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

[robvalue]

One arbitrary supposed supernatural causation is indistinguishable from another; and is also indistinguishable from no cause at all.

Real world stuff.

It's why all religious "arguments" look exactly the same before the final unjustified leap into the person's favourite book.

[Crossless2.0]

One arbitrary supposed supernatural causation is indistinguishable from another; and is also indistinguishable from no cause at all.

Real world stuff.

Exactly. Hence, my earlier answer: Brahma. It's just as good/bad/completely irrelevant a response as Yahweh or the Immortal Duck of Creation.

[Athene]

Yes,I'm familiar with the fable.
Your God determined that all of humanity would be afflicted with a sinful nature due to the disobedience that occurred in the Garden, despite having absolutely no connection to the original sin. That makes your God completely responsible for man's fallible and sinful nature, like it or not.

God does not cause us to sin but He does take responsibility for us. Jesus came and died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin. In the end He will remove all sin from the earth. If you choose to hold on to your sin then you will be removed along with it. He will allow you to disobey Him but you can either allow Him to pay for you or you can pay the price yourself.

No. According to the myth, your God set the bait in the Garden of Eden. That is what's known as entrapment.

In continuing with the story, it is your God that illegitimately implicates the whole of humanity for a single transgression, and deems everyone to be an unworthy sinner. That was God's judgement, His determination, His will and therefore His fault, by design.

Your God created the very idea of sin, the conditions for the original sin to transpire, as well as the capacity/predisposition to sin in every man, woman, child and infant.

Your God made you sick, so that He could sell you the cure...and you're actually buying it.
None for me, thanks...I know a shakedown when I see it.

[Redbeard The Pink]

Earlier you said you don't know why things are uniform so why can you do it now?

You said I could. Make up your mind...or learn to type.


You keep flinging around this word..."uniform, uniformity, etc." I really think you mean to say "constant." The Universe is anything but uniform. It's completely rife with variables and chaos. It functions according to consistent rules, but I really wouldn't actually call it "uniform."


There are two main reasons why it's acceptable to assume that the Universe behaves according to consistent norms: that conclusion is affirmed by literally billions of years worth of evidence all throughout the Universe, and there is not one shred of evidence to the contrary. Those two facts make it a pretty safe bet that physics does not take breaks. Ever. There's a difference between an assumption and an unfounded assumption. An assumption would be that the Universe behaves more or less consistently. An unfounded assumption would be that this happens because Gaud makes it so.

God doesn't make you sin. You can't blame your faults on Him. If I tell my child not to do a thing, and I make him aware of the consequences, if he does it it is his fault for disobeying me.  It would be evil to allow someone to disobey and not give them a warning but that isn't what God does. He tells us explicitly through His word and implicitly through the systems of the earth as well as our conscious. If we willfully do it then it is us who choose evil but we can not claim ignorance. Also since you don't know all things you don't know how much evil God has stopped.

If Gaud is truly the cause and creator of everything, then he is personally responsible for all sin on many levels. For one thing, in order for sin to enter his system, he must have either created sin or created the thing that invented sin. Regardless of who or what invented sin and introduced it to the system, Gaud invented that thing and introduced it into the system, so the introduction of sin is still Gaud's fault.


For another thing, he also allegedly decides which behaviors are moral and immoral, aka which things are sins. He could decide that nothing is a sin, effectively eliminating the concept of sin from even being possible. He also could have created beings that had the choice not to love him, but didn't have the choice to sin and therefore damn themselves. Any way you slice it, Gaud is either personally responsible for evil or he's personally responsible for the source of evil. There is no escaping this except by ignoring it.


The same goes for suffering, and before you start I'd like to point out that not all suffering is caused by "sin." Some of it is merely caused by our environment, like diseases and natural disasters. Gaud designed the microbes and systems that cause all of that, and he designed us to be susceptible to those things, and he put us here with those things. Obviously he wanted us to suffer from disease and natural events. Otherwise he wouldn't have put us here and made us so destructible.


I mean, hell...our own otherwise healthy cells have the genetic capacity to do this thing called "cancer" where they just fuck up into this nasty, useless stuff and then start multiplying til they kill you. Germs don't do that...our bodies do it to themselves, basically. What all-knowing designer builds in something like that unless he intends for us to suffer horribly and die wasting deaths from it? In what way would he not be responsible for the suffering caused by such a feature? Satan didn't invent cancer, and neither did humans. If there were a creator god, he would be personally and solely responsible for all suffering, all sin, all failure, and all death. He made himself responsible merely by being the one who set it all into motion, even if he never touched it after that.

Again don't have a foundation for what evil is because you think morals are subjective. What you said was evil when you claimed Christianity you don't claim now. So your idea of an evil God is just your opinion but it isn't based on any true foundation.

