Stupid things religious people say

[Fake Messiah]

Here are some sayings by Frank Turek. He is celebrated in Christian circles as some sort of a thinker.

And although his claims are all obviously absurd, I commented few in the brackets.

●Even skeptics have faith. They have faith that skepticism is true.

●Likewise, agnostics have faith that agnosticism is true.

●In other words, atheists, who are naturally skeptical of Christianity, turn out to be true believers in atheism.

●As a Christian apologist, author, and native of India, Ravi Zacharias travels the world giving evidence for the Christian faith. He has an incisive intellect and an engaging personality, which makes him a favorite on college and university campuses.

(Of course, who else can be an admired teacher of Christianity if not a sexual predator.)

●The God of the Bible is not like Zeus, Apollo, Baal, and the rest, or even what the Bible calls an “angel.” God is not a created being among other beings inside the universe.

(Even the Bible describes Yahweh as just another god among other gods who frequently wants certain tribes of people to worship exclusively him or along with other gods. Even so, there is nothing that stops Zeus, Apollo, Baal, and etc. from being a "non-created being among other beings inside the universe.")

●If atheism is merely a lack of belief in God, then rocks, trees, and outhouses are all “atheists” because they, too, lack a belief in God.

●To claim that atheism is not a worldview is like saying anarchy is not really a political position. As Bo Jinn observes, “An anarchist might say that he simply ‘rejects politics,’ but he is still confronted with the inescapable problem of how human society is to organize itself, whether he likes the idea of someone being in charge or not.”

(No. Even though some people "bring god" into politics and create theocracies, that doesn't mean that belief of god is in any way needed to organize society. Neither is that an "inescapable problem". Even many religious politicians don't mix god in laws or any kind of politics.)

●Atheists can say they just “reject God,” but they are still confronted with the inescapable problem of how to explain ultimate reality.

(God is not needed to explain reality. It's like a Santa Claus believer claiming that without the belief in Santa Claus you cannot explain who brings presents on Christmas.)

●Dr. William Lane Craig asks an excellent question: If atheists are going to claim that things can pop into existence uncaused out of nothing, then why doesn’t everything do so? Why don’t iPads, Teslas, atheist books, and pizzas pop into existence out of nothing? If you’re hungry for a pizza right now, does it make more sense to order one or just wait and hope? Talk about faith.

[Fake Messiah]

Pastors in Ghana make female members remove their underpants during service and shave their pubic hair for easy deliverance of the Holy Spirit.

[Fake Messiah]

The ‘exorcism economy’ is flourishing – with consults starting at £100

According to reports in Russian media outlets such as Gazeta.ru, thousands of people in Russia are actively discussing exorcisms on social media. This is a spiritual ritual performed by a handful of Russian priests to expel spirits or demons from a person who is believed to be possessed.

Some people are travelling to well-known “exorcism destinations” such as Oryol Oblast about 400km south of Moscow. A priest there called Father Igor, the official exorcist of the local diocese, performs a ritual called otchitka. The ritual involves the priest reciting a set of prayers to help those deemed to be under the influence of spirits.

Other people are turning to the informal “exorcism economy”, which is offered by local mediums. Some have reported paying between 10,000 rubles (£98) and 20,000 rubles (£196) just for an initial consultation to determine whether they are truly possessed. Russia’s Orthodox Church warns that exorcism attempts should be left to members of the clergy.

Exorcism is embedded in the Orthodox tradition, with exorcism prayers first brought into Russian religious practice in the 17th century by Archbishop Peter Mogila. However, exorcisms remained rare until the late Soviet period.

Media reporting suggests that the business of “banishing demons” seen in present-day Russia is also reflective of a society under strain – but, in this case, one grappling with the effects of the war in Ukraine.

The Russian Orthodox Church’s appointment of Vladimir Putin as “chief exorcist” in 2022 could also help explain why some Russians have been drawn into a fight with their inner demons. The Russian president’s appointment came after the Kremlin called for Ukraine to be “desatanised”.

Russian audiences have spent nearly two decades watching the popular television show, Battle of the Psychics. This show showcases the supposed paranormal abilities of self-proclaimed healers, witches and mediums in various competitive challenges. A recent episode even featured a live exorcism.

