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I realize that it is hard for [some] Christians to understand what could critics actually find issue with the Bible and its stories/concepts. There are [some] Christians who really believe that everything is crystal clear and critics should have no problems with anything and rebelling against the Christian message has something to do with just wanting to be ignorant and resistant to their god in order to follow the way of the devil.
Since I realize this is hardly the case UNLESS the person doing the resisting actually believes the Christian message but is just not ready to make a commitment to it, what are those stories/concepts you can point to that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the Bible nor its god is worth your serious contemplation?
I suppose it depends on the Christian! I'm pretty much convinced that a God who made a creation and then says..."
(boomflash) "Not so Good as I thought. Better destroy it. Let's see. The best of the bunch is Noah. Bit of a drinks problem and his daughters are a bit flighty but at least, if I tell him to get a gang of men to build an Ark and then leave them to drown, he won't raise a murmur."
is an absurdity. But the Christian may well say that's just myth as the real meat is in the Gospels.
In fact, all the miracles strike me as absurd and unbelievable, the whole God - thing and Son of God theory incomprehensible and unbelievable. But if it was true I'd know no different.
It really isn't as simple as what strikes me as absurd or unbelievable. It is more that understanding the Bible in the way a believer never could is what really leads to putting it on the 'mythology' shelf.
Since I realize this is hardly the case UNLESS the person doing the resisting actually believes the Christian message but is just not ready to make a commitment to it, what are those stories/concepts you can point to that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the Bible nor its god is worth your serious contemplation?
Well for theists, hope springs eternal and they often think, in my experience, that atheism is a passing phase that can be set right by clearing up a few things or, as you say, waiting until the mark is "ready". That is a more comforting notion than accepting that some people see no substantiation at all for their theistic notions. Because to accept that, you'd have to accept the (ridiculous!) possibility that there is a reasoning process that could even get you close to unbelief, much less make unbelief a justifiable position.
As to your question ... for me it has always been a more general problem that religious faith is a completely unreliable way to determine what is true. And that's being charitable. Actually it's a complete fail as an epistemology, because it fails to either explain experienced reality, or predict what one can expect of it given certain inputs.
But if I had to pick a particular concept it would be the asserted nature of god as being all powerful, all knowing, and all benevolent and yet okay with human suffering -- if not actually inflicting it personally. That is such a logically inconsistent concept it's not funny.
Even apart from this so-called Problem of Evil (which I prefer to call the Problem of Suffering), the attributes of god are problematic in their own right. For example, a god who is all powerful would BE all knowing so it is impossible to truly separate those two qualities anyway. One "solution" to the Problem of Suffering is to say that god is all knowing and all loving, but not all powerful. Since knowing everything is arguably a subset of being all-powerful, I guess that works so far as it goes, but it has no transitive property to it, such that you could try to remove god's all-knowing nature and still call him all-powerful. That is logically impossible. If god is ignorant of some things than by definition he is not all powerful. Being unable to substitute two properties of a thing because of some hidden dependency between them is a sign of a fundamental category error.
It's almost as if these attributes were not well thought through to begin with.
If you do not subscribe to the above "tri-omni" concept then you elude the Problem of Suffering only to encounter a problem with the definition of god. If god is not tri-omni then in what sense is he god? Many liberal Christians for example drift in the direction of the more New Thought / New Age notion of equating god with a cosmic consciousness, with existence itself, or they become deists who posit an absent or indifferent god. The problem is that absent or indifferent gods are not distinguishable in practice from no god at all, and diluting the concept of god so that you slap the label "god" on things that god doesn't add to or explain in any way, leaves you without a god who matters, in my view. Maybe this is just because of my background in fundamentalism but I have to say that part of fundamentalism that I DID resonate with was that if you're going to believe in a god it ought to be a god that at least superficially seems worth believing IN. One with the power to help or save his followers, to render their lives explicable, to set forth clear rules with positive and negative consequences and provide things to look forward to or at least help one avoid hidden pitfalls -- otherwise, why bother?
And the problem was that fundamentalism didn't deliver on those promises. Despite my devotion to the faith, my personal life was indistinguishable from that of any reprobate or wicked person. I, and those I loved, experienced bafflement, sickness, disappointment and suffering AT LEAST at the same level as people outside the faith. There was no transformation into a "new creation". There was no blessing because you were righteous, and we did not see the wicked confounded. We just remained human beings, subject to the human condition, only more so because our thought processes were limited and filled with taboos.
