Hi, I'm a Christian. Help Me Disprove My Religion!

[Aractus]

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Here: http://atheistforums.org/thread-36296.html

All the proof you need.

Or pick one of these topics and I'll explain it to you:

1. God lies to Abraham about the covenant he makes with him. Then he lies to Moses, Joshua, and David too.
2. God is a misogynist: Women are property, only men can get divorced, and adultary means sleeping with a married woman (married men are allowed to sleep with sex slaves, prostitutes, other wives they own, and unmarried women).
3. There is no morality in the Old Testament that isn't reflective of the conventional wisdom of the age.
4. There was no Exodus.
5. There was no conquest of Canaan.
6. The Pentateuch wasn't written until the 7th century BC at the earliest - that's 6-8 centuries after the mythical Exodus.
7. While there's very good evidence that Jesus was crucified, there's almost no evidence for his supposed bodily resurrection and ascension which forms the cornerstone of modern Christianity. Paul never mentions it, James and Jude and Peter never mention it, the author of Hebrews doesn't mention it, and Mark doesn't mention it either. Mark does say that Jesus ascended, and he does say Jesus will appear to people - but that's it - there isn't any mention of a bodily resurrection or an ascension. Matt 28:17 says that "some who saw the resurrected Jesus doubted" - so by the own admission of the gospel writer there were people who saw the supposed resurrected Jesus and said "that's not him". So what makes the people who did believe right and those that didn't wrong? We have no objective way to determine that other than to ask the question "who are the ones that are religiously biased"? So the gospel writer is basing the account on religiously-biased hearsay - that's hardly convincing evidence.
8. God is not faithful to his followers: Jesus is crucified, John the Baptist is beheaded, Judas Iscariot hangs himself, Herod has James the son of Zebedee killed by the sword, Simeon and James the Just are stoned to death, Peter is crucified, Paul is executed by the Romans, Nero persecutes the Christians from 64-68AD, and in 70AD the Jerusalem Church is completely destroyed (along with the rest of Jerusalem) as far as anyone can tell. BUT Jesus promised that the Son of Man would come before they finish going through all the towns of Israel (Matt 10:23).

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First of all, thanks for giving me all this info in such an orderly manner, and giving me so very much information. I found your blog by using the link in the other thread you created, and there's a huge amount of information there.

I hope you'll understand if I don't respond to it all, as it's going to take quite some time to go through it. Again, thank you for your help.

No probs at all as you see I have plenty of other stuff to respond to as it is in your thread. LOL.

Keep in mind it's difficult for us non-scholars to access academic peer-reviewed scholarship for the NT, believe me I try all the time and to be honest - unless you find scholars who are distributing their own articles on their own websites, there is almost nothing that is open-access in the field, unfortunately. And that's true for a lot of ancient history fields as well. What we can access are academic books, I gave a link to one a few posts back by Larry Hurtado - his book "One God One Lord" is used as a textbook in academic courses on New Testament history and is considered essential reading by many. That book - which I haven't read mind you - isn't going to "disprove" Christianity, but it does explain in no uncertain terms that the first century church didn't have a concept of the Trinity, and explains the origins of Christian beliefs.

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My advice: Read your Bible for yourself. Take the ten commands as an example, the tenth commandment is "thou shalt not covet anything that belongs to thy neighbour" or specifically:

"You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour." (Ex 20:17)

Christians try to claim this means don't think of you neighbour's wife lustfully - however the 7th commandment is "You shall not commit adultery" (even though adultery hasn't even yet been defined - it gets defined in Leviticus 18 for the first time in the Bible) - and Jesus says "'You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery." But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart." (Matt 5:27-28). And that means that "means don't think of you neighbour's wife lustfully" is covered in the seventh commandment not the tenth commandment. And anyway the tenth command ends with "or anything that belongs to your neighbour" - so it's clearly talking about property, and wives are listed as property.

Besides adultery, Exodus does not talk about sexual immorality. There is no mention of sexual immorality other than bestiality until Leviticus. This is one reason why Sodom and Gomorrah can't be guilty of homosexual acts for example - God never said in Genesis that any specific sexual act is wrong.

As mentioned, at no time in Genesis or Exodus does God or anyone else define "adultery". So Moses can't possibly know at that time what the seventh commandment even means. It's not until Leviticus 18 that it gets defined, and if you blink you literally miss it:

Lev 18:19-23: "19 You shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness while she is in her menstrual uncleanness. 20 You shall not have sexual relations with your kinsman’s wife, and defile yourself with her. 21 You shall not give any of your offspring to sacrifice them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. 22 You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. 23 You shall not have sexual relations with any animal and defile yourself with it, nor shall any woman give herself to an animal to have sexual relations with it: it is perversion."

That's a very narrow definition of adultery - it simply means any man who sleeps with another's man's wife. Married men are allowed to sleep with concubines (sex slaves), any wife that they own, unmarried women, and prostitutes. There is no law against any of that - and it happens quite a lot in the Old Testament. Most Christians do not know the correct Biblical definition of adultery and when they look at Matt 5:27-28 they take an erroneous definition of adultery based on the contemporary secular definition and not the ancient Jewish definition that applied in the first century, or the one that can be derived from Leviticus 18 and the rest of the Old Testament. The bible does NOT ever say that "extramarital sex is adultery" - it's only adultery if it is the wife that does it, and both parties are guilty.

