What makes your faith true?

[Odoital77]

Odoital77 Wrote: He chose a method that put a premium on human freedom and was merely adequate to the task rather than something so compelling that you would have had to be in a deep state of denial or otherwise deluded to reject it.

Fake Messiah Wrote: What? His method was to whisper into the ears of crazy people, hermits stuff that are historically unprovable and non existent like Moses, Samson, Adam, Daniel, Noah etc. That were later re-written in all sorts of versions. Even today Catholics don't read protestant Bibles and so on. I mean if some deity wanted us to follow some written word why not write it on some non destructible monoliths on some place where no one can't live for long (so that no one can claim the land) so that everyone can read it as it is meant.

If you are attempting to re-phrase anything like what I believe, as a Christian, you’ve failed to do so.  What you’ve done is construct a straw-man, or a mere caricature of Christian belief.  For example, scholars in the field of critical Old & New Testament history, secular or religious, aren’t looking at the books of the Bible as a religious book when it comes to their historical methodology.  Instead, they are looking at these various writings as extant writings from ancient history, of which we have very few, broadly speaking.  For example, if you look at the scholarship on the historical Jesus, we have traditions and writings that go back to within 5 to 10 years of His life, and this is virtually unheard of in the field of ancient history.  For example, the earliest biographies of Alexander The Great written by Arrias and Plutarch are something like 400 years after his death.  We have absolutely NOTHING that compares to the early sources that we have for the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.  There is simply no comparison.  And keep in mind that the so-called “Bible” wasn’t a Bible at all for hundreds of years.  They were letters and accounts written by followers of Jesus in their day, which were later passed around to various churches and carefully copied so that multiple churches could read and be educated and edified regarding the one who came to save them from their sins.  These letters were spread all over the world and in multiple copies.  And when brought back together in the modern age, there is remarkable fidelity despite the separation in time, being reproduced on different continents, and being written in multiple languages.  In fact, the fidelity is so good and the number of copies so extensive that we can compare and see where any changes have been made over time and tradition.  Any good Bible actually notates the sections that are less attested and should be deemed less trustworthy.  In addition, none of the few significant changes that do exist touch on any point of Christian doctrine or affect the central message of the Christian Bible in any way.  And as I’ve said, any moderately informed Christian with a good Bible is aware of any passages that should be taken with a grain of salt like the long ending of Mark or the passage in John chapter 8.  The rest of the differences have primarily to do with spelling and punctuation, not substantive changes to the texts themselves.  Much of this is also true of the Old Testament, though we have fewer copies of it due to its even more advanced age.  But where we do have copies that were separated by about 1,000 years between the Dead Sea Scrolls (250 B.C. to 70 A.D.) and the Masoretic Text (950 A.D. to 1,000 A.D.) there is remarkable fidelity.  In short, there is quite substantial proof that the texts did not change substantially over time and therefore have experienced the most minimal corruption, often far less than other ancient documents of antiquity.  Also, I would point out that the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, and certainly isn’t a justification to conclude the falsehood of those things recorded in the Old or New Testaments.  We have greater attestation for many of the things in the Bible than we do for a lot of other things we believe about ancient history, and this is particularly true for the life of Jesus.  I would urge you to familiarize yourself with the scholarship on these issues, of which you’re obviously unaware at the present time.
 
“In the Fullness of Time: A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter, and the Early Church” by Paul L. Maier
 
“The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant?” by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.
 
“Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ” by Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B.Wallace
 
“Reinventing Jesus: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss The Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Culture” by J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace
 
“The Son Rises: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus” by William Lane Craig
 
“The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach” by Michael R. Licona
 
“The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs” by Craig L. Blomberg
 
 
So Catholics don’t read the same Bible huh?  Do you even know why that is?  And are you aware that the books that we have in common, which are most of them, have not been changed from what my Bible says?
 
Well, no deity is looking for you or anyone else to follow some written word.  Instead, the God who created the universe chose to reveal Himself in a people and in a written word to man, as he is, and in the context of respecting human freedom.  He chose, under no obligation, to provide a way for us to know Him and be reconciled to Him through the forgiveness of our sins in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  Absent that sacrifice, His justice would require punishment and payment for those sins against Him, and we would be those punished and providing payment.  He chose a method that would not impinge upon human freedom, but would instead, allow people to freely come to Him or reject Him.  Thus, every person will decide on their own where they go after death.  Do they ultimately get punished and provide payment for their sins against Him, or do they accept His gracious offer of forgiveness, reconciliation, and eternal reward?  The fact that God failed to meet your expectations or somehow didn’t do it the way you would have is of little consequence.  If God does actually exist, there very suggestion that you might actually know the best and most effective way to accomplish the task that God had in mind is likely amongst those things that would illustrate the heights of human arrogance and vanity.  Those aren’t meant as pejoratives but as factual descriptions.
 
