A lot to respond to… here we go.
Hawkeye:
Quote: God made the universe? What?... Says who? There wasn't even a Christion type God before their were humans to believe there was that possibility.
It seems like you are saying that God is a creation of humanity. There is a chain of causality for the entire universe that I have pointed out that extends beyond our space and time, suggesting that actually God exists independently of our universe, and independently whether or not someone believes in Him. Your point is like saying if all humanity stopped believing in a law of gravity, it would cease to exist, which is nonsense.
Quote: When it comes to morality or the ten comandments, its a survival instinct. To survive is far easier to do so by living together. Therefor the need for social structure. Not because God said so. Collectively working together to get food and shelter. If you kill your neighbour your not going to have help. If you sleep with you neighbour wife you not going to work together, etc...All about social structure and there is nothing in the ten comandments that wasent already going on before the ten were put in place with the exception of the him being at the top and before all others. Or else!! Whamo!! That God does nothing with those who kill or hurt babies. Social structure does that.
What you are talking about is called sociobiology, and just because it provides a reason for how these ideas originate has no bearing on whether these ideas of morality are true or not. I write later in this post to Starcraft about the genetic fallacy, which is what you are falling into here. Of course sociobiology exists; that fact is totally irrelevant to the validity or falsity of the 10 commandments however.
Quote: Have you read any papers lately or heard the news. Being "good" sure as hells got nothing to do with Christianity or God. Perhaps you would leave your children with the local Christian priests for a sleep over, but I sure wouldn't. Even the Pope may have his hands dirty.
As a former Catholic, I’m taking these news reports harder than my friends I find. I personally think any church official who protected a pedophile in their midst should serve jail time, including the pope. These sickos are a false representation of Jesus however. If you are truly claiming being ‘good’ has nothing to do with Christianity then you have no idea what Jesus was about.
Quote: Throughout hundreds of years, even thousands of years, people have been using God and religion as a means of the reasoning behind exploitation of others. Including war, murder, sexual molestation, human sacrifice, the list goes on and on and on.
your point doesn’t prove Christianity is wrong, it simply proves people are bad. I’m in agreement by the way. I believe Christianity provides satisfactory answers for why evil exists (not that I like evil), while the absence of Christianity generally just is a witness to utterly meaningless suffering.
Quote: I have nothing against Jesus, God, Holy Spirit, any of them,etc. But that doesn't mean I am going to bend over and present my backside to them and take it, just because someone says I have to because I should believe and have "blind" faith, and that I should except the fear of God being put into me.
I wouldn’t accept blind faith either, and I don’t. I have carefully thought out reasons for what I believe, and if it didn’t make sense, I wouldn’t believe it. As for fear, is it wrong to warn someone of an impending disaster?
Quote: I guess the Christian God doesn't mind that children are getting molested. Perhaps he approves of it, or he would have smacked these people down. Perhaps it should be passed off as a test of their faith? Ya, thats it, a test. Yet another test.
No, we are given a temporary, limited amount of freedom to do what we want during our lives, and the results of that will determine what kind of trajectory we will be on for the afterlife. For people to have real freedom, real ability to make choices, they must be allowed to choose evil as well as good. And most do. Is that what God wants? Read the parables of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke and see if you can honestly say that God wants people to suffer.
Quote: So if you ask for proof of the afterlife, be expected to prove your beliefs as well.
Actually I haven’t asked for your proof, and I have given a pretty comprehensive overview of my belief of an inductive argument for the existence of God.
Beau:
Quote: Jesus did not write the bible and that tells me all I need to know about it. I resent that I was taught Christianity at birth until I was in my teens. It really screwed up my path. That fear doctrine is a hard one to break. Jesus went on his gut and so shall I. When they find something HE wrote I'll surely take note. Otherwise I say the Bible (buy bull) is a bastardized version of someone else's truth written by the elders who wanted to control a people and that this mere book reflects some elements of truth and a whole lot of human fallacy. It's just my take.
There are a couple statements like this first sentence from a couple of the recent posters, and honestly I’m not sure if there is a way to prove to someone like you that Jesus said these things. If there was somehow an old movie recording Jesus with sound dubbed in? Jesus wasn’t actually saying those things. What if there was a more modern movie with sound? Someone was modifying the analog or digital format. If there was something written in blazing handwriting across the sky, signed as Jesus and God? Oh it’s just a mass hallucination, or strange atmospheric effect. Maybe I’m wrong, but sometimes skeptics are simply insatiable. Let’s just say I’d argue there is great evidence to support the gospels as being mostly reliable. I can come back to this if this is questioned. Jesus talked about this insatiable skepticism as well. The familiar parable of Lazarus in hell, Jesus concludes with the same idea about human nature:
Quote: 27"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, 28for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.' 29"Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.' 30" 'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' 31"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' "
And of course the truly crazy thing is that we do have a claim of Jesus being raised from the dead in recorded history, and people are not willing to listen. Jesus’ characterization of human nature seems to be fulfilled in this sequence of posts.
