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Honestly? You kind of seem to be all over the board at times. Maybe you ought to.
Can you give some examples? Or is this like when you argue with someone and they say "You always....." but don't really mean to talk about specifics?
Well, I've talked about the way in which the Bible Belt handles the poor again and again. You'll find plenty of horrific policies of un-Christ-like laws south of the Mason-Dixon that violates scripture from Deuteronomy to Luke.
One of my favorites is how the Bible implicitly states in Deuteronomy that usury is not to be charged against the poor. Granted, this happens nationally, not just in the South, but that just makes it worse, being a supposedly "Christian nation" and all.
In fact, what makes the violation of this scripture all the more despicable is how the poor are almost invariably charged considerably *higher* interest rates than the rich; not only is this scripture ignored, it's flagrantly mocked with loans to the poor that they could never hope to pay back.
I don't think Christ wants us to give to the level that we are destitute and homeless ourselves. IF everyone just helped a little bit then most needs would be met. Maybe atheists should get off their fannies and help too instead of wasting all day bashing Christians online.
He wants you to give in a way that doesn't just give you an excuse to pat yourself on the back for earning your 'Good Christian Merit Badge'.
While we're talking about giving, let's look at Acts 4:35-35:
So, when will your Christian brethren share the proverbial wealth? Or are forty-million-dollar mansions and private jets (I'm looking at you, Creflo Dollar) somehow signs that God wants His flock to prosper at the expense of the financially disadvantaged?
If you spent half as much time actually practicing the charity, kindness and generosity that's printed in the Bible as you do lambasting others for pointing out the obvious flaws in the excuses you give for why you're not, you'd probably be one of the most revered public figures on the planet.
Well, I've talked about the way in which the Bible Belt handles the poor again and again. You'll find plenty of horrific policies of un-Christ-like laws south of the Mason-Dixon that violates scripture from Deuteronomy to Luke.
One of my favorites is how the Bible implicitly states in Deuteronomy that usury is not to be charged against the poor. Granted, this happens nationally, not just in the South, but that just makes it worse, being a supposedly "Christian nation" and all.
In fact, what makes the violation of this scripture all the more despicable is how the poor are almost invariably charged considerably *higher* interest rates than the rich; not only is this scripture ignored, it's flagrantly mocked with loans to the poor that they could never hope to pay back.
So your argument really revolves around how bad people do bad things? And you just assume they're Christians? Or that they get their attitudes and behaviors from the Bible? It's funny how a lot of atheists on here tend to get pretty worked up if I stereotype what they believe, or do. Or especially if someone suggests something regarding a woman that is seen as anything less than complimentary.
I'm sorry that bad people mistreat others. I really am. But I fail to see your point here. I don't believe we are a "Christian Nation". There is no pastor-in-chief that gives us our marching orders.
So your argument really revolves around how bad people do bad things? And you just assume they're Christians? Or that they get their attitudes and behaviors from the Bible? It's funny how a lot of atheists on here tend to get pretty worked up if I stereotype what they believe, or do. Or especially if someone suggests something regarding a woman that is seen as anything less than complimentary.
I'm sorry that bad people mistreat others. I really am. But I fail to see your point here. I don't believe we are a "Christian Nation". There is no pastor-in-chief that gives us our marching orders.
If you do not subscribe to the fallacy that we are a Christian nation, then your thinking is way clearer than most Fundamentalists, for whom this assertion that the US is a "Christian nation" is pretty much a shibboleth. Our nation's founders were, for the most part, deists, and their ideals were about pluralism and non-endorsement of ANY religion.
However if I understood Shirina correctly her point is not that Christians are solely responsible for public policy in this country, such as extending usurious loans to the poor, but rather that they bear most of the responsibility at least in those Bible Belt states where they are dominant. I rather doubt that such practices exist in spite of strenuous objections of people of faith. Rather they are a product of unbridled capitalist practices which conservative theists are generally in favor of. The only people I have seen really fighting against things like payday loans are political progressives, who have themselves been outside the mainstream of the left up to now.
So your argument really revolves around how bad people do bad things? And you just assume they're Christians? Or that they get their attitudes and behaviors from the Bible? It's funny how a lot of atheists on here tend to get pretty worked up if I stereotype what they believe, or do. Or especially if someone suggests something regarding a woman that is seen as anything less than complimentary.
The thing is, Vizo, that when a Christian does a 'bad thing', his fellow Christians go out of their way to excuse, justify and/or rationalize it. They say 'Satan tempted him' (indirectly, 'it's not his fault'), 'he's repented and no longer does it' ('what he did doesn't matter any more because he told God he's really, really sorry') or even 'he's a Christian and Christians don't do that' (as if saying that will somehow magically make it 'not have happened', which also comes dangerously close to victim-blaming).