 

Odoital77 Wrote: Atheism certainly attacks other religions beyond Christianity, but Christianity has always been the main impetus.
Fake Messiah Wrote: Hey atheism exists long before Christianity. Just remember what Epicurus said:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

And yet he was right, even by your account because he was talking about Olympian gods which everyone now knows don't exist.

Well, I was talking about the atheism of today. Finding an atheist in the day of Epicurus was likely significantly more difficult than it is today.  And to the degree that Atheism has grown and thrived in our day (i.e. the last 300 to 400 years or so), it has done so primarily, in the context of opposing or objecting to Christianity.  In either case, the God of Christianity existed long before Epicurus or Atheism.  And yes, I would suggest that he was right about the Olympian gods.  In the case of the Christian God, preventing evil would be to prevent freedom, and it is only in the context of freedom that our actions can have true meaning or worth.  In addition, for this to be a good or legitimate objection to the existence of God, it would have be shown that God could not have morally sufficient reasons for allowing certain evils to occur.  As finite creatures vastly limited in our knowledge and understanding, we simply aren’t in a position to make those kinds of probability judgements with any hope of accuracy.  It’s possible that only in a world that allows for human freedom and is exposed both evil and suffering would the maximum number of people freely seek God and avail themselves of His offer of rescue and redemption.  As long as that’s possible, the objection doesn’t go through.
 
 

Odoital77 Wrote: Every document is open to this kind of behavior, and that speaks to the nature of human beings, which the Bible describes quite accurately.
Fake Messiah Wrote: Not really. Bible is hardly a document considering that it's written, like I told you before, as poetry and metaphors which is open for interpretations. Some parts are straight but contradictory elsewhere. Like divorce, in one part Jesus says people can't divorce and in other that divorce is OK if woman is caught in adultery and that's why some denominations allow divorce and some don't.

 
Document (noun): a piece of written, printed, or electronic matter that provides information or evidence or that serves as an official record.
 
Document (verb): record (something) in written, photographic, or other form.
 
The fact that the Bible contains writings from various genres does not disqualify it from being a document.  And as I’ve said, virtually all writing and even speech is open to misinterpretation depending up all kinds of factors, many of them subjective and having to do with the reader or receiver rather than the document itself.  A bad intention on the part of the person, a lack of understanding, a lack of intelligence, or a disposition for or against something related to whatever document is being read can affect the interpretation.  That is not to say that we cannot and do not regularly and successfully communicate through the written word.  Obviously we do.  Most of what people call contradictions in the Bible are based upon misunderstandings rather than contradictions.  Typically, they are called apparent contradictions, but can typically be cleared up easily with a bit of study providing a more accurate understanding.  There are whole volumes that have been written resolving thousands of what amount to superficial or merely apparent contradictions, the vast majority of which aren’t found to be contradictory by most people who are actually studying the Bible.  So the moderately informed Christian might come to a book like that with questions about 2 or 3 different things, but very few pick up a volume like that hoping to get 1,000 supposed contradictions they’ve found resolved.  In short, it’s not that big of an issue.  Usually, it’s the skeptic that has the biggest issue, and as I’ve said, that’s mostly due to their objections coming from a place of ignorance, misunderstanding, or disingenuousness.  Why do I say disingenuous?  Well, almost every time I’ve been given a contradiction and have taken the time to resolve it for them, it turns out that the contradiction they cited was merely a rhetorical objection and not something that they were interested in having resolved in the first place.  I can only hope that your claims of contradiction aren’t the same as those.  Assuming that they are not, a good starting place to resolve some of those issues is as follows:
 
“When Critics Ask: A Popular Handbook on Bible Difficulties by Normal L. Geisler and Thomas A. Howe
 
“Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties” by Gleason Archer
 
“The Bible Handbook of Difficult Verses: A Complete Guide to Answering the Tough Questions” by Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell
 