Just as Battle of Psychics spawned a multimillion-ruble industry of celebrity healers, Russia’s wartime exorcism surge reveals a similar monetisation of fear and uncertainty. What was once a localised ritual appears to be evolving into a structured commercial service – a phenomenon I call “exorcism tourism”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world...03879.html

[Mister Agenda]

Here are some sayings by Frank Turek. He is celebrated in Christian circles as some sort of a thinker.

And although his claims are all obviously absurd, I commented few in the brackets.

●Even skeptics have faith. They have faith that skepticism is true.

●Likewise, agnostics have faith that agnosticism is true.

●In other words, atheists, who are naturally skeptical of Christianity, turn out to be true believers in atheism.

●As a Christian apologist, author, and native of India, Ravi Zacharias travels the world giving evidence for the Christian faith. He has an incisive intellect and an engaging personality, which makes him a favorite on college and university campuses.

(Of course, who else can be an admired teacher of Christianity if not a sexual predator.)

●The God of the Bible is not like Zeus, Apollo, Baal, and the rest, or even what the Bible calls an “angel.” God is not a created being among other beings inside the universe.

(Even the Bible describes Yahweh as just another god among other gods who frequently wants certain tribes of people to worship exclusively him or along with other gods. Even so, there is nothing that stops Zeus, Apollo, Baal, and etc. from being a "non-created being among other beings inside the universe.")

●If atheism is merely a lack of belief in God, then rocks, trees, and outhouses are all “atheists” because they, too, lack a belief in God.

●To claim that atheism is not a worldview is like saying anarchy is not really a political position. As Bo Jinn observes, “An anarchist might say that he simply ‘rejects politics,’ but he is still confronted with the inescapable problem of how human society is to organize itself, whether he likes the idea of someone being in charge or not.”

(No. Even though some people "bring god" into politics and create theocracies, that doesn't mean that belief of god is in any way needed to organize society. Neither is that an "inescapable problem". Even many religious politicians don't mix god in laws or any kind of politics.)

●Atheists can say they just “reject God,” but they are still confronted with the inescapable problem of how to explain ultimate reality.

(God is not needed to explain reality. It's like a Santa Claus believer claiming that without the belief in Santa Claus you cannot explain who brings presents on Christmas.)

●Dr. William Lane Craig asks an excellent question: If atheists are going to claim that things can pop into existence uncaused out of nothing, then why doesn’t everything do so? Why don’t iPads, Teslas, atheist books, and pizzas pop into existence out of nothing? If you’re hungry for a pizza right now, does it make more sense to order one or just wait and hope? Talk about faith.

I read I don't have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Frank Turek. My face hurt from all the palming.

[Fake Messiah]

Here are some sayings by a certain anonymous person who calls himself Bo Jinn and who has penned several books supposedly debunking atheism.

His claims are in italics, while my comments are in brackets.

●the Bible never describes God or what he looks like. He seems to manifest at times in the form of certain things like bushes and doves, but there is no reference in either the Koran or the Torah or the New Testament which indicates, for instance; that God is an old man with a white beard hovering around in the clouds.

(It's not just the burning bush and dove. The Bible claims that Moses have enjoyed regular meetings with God, talking to him “face to face, as one would speak to a friend”. Abraham walks alongside him, and Jacob has a wrestling match with him. The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel each see God sitting on his throne, while Amos sees him standing in one of his temples. In the Gospels, Jesus not only boasts he has seen God, but is also said to have seated himself alongside God in the heavens, at his right hand. As do Stephen in the book of Acts, and the writer of Revelation, both of whom see God sitting enthroned in the heavens—you know, like “an old man with a white beard hovering around in the clouds.”)

●God is the point at which the theist humbles himself to the reality that he cannot understand everything with empirical certainty, because God exists in a non-empirical sense. Postulating a flying spaghetti monster or a “special computer” in God’s place is just a meaningless parody of a being that was never intended to have a face to begin with- at least not in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

(That’s the point of the argument. Nothing forbids a flying spaghetti monster from “existing in a non-empirical sense”—that he is invisible, inaudible, and imperceptible. Although Bo Jinn thinks that Christians have exclusivity over a being whose attributes are invisibility, inaudibility, and imperceptibility. So, according to him, if you were to imagine this being, you are imagining the Christian God, but you are calling him the Flying Spaghetti Monster.)

