Atheists are mentally ill

[pocaracas]

ah.... yesterday, I replied to this, but it seems the forum didn't store my reply...
I'll give it another go

Abraham didn't ask..and yet wad asked to kill his own son.

The point of the story as far I know was that God isn't like the other pagan gods who occasionally demanded human sacrifice. He didn't kill him after all. Prophets are individuals chosen by God to bring his message to his chosen people.

Nice wording there...
It's a story, just a story.
A story in which people claim that this one man had direct contact with a god. This god asked him directly to kill his own son.
Looks a lot like those other pagan gods demanding human sacrifice.
Oh, in the end the god of the story told the guy to stop, because it was enough for the man to show he would obey, no matter what.
Sort of like soldiers have to obey their commanding officers...

Now, this man was obeying an incorporeal being... That is so reassuring in what concerns his mental state.

Prophets... to me, they all sound like con artists, even though... some of them may be actually convinced of the BS they're spouting... these are the deluded ones, perhaps a delusion brought on by some psychological abnormality.... we are only far too aware of all the complexity of the human brain and how a small fault can yield strange results.
It is not inconceivable that Abraham was delusional, or a liar.... both options sound much more likely than accepting the claim that he actually talked with a god who asked him to kill his own son.
The same reasoning can be applied to any other prophet.

Oh, and this abrahamic god's first claimed interaction with the man was to assert itself as different from the other pagan gods... as if those exist, but need to be combated... strange... considering that, after Adam&Eve, this was the first god-human interaction... why would humans have developed these other gods? How long was there between these two events?

Moses didn't ask, and yet got a few stone tablets with writing on them.

Again he was a prophet. He may have had to carve the tablets himself, they would have been given to him in vision or something.

That's not how the story goes.
And visions fit right into the good old hallucination category... it seems prophets were ripe with mental problems...
And the few who had the ability to convince others... aka, con artists... got to spread their delusional crap.

No, I have no evidence for this view... it's just a hypothesis... one that carries much more weight than accepting that such incorporeal beings exist and talk only to a few very specific people, asking them to kill someone, then telling them how to behave, then telling them that their interpretation of the behavioral rules was wrong and needs a bit of a change... oh... so much idiocy from a being of such high regard.

If we accept god does such things, then why settle for crapy confirmation bias and self delusions?

He won't have done it in quite the dramatic way the Bible describes. But the Torah/Bible is a revelation to humanity from God overall, it's "God breathed" and all that business.

OH, so people were using confirmation bias back then? and writing some BS for others to follow?

If the evidence is there, then god is doing a bang up job hiding it from us.
Did it lose its ability to write on stone tablets?

When it says God used his finger to carve the tablets it was (according to my annotated Bible here) referring to the Holy Spirit of God. I'm sure there were some tablets those were kept in the Ark of the Covenant they carried around with them.

Your "annotated bible"??
Annotated by whom? god? or some human with his own confirmation bias? And his own yearning for a way to explain away these inconsistencies?

Yes people have direct contact with God through the Holy Spirit. I'd argue that atheists have the exact same contact, certainly as they seem to place great importance on morality and they share the same awe at the universe.

There he goes with the morality thing again...
People had morals before JC came into the picture.

There's your evidence for God/the Holy Spirit then. What more do you want?

I want you to understand that that is not evidence for god/holy spirit.
It is evidence for a common evolution of human societies.

Christianity is the one that adopted pre-existing morals.

Are you sure it didn't just reveal the Moral Law that had always been present? Seems like you're recognizing something as beyond human culture and opinion to me.

Am I?
Are you trying to project your own ignorance onto me?

Humans evolved within the context of a social group. Individuals who were not beneficial for the group were eliminated. Those individuals who managed not to be detrimental to the group survived and passed on those genes.
What you call morality is simply what has worked better for the continuation of the group. Much trial and error was required... Many errors still sprout every now and then, but, for the most part, we are the product of this natural selection... Much like an experiment being carried out in Siberia, with foxes, where the researchers are trying to domesticate foxes, by selecting for breeding only those who are more friendly around humans, and then repeating it for the offspring and for the offspring of the offspring, and so on and so forth... This experiment is very close to an actual domesticated fox (as domesticated as a cat, I guess) and is a good example of foxes acquiring some sort of morality, at least, towards humans.

Awe at the universe... research: China, 6th century BC.

I didn't say it was exclusive to Christianity/the West it's a universal trait for all humanity in all eras of history. It all comes from God of course.

Of course?! Dammit, I remember having written something nice in here, about this... But can't remember what...
If ti was "of course" there would be no atheists.
IF it was "of course" there would be no religions.
If it was "of course" every single human being would be fully aware of that fact.

No, this is far from "of course"!

That's the thing...you don't grow indoctrinated into atheism. You grow immersed in the culture of the country where you live... in the western world, this culture had been greatly influenced by Christianity and, more recently, by science, technology and economics.
So, the most common path is one where you learn about the god of the bible or the Qur'an, the adults tell you it's true and tout live happy with that information... Until you grow, think a bit, and go either the atheist way, or become like you.

