Scripture for Trinitarians

[lucent]

Ah, something that involves dreams, feelings or something along those lines that would be wholly unconvincing to any skeptic.

As a skeptic, are you skeptical of skepticism? Don't you just have a worldview which you use skepticism to defend and to justify your core beliefs?

So they're always separate but they are one.

Every explanation you offer just makes it clearer and clearer. [/sarcasm]

The trinity can be equated to having your cake and eating it too. Yes, they are separate people, and together they are one God.

Translation: He bled on a cross because that was the only way he could convince himself to forgive us for being sinful beings which we are because an ancestor of ours who was made from a rib ate a magic fruit after speaking with a talking snake.

Your meme is inaccurate, and theologically illiterate. It's not a clever way of condensing the account of scripture, it is just plainly false, for reasons I have already demonstrated. Since you don't consider mindlessly repeating atheist memes beneath you, I'll just have to keep hoping that you'll elevate the conversation and say something substanitive at some point. And, I think it's the height of hypocripsy to mock the supernatural when you yourself believe in the supernatural. Your account of reality isn't any more plausible than the flying spaghetti monster, but you take it on faith without any evidence at all. IE, you have blind faith in Deism.

So how do you think that would play out in International Court?

Here is a more accurate account:

Soldier: Unit 37 has gone AWOL sir. We've gotten reports they are killing civilians.

General: I want that situation contained. Send in medical supplies and additional troops. Send out a search party to find those soldiers and bring them back to me.

Soldier: Sir, we located the rebels but they fired on us and we took some casualities. They also captured some of us and took the prisoners back to their base.

General: Send in additional troops and saturate the area. I want you shelling them day and night. Continue to protect the civilians and give me a report every 2 hours.

Soldier: Sir, yes sir!

Yes, I've read McDowell and the likes. It's utter crap. Real history shows that Christianity was dragged kicking-and-screaming the whole way and after the dust settled has the nerve to try to take credit.

You must think history is "utter crap" then. Let's take science for example. It had its birth place in Christian Europe, and many of its founders were deeply committed Christians. The development of the scientific method owes a lot of Christianity. Not only that, but it was the belief that God created a well ordered Universe based on laws that Christians felt they could describe the Universe according to those laws. Check these out:

http://www.bede.org.uk/sciencehistory.htm#conclusion
http://www.ldolphin.org/bumbulis/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/det...deslibrary

Yes, brutal dictators who might have been atheists have done terrible things but were they really inspired by atheism? As opposed to religious tyrants inspired to torture and murder to save souls from eternal torments in Hell? Cause and effect is much easier to map with religion.

I would reply here but John Lennox already said it far better than I can:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdgmUY7MtY4

Yes I do. A personal god would create a world where heart attacks and strokes bring a quick death instead of cancer or Alzheimer's.

A personal God created a world without death but His creation corrupted it. Let's explore this.

God uses everything in our lives for the greater good. Let's say that a persons extended death witnesses the reality of death to 5 people who wouldn't have otherwised realized it, which leads them to eventually accept Christ and avoid hell. If they hadn't witnessed it, they never would have realized it and would have died in their sins.

Yes, I do feel rage under the surface.

Meaning, you are driven not by reason but by emotion. I wonder if you have any ability to separate the two things in regards to this subject, or if you have even realized that they aren't separate.

It's hard to take in the horrors of Christian history,

The horrors of history are not exclusive to any particular group of people or belief system. Taken as a whole, the only logical conclusion you can make is that humanity is corrupt, and that people can pervert anything, including, or especially, what is beautiful and true.

the lies that are told,

What lies?

the human potential that is wasted

I guess Louis Aggasiz (founder of glacial science and perhaps paleontology); Charles Babbage (often said to be the creator of the computer); Francis Bacon (father of the scientific method); Sir Charles Bell (first to extensively map the brain and nervous system); Robert Boyle (father of modern chemistry); Georges Cuvier (founder of comparative anatomy and perhaps paleontology); John Dalton (father of modern atomic theory); Jean Henri Fabre (chief founder of modern entomology); John Ambrose Fleming (some call him the founder of modern electronics/inventor of the diode); James Joule (discoverer of the first law of thermodynamics); William Thomson Kelvin (perhaps the first to clearly state the second law of thermodynamics); Johannes Kepler (discoverer of the laws of planetary motion); Carolus Linnaeus (father of modern taxonomy); James Clerk Maxwell (formulator of the electromagnetic theory of light); Gregor Mendel (father of genetics); Isaac Newton (discoverer of the universal laws of gravitation); Blaise Pascal (major contributor to probability studies and hydrostatics); Louis Pasteur (formulator of the germ theory) just wasted their potential.