●The theory of evolution is the sole theory which would seem to suggest that life on Earth could emerge causelessly and without “design”. In other words, if Darwinian evolution was ever compromised, the whole materialist house of cards would come a-tumbling down, and atheism along with it.

(No. An alternative to the theory of evolution is not creationism. If, somehow—although highly unlikely—evolution were to be proven wrong, it doesn’t mean that the world was created in six days by a wizard. The science still goes on, and it will find another way to explain how living creatures came to be.)

●However, given that the vast majority of scientific theories are revised, the odds are against the future of Darwinism.

(Ha, ha, no. Also, this guy calling evolution “Darwinism” tells you all you need to know about him.)

●what exactly are the findings in life’s origins that would have satisfied Richard Dawkins of the God’s existence? Are we expected to find some kind of scientific evidence pointing to a 4 billion year old bald man with a white beard, soaring over the Earth, sprinkling tiny molecules of DNA over our seas and oceans?

(That’s not Dawkin's fault, but rather that God or his workings are not defined. Bo Jinn already said that he doesn’t accept God as a “bald man with a white beard”, so his claim/ question is already inaccurate enough for this to be a non sequitur. I mean he is blaming Dawkins for not seeing in biology works of a being he wrongly describes (doesn’t believe). And since you can define God as you like, so you can say that God is the forces of nature, and his work is, thus, indistinguishable from nature.)

●The theist is not committed to an accurate description of God in order to maintain theism and reject atheism.

(There you go. He is not obliged to define how God works, but Dawkins is obliged to behave as if he did.)

●Do we have good grounds to reject the existence of Zeus? That depends on your interpretation of who/what Zeus is. If by “Zeus” one means to imply a statuesque, titan of a man hurling thunderbolts from the peak of Mount Olympus, then that is an empirically falsifiable claim. However, if by “Zeus” you mean an infinitely powerful, transcendental and necessary being, who exists as the overriding final and efficient cause of the universe and everything in it, then what you are calling “Zeus” is really “God”.

(There you go again: if you define God as a non-existing entity, then he miraculously “exists”. He obviously doesn’t need atheists to “kill” god—he’s doing it fine by himself. And yes, ancient Greeks did believe that Zeus was a titan of a man hurling thunderbolts from the peak of Mount Olympus.)

●The reason why western moral epistemology exists in its current state is because for centuries human beings believed in a moral ontology grounded in an overarching deity. By comparison, the only moral philosophies which secular humanism has contributed to the western world in the last fifty years is a strong push in favor of abortion, stem-cell research and euthanasia. Everything else is the residue of a long Christian tradition and all the scruples of all the atheists in all the world are not going to change that.

(Ah, the old delusion that Christians invented morality. He must be so stupid to be oblivious that people had laws and lawgivers and even morality before Christianity. The laws and morality came naturally when people started living in communities—they discovered they needed rules to obey by—and, thus, little by little, they started creating laws. But then there is his claim that secular humanism did nothing to contribute to morality except for abortion and stem-cell research—which are actually useful—but secular humanism made the modern world possible. How? For starters it made people stop killing and discriminating each other for religious and other differences; it brought democracy; gave women equal rights; abolish slavery and servitude; etc.)

●Truthfully, if atheism is true and there is no absolute, transcendent moral truth, then if Hitler won the war and succeeded in creating his perverted new world order, he would be absolved, nay exalted for everything he had done. To invoke an adage often attributed to Chesterton himself; when people reject God it is not so much that they believe in nothing; it’s that they become capable of believing absolutely anything.

(What does it matter if Hitler won or lost the war for secular humanism to judge him? Inside the Nazi regime, Hitler was seen as righteous because he dictated the narrative, so there is no need to speculate on what would have happened inside the regime if he had won. However, secular humanism viewed him as wrong because it cherishes human feelings. Like, you have the voter deciding what is best for the people and you don't ask God or the Pope or Hitler. You go to each human and ask him or her what they want. Which can hardly be said about Christianity which collaborated with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. Like when Pious XII kept quiet about the Holocaust and never regretted it, and then, after the war, pressed the allies to give clemency to Catholic Nazis—including those that ran the camps.
And then it gets even more absurd as he quotes Chesterton as a voice of reason—Chesterton, who was an anti-Semite.)