Of course the final nail in the coffin for my own faith was the fact that the more I understood how to have decent evidentiary standards, and the importance of compensating for confirmation bias, agency inference and other well understood quirks of human perception and mentation, I realized that religious faith was an utterly hopeless attempt at apprehending reality and responding properly to it.
To me, the biblical, christian concept that all human life is precious and we should procreate as much as possible is absurd and dangerous.
Dangerous? Life needs to reproduce. Truth be told, the entirety of humanity can support itself on hydrponics on literally every square inch of Earth that isnt rocks and trees, we have suffering only because we have grossly misused the Earth. And the actual Earths population couldfit into Texas.
The most absurd concept was the church writing about women needing to wear hats in the temple, and not allowing them priesthood.
Dangerous? Life needs to reproduce. Truth be told, the entirety of humanity can support itself on hydrponics on literally every square inch of Earth that isnt rocks and trees, we have suffering only because we have grossly misused the Earth. And the actual Earths population couldfit into Texas.
The most absurd concept was the church writing about women needing to wear hats in the temple, and not allowing them priesthood.
No. With more than 7 billion people on this planet, we do not need to reproduce indiscriminately. And until people figure out that pollution and destruction of resources are not a good idea, reducing population growth and therefore putting less demand on what clean resources are left, would be the sane thing to do. As for fitting everyone into TX, here's a fact: "The area of Texas is about 262,000 mi2. Dividing this figure by the current human population of 7 billion leaves each person with less than 100 square meters, a small plot the size of a big room about 10 m x 10 m."
I realize that it is hard for [some] Christians to understand what could critics actually find issue with the Bible and its stories/concepts. There are [some] Christians who really believe that everything is crystal clear and critics should have no problems with anything and rebelling against the Christian message has something to do with just wanting to be ignorant and resistant to their god in order to follow the way of the devil.
Since I realize this is hardly the case UNLESS the person doing the resisting actually believes the Christian message but is just not ready to make a commitment to it, what are those stories/concepts you can point to that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the Bible nor its god is worth your serious contemplation?
love, compassion, and understanding ... good
Died, woke up, and flew away for sins ... bad
Since I realize this is hardly the case UNLESS the person doing the resisting actually believes the Christian message but is just not ready to make a commitment to it, what are those stories/concepts you can point to that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt the Bible nor its god is worth your serious contemplation?
Well of course the problem with assuming there is an all powerful god is that nothing in the Bible could therefore be held to be Absurd. Talking snakes, bushes that burn without consuming fuel, a worldwide flood that managed magically to leave no evidence of its existence, impregnanting an underage virgin against her will in order to give birth to yourself, a man dead for three days who comes back to life along with many other people who were dead MUCH longer, crackers becoming magic when latin is mumbled at them ..... all of these things are PERFECTLY congruent with the existence of an all powerful god. Because that god can do ANYTHING.
So the reason all the Christian beliefs are absurd is that this core assumption.......... that a non-human all powerful intelligent and intentional agency exists in the first place....... is not just slightly but ENTIRELY unsubstantiated in any way.
Specifically what things suggests beyond a shadow of a doubt that these things are not worthy of contemplation? Well one thing that springs to mind is that much like a married bachelor...... an all powerful all knowing god can simply not exist. Because there are things being all powerful would preclude such a god knowing..... and there are things being all knowing that would preclude the god being all powerful.
Plus I find the concept of vicarious redemption or scapegoating to be highly dangerous and immoral teaching. No one can, nor has the right to presume to, forgive me my sins or take my sins as their own.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bulmabriefs144
Dangerous? Life needs to reproduce.
The user did not say otherwise, so you are attempting to rebut something that the user never actually said in order to dodge what he did. The user specifically said that what was problematic or dangerous was the "as much as possible" part. That is to say that wanton reproduction without being cognizant of the issues or results, is problematic and dangerous.
One for me is the story of Lot. Supposedly, he is the only man righteous enough for God to save in Sodom. Yet, he offered his two daughters to be raped by a crowd, then later gets drunk and empregnates both on two seperate occations.
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