrote for my own use:

Quote: XI. Valentinianism and the Origins of the Trinity

Another Christian sect that arose in the 130s and gained a large following within the Roman Empire was that of the Gnostic Christian Valentinus (also called Valentinius). Born in Phrebonis, Egypt in 100 CE, Valentinus was schooled in Alexandria . He was reported to have been trained by Theudas, a disciple of St. Paul, from whom Valentinus professes to derive his ideas from. Teaching first in Alexandria, Valentinus went to Rome in 136 CE, and had between 150 and 155 CE arose to the heights of his teaching career and had been a well respected member of the Christian community in Rome. A prolific writer, the only surviving remains of his texts were transmitted by Clement of Alexandria, Marcellus of Ancyra, and Hippolytus. Most scholars believe that Valentinus wrote the Gospel of Truth, one of the texts found within the Nag Hammadi Library. Epiphanius reports that Valentinus withdrew to Cyprus after a long career and continued to teach and attract students. He died in 160 CE.

A school of gnostic philosophy was named after him, Valentinianism. It became a major gnostic movement after Valentinus's death, having spread from Rome to Egypt, Northwest Africa, Syria, and Asia Minor. Among the most notable Valentinians were Axionicus, Florinus, Heracleon, Marcus, and Ptolemy the Gnostic. Valentinus attempted, among many other Early Christians, to align Christianity with Platonism's dualistic conceptions (pleroma and kenoma). Valentinian cosmology included the Primal Being, called Bythos, as the beginning of everything, who gave rise to other beings (aeons, syzgies, Sophia, Man, Horos, etc.). According to Valentinianism, the God of the Torah/Old Testament is identified as the Demiurge, the imperfect creator of the material world. Valentinians held that Man participates in both spiritual and material nature.

Valentinian Christology contemplated the existence of three redeeming beings, or hypostases, the Godhead had three prosopas: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Gospel of Truth explains that possessing the unknown name of the Father enables the knower to penetrate the veil of ignorance separating all created beings from the Father, and declares that Jesus Christ as Savior has revealed that name through a variety of modes laden with a language of abstract elements. This Christological trinity and the figure of Horos the Limiter underscores the Ancient Egyptian religious influence upon Valentinianism in particular, and with Christianity in general. In Ancient Egyptian religion major and minor cults usually occurred in groupings of threes referred to as Triads , holy families consisting of two parents and an offspring ( e.g., Osiris the father, Isis the wife and mother, and their son Horus). The adoption of this concept within Christianity had a practical application in gaining more converts. Pagan converts to the new religion readily accepted the concept of a triune godhead as many non-Christian religions from the Middle East, especially Egyptian religious concepts, were imbued with orders of three within them. Getting back to Valentinian Christianity, the Valentinian belief was that gnosis, not faith, was the key to salvation. Valentinus' system was more monistic (the proposition that there is only one basic substance or principle as the ground of reality), though it was expressed in dualistic terms.

Valentinianism became a serious challenge to Proto-orthodox Christianity. The distinction between the human and divine Savior was a major point of contention between these two branches of Christianity. Valentinus had separated Christ into three figures: the spiritual, psychical, and the material. Each of the three Christ figures had its own meaning and purpose. Another point of contention between the two was the Valentinian assertion that God and the creator were two separate beings. Valentinians also considered women as equals or near-equals, for there were among them female prophets, healers, evangelists, and teachers. The Proto-orthodox saw this as a threat to what they considered the God-ordained male hierarchy of clerics. The most notable critic of Valentiniansm was Irenaeus, who vigorously condemned it as heresy.

The Valentinian movement later broke into two schools, an Eastern and a Western one. Disciples of Valentinus continued to be active in the 4th Century CE.

The most interesting thing about the Trinity as a doctrine is that it was supported by Irenaeus around 110 CE and was not really formally adopted as orthodoxy until the Council of Nicaea in 325.

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(June 4, 2015 at 2:58 pm)Rekeisha Wrote: @Secular Elf did you have a relationship with Jesus?

Interesting how you sidestepped my question.  So I ask it again.

If your god came to you in a vision and asked you to kill your kids (like he asked Abraham to do) or to shootup a location full of "sinners", would you do it?  Remember, you have to obey god, it is a Biblical imperative (Job 36:11; John 14:15; Luke 6:46; Ephesians 6: 5-9, etc., etc., etc.).

Rek: you don't play tricks? Or you're admitting God doesn't know what number I'm thinking of? See, I'm challenging you to prove your case and you refuse.

What you are appealing to is the argument from ignorance. You are asking that I disprove your claim, rather than you having to prove it. Your claims cannot be proved wrong, so this is an impossible request. However, that does not imply that they are correct. Please see my explanation on my website here:

http://robvalue.wix.com/atheism#!argumen...lity/c1831

You're conversation style is a list of judgements and demands, and if that doesn't change, we'll be done talking.

(June 9, 2015 at 1:11 am)robvalue Wrote: How are we doing on that four digit number? Does God know what I'm thinking, or not? Here's a chance to demonstrate everything you are saying actually has some weight behind it.

Even if God knows it, why would God tell Rekeisha what the four digit number you're thinking of is?

Secular Elf, your post is so long and involved that I just can't divide it up and reply to sections separately.  First of all, calling me willfully ignorant is not an answer to my questions.  Secondly, going through a zillion word summary of your accepted version of the history of judiasm and christianity may show why you don't believe in them, but it doesn't invalidate either religion.  The same goes for your essay on your version of the history of the development of the doctrine of the Trinity.  Are you just giving an informational account here or are you trying to prove that christianity is untrue?  If you're trying to show that christianity is untrue, how does your history lesson prove this?

(June 10, 2015 at 2:51 pm)Lek Wrote:

(June 9, 2015 at 1:11 am)robvalue Wrote: How are we doing on that four digit number? Does God know what I'm thinking, or not? Here's a chance to demonstrate everything you are saying actually has some weight behind it.

Even if God knows it, why would God tell Rekeisha what the four digit number you're thinking of is?

To provide some evidence?