Misconceptions of Christian theology

[jstrodel]

Here is the interesting thing about this conversation: You can argue all you want that this is right, that is wrong and this is what god really means or wants us to do. It is all mental masturbation.

What you call mental masturbation most people in history have called the most important questions people have to grapple with, the nature of human life, why evil exists in the world, what it means to live the good life, etc. So with two words, you have dealt with the human predicament. Could you list an address so I could send you a Nobel prize?

The fact is, since the bible is supposed to be the supreme, infallible word of god, if you discount ANY of the bible, then you are, by default, discounting all of the bible. By discounting any one thing, you have wiped out its base of infallibility and therefore, its origin as the word of god. At this point, it just becomes another story book.

Now, you can make arguments for different interpretations but in the end, what you end up doing is cherry-picking the parts you like and discounting or explaining away the parts you don't like.

So why do we atheists tend to go after the fundamentalists? Because we believe the ENTIRE bible is a work of fiction and carries no more weight than any other piece of literature. We try to address the book as a whole. When faced with cherry-picked verses, interpretations and theological mumbo-jumbo, it is like trying to disprove all of evolution by saying this single fossil is wrong. It is a battle won in a war that has no end. So, while we are more than ready to take on your single point argument, it is more effective to destabilize the foundation the argument is built upon.

In other words, it is easier to take down the whole structure at once rather than tear it apart brick by brick.

I don't think I am discounting any part of the Bible. I don't think the Bible has ever intended to teach a young earth or double predestination or many other doctrines that fundamentalists teach. So I do not see myself as somehow compromising my orthodoxy to accommodate external beliefs, I see fundamentalists as being those who have compromised.

The Bible is a complicated book, which has been interpreted by many people for 2000 years. The modern fundamentalist movement is a tiny fraction of the experience of the Christian church. Kent Hovind is not the person who defines what orthodox belief is, God does.

I don't ever cherry pick parts of the Bible that I like. But if you study the whole Bible, with an open mind, and listen to God, you will see that God is a nice person, much more fair and evenhanded than any ruler that has ever existed in any nation. To compare the God of scripture to your mother making food for you and excusing your sins would be a false comparison. The LORD is a king, a just God, but there is nothing malevolent about Gods character, no matter how much you may not want to obey God's decrees, they are unimpeachable and are the basis of the most moral, most free societies that have ever existed.

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What is the sort of proof that is required?

The most extraordinary kind of proof imaginable, to match the most extraordinary claims you make. It has to withstand every imaginable kind of scrutiny. It has to be entirely immune to doubt.

Does that sound harsh? That's not our problem. Christians have had the luxury of defining God so that physical scrutiny of him is impossible, but in the act of making God impossible to disprove, they have made it equally impossible to display evidence of him. To make up for the logical box they've locked themselves into, they make special exceptions for themselves. We cannot know God, unless you're super special and ask in just the right way which is apparently unique for every individual. That way, believers can have their cake and eat it, too.

But, that only works if you're willing to make insane assumptions and are good at self-delusion, because believing in 'proof' of an unproveable God means that all you're really doing is seeing God where there is none, because you want him to be there.

In the Bible, God rarely hides. He makes sure everyone, believer and non, is aware that he is there. The transformation from consistent and blatant interference to the completely invisible skydaddy who only appears to those who pass a lot of very specific spiritual tests is nowhere documented and has forced believers into ever more heinously ridiculous interpretations of reality so that it bears some resemblance to the awful narrative by which they live their lives.

You can create your own standard to fit your presupposition against theism or to match some false idea that theology should be subject to the same kind of verification that physics is. That is fine, but I know that God is knowable because I know God. I have received revelation, if you want to experience God and know God, you must seek God on God's own terms. Would you study sociology or economics according to the rules that are defined to justify physical science? Of course not.

Religious belief is not based on self deception. You have no idea what your rationalistic posturing looks like to me. I know that God is real because I interact with God all the time. There are many good arguments for God's existence and role in the world.

The most extraordinary claim ever made is not that people are created with a moral nature and people have sinned and fallen and turned away from their nature to follow self interest. That is something that is observable and verifiable, even from the perspective of naturalism. How many things are verifiable outside of the specialized language of the discipline they are in?

The most extraordinary claim is that people have no moral nature, that the universe is random, and that all of human history which in every society has pointed to some sort of God and some sense of a human nature which implies moral obligation is false, and that in fact, people have no obligation to anything but their desires. This is the most extraordinary claim, and there is no evidence for this claim. There is absolutely nothing anywhere that even remotely proves by a standard half as rigorous as you demand religious belief has that can prove that people have no intrinsic nature and no moral duties to perform and that they were created by blind processes.

This is what you take on faith, and you think it is a smaller thing to believe on faith that people may do whatever they wish than to believe that people must be good people because they were created to be good people. Perhaps the reason for this is that in your heart of hearts, underneath all your ideas, you really just want to do what you want.