The Reasons why "Just Following Jesus" Doesn't work

[Rekeisha]

Again your world view does not support cruelty we are just atom bumping up against each other. I know you find it difficult to understand how the things in the Bible could happen because you refuse to accept the Supernatural and you don't want to know God. Humility is hard (I know from experience). To say that you are not the ultimate authority over your own life is difficult. In some ways I see that it is easier to just wish sin away the problem is that you will have to pay for your actions in the end. It is easier to live in denial of the truth and not have to face the facts, but that kind of life always comes crashing down. God does not want that for you. He doesn't need to justify Himself there is no one who has authority over Him. He doesn't need to save anyone He is in the right. There is nothing in this universe He needs. You do need to be justified because you refuse to recognize your sin against a holy and perfect God. Your rejection of the truth will not save you and in God's mercy He is giving you an opportunity to know Him, the God of all creation. To be made right through His grace. He paid the way to make you right and holds out His hand so that you can experience something truly amazing. The God of the universe wants you to know Him. This isn't magic this is amazing grace! You know that this universe is amazing how about knowing the one who made it!

I think for every post where you straw-man my or someone else's world view, I'm just gonna reduce my whole argument to "stop straw-manning people's world view, you fuck." It's reached that stage of irritating. You need to stop fucking doing this.

We are not just "atoms bumping into each other," and neither Rob nor I has ever said that. Yes, we're made of atoms, but those atoms are clustered into a being that can think, feel, and act. Things exist on levels of complexity above the atomic level, hence the existence of molecules, compounds, and eventually complex beings. You are straw-manning us. Stop straw-manning people's world view, you fuck.

So what are you according to your world view and what makes you have more value than a tree?

[Rekeisha]

Gen 3:8 The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there He placed the man He had formed. 9 The Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden, as well as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So it is the knowledge of Good and evil but that doesn't mean she didn't know what she should not do and what she should do. Gen 3:2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat the fruit from the trees in the garden. 3 But about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God said, ‘You must not eat it or touch it, or you will die.’”
Her last part was an addition God didn't say that you would surly die if you ate it. She could have ask God and her husband was right there so he could have said something too.
Gen 2:16...“You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die.”

It doesn't matter wither God said spiritual or physical, they wouldn't have understood what death was anyway, they should have just obeyed.  I don't explain everything to my children some things they can't fully understand. If I don't want them doing something harmful I don't need to explain all of the details I just need them to obey.
Adam and Eve had the entire garden to eat from yet the one tree and the only one negative command they had was don't eat from the tree of good and evil. God was giving them a chance to obey or disobey. To choose to trust him or distrust. God says if you obey His commands you love Him and it is only by faith that you can please Him and are justified. We have this choice and our choices do effect our children. We don't sin in a vacuum. Our decision will do harm or bless others. Their decision ruined themselves and their children. They allowed a spiritual sickness to invade all of humanity. Still God had a plan to redeem us through His own sacrifice on the cross so that whoever puts their trust in Him repents and accepts His death on the cross can be brought back into a right relationship with God. The curses were just a sign to us all that something isn't right and we need to be fixed.

As for the snake not totally clear on that but I do know that it is a metaphor. Every time Adam's decedents would see the snake they would have been reminded that they had lost something because of sin and they would also know that God had given them a promise to defeat the snake. If you look in the Bible you see the snake throughout scripture as a sign of sin/Satan and God's promise to defeat the snake at the same time.

When your kids disobey do you kick them out of the house with nothing but the clothes on their back?
Do you put the thing that's harmful somewhere where they can get to it when you're not there?

I'm going to assume no, because any parent that did would be a neglectful piece of shit. Choice? What choice? If God knows everything then we have no choice, and there isn't much choice between, "Do what I tell you, or you're going to hell," which is the whole basis of Christianity and why you need to follow Jesus in the first place. That doesn't even get into why he needs to go through the whole 'Jesus' ordeal YEARS later to do something that should take the snap of a finger if he really is all powerful, but that's the problem when you take such a story as fact. The facts don't add up. Although, even when you look at it as a piece of fiction as the rest of us do the thing has more plot holes than the Star Wars saga after the Prequels.

God was still with them but He removed them for the garden because the tree of life was there. If they ate from that they would have stayed in their sin state forever and so would all of the world. God didn't want that so He removed them from the Garden. If one of my children became so rebellious that they were going to harm another one of my children, my husband or I would kick them out. As of right now I just put them in time out.

