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That is indeed One answer to the problem of evil - God doesn't need to give a crap, but we should all grovel to him or he'll burn us forever. You can thoroughly stuff such a god for me, sunshine, and for a large number of deconverts, too.
The other is to say that somehow God's hands are tied, because it would make robots of us, or compromise Faith so much that nobody's would be Pure enough (Faith needs to be belief without good reason or it ain't faith) to get into heaven.
Cobblers. It didn't stop God in the past and shouldn't stop him now. Free will does not get God off the Hook and never did, and the big bully is simply brutal.
Maybe one day you will come to see that a Creator may exist, but that beast of the Bible, never. And that goes for the Quran, too.
Excellent. You are thinking deep about this. Whatever conclusion you come to inb the end, kudos for doing so rather than swallowing the greasy excuses Christian apologetis dishes out.
The last word on this cognitive dissconnect, doublethink and apolocrap was said by George Carlin years ago. never really been said better.
It'sa crapola, my godsucking friends. It is not deserving of anything other that a two-class study with a true/false test in ancient literature class. so what do you do? Weep and cry and feel like you lost your right arm? No, Bill burr has the answer.
Oh my goodness, this is by far one of your best posts. It's not over my head for one thing, actually I find it to be something that I would have written. And I LOVE George Carlin! I watched the whole thing, don't think I've ever seen that one before. Kudos my friend.
It depends on the Christian, perhaps, as to what there mind is made up to (and isn't a good thing when a person's mind isn't so made up as to be completely closed off to a different possibility?). Speaking very broadly, I think there are quite a few Christians who look at the OT stories mostly metaphorically, and the NT less so. But, to try to get everyone to agree about everything in any group isn't realistic.
You're misunderstanding me. I think.
I don't care what some individual thinks. I'm talking about the body we call "christianity". And the reason it's important is because they want to sell their product.
When I was a principal, and we had to sell an idea to the community, it wouldn't have been very effective for the principal to be publicly saying one thing, one vice principal saying something significantly different, the other vice principal having yet another story, and the guidance director spouting yet another version. To sell it, we had to have a common voice.
You know, more and more I believe it's intentionally fraudulent. Years ago I had a friend who was from Vietnam. We'd get into discussion about various topics, and to win a particular "argument", sometimes he'd say, "But you have to remember, I think from a Vietnamese cultural perspective", or in other cases to win an argument he'd say "But I'm an American now".
As we have discussed repeatedly, Christians cannot agree upon which things in the bible are factual and which things are symbolic.
Yet, they all can recognize that there is truth in the stories. It's the same kind of truth which is found in any story or legend. Yet this could be a deeper truth since it is inspired by our faith.
I don't care what some individual thinks. I'm talking about the body we call "christianity". And the reason it's important is because they want to sell their product.
When I was a principal, and we had to sell an idea to the community, it wouldn't have been very effective for the principal to be publicly saying one thing, one vice principal saying something significantly different, the other vice principal having yet another story, and the guidance director spouting yet another version. To sell it, we had to have a common voice.
You know, more and more I believe it's intentionally fraudulent. Years ago I had a friend who was from Vietnam. We'd get into discussion about various topics, and to win a particular "argument", sometimes he'd say, "But you have to remember, I think from a Vietnamese cultural perspective", or in other cases to win an argument he'd say "But I'm an American now".
Take a position and stand on it.
Okay, if you want all Christians everywhere to give you a stock answer, I don't think that's going to happen, ever. [Best bet for that would be to talk to a JW. They don't consider anyone else Christians (to the best of my knowledge), and they do all cite the exact same answers, and bible verse, to any given question.] But I don't really understand how you come to the conclusion that it's out of intentional deceit just because an enormous group such as Christianity, which includes thousands of various sects, doesn't have a single mind about anything. If an individual is changing their stance based on the circumstance, that's a different matter.
The sad part for those who leave Christianity is that they have often just lost sight of what brought them to their faith originally. They get so caught up in only seeing the politics of the church, that they start to mistake the walls of the church with the spiritual walls in the human heart, even their own.
"I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it."
You really believe you've got it all figured out don't you? Not just for you but for everyone else too. How arrogant. NO, the reason people leave christianity is it's completely ludicrous and has no basis in reality. It has nothing to do with just the politics of the church because I was a christian for a long time and didn't even go to church. There are no "spiritual walls", it's all in your own head. How do reconcile believing in something you've never seen/witnessed against reality and logic?
And enough with quoting scripture, that's not allowed here. At least it shouldn't be allowed if it's not already. We don't believe in your buy-bull so stop quoting it!
Yet, they all can recognize that there is truth in the stories. It's the same kind of truth which is found in any story or legend. Yet this could be a deeper truth since it is inspired by our faith.
The problem is that different people can sometimes learn different concepts from the same story.
In many ways, it's not ridiculous to suggest that.
You ask one christian about the great flood and he says it's fiction.
You ask another christian about the great flood and he says it's actual fact.
It's can't be both. It's one or the other.
And that inability to say which is which, is why the bible is, at best, unreliable.
Our particular personal interpretations of a story are not nearly as important as the shared values that humans have. In fact I would say that they have very little importance. It is what our faith causes us to do which is important.
All stories are symbolic. Even many children understand this. Religion is man's way of trying to understand God. What does "logic" have to do with reading anything of this sort? The stories have endured which proves that they are true. One of the foundations of western civilization. How we interpret them is up to each one of us.
The vast majority of fans in the west who share the love of the same stories you love are also Bible believing Christians. I'm referring to the popular fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy stories you love.
Anti-theists here spend so much time discussing the religious stories, but they don't seem to offer any real ideas about them. They claim to be humanistic or whatever, yet they offer no evidence that they even care about what this all means. They just want to see the death of something (religion) that will never die, since it is about something mysterious we will probably never understand and may only grow more mysterious the more we learn about the universe. It seems insane to me. Insanity is the repeated action of something meaningless with the same result each time, or however that saying goes.
No, you missed it again.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
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