Note that even Jesus himself was specific enough to say "a man who looks at a woman with lust" (Matt 5), and he does the same thing when he talks about divorce. Divorce is permitted only for men in ancient Israel (Exodus 23), and when Jesus talks about divorce in Matt 5 & 19 he affirms this: "“It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." (Matt 5:31-32). See, nothing to do with unfaithful men or women who want to divorce their husbands. If he though they should be more progressive like Egypt and give women equal rights then he would have said so.

Numbers 5 spends the entire chapter starting from verse 11 on what to do about an "unfaithful wife". There is nothing in Numbers that discusses what to do about an "unfaithful husband" because as far as the Pentateuch is concerned, husbands can't be "unfaithful". They can be guilty of adultery if they sleep with a married woman, but that's not even seen as being "unfaithful".

It is quite funny that Christians today (except for hardcore fundamentalists) believe that their god is not a misogynist.

Exodus 22:18 "You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live."

Funny though that the Magi the "wise men" are the ones to "worship the king of the Jews". Had they been women they likely would have been stoned to death.

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Yes, the Bible is quite sexist. What worries me is that this doesn't disprove Christianity, it just means that if it's true, reality is a crappy place to live for women (and men, and children). When I've talked to people about injustice in the Bible (though I tend to talk more about hell than sexism), so far the answer I've been getting is that God is what determines our morality. This is probably the biggest reason I want to get away from Christianity (to my shame, bigger than the fact that I don't have a good reason to believe it beyond my upbringing). If it's true, then morality means we're all screwed.

"The answer I've been getting is that God is what determines our morality." Exactly.

The fact is that there is no morality in the Bible that is not merely reflective of the conventional wisdom of the ancient age. And even then it was primitive by Egyptian and Roman standards.

Christianity arose in multiple stages: First there was Jesus himself, and he called disciples and had other followers. He didn't seem to have a large following, but nevertheless the Romans executed for reasons we are not sure of in c. 30-31 AD. He died on either a "Wednesday" or a "Friday" (noting that the ancient Jews did not have individual days for each day of the week) and it was around the time of Passover (Secular scholars will even argue whether it was on the 14th, 15th, or 16th). His body was entrusted to a Christian named Joseph of Arimathea - a person we know nothing about other than that he put the body of Jesus in his tomb. At some point his body was moved from the tomb, and it appears that the women went to anoint his body believing he was still laid in the tomb the following "Sunday".

The body was moved for reburial, or for anointing, or embalming, or for some other unknown purpose. This is the key part that is missing from the gospel accounts. We don't know the exact customs that his parents (if they were even alive at the time) and other family members followed. They may have been outraged at the notion that he had been laid in Joseph's tomb without their knowledge. Who knows. Joseph may have gone to the family and said "I have placed his body in my tomb because the Sabbath was fast approaching, but I want you to take him away as soon as it's over".

If the tomb was empty for a supernatural reason then we'd expect that the first people the disciples went to ask was Joseph of Arimathea. Yet they never do. They don't think to ask him - wouldn't you know it? Perhaps over the next couple of years the two or three of the disciples started thinking up explanations. Because here's another key thing: Judas, James, Joseph, and Simon (Jesus's brothers) were not followers. They became Christians later (according to Acts). So I'd hazard a guess that in 30 or 31 AD when Jesus is killed his family feel apathetic towards the disciples and followers.

So his followers thought up explanations for why the tomb was empty. Perhaps they had found the Roman guards sleeping and concluded it must have been divine intervention. The Gospel accounts are religiously-biased, so they don't tell us what really happened. They do tell us what the writers are saying in 60-85 AD whenever they were written.

In 50 AD the Church undergoes massive transformation (Acts 15, Galatians 2). By this time there was already much disagreement about doctrine in the early church. Most importantly of all Acts and Galatians tell us in no uncertain terms that the governing centre of the church is in Jerusalem.

In 70 AD, I would argue, the Jerusalem Church is completely destroyed - along with every still living senior leader of the early church. This hypothesis which I am proposing perfectly explains why we have pseudonymous Epistles and why we have attribution to disciples to the authorship of the four gospels and gnostic gospels. No one could disprove these claims now that the Jerusalem Church was gone, and different sects of early first and second century used their names to defend the authority of their texts.

Jesus being a genuine messiah is not required to explain the expansion of the church.

Finally, the proof comes in "healing". Jesus heals many people himself, according to the gospels. Then he tells his disciples they can heal "every kind of disease" (Matt 10:1), affirmed by James (James 5:16), Paul (1 Cor 12), and "Luke" (Acts 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 28). In those accounts of Acts - Peter heals a man crippled from birth and then tells the Jewish leaders he did it by the name of Jesus, he heals Aeneas, Ananias heals Paul's sight, Paul also heals a man crippled from birth, the apostles are said to have healed many many people, and they preach to the laity to go out and heal people!

Nowadays this supposed healing has been scaled way back. So as soon as we're able to scientifically verify divine healing it stops completely.