Yes

How does knowledge equate to making something happen?

That was not the choice they had. It was- you can eat from every tree but that one tree. God didn't talk about Hell. I don't know if Adam and Eve are going to Hell if they trusted God to redeem them by His promise then they probably aren't.

God is a just, holy and a merciful God. To just snap his finger would be unjust. To give us all what we deserve would be unmerciful but His Holiness demands holiness for those around Him. His ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. When you wrong Him He must administer justice. He knows that the penalty is a costly one so He deiced to pay the cost for all those who are willing to accept His payment for their sin. This would take humility on the person's part, and the grace from God to help them get there. They have to realize that they are a sinner and have wrong the holy God. Then they must repent and give their life to God in exchange for his righteousness. Still, God in his grace gives us more. He give his Holy spirit to us and a heart with new desires. He will keep us in the faith and teach us truth through His spirit. Later, He will create a new world where everything is as it should be and we will be able to live with Him for all of eternity in perfection being made perfect for Him. If you don't want Him then you will pay the penalty yourself.

[Whateverist]

As a Christian I think it is very dangerous to pick and choose from the bible because, you are correct Mental Outlaw, the New Testament is dependent upon the Old Testament and God hasn't changed from one testament to the other. I would like to ask all of you a question. Do you not pick and choose as an atheist? You say God is evil but where are you getting your standard for what is evil? I can say something is evil because I have an absolute standard on what I base evil off of which is God and what He says about himself. So where are you getting you standard of evil from?

So this is why the thread with the unappealing title has been on the charts for like forever.  Wow, have you truly always and only ever posted on just this one thread?  Funny how certain posters -lil' Rik comes to mind- prefer to do all their business on just one thread.

But I completely agree with you about picking and choosing.  I mean, why the bible?  Personally though I don't say God is evil even though the entity that goes by that name in the old testament certainly seems to be played that way.  No, for me, the problem with God is the incoherence.  What the hell is a god?

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Maybe the tree of knowledge of good and evil simply represented the Emperor's laws, like Hammurabi's. The local yokels were expected to follow them without deviation and when they decided to make their own laws they incurred the wrath of the big wig. Remember, in the fairy tale there's a story about a time when men were free to do as they saw fit without anyone bossing them around.

One of the main themes in the Bible and in the Koran is that people are not free to make their own rules. They have to follow those laid out by the Big Wig or else he will gut and roast them for being uppity. Look at the rules Jesus spewed out. He doesn't give a damn if you are a good person without following his rules. He's going to toss your butt in the lake of fire because you rejected his set of rules and followed your own, even if your own rules make you a better person than his rules will.

The doctrine is: comply or die.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Rekeisha pid='906491' dateline='1427230055']As a Christian I think it is very dangerous to pick and choose from the bible because, you are correct Mental Outlaw, the New Testament is dependent upon the Old Testament and God hasn't changed from one testament to the other. I would like to ask all of you a question. Do you not pick and choose as an atheist? You say God is evil but where are you getting your standard for what is evil? I can say something is evil because I have an absolute standard on what I base evil off of which is God and what He says about himself. So where are you getting you standard of evil from?[/hide]

So this is why the thread with the unappealing title has been on the charts for like forever.  Wow, have you truly always and only ever posted on just this one thread?  Funny how certain posters -lil' Rik comes to mind- prefer to do all their business on just one thread.

But I completely agree with you about picking and choosing.  I mean, why the bible?  Personally though I don't say God is evil even though the entity that goes by that name in the old testament certainly seems to be played that way.  No, for me, the problem with God is the incoherence.  What the hell is a god?

"What the hell is a god?"

A god was simply a man in ancient times who enforced his political and religious rules by killing people who violated them.  

The "God" of the Bible was simply the series of men who ruled the dominant empire at any particular time in  the Middle East during ancient times who controlled the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews.  That's why the "God" character acts like an ISIS nut on LSD and magic mushrooms.  Most of them were legitimately insane.  They wrapped themselves in the cloak of celestial authority by claiming to be some invisible deity who created the universe but they were really only talking about their own empire.  

There has never been a real god in this solar system, galaxy, or universe.

[Redbeard The Pink]

I think for every post where you straw-man my or someone else's world view, I'm just gonna reduce my whole argument to "stop straw-manning people's world view, you fuck." It's reached that stage of irritating. You need to stop fucking doing this.