 
With regard to your take on Jesus contradicting Himself on divorce, nothing could be further from the truth.  This makes me think that you actually haven’t looked into the issue much at all.  What Jesus did was lay down the ideal, which is to say that once married no one should seek divorce.  But He did give permission to divorce for a particular violation of the marriage bond, adultery.  However, you need to keep in mind that this was something that was permitted, not commanded or even encouraged.  On the other hand, it was also permitted to stay married after an incident of adultery.  And of course, reconciliation and restoration, rather than the permitting of a divorce, was strongly encouraged.  So the thrust was for life-long monogamous marriage with a permission to divorce, if reconciliation and restoration could not be accomplished or was not desired on the part of the injured party.  But there is no genuine contradiction present at all, and I’m not aware of the Church seeing His view as contradictory.  There have been questions as far as how to best understand its meaning and the kinds of things that might count as adultery, given the particular Greek words used (i.e. porneia vs. molxeia).  One word is more general and can theoretically encompass something like an emotional affair over the internet or a sexual indulgence in pornography, while the other word refers more specifically to the physical act of actual physical sexual contact with someone other than your spouse.  However, that’s not a contradiction.  That’s a question of study and understanding all of the nuance related to a passage, rather than merely the most wooden literal meaning and untutored understanding.  As for how individual churches or denominations deal with the issue, that’s another question.  That has to do with whether a church is acting in accordance with what the Bible teaches or whether they’ve elevated someone or something to the same or greater level of authority than the Biblical text.  In this case, you would most likely be talking about the Catholic Church, which has multiple co-equal sources of authority, something eschewed by virtually all other Christian denominations.  That is another question entirely, but it has to do with a particular church’s or denomination’s fidelity to what the Bible teachers rather than the actual teaching of the Bible itself.  Beyond that, I’m not aware of any church or denomination that disallows divorce entirely, no matter the circumstance.  And of course, the Church’s teaching on divorce is not an essential doctrine of the Christian faith, and Christians are free to disagree and debate (in-house) amicably on secondary and tertiary issues.
 
 

Odoital77 Wrote: Slavery in the Bible was nothing like chattel slavery in America.
Fake Messiah Wrote: I really don't understand how you can say that considering that Bible lets you beat slaves, rape their wives and if they were not from your Jewish tribes there weren't no constrains you could kill them and do what ever you liked.

Since most of what you’ve said here is either misleading or false, I will simply say that you need to read more about slavery in the Middle East during relevant times.  You don’t understand the slavery system that existed in the Middle East.  The penalty for kidnapping someone and selling them into slavery was death under the Mosaic Law.  That can be found in Exodus 21.  The overwhelming vast majority of slaves in the Bible were self-enslaved.  Some people chose slavery because it was easier to have your basic needs provided by a master than to be out there attempting to fend for yourself with no safety net.  Others chose slavery as a means of paying off debts that they owed.  The point I’m making is that there were all kinds of reasons why people were slaves and ways by which they became slaves.  And unlike the modern day (i.e. the last 300 to 400 years or so) slavery wasn’t based on things like race.  In addition, I’m not aware of anywhere in the Bible that it allows you to simply murder and rape slaves no matter the context.  Quite the opposite.  I’m aware of the laws that were instituted, which raised the level of treatment of slaves and is remarkable specifically for that reason.  But please provide the reference information, if you’re aware of something I’m not, and I’ll look into the matter.  In addition, slavery is not prescribed or commanded in the Bible.  It is simply allowed for, since as I’ve said, God has chosen to respect human freedom and deal with us as we are, rather than as He wants us to be.  Merely because you allow someone to do something that you don’t particularly like or agree with doesn’t automatically mean that you support such things or think that they are consistent with the highest moral behavior.  Anyway, I suggest you look into the issue more deeply.  Moving forward on the basis of a superficial understanding won’t help anyone.
 
“Did God Really Command Genocide?: Coming to Terms with the Justice of God” by Paul Copan and Matt Flannagan
 
“Is God a Moral Monster?: Making Sense of the Old Testament God” by Paul Copan
 
https://www.zachariastrust.org/does-the-...ne-slavery
 
https://bible.org/article/some-initial-r...-testament
 
https://www.allaboutworldview.org/slaver...-bible.htm
 
 

Odoital77 Wrote: Yes, there were some who used the Bible to defend the American institution of slavery, though anyone who has studied the Bible knows how illegitimate that interpretation was.
Fake Messiah Wrote: Some?! Only the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, who claimed to follow what the scriptures said: "[Slavery] was established by decree of Almighty God ... it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation."

While on the winning side leaders were mostly deists, not very religious although most of the soldiers and people were Christians and they clearly were not guided by the literal words of scripture but by their own interpretations and innate senses of a higher good.

