Hi, I'm a Christian. Help Me Disprove My Religion!

[Regina]

[TheRocketSurgeon]

[vorlon13]

I know a Christian who believes the Bible is full of errors. He believers the over all message is inspired, but, not that it's absolute word of God.

So given you can have that view, how would one disprove Christianity?

Whether your acquaintance wants to admit it or not, he comes damn close.

[Randy Carson]

Here: http://atheistforums.org/thread-36296.html

All the proof you need.

Or pick one of these topics and I'll explain it to you:

1. God lies to Abraham about the covenant he makes with him. Then he lies to Moses, Joshua, and David too.
2. God is a misogynist: Women are property, only men can get divorced, and adultary means sleeping with a married woman (married men are allowed to sleep with sex slaves, prostitutes, other wives they own, and unmarried women).
3. There is no morality in the Old Testament that isn't reflective of the conventional wisdom of the age.
4. There was no Exodus.
5. There was no conquest of Canaan.
6. The Pentateuch wasn't written until the 7th century BC at the earliest - that's 6-8 centuries after the mythical Exodus.
7. While there's very good evidence that Jesus was crucified, there's almost no evidence for his supposed bodily resurrection and ascension which forms the cornerstone of modern Christianity. Paul never mentions it, James and Jude and Peter never mention it, the author of Hebrews doesn't mention it, and Mark doesn't mention it either. Mark does say that Jesus ascended, and he does say Jesus will appear to people - but that's it - there isn't any mention of a bodily resurrection or an ascension. Matt 28:17 says that "some who saw the resurrected Jesus doubted" - so by the own admission of the gospel writer there were people who saw the supposed resurrected Jesus and said "that's not him". So what makes the people who did believe right and those that didn't wrong? We have no objective way to determine that other than to ask the question "who are the ones that are religiously biased"? So the gospel writer is basing the account on religiously-biased hearsay - that's hardly convincing evidence.
8. God is not faithful to his followers: Jesus is crucified, John the Baptist is beheaded, Judas Iscariot hangs himself, Herod has James the son of Zebedee killed by the sword, Simeon and James the Just are stoned to death, Peter is crucified, Paul is executed by the Romans, Nero persecutes the Christians from 64-68AD, and in 70AD the Jerusalem Church is completely destroyed (along with the rest of Jerusalem) as far as anyone can tell. BUT Jesus promised that the Son of Man would come before they finish going through all the towns of Israel (Matt 10:23).

Number 7, please. Thanks in advance.

[Aractus]

Good analysis, Aractus. I don't doubt that Paul knew the disciples (indeed, it's my hunch that he was not converted "on the road to Damascus" by a vision, but was converted during the process of Christian-hunting on behalf of the Romans, and ran in his own direction--influenced by his Pharisee background--with the information he had, one of the reasons Paul seems so different in tone from Jesus, and why I like to joke that modern Christians are actually "Paulians"), but it's clear from his own writings that they considered him a fanboy and questionable in his theological approach. Nevertheless, I don't think one should throw the baby out with the bathwater, with regard to Carrier. His questionable results should be criticized, most heavily of all by us, but his speculations may produce fruit when turned over by other scholars, and at the very least I find his speculations about the relatedness of Hebrew theology to the theological inputs of now-extinct religions to be useful in forming a picture of the ancient mindset.

Paul was converted on the road to Damascus - that's what he himself says. He says he received a revelation, but he doesn't say how he received it. It's likely he received his revelation from a Christian (or whatever you want to call the followers of Jesus at that time) in 36AD. Christians use Acts 9 to tell them about it, but it's not contemporary and is written by someone who didn't have first-hand knowledge of any Christian events that early. Acts 22 quotes Paul directly giving testimony that he did have a vision and hear the voice of Jesus on the road to Damascus - and the author is writing about contemporary events they have some first-hand knowledge about at this point, and furthermore the author knew Paul. So Acts 22 is the strongest case that Paul did indeed receive a vision - or at least believed that he had.

However, Paul doesn't mention it as a part of his conversion in any of his letters. So I would agree that it's perfectly disputable about whether he had a vision or not - however we know that's the time and location he was converted because he himself says so.

Carrier doesn't really make ANY interesting insights in that video. He has a few minor valid points, but they're overshadowed by his quackery, and don't contribute anything substantial to showing that his hypothesis should be treated as a theory.

As I said, any decent presenter would have references on their slides - yet he has none at all. That's not academic, and if he's using other people's ideas (as he claims to be doing), or even his own published ideas, then it's plagiarism. So either he's making everything up as he goes along, or he's plagiarising - that doesn't make him very credible at all in my book.

This is one of his slides:



And this is how it should look, either like this:



Or like this:



Or of course you can use other referencing methods such as supertexts: "4. And other evidence forged in its place6" ... and then on your references slide have them ordered by number instead of author. But the fact is he didn't use any at all.

[Mystic]

I know a Christian who believes the Bible is full of errors. He believers the over all message is inspired, but, not that it's absolute word of God.

So given you can have that view, how would one disprove Christianity?

Whether your acquaintance wants to admit it or not, he comes damn close.

Why is that?

[vorlon13]

He knows better than God which verses apply and which ones don't.

Gives himself an A+ on the course work, gives God a D-.

Practically one of us.

If he was a Muslim he'd have a Fatwa on his ass with that attitude in regards to the Koran.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

[WishfulThinking]

[Aractus]