, the stagnation of society for the thousand plus years prior to the Enlightenment

What a primitive view of history you seem to have. I think the decline and fall of the Roman Empire had something to do with it, as well as the barbarian hordes forming a bunch of warring nation states that kept civilization in the mud for centuries. Perhaps the spread of disease, lack of food and drinking water, as well as natural disasters, and volcanos contributed? Also, this was just western europe. Civilization continued in Arabia, China, Japan and elsewhere..

, the bigotry promoted by it and its scripture,

scripture says all people are equal and have equal rights, that every single person is in the image of God. what is bigoted about that?

the minds that it terrorizes

you mean liberated

and the political problems it creates

hah. the biggest political problems we have have nothing to do with Christianity, they have to do with corrupt politicians.

without feeling that righteous rage.

Your rage is a wicked little fountain of hubris. It is unreasoned, ignoble and misdirected, and you need to dig a little deeper because you're still not at the core of it yet.

I try to keep it under control, remembering that those under Islamo-Christianity's spell are victims, not enemies. No apologies for that rage. You'd feel it too if only you knew.

Well, you can toss this argument in the bin because I used to think just like you. I used to be an agnostic materialist, remember? I thought religion was a delusion, especially Christianity. I hated it more than any other religion and I would engage Christians and point out what I felt were flaws in their beliefs, just like you do. I was liberal, pro life, pro gay, pro-femenism, anti-republican, pro-euthanasia believed in evolution, believed in the big bang, etc. I didn't believe Jesus was a real person, and as far as I was concerned, anyone who had spiritual experiences were either lying or insane.

Even when I found out there is a God, I still believed some of that. It's only when I found out the reality of evil that I woke up to the truth and realized I had been deceived. Let me put it this way.

The reason you don't know who God is because of this:

2 Corinthians 4:4

In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

You don't know there is real and orchaestrated evil in the world, that you are deceived, and that everything you believe about God has been carefully spoonfed to you your entire life, to add up to one specific answer: that Jesus is not the Son of God. You have been given positive evidence as well, but you have chosen to ignore it in favor of keeping your favorite scapegoat, which you use to explain all the problems in the world. Without it, you might have to admit that humanity is wicked and incapable of ever building a utopia.

Seriously, it's called a definition. In fact, it's more like a tautology. A conscious mind is a conscious mind. Your attempt to change the subject by speaking of a shared body is not a distraction for me.

You say it's everything, you have no proof, you don't even have a theory for where it comes from. Seriously, it's an empty statement which doesn't invalidate my comparison. The fact that you want to be so obtuse as to debate an analogy is beyond me. If you just want to debate a specific subject here then name it.

Appeal to popularity

Yet, evolution is rock solid because nearly all scientists agree that it is correct. Your fallacy, btw, doesn't apply. I am not appealing to popularity, I am stating a basic fact that the more people who testify about something, the more reliable the claim. It could still prove to be ultimately false, but in a court of law having multiple witnesses is extremely powerful. The fact that you so easily dismiss that is ridiculous.

From beginning to end.

Have you even watched it? I know you *have* to believe it is a lie, because if it were true, you would be wrong about everything you believe. Pride won't ever let that happen, so you have to create the story in your mind that it is a lie. It's not a lie, however..he is a real person, with a real testimony.

beginning to end.

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The fact that early xtians were so embarrassed by the lack of historical reference to their boy that they went back and forged a few speaks volumes to me about the reality of your beliefs.

First, thank you for being honest enough to admit your complete bias and closed mindedness to anything I have to say.

There is another 1st century source, who confirms the events of the crucifixion:

http://www.westarkchurchofchrist.org/lib...blical.htm

If you're referring to Josephus, yes apparently some scribes added things, but the core testimony remains according to scholars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6cQgqbXY...re=related

All you have are the gospel ramblings which, no matter when they were originally written have been extensively edited by men with an agenda of their own

Debunked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-lK2hLf_Sg