We are not just "atoms bumping into each other," and neither Rob nor I has ever said that. Yes, we're made of atoms, but those atoms are clustered into a being that can think, feel, and act. Things exist on levels of complexity above the atomic level, hence the existence of molecules, compounds, and eventually complex beings. You are straw-manning us. Stop straw-manning people's world view, you fuck.

So what are you according to your world view and what makes you have more value than a tree?

According to my world view, I am a human being, and I value myself more highly than a tree because my species has evolved with a survival instinct that inspires me to value my life (the same way it does in other humans, usually). There are humans that I value about the same as a tree, or a table, or a feral cat, and this is because of a concept known as the monkeysphere. Theoretically there are other humans out there that place little to no value on my life, even if they know who I am and maybe even if they know me personally. Value, like morality, is another one of those funny things that's always subjective; nothing has absolute value, only the value attributed to it by the individual. It's the same reason you see faith as valuable and I see it as a detriment to one's mental health.

[robvalue]

I keep hearing "life without God is meaningless" but still no one will tell me what this meaning is if there is a god.

I could make another thread about it I suppose, but I get barely any answers when I ask difficult questions like this. I've kind of given up bothering to try anymore. I know we don't have many theists, but I only get about 5% of them to answer, if I'm lucky. Clearly they don't want to think about certain questions.

How does a super-powered being keeping a tally of good deeds versus bad deeds give life any meaning? To me it reduces the whole thing to a joke, a joke I must live through none-the-less and I'll do it as best as I can and ignore the insane tallying God.

I suspect the "meaning" is invested in the hope that life isn't going to end. This implies that a finite existence is utterly pointless, which is a very scary conclusion; but a big insight into the mind of the person claiming this to be the case. This isn't any meaning at all of course, it's just a delusion to avoid having to face reality. (Cue the argument from ignorance.)

[Rekeisha]

As a Christian I think it is very dangerous to pick and choose from the bible because, you are correct Mental Outlaw, the New Testament is dependent upon the Old Testament and God hasn't changed from one testament to the other. I would like to ask all of you a question. Do you not pick and choose as an atheist? You say God is evil but where are you getting your standard for what is evil? I can say something is evil because I have an absolute standard on what I base evil off of which is God and what He says about himself. So where are you getting you standard of evil from?

So this is why the thread with the unappealing title has been on the charts for like forever.  Wow, have you truly always and only ever posted on just this one thread?  Funny how certain posters -lil' Rik comes to mind- prefer to do all their business on just one thread.

But I completely agree with you about picking and choosing.  I mean, why the bible?  Personally though I don't say God is evil even though the entity that goes by that name in the old testament certainly seems to be played that way.  No, for me, the problem with God is the incoherence.  What the hell is a god?

That would take an eternity to answer. So God is a being that is beyond time that created everything for His glory. He has no evil in Him He is holy and created people to be holy and to love him. We failed at that so by his grace and mercy He paid the penalty for our sins on the cross to that we could be put back into right relationship with him and continue to spread the glory of God.

I have been reading a little bit on why some people see God as incoherent or a contradiction but I would like to know why you think this is so.

[Rekeisha]

Maybe the tree of knowledge of good and evil simply represented the Emperor's laws, like Hammurabi's.  The local yokels were expected to follow them without deviation and when they decided to make their own laws they incurred the wrath of the big wig.  Remember, in the fairy tale there's a story about a time when men were free to do as they saw fit without anyone bossing them around.  

One of the main themes in the Bible and in the Koran is that people are not free to make their own rules.  They have to follow those laid out by the Big Wig or else he will gut and roast them for being uppity.  Look at the rules Jesus spewed out.  He doesn't give a damn if you are a good person without following his rules.  He's going to toss your butt in the lake of fire because you rejected his set of rules and followed your own, even if your own rules make you a better person than his rules will.  

The doctrine is:  comply or die.

Who would have been the Israelites emperor?

God's ways are ways of life.
John 8:31-32 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

It is follow or die because God's ways are life and freedom and so the opposing ways would be death and captivity. God even calls himself Life (john 14:6, John 5:26) so if you go against Him then you would be on the side of death.
I don't know a great deal about the Qur'an but I have been looking into their religion for the past couple of days and their religion has a different view of man and sin and how to be made right.

[robvalue]

Hmm, no one wants to tell me what the meaning is. What a surprise