RE: What makes your faith true?
November 7, 2017 at 12:03 am
(This post was last modified: November 7, 2017 at 12:15 am by Fake Messiah.)
(November 6, 2017 at 11:52 am)pool the matey Wrote: Your whole method is wrong because what you're doing is cherry picking from here and there, it's possible to disagree with anything if all you do is cherry pick. Look at what the meaning or message of the whole of the Bible is.
My method? What about all the hate preachers, witch hunters, terrorists, young earth creationists, televangelists and so on. You say to take a Bible as a whole I should ignore the parts where Jesus lies, steals, curses people - you see how you don't make sense. Even the parts that you talk about on your mass like when Jesus was on the cross and told the thief that tomorrow he'll be with him in paradise is a big fat lie, since earlier Jesus said he'll be under ground.
And even if you take NT as a "whole" it sounds of very barking mad because you have a story in which God, to forgive people for eating from a wrong tree, kills violently his son /himself thus thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers'. Couldn't he just forgive people like any normal person?
To think that your holy book and thus religion is beautiful and look only at the good parts is ignoring reality. Just like many people think of the natural world as universally beautiful. But this ignores reality. For every gorgeous bird there is a deadly earthquake. For every bright flower there are millions of microbes waiting to kill us in slow and agonizing ways. So it is with religion.
Some Muslims think it is justifiable to kill nonbelievers if they refuse to convert to Islam. And if you read the Koran you can understand why some more passionate believers would think that Allah wants this. There are statements that suggest that killing nonbelievers is not only acceptable but a duty as well. Fortunately, most Muslims disregard this or offer softer interpretations of the scarier passages and point to peaceful quotes within the Koran that would seem to counter calls for violence against nonbelievers. Still, some Muslims do believe that "kill the infidels" means kill the infidels. This is not beautiful. As it is in parts of the Bible that tell you to kill people who do not believe in the god of the Bible.
Every time good people sing religious song beautifully and from the heart, there is a preacher out there somewhere who is delivering a poisonous sermon that encourages believers to hate others and to embrace a medieval ignorance of the world. Wars, suicide bombers, televangelists and other evil deeds that were inspired by or sanctioned by religion provide a counterbalance to all the goodness that comes from religion. For every life improved by belief in a god, there are lives damaged by it. The belief inspired mistreatment of countless millions of girls and women alone proves that. It is either a mistake or outright dishonesty to describe popular religions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism as completely peaceful and wholly good.
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"