Yes but the religion of the culture you live in can still be the best one and the religion of your own culture can still be the one that contains the most truth. So you're lucky to have had a head start in it. Bear in mind of course that atheism is only something that is popular as a philosophy/worldview in the Western nations, it's not popular in Africa or South America. So your atheism can just as easily be an accident of where you were born. But you think it's true anyway and you think you have good reasons for believing it. So it's very much the same thing really.

Atheism is "popular" in the western world, because that's where most of the educated people are.
As soon as you know a few things about the world, you realize how much BS religions spout... unless you deliberately ignore the knowledge that has been amassed by fellow humans attempting to demonstrate to everyone else how the world really works... and you insist on following whatever religions have been saying for hundreds of years with no shred of evidence to back them up.

Typically(from what I have observed in this forum - not a good source for stats, I know), the people who become atheist have a more analytical mind, while the ones who become theists tend to be more emotional.

You can use both parts of your mind equally. you can deduce the existence of God on a purely rational/scientific basis, it's called deism. To believe in say the Bible or Christ you need to add some faith but it can be a "Reasonable Faith".



Rather than a blind faith. So what you have here is the best of both worlds.

Really?
William Lane Craig?
The crap apologist who masks his ignorance behind fancy words?
If you truly accept what this guy says, then you really are deluded... (notice how I used the words "truly" and "really")
Here, check this link and any that come up after it:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=william+lane+craig+refuted

You're from a western culture hence you find Christianity as the "truth". Had you been born in the middle east, you'd probably claim Islam to be the truth...same for India, Indonesia, south America, and anywhere on this planet...you tend to embrace the local mythology.

You're from a Western secularized culture so you think atheism/naturalism is true. What works for me works for you. We both have same the secular background anyway it seems I'm the one being more independent of my upbringing.

What does "atheism is true" mean?

I am an atheist because I do not believe that any god exists.
If any god does exist, then it has provided me, and many like me, with no reason to accept that existence. If it doesn't want me to acknowledge its existence, then... why should I?
If it does want me to acknowledge its existence, then by all means, I'm waiting for it... not you, nor any deluded person would be able to make me acknowledge it.... only itself would do the trick. Can't wait! But I'm not holding my breath for it, either...

Christianity has no evidence.

Not scientific evidence no. God is a good foundation for what we understand through science we have a rationally understandable, intricate and perfectly balanced universe right here. There is kind of a God involved in Christianity if you think about it. It's the kind of thing you may see occasionally mentioned.

Are you trying a foray into the god of the gaps argument?

Here's a bit of it: in the years or decades after this alleged resurrection, Jerusalem remained a Jew city.most of the people there remained Jews, or Romans. It was only elsewhere that people came to believe such tales about JC, as three resurrection, turning water to wine, walking on water, etc.

The Jews didn't really accept Jesus as their Messiah but that does actually fulfill the Biblical prophecy where the Messiah would be rejected by his own people and bring God to the Gentiles. Interesting.

The jews, who were there and got first hand accounts of the event, didn't believe... and yet, you suppose I should?
Isn't it much simpler to think that this new religion appeared at some point after the supposed timestamp of the events, carrying some elements that would allow it to "fulfill" a bit of prophecy and, because no evidence for this JC boy existed, the jews refused to accept it?

Then Muslims walked into the city and turned it into a Muslim center.
Christianity has always been a minority in the place where the man actually came back to life!! How's that possible, unless there's no evidence for such occurrence and, even at the time when it supposedly happened, there was no evidence for it?

What matters is the first followers of Christ can be traced to the historical time and place and the resurrection account wasn't a later addition to the story but was there from the very start. But like yourself the Jews who hadn't experienced these events would have been skeptical as it didn't fit with the traditional Jewish faith, it was much too strange. Also the first Christians believed in what had happened so strongly they were prepared to suffer persecution and die for it. Saint Paul was originally a bounty hunter of Christians called Saul but certainly something happened to him to make him very radically change his mind.

Yes, something happened to Saul... something so nasty, it turned him into Paul.
Let's assume it was the same person: epileptic seizure could explain it... something we can observe nowadays happening in people, unlike your explanation...
Let's assume it wasn't the same person: Prosecutor gets kidnapped and killed and replaced by someone similar which decides to preach something related to the growing belief in the JC figure as a god/prophet thing, but in a novel way... It was this guy that introduced the notion of the holy ghost, if I'm not mistaken. This guy, who had zero contact with JC himself.
And people have been buying into this seemingly made up crap for 2 millenia, not counting what jews had been buying into before that, and what other civilizations had bought even before.

Yes, the first christians were prosecuted so much that, allegedly, Peter managed to arrive at Rome, unscathed and spread the word.

Oh, but you'd probably like to learn a bit more about those first christians...
Here's what a historical biblical scholar has to say on the matter: