The Problem with Christians

[God of Mr. Hanky]

No, it's not even on the level of ignorance, it's simply bigoted. Straight on the my god has the biggest dick line. Primitive on the side, but that usually goes hand in hand with bigotry.

Ignorant barges in with a vengeance, when you actually take an ambivalent phrase and turn it into a meaning of your liking. Thereby not only ignoring the history of the bible, such as when it actually was compiled.

Lastly, ignorance is also in play when you actually take the mark of the beast to be a real thiing. But I think, we established that already.

The Bible correctly predicts the rise of an end-times antichrist system. Why would a ragtag bunch of Jews 2000 years ago have the audacity to predict that the entire world would end up engulfed in a battle between what they believed as Christians and the forces denying their beliefs. It's an outrageously unlikely prediction and yet here we are watching it unfold. Fundamental Islam is slaughtering people all over the world for simply refusing to submit to its totalitarian demands. How is my observation of the actions of Islam bigotry or ignorance?

If you despise the Christian faith, how on earth could you not feel the same way about Islam?

The only thing your bible correctly predicts is that humans will act according to their nature. Nature! It's something that really doesn't give a fuck about Jesus, Mohammad, Jehova, Brahma, Buddha, Zeus, Zoroaster, Ishtar, nor Thor.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

AJW333

If it makes good sense to associate Islam with a worldwide and supernatural dictator, then it makes equal or better sense to associate evangelical Christianity with the same. If it's they who expect this, then it's they who will do their best to bring it.

AJW333 Wrote:

Are you saying that Christians wish to bring the antichrist?

Are you really ignorant enough to doubt that?

Christian deadbeats live far beyond their means on credit, betting that Jesus will return and set them free of their debt before it comes time to pay up.

Mega-church evangelical pastors are raking in billions of dollars while lobbying Congress to support Israel, which exists with our support specifically because American Christians, who are a bit more numerous than our US 1% Jewish population, want them to aggravate Muslim cultures into a conflict which will result in the next world war, which they presume will bring that final "Battle of Armageddon" which was "prophesied" in their bible. Idiots are raking in millions from writing fantasy books about the "Tribulation" which they say will come after the expected "Rapture" happens. It never will happen, but that won't deter people from engaging in an alluring and self-satisfying fantasy!

[Cyberman]

The Bible correctly predicts the rise of an end-times antichrist system.

Quick question: how can you have a correct prediction of something that hasn't happened? It's like me talking about that lovely, satisfying shit I'm going to have next Thursday.

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Polymerisation.

Your turn.

"The DNA polymerases are enzymes that create DNA molecules by assembling nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA. These enzymes are essential to DNA replication and usually work in pairs to create two identical DNA strands from one original DNA molecule. During this process, DNA polymerase “reads” the existing DNA strands to create two new strands that match the existing ones.
Every time a cell divides, DNA polymerase is required to help duplicate the cell’s DNA, so that a copy of the original DNA molecule can be passed to each of the daughter cells. In this way, genetic information is transmitted from generation to generation.
Before replication can take place, an enzyme called helicase unwinds the DNA molecule from its tightly woven form. This opens up or “unzips” the double stranded DNA to give two single strands of DNA that can be used as templates for replication.
DNA polymerase adds new free nucleotides to the 3’ end of the newly-forming strand, elongating it in a 5’ to 3’ direction. However, DNA polymerase cannot begin the formation of this new chain on its own and can only add nucleotides to a pre-existing 3'-OH group. A primer is therefore needed, at which nucleotides can be added. Primers are usually composed of RNA and DNA bases and the first two bases are always RNA. These primers are made by another enzyme called primase.
Although the function of DNA polymerase is highly accurate, a mistake is made for about one in every billion base pairs copied." http://www.news-medical.net/life-science...erase.aspx

For polymerisation to occur, you have to have a bunch of enzymes which are basically proteins that come from DNA. So how did the first DNA polymerisation reactions happen without the necessary enzymes? Seems like chicken and egg here.

You don't need DNA to get life started. Before that, it got by on RNA, and probably something different when starting out. However, some of the nucleotide monomers exist in the clay particles which flowing stream water interacts with - yes, it could have been as simple as that, so say the scientists at Cornell U:

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/...s-find.htm

[God of Mr. Hanky]

Well that's an interesting argument but looking at a barren earth 4.5 billion years ago turning into a place that is literally teeming with incredibly complex life forms, it still represents a massive reversal of local entropy, especially considering that the contributions from outside the local system of the earth appear to be somewhat limited.