As for the bible being a book about wanting to control others; I would argue that it has been handled and interpreted in those ways, but that is not the intent of Jesus. In fact Jesus’ harshest criticism (like yours and others’ here) was for the religious leaders of his day. Jesus was actually very anti establishment; his old wine in new wineskins parable can be seen as a challenge to Judaic rule; his overturning of the tables and anger at Jewish selling of items viewed as necessary to get close to God, and he eventually wanted to break oppressive governmental control through a nonviolent change in people’s hearts; not necessarily through violent or controlling means.
Lastly, Jesus talked more about hell than he did heaven. Just bear with me for a moment, and imagine that maybe, just maybe, there is a hell that actually exists. And that we could warn people about it. Don’t you think a loving thing to do would be to warn people about it, even if it entails talking about a scary concept? Or put another way; imagine my friend is driving towards a cliff. I see the cliff and he doesn’t. I shout at him, ‘hey, watch out for that cliff dead ahead, over the slight hill!” And he yells back at me, ‘hey, shut the hell up about negative things; I don’t want to live my life in fear!”
B2:
I’m guessing you already agree with this, but God is spirit and is beyond gender. To put it bluntly, God has no sex organs. However the masculine and feminine aspects of life are actually both represented in God in the Judeo-Christian faith. Jesus goes so far as to use a feminine image to refer to himself, virtually unheard of!
Quote: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! (Luke 13:34)
The word for Wisdom, Sophia, as I understand it, has a feminine aspect of God implied, although I’m no Hebrew scholar. I think the male has been emphasized so much because God needed to work with a more patriarchal society in the past (not saying that that is necessarily a good way for society to be, but it was reality), and I would guess that if Jesus chose to incarnate today as opposed to Roman times he might have even incarnated as a woman. Our societies have progressed (in some parts of the world at least) to be open to hearing it. Additionally, Jesus greatly elevated the status of women in his time. There are a few examples of this I can point to later if you like.
Beau again: I think your pack mentality concept may be right for you; you seem to have such a revulsion for anything that has to do with organized religion that maybe organized religion is simply poison to you. I just want to point out I am not arguing that you should get involved in organized religion.
Starcraft:
To address what you are saying philosophically, I want to make an argument by analogy. So please follow along with my example. I teach high school Physics. Let’s say one day I tell my students about Maxwell’s laws that have to do with electromagnetism, but I don’t say that I got these laws from Maxwell. Lets say one of my students discovers this, and begins shouting at me “LIAR! THEIF! YOU DIDN’T’ COME UP WITH THESE IDEAS YOURSELF! THEY MUST BE FALSE!” Can you see the fallacy here? Maybe the ideas weren’t originally mine. Maybe I borrowed ideas from somewhere else. Maybe its even helpful to point out that these ideas historically came from Maxwell originally, not myself. However, that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not these concepts about the universe that Maxwell discovered are true or not. It is simply a fallacy to say that those laws are false because knowledge of them have clearly arisen from a path that has been discovered. Can you see where I’m going with this? If the bible has drawn ideas from other societies, myths and religions (it has by the way), that has absolutely nothing to do with whether the concepts mentioned are true or not. What you are committing here is called the genetic fallacy in philosophy.
Quote: The genetic fallacy is a fallacy of irrelevance where a conclusion is suggested based solely on something or someone's origin rather than its current meaning or context. This overlooks any difference to be found in the present situation, typically transferring the positive or negative esteem from the earlier context. The fallacy therefore fails to assess the claim on its merit. The first criterion of a good argument is that the premises must have bearing on the truth or falsity of the claim in question.[1] Genetic accounts of an issue may be true, and they may help illuminate the reasons why the issue has assumed its present form, but they are irrelevant to its merits.
This is my answer to some of your post and the links provided (which is also why I started typing in all caps as the first site often does). So there are other sources that also cite there was a huge flood. So what? There being multiple accounts of this just seem to me to support the idea that there was a massive flood. It doesn’t mean that the bible is false, or that because the bible wasn’t the only take on the matter that there wasn’t a flood.
Hawkeye:
Agreed, nicely stated.
Starcraft again:
Please see my above description to Beau, with the parable that Jesus tells, that I believe hits the nail on the head for you. You will never believe, because you will never be satisfied with the proof that is given you. There is nothing that can be done to convince you and people like you, and Jesus not only anticipated that he commented on it in a parable.
Beau again:
About making our own path towards enlightenment: I think you are somewhat correct, but people tend to sink into moral relativism with that freedom. In other words, they create belief systems for themselves that justify their own actions and make life easy. Life is hard, and living life in a way that is selfless and loving is even harder. Saying “I’m going to make up my own belief system” oftentimes is simply a justification for “I’m going to do what I want and feel good about it in the process, with nothing negative hindering my path such as guilt or obligation”.
Stone Cold True:
You are right in saying there is great value to trying to develop spiritually by oneself. I agree with you that for some people (like you, and maybe myself somewhat) religion has served its purpose and run its course, but not for all. It’s true that much evil has been committed in the name of religion, but that fact doesn’t do much but simply emphasize the problem of evil, which is resolved with the idea of free will and the fact that God values character development (and its natural opposite, character devolvement) for a time over temporary suffering and pleasure.
Starcraft Again:
You are right, if everyone in the world was a pacifist like yourself, the world would be a much, much better place.
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