Yeah, SOME!  Not everyone in the South was fighting for the continuance of slavery.  Many were simply fighting for their state’s right to secede from the Union.  The fact that Jefferson Davis said what he said or did was he did doesn’t make his claim true.  For example, slavery was not decreed or prescribed by God.  It was merely permitted.  You will find that the Bible often does not directly speak out against entrenched cultural customs of the day for the same reason that Jesus did not speak out directly against Roman rule in His day: social reform was secondary to certain internal, attitudinal transformations.  In addition, social reform was a consequence of God’s unfolding plan rather than the point of his unfolding plan.  The point being the redemption of mankind through Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  So because man’s understanding of how to apply God’s moral law had not yet extended to the institution of slavery, likely because, in context, Biblical slavery was far less brutal and out of place in its obvious immorality than was the form of chattel slavery practiced later in the western hemisphere; does not mean that God or the Bible somehow condoned it.  There is a difference between an absolute moral value and the changing understanding of that value.  For example, it was once the case that witches were sentenced as murderers, but now they are not.  What changed was not the moral principle that murder is wrong.  Rather, our understanding changed about whether witches really murder people by their curses.  One’s factual understanding of a moral situation is relative, but the moral values involved in the situation are not.  As Christianity persisted and the moral understanding of people relative to God’s moral commands deepened or increased, the immoral nature of enslaving of your brother (i.e. another human being) became more and more obvious.  And as I’ve said in other places, Christianity and the West were not unique in the presence of slavery.  Slavery has existed in virtually every society on every continent where mankind has long been established.  What is unique about Christianity and the West is that it was within that civilization so transformed and influenced by Christianity that slavery met its end, eventually being eradicated throughout the world.  It is only in places where Christianity has not deeply touched or where its influence has significantly waned that slavery can still be found today.  And to the degree that Christianity’s influence falls, you will see it return more and more, though mostly in the form of sexual bondage.  Also, most of the leaders of the abolitionist movements in the North were not deists.  They were Christians.  They were Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists.  They were Christians of all sorts who were indeed being inspired by the literal words of Scripture.
 
Acts 10:34-35: 34 So Peter opened his mouth and said: “Truly I understand that God shows no partiality, 35 but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.
Mark 12:30-31: 30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
 
Why had such things not occurred earlier?  It’s hard to say, but you do have to remember that it wasn’t until the late 15th and early 16th centuries that large numbers of people were able to get their hands on a personal Bible to begin with.  Once people could read and study the Bible for themselves in a more in-depth way, things began to change in different and faster ways than they had before.
 
 

Odoital77 Wrote: Where Christianity has had a deep and abiding influence, widespread slavery of the type you’re talking about is virtually unheard of.  So while I take your objection seriously, I’m afraid it is historically and factually misplaced.
Fake Messiah Wrote: Take Popes and other fathers of the Catholic Church who owned slaves as late as 1800. Jesuits in colonial Maryland and nuns in Europe and Latin America owned slaves. The Church did not condemn slavery until 1888, after every Christian nation had abolished the practice.

That may tell you something about the Catholic church, but it doesn’t tell you much about the Bible or Christianity.  It might also give you some hint as to why the Protestant Reformation occurred, and why it was around that same time that the Catholic Bible changed in its structure to include additional books that were not part of the original Canon.  I have no interest in defending Catholicism, any particular church, or a particular denomination.  What the Catholic church did or failed to do doesn’t say anything in particular about the Biblical teaching or its veracity on any particular topic.  It will simply tell you about that church or denomination and its fidelity to the Bible’s authority and teaching.  As I’ve already pointed out, the Catholic church has multiple sources of authority, and the Bible has tended to take a backseat to those other sources.  That’s the activity of man at work, not God.
 
 

Odoital77 Wrote: If everywhere human civilization existed on the planet at that time was affected, saying that every mountain top was covered isn’t a hard thing to understand.
Fake Messiah Wrote: Bible claims that God said he'd kill every living thing so it's hardly local and even if it was local then it would have been very stupid of Noah to spend 100 years building a giant ark when he could have just moved away to the "unaffected parts" of the world that you claim existed.

You’re doing it again.  You’re bringing your modern day sensibilities into a situation where they don’t belong.  You have to look at it from the perspective of Noah, to whom God is speaking at the time.  From the perspective of Noah, everything would have died because everywhere that man had himself would have been ravaged and destroyed in the flood.  And from the perspective of Noah, he wouldn’t have known that he could have simply moved away to the unaffected parts.  From his perspective, there wouldn’t have been any unaffected parts.  Everywhere that mankind had been or was present would be consumed in the flood.  So everywhere that anyone would have known to go would have been affected.  Noah didn’t know that there was a North & South America, or that the Australian continent stood ready for habitation.  From his perspective he had nowhere to go.  And what was Noah supposed to think; that he could somehow take actions that God would be unaware of, would thwart God’s plan, or make God’s command to build an ark unnecessary?  That’s just not realistic in any sense.  For all intents and purposes, what’s reported about the flood would have appeared exactly that way to Noah, whether or not the entire global earth was flooded.  Having said all of that, this too is an in-house debate amongst Christians, and is not an essential of the Christian faith or necessary for one’s salvation or redemption from sin through Jesus Christ.