Not true - life increases entropy! Our planet was losing its stored energy in a slow, orderly fashion, when along came a few, then a few million, and eventually quadrillions upon kazillions of life forms which were sucking up energy out of the soil, using up all its stored energy, and breaking up the rocks so that even more energy could be sucked up out of them and then expelled to be radiated out through the atmosphere. Then along came animal life, which helped plants achieve this even faster, while they too redirect the energy which they consume.

What the above implies is that because the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics exists, life doesn't just happen - it is mandated to happen, wherever possible (and we still don't know the half of it on all the possible scenarios), in order to uphold that law.

Read this article on MIT research - I really don't know why it isn't making more news than it is, because once you read it, it's a major "a-DUH, why didn't I think of it that way?":

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-...y-of-life/

[Esquilax]

The way I look at it, there is no such thing as a random code. Entropy takes care of that. Given that all life depends on very sophisticated code, I see that you have a problem with life getting off the ground in the first place.

Random activity = no code. No code = no life.

DNA is not a code. DNA is a series of chemical processes acting within a limited framework of actions and reactions. It is a code only in a post-hoc sense, as living minds long after the fact are able to predict the expressions of those chemical reactions due to their reliability and corresponding observations of the genomes of extant organisms. At the time that DNA forms- the relevant time for your argument- it is not a code, but merely chemicals pairing in ways that best assure their propagation as described in the theory of natural selection.

This argument from analogy isn't new to us, and it's no more fallacious the hundredth time we hear it than it was on the first. The only difference here is that you've front-loaded it with a bald assertion as to the impossibility of a random code with nothing to justify it. So you've taken a fallacy and then managed to make it worse.

Be that as it may, you have to assemble those building blocks in a meaningful sequence to make intelligent code and therefor life. This doesn't happen through random activity.

And equally, you never answered my question: if I had no answer to give you, do that mean that your god wins by default?

The problem here, that I suspect you might be aware of, given your earlier dodge, is that you're attempting to get to positive evidence only by subtracting. You're never going to demonstrate that your god was involved at all just by poking holes in the arguments of your detractors, but in the end, reducing the positions of others is all you have to make your own seem better. The purpose of my question was to show that, even if you were able to reduce our positions to zero, your own position isn't somehow the default we must return to: if you get us to the point that what we believe is wrong, the answer becomes "I don't know," not "god must have done it."

So, do you have any positive evidence for intelligent design, or does all of your support rest on one variation of "we can't explain this, therefore designer," or another?

Well that's an interesting argument but looking at a barren earth 4.5 billion years ago turning into a place that is literally teeming with incredibly complex life forms, it still represents a massive reversal of local entropy, especially considering that the contributions from outside the local system of the earth appear to be somewhat limited.

And I ask you: what seems more entropic to you: a barren, lifeless rock, or a world teeming with organisms that expend energy and change it and alter that rock in ever more chaotic ways?

Also, "somewhat limited" contributions from outside Earth? When we receive endless solar radiation from the sun, meteors and other space debris in our atmosphere, and a continual dose of radiation from space that's only really blocked out by that same atmosphere? Not to mention all the emissions from other stellar bodies that we continue to receive on Earth after traveling so many lightyears to get here. This is not limited, it's a bombardment from every side. It's just not all immediately detectable by any old guy with a keyboard.

[Foxaèr]

The Bible correctly predicts

I know for a fact that the work of fiction known as the bible does not accurately predict anything, the same as it never accurately described anything about the earth or how anything works.

Ignorant people wrote about that which they knew nothing, pure and simple. Adding a super magical sky daddy to the equation does not make it believable. It merely makes the believers gullible.

[Huggy Bear]

Don't feel like dealing with all quotes, there so I'll sum up briefly:

1) The tradition comes from the society at Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and the stories are part of the apocrypha that were found along with it. There was a church legend of the heritage Ol' Elz's lineage, and the apocrypha seem to back up the source of that legend. If the only things you know about how your legends were formed is based on what came out on the other side of the editor's table, then your knowledge will only reflect what someone deliberately wanted you to think. Doesn't that frighten you a little?

There's just one problem with the theory of Eliezer being Abrahams son:

Genesis 15
2 But Abram said, “Sovereign Lord, what can you give me since I remain childless and the one who will inherit my estate is Eliezer of Damascus?”
3 And Abram said, “You have given me no children; so a servant in my household will be my heir.”
4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir."

There is a reason why the apocrypha aren't considered cannon.

Also, again, If Eliezar is considered "property", how is he inheriting Abraham's estate?

2) Most African slaves were not kidnapped by us, but were part of the conquests of Colonial wars, as we backed one group against the other in an attempt to gain control of the resource-rich nations to plunder. They were then sold by their fellow Africans (of other nations/tribes) to the European/American shippers, who then brought them to the auction blocks throughout the Persian Gulf region and the Americas. And you are out of your mind if you think that it is reasonable to conclude "they shall be your possession" or "to be an inheritance to your children" means anything other than personal property... chattel slavery.