[The Grand Nudger]

It's amazing how many people will tell you, at great length, that they believe in gods because they don't personally understand how biology and morality work.

[Fake Messiah]

Christians should be wary of announcements of alien existence because the Bible does not mention aliens, and since the Bible knows everything, it would have mentioned aliens. However, the Bible does mention demons, so the aliens that people are seeing and being abducted by are most likely demons.

Former senior Bank of England analyst warns of the existence of aliens, how should Christians respond?

But before we start stock-piling gold, I think we need to talk about aliens from a Christian perspective. Have you ever heard about aliens in a Sunday church sermon?

Back in 2016, before I became a Christian, a video appeared on my Facebook feed of a man talking about aliens. There was something about the scene that lended itself credibility. The man was dressed in a suit, speaking in a university auditorium. For the first time I felt open to considering the fact that aliens might be real.

A few years later, in 2020, I was seeking spiritual comfort in the isolation of lockdown. I spent a lot of time watching videos from new age gurus; a number of whom had their own alien abduction experiences, or channelled information from so-called beings from other planets.

What amazed me about the stories of alien abduction was that they all corroborated each other. They often met the same type of aliens or had similar experiences that backed each other up. Aliens were real! Or so I thought.

I was hungry for truth, and that led me to the place all genuine truth-seekers arrive at; God and the Bible. I listened to testimony after testimony of people leaving the new age to follow Jesus. One day I said the Lord’s prayer, felt the presence of God, and knew he was real.

So what about aliens? I came across a video from Joseph Jordan; an ex. UFO researcher who stumbled upon something surprising in his research; that Bible believing born again Christians don’t get abducted by aliens. Jordan also discovered that calling on Jesus Christ during an abduction can stop it completely. Jordan’s conclusion is that aliens are not physical beings from other planets but are actually demons.

The Bible tells us that Satan masquerades as an angel of light, and is the father of lies, and it seems that the alien narrative is a lie being told by demons. More evidence comes from Dr. Hugh Ross, a Christian astrophysicist, and author of Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men. Ross has studied the UFO phenomenon, and made some interesting observations.

Ross explains that genuine UFO’s are different to physical phenomena because there’s a number of aspects that show they are not subject to the laws of physics in the way physical phenomena are. There is no ‘sonic boom’ heard when the UFO moves. A sonic book is an explosive noise that happens when an aircraft flies faster than the speed of sound. There is also no heat friction observed. Heat friction is a bright glow seen when spacecraft travel through the atmosphere, so we would expect to see this with a fast-moving object. There is also no physical debris left when a UFO crashes. There may be a crater left in the ground but not actually any remains of their craft.

Ross’s conclusion along with other secular UFO researchers is that we are not dealing with a physical phenomenon, but an inter-dimensional phenomenon. Ross like Jordan, agrees that alien abduction is very real, but it’s a spiritual rather than a physical phenomenon. Ross has observed that there is always a correlation between abduction and being active in the occult, either personally or having a family member who practises. If people experiencing abduction cease any occult activity, then their alien encounters cease too.

The Book of Urantia, is a 4000 page text of automatic writing; words channeled through an ‘alien’ to a human. Roughly ⅓ of the book is dedicated to denying the deity of Jesus Christ, so it’s clear that ‘aliens’ are not telling the truth, and they have an agenda.

The Bible warns us a lot about demons and spiritual warfare, but doesn’t mention aliens. As Christians we must be discerning of any future ‘disclosure,’ and see it through a biblical lens. If the world does plunge into chaos because of alien announcements, let’s use it as an opportunity to share how Jesus can not only cast out an unwanted alien/demon, but to transform our lives when we repent and follow him.

https://www.womanalive.co.uk/opinion/for...22.article

[Fake Messiah]

For Hindus, it's an honor when cows trample over you.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

For Hindus, it's an honor when cows trample over you.

I have a bit of experience with that. Makes me glad I'm not Hindu. When a cow just steps on your foot, you don't thank Lord Bramha. You shriek 'I WANT MORPHINE!!'

Boru

[Mister Agenda]

Made me glad our field was soft earth, still hurt like the dickens.