(January 22, 2016 at 7:06 pm)Irrational Wrote: What are you trying to get at, athrock? We're not stupid people here. We each have good reasons to be against the morality expressed in the Old Testament. Even you yourself implied you have an issue with genocide and slaughter of people. But unlike you, I believe (as do many others) that genocide is repulsive no matter what. So even if God exists, and even if God commanded me to do so, I'd still find it repulsive. God himself would have to threaten my loved ones to eternal hell for me to even think about (reluctantly) applying his sick plan.
But anyway, when are you going to change your label to Bible-believing Christian? Or is it Catholic Christian? Come on, you're not a deist ... just as you weren't just simply an open-minded agnostic before.
Oh, no...not stupid. Well, most of you don't appear to be. There are some whom I suspect are either stupid, angry teenagers or ignorant, elderly cranks. But some folks are clearly sharp as a tack. And fun to read and talk to!
The problem, I think, is that many have made rational decisions based on incomplete or false data. What do I mean by this? Well, I'm no Bible scholar, but I know enough to spot obvious errors. For example, Rhondavous and Brakeman are in this camp. They are in the worst possible situation, btw - they know just enough to think that they understand the Bible but probing the depth of their actual theology doesn't require a very long measuring stick.
They (and pretty much everyone else as best I can tell) have concluded that they already know what theism in general or Christianity in particular are all about, so they either have no need to do any further research or (worse) they rely on other atheists to tell them what theism and Christianity are all about.
Sorry, but if you want to take issue with what a believer holds, then read the believer's own materials first and then dissect it. Luther's Small Catechism or the Catechism of the Catholic Church are available online...quote a passage and begin to argue against it. But don't build up with a strawman and then proceed to dismantle it. You've proven nothing in the process except your own ignorance.
As a side note, does any atheist here ever go into a Christian bookstore and buy a decent book in order to understand what Christians actually believe? And don't tell me you heard it all when you were a child. Really? You have a grade-school understanding of the deepest mysteries of God? Please. And yes, I'm aware that some folks here had their crisis of faith when they were older (I do go back and read old threads - it pays to do research!), but I warrant that many of these deconversions were predominantly emotional and not intellectual in nature. (If you are that ONE exception, don't feel obligated to tell me your story. I could bury you with plenty of conversion stories in return.)
Yet Christians (not all) will read books by Hitchens and Dawkins in order to understand atheism. My point here is that a lot of this forum's members are woefully ignorant of what believers actually believe...despite having been raised in theist homes in some cases.
So, the arguments made by ignorant people can be completely rational...and completely wrong because they are based on bad data. Garbage in, garbage out.
Ironically, this is where the atheist often closes his or her mind (and the conversation)...by snidely commenting that the Bible (or the Qur'an or the BoM, etc.) is the garbage that the gullible have taken in. Yet, former atheists attest that it was only when they were able to examine things more open-mindedly, "Hey, hang on a sec...this has a ring of truth to it...", that they were able to begin a process of real discovery.
Subsequent posts will reveal who is and isn't at that point, yet.