I mean, half the time the behaviors that they do glean from Bible verses are so heavily skewed in their favor (or deliberately misinterpreted) that they're willing to totally dismiss verses that place specific limits on 'proper' Christian conduct -- witness the 'what Jesus said in the Old Testament no longer applies' nonsense that pops up every so often.
Yes, the argument revolves around bad people doing bad things. Quite often, they do get their bad attitudes and nasty behaviors from some obscure Bible verse that they chose to take wildly out-of-context. We call them out, and they get all huffy about it. We point out the obvious contradiction caused by how the Bible tells them to behave vs. how they actually behave, and they get offended.
I'm going to put this out there, Vizo, for you and Jeff: if you don't want to be called out for acting like a hypocrite, don't act like a hypocrite. The concept is not that hard to process. At the very least, some Christians (not all) should show some intellectual honesty and admit that they're not living up to the Bible's high ideals.
I agree with 99% of the sentiment of this video. This woman went out of her way to buy a meal and some chapstick for a homeless man, which is more than most of us usually do with our time. In my opinion, she deserves a big hug.
But...
This is also the perfect portrait of most Christians: they mean well, they have good intentions, and they use their religion to do what they think are good things for the world around them. The problem is this: even if Bible god really did tell this woman to buy bananas and chapstick for a homeless man, he is malevolent. He allows nine million children under the age of five to die of starvation, every year. He created retroviruses whose only function and only means of survival is to lodge themselves in the organs of vulnerable humans and kill them slowly and painfully. He created our jaws too small to accommodate our own teeth; a condition that has historically been responsible for the death of a surprisingly large segment of the human population. He creates babies with genetic deformities that kill them painfully. He creates meteorological, seismic and volcano phenomena that kill and displace millions of Bible-believing Christians, every year. But to the Christian, Bible god is somehow a nice guy, because he told one of his followers to buy bananas for a homeless man, while arranging for another person to buy the guy some chicken.
I'm willing to grant it all: the virgin birth, the resurrection, heaven, hell, and commands to buy lunch for freezing transients. As wonderful or wacky as those things may be, any sovereign god that exists must necessarily take responsibility for ALL things that ever occur. So focusing in on what really is a hopelessly small fraction of the big picture, and allowing oneself to be thrilled by the perceived goodness that Bible god has done in that fraction, is the ultimate exercise in selective perception. Again, nobody with a heart would pronounce what this woman did to be a bad thing; it was very much a good thing. But to allow this one good thing to be the philosophical foundation on which your religious faith rests is to ignore the hundreds of millions of human beings (and animals) whose most fundamental needs go unaddressed. More importantly, that sort of philosophy ignores the fact that, by definition, a sovereign god must take responsibility for creating suffering to begin with.
Nice video, full of positive emotion, but if I bake you ten thousand cakes, and only one of them doesn't kill you, would you really call me a good chef? And more tellingly, what about the millions upon millions upon millions of coincidences that DON'T happen? How does one pleasant coincidence excuse all of those? What about the millions of times when we buy bananas for a homeless guy and nobody buys him chicken? Because that's what happens the staggering majority of the time.
We all know that emotions don't supersede that reality.
Yet, they're exactly where this woman's religion lives.
And we should ask ourselves why.
I didn't read all of this but I see you blaming God when God has put man in charge of this world and it is man who is vain, selfish and haughty.
Man is cruel, men are cutting down rainforest to make room for agriculture, and we are farming the whole farmable earth to feed animals. We grow enough grains to feed the entire world and to make them fat, but all that farming is going to make grains to feed animals to feed people meat but if mankind was no so selfish, we could feed the whole world and even then we would destroy ourselves. Man is making war after war, and we prove that we are inherently evil because of the fact that we watch these people starve and we create the wars where terrible things happen to children. Mankind is so inherently evil that we have to try and protect man against man, why would everything be God's fault?
Mankind is so inherently evil that we have to try and protect man against man, why would everything be God's fault?
...because (assuming 'God' exists for the sake of debate) he designed it that way and if a designer deliberately designs a product that he knows will fail then it is the designer that is at fault, not the product.
...because (assuming 'God' exists for the sake of debate) he designed it that way and if a designer deliberately designs a product that he knows will fail then it is the designer that is at fault, not the product.
It failed with a third of it's original free willed angel creations. Why did it think creating humans would have any different outcome that omnigod already knew would fail jimmies?
Which God should be able to override. If God created mankind, and mankind has free will, that means that God gave mankind free will.
So, again -- if a designer creates a product that he knows is flawed, it's not the creation's fault for being flawed. The chair is not responsible for the poor design that causes it to collapse.
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