My morality, like virtually all human morality, is a personal amalgam of empathy and cultural influence. For me, it all boils down to the Golden Rule. Because the Bible depicts Jehovah as doing a whole bunch of things to people that I wouldn't want done to me and that Jehovah probably wouldn't want done to him, I recognize Jehovah as being evil and immoral. Yes, this is basically my opinion when you get right down to it, but at least my opinion isn't based on cherry-picked passages from the Bible, and at least I recognize that it's an opinion and not a decree from an invisible bogey man in the sky.

You have no proof this is just conjecture. I also said that God lead me to the bible because that is His word. What I have told you is reality and it will not change the truth. I don't put my faith in a religion I put my faith in God. He is my foundation.

The proof is that what I described is exactly what happened, just with the Bible instead of the Quran. You had a personal "encounter" with a voice in your head who claimed two characteristics that are exceedingly vague and exceedingly common amongst god characters, and then you converted to the first religion you tripped over. That series of events is evidence that it wouldn't have mattered what religion you actually found, so long as it had a god who is eternal and does not have parents. You obviously were looking to convert to a religion, and because you're American you picked Christianity because it's the most accessible and it happened to feed into your confirmation bias from your imaginary conversation with your imaginary friend.

[robvalue]

Christianity = Stockholm Syndrome

I've noticed a lot of people saying this, and I have to agree. It makes me really sad, because people are victims of their own abuse, on top of any external abuse. An imaginary father figure who beats them every day for things someone else did, but insists so strongly that they deserve the beatings that they come to believe it. It has to be crushing for self-worth.

[Rekeisha]

So you don't have an answer?

Brahma.

And since you can't disprove my non-falsifiable claim, let's move on.

You are now Hindu? So how does Brahma keep the universe in order?

[Crossless2.0]

Brahma.

And since you can't disprove my non-falsifiable claim, let's move on.

You are now Hindu? So how does Brahma keep the universe in order?

Way to completely miss the point!

[Redbeard The Pink]

Brahma.

And since you can't disprove my non-falsifiable claim, let's move on.

You are now Hindu? So how does Brahma keep the universe in order?

The same way your Gaud does: by willing it to be so because he's Brahma. What more explanation do you need?

[Rekeisha]

Do you have infinite knowledge? If you don't then how can you know that no on knows?

Well isn't that special? I must have infinite knowledge to read the works of top physicists who are debating the subject, notice that they, who would be in the best position to know such a thing, say they don't know but have some pretty good ideas, and accept that at face value.

Obviously I don't believe in werewolves. But if a person came up to me (or to you) and suggested that werewolves were what kept the laws of physics from changing, I'd likely have a pretty hard time not simply laughing at their suggestion, unless they backed up that assertion with some pretty serious evidence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You continue to assert that the laws of physics may be variable, and must be fixed in place by the action of a Deity. I see no reason to suppose this assertion is true. As far as I can tell, the physicists are right when they demonstrate (via experiments at the high-speed particle colliders) that the properties of the universe, such as gravity, density, and electromagnetism, are emergent properties from the way in which subatomic particles interact with one another. Going back after the fact and imagining that some werewolf (or god) "fixed" those particules just so, so they would interact in this way, rather than some other hypothetical way, is irrelevant except in the context of those people who try to claim that we live in a world ordered by magic, and not the discovered laws of physics.

So you just know that some physicist says that no one knows and you accept it without question? Do these physicist possess infinite knowledge?

The only reason why their is order in the universe is because God keeps it in order. He made the universe and he keeps it in order don't by magic but because he posses infinite knowledge and power and wants it to still exist. You may not understand it but that doesn't make it magic.

You get extraordinary evidence every day but you choose not to accept it. The fact that there is life on the earth is extraordinary. The universe is vast, amazing and full of wonder and yet finely tuned. Our bodies have DNA which has a purpose and a reason to be there.  It is not evidence that you lack.

[Rekeisha]

God does not cause us to sin but He does take responsibility for us. Jesus came and died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sin. In the end He will remove all sin from the earth. If you choose to hold on to your sin then you will be removed along with it. He will allow you to disobey Him but you can either allow Him to pay for you or you can pay the price yourself.

No. According to the myth, your God set the bait in the Garden of Eden. That is what's known as entrapment.

In continuing with the story, it is your God that illegitimately implicates the whole of humanity for a single transgression, and deems everyone to be an unworthy sinner. That was God's judgement, His determination, His will and therefore His fault, by design.

Your God created the very idea of sin, the conditions for the original sin to transpire, as well as the capacity/predisposition to sin in every man, woman, child and infant.

Your God made you sick, so that He could sell you the cure...and you're actually buying it.
None for me, thanks...I know a shakedown when I see it.

Yes, God does make the rules and they are based on His perfectly good nature. He is the bar at which all people will be judged and your fabrications will not save you from the truth. You can't account for what is right without Him because He is the standard. You can pretend otherwise but it is at your own risk. This is not a threat but a warning.