RE: For former Christians only, why did you leave your faith?
January 12, 2023 at 10:41 am
(This post was last modified: January 12, 2023 at 10:43 am by Fake Messiah.)
(January 12, 2023 at 9:10 am)tjdisc Wrote: I can't speak for others nor can I judge them, but in general just because some claim to be Christian and act differently doesn't disprove the truth in the gospel of Christ.
Some claim? I just described almost all Christians.
And what disproves the truth in Jesus' teachings is that they are absurd. Like the one I described and it goes even further in absurdity when Jesus promises that food, drink, and clothing will be given to those who “strive first for the kingdom.”
Needless to say that there were many examples of people dying in mass starvation. Take when mass starvation killed more than three million people in Ukraine in the 1930s. Wasn’t God up to this task? Were none of the 3 million people who died seeking his kingdom above all else? And if that were the case -- that no one qualified in the putting-kingdom-first category -- then the standard must be too hard for anyone to attain.
Matthew 6:25-26,
...do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
It is jarring to see Jesus ridiculing the Gentiles for being concerned about what to eat, drink, and wear.
In Matthew and Mark, we read about the miraculous feeding of 4,000 with just a few loaves and fishes, and all four gospels report that the same deed was also done for 5,000. Such tales make Jesus and God look good, but the experience of Ukraine puts the lie to these gospel fantasies.
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"
