RE: Refuting Christians with their Own Bible
June 30, 2016 at 7:47 am
(This post was last modified: June 30, 2016 at 7:48 am by Fake Messiah.)
(June 30, 2016 at 7:03 am)SteveII Wrote: You do selectively read things don't you?
"Option 2. is give humanity moral guidance. How best to do this? Lots of ways - he could simply appear to each human being, or to whole groups at a time, and clearly explain the world and what is good and bad." No matter how you slice that sentence, that is God personally appearing to everyone.
You would be the exception.
God could also have made his presence known by engraving the Ten Commandments in large letters on the Moon so that all people in the world can see it and not just one small tribe in the desert in the Middle East. Ancient scripture could have given us scientific evidence for God. It could, for instance, have presented information not known to humans when the sacred texts were written. These include statements like, “Thou shall use antibiotics for bacterial infections” or “Two strands entwined is the secret of life.”
Unless defined tautologically, then, the supernatural is either in principle or in practice within the realm of science. And when we consider all the failures to find it we find a big hole: the absence of evidence when the evidence should be there. Our rational response should be to tentatively reject the existence of any supernatural beings or powers.
But all the Bible was is ensuring alpha-male dominance to no surprise since it is and always has been a huge part of our animal history. Take the Decalogue as a perfect example, where the first three Commandments are inherently abject to anything not involving utter worship of the male leader, and the rest of his property. Killing, stealing, and wanting your neighbor’s wife are thrown in practically as an afterthought.
We have an excellent indication of the man-made extent of the Ten Commandments, and flagrant signs of the evolution of the human animal and the “morality” that evolved with us.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"