3) The slave trade in North America continued long after it was technically banned:

The United States Constitution, adopted in 1787, prevented Congress from completely banning the importation of slaves until 1808, although Congress regulated it in the Slave Trade Act of 1794, and in subsequent Acts in 1800 and 1803. Knowing the trade would end, in the eight years from 1800 until December 31, 1807, the states of Georgia and South Carolina reopened their trade and traders imported about 100,000 enslaved Africans into the country. Numerous states individually passed laws against importing slaves after the Revolution.

By January 1, 1808, when Congress banned further imports, only South Carolina was still importing slaves. Congress allowed continued trade only in slaves who were descendants of those currently in the United States. The domestic slave trade became more profitable than ever with the expansion of cultivation in the Deep South for cotton and sugar crops. In addition, US citizens could participate in the international slave trade and the outfitting of ships for that trade. Slavery in the United States became, more or less, self-sustaining by natural increase among the current slaves and their descendants.

Despite the ban, slave imports continued, if on a smaller scale, with smugglers continuing to bring in slaves past the U.S. Navy's African Slave Trade Patrol to South Carolina, and overland from Texas and Florida, both under Spanish control. Congress increased the punishment associated with importing slaves, classifying it in 1820 as an act of piracy, with smugglers subject to harsh penalties, including death if caught. After that, "it is unlikely that more than 10,000 [slaves] were successfully landed in the United States." But, some smuggling of slaves into the United States continued until just before the start of the Civil War.

(ETA: Citation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in...ted_States )

And yet, as we all know, the sales of slaves not only continued but was regulated by Southern state laws up until the Civil War, after which Jim Crow laws spent a century doing everything the leaders could sneak past, to try to find new laws to use to maintain slavery-while-technically-prohibited.

It's also one of the reasons any person of color (and/or of reason) should be afraid when people start grumbling too much about the federal government and promoting "state's rights" arguments now popular in conservative circles.

Here we go, the inevitable comparison of "slavery" in the bible to the Atlantic slave trade, but you forget one thing; The Atlantic slave trade justified itself through racism, slaves weren't any different than animals, there is no comparison.

Was not Joseph (the slave of Potiphar, an Egyptian) falsely accused of trying to rape the wife of his master, yet he was only put in prison? Why not just kill him since as you seem to think he was only property?

What do you think would happen if an American slave was accused of trying to rape the masters wife? Like I said, no comparison.

If you want a more apt comparison then biblical servitude was more like feudalism, "lord" and "vassal" are synonymous with "master" and "slave", yet I don't hear anyone railing against the evils of feudalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

A lord was in broad terms a noble who held land, a vassal was a person who was granted possession of the land by the lord, and the land was known as a fief. In exchange for the use of the fief and the protection of the lord, the vassal would provide some sort of service to the lord. There were many varieties of feudal land tenure, consisting of military and non-military service. The obligations and corresponding rights between lord and vassal concerning the fief form the basis of the feudal relationship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom

Serfdom is the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism. It was a condition of bondage, which developed primarily during the High Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.

Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land, and in return were entitled to protection, justice and the right to exploit certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also his mines, forests and roads. The manor formed the basic unit of feudal society, and the lord of the manor and his serfs were bound legally, economically, and socially. Serfs formed the lowest social class of feudal society.

*emphasis mine*
When Abraham's nephew was taken captive, he basically called all his servants to arms and went to war against 4 kings.

Genesis 14
14 And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan.
15 And he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left hand of Damascus.

See? The feudal comparison is more appropriate.

What do you think would happen if an American slave holder armed 318 slaves? Once again, no comparison.

And you are out of your mind if you think that it is reasonable to conclude "they shall be your possession" or "to be an inheritance to your children" means anything other than personal property... chattel slavery.

Possession does not imply ownership, you can have possession of something without being the owner, hence the word "borrow". One entered into a contract by selling himself in the case of the bible or by taking an oath of vassalage in the case of feudalism.

In the case of the Bible the contract was until the year of Jubilee, no if's, and's or but's. Now if the bondservant didn't want to go free, that was HIS prerogative.

Tell me when American slaves were scheduled to go free? again, no comparison.

[Cyberman]

I just want to say thank you to the theist participants in this thread for quite comprehensively demonstrating the rationale set out in the OP. Well done!

[robvalue]

Lol, we're not really needed, are we?

I'd love to hear how "faith based" approaches work in other situations.

"Maybe the door isn't where it looks like it is, and where it's always been. Maybe the door is now in what looks like a brick wall. You can't prove it isn't. I'm going to walk through the brick wall."