My issues with Christianity

[jdgregory84]

I find it interesting that you and I agree on many big issues, and you take offense to someone calling you out on it. lol

I admit, I should not join in in the banter back and forth when atheists here go off on me before I have done anything mean to them. And there is no excuse for that. I do find it funny that they attack me first in most every thread, and then accuse me of attacking them as if I did it first. Pot calling the kettle black.

But you are much more civil than me and you don't give in to any desires to rip into these people who disagree with you. That is the correct way to do it.

For me, I choose to be stupid, as I know I shouldn't, and mess with them. One day I'll actually vow never to do it again, cause I know I shouldn't. lol Until then, I'll have a little more fun with them.

Though, I will say this: when a Christian here judges an atheist morally or calls them stupid because they don't believe in God, I jump in immediately to defend the atheist, because we're told not to judge the world and that no one is better than anyone else. That's one thing religion does and I won't be a part of that.

Lie #3

[FATHERFORD]

I don't follow religion. I follow the Bible. Religion has it all screwed up. Like Denny said, you're upset with religion, not God.

As for you living life as the best person you can, evolution does not teach you those morals. Evolution has no moral foundations. You get that desire to set your morals to be the best person you can from the Bible. It is the only source of all morals you'll find world-wide. No other religion has the comprehensive morals Christianity does. There's good research on that. So, you are living in contradiction to your beliefs. You believe in evolution, and so you should be living without any morals, or at least you should be living with morals which benefit you primarily and your progress and survival. Being good to others doesn't necessarily fit that mold all the time. Just sayin'...

I can halfway agree with that.

One could say that I follow most of the teachings of the bible. I do not though in anyway read the bible as a factual book of times past.

[racrguy]

I don't follow religion. I follow the Bible. Religion has it all screwed up. Like Denny said, you're upset with religion, not God.

As for you living life as the best person you can, evolution does not teach you those morals. Evolution has no moral foundations. You get that desire to set your morals to be the best person you can from the Bible. It is the only source of all morals you'll find world-wide. No other religion has the comprehensive morals Christianity does. There's good research on that. So, you are living in contradiction to your beliefs. You believe in evolution, and so you should be living without any morals, or at least you should be living with morals which benefit you primarily and your progress and survival. Being good to others doesn't necessarily fit that mold all the time. Just sayin'...

And here you go spouting more bullshit that's already been shown to be false.

When did evolution, or science for that matter, make a claim to morals? That's right, never. You've already been told that morals and ethics are a product of society, not religion.

[BrianC]

2. God as a loving God.
God killed more people than the devil in the bible. Many, many times more. He not only ordered the Diaspora to raze the city of Jericho and leave no living inhabitants, but also killed a huge portion of the jews. A portion of the people decided to cast a golden calf as an idol, so without hesitation god opened up the ground and killed thousand of people for a single sin. Pretty loving if you ask me.

According to the book of Job, Satan cannot kill someone unless God allows it, so technically, God is really the One who kills everyone in the Bible. Regardless, let's examine how His actions were, in fact, loving.

In the Old Testament, God always gives justification for killing people. When He has His people go into Canaan, He says that the inhabitants have sinned against Him in horrible ways and He is justified in killing them. They were doing unspeakable things to little babies and kids and sacrificing babies to their false gods.

Scenario: One day, you go to your neighbors' house to check to see if they're okay, because you hear a cry for help. You bring a gun for protection purposes. The door is open and you walk in. You go to the basement only to have a battered and bloddy girl run toward you with her baby sister in her arms. She screams for help. You see behind her that her mother and father are both about to shoot her and then you, because their "festivities" have gotten out of hand. Yes, that's right... they are Satanists and were about to rape the kids and then sacrifice the baby girl while the slightly older sister was made to watch (I work with multiples who have had this and much worse happen to them).

Which would you do:

A. Shoot the parents before they shot the girl and you?
B. Run in fear to save yourself?
C. Try to reason with the people (knowing full well they're going to shoot you since you're a witness to all of this)?
D. Grab the girl and her baby sister and try to escape knowing you are going to be shot at and likely killed?

Now, personally, I would shoot the two parents as quickly as I could, and they would likely die. In that act of kindness, I just saved two sisters from abuse and murder. Shoot first, ask questions later in this instance.

What God did is very similar. God told the Israelites to drive all of the people out of the land IF the people would not agree to conform to their business practices and trade with them. He also told them not to take slaves. God did not want His people enslaving others. However, in their own culture, they were allowed to offer themselves into slavery to their debtors till the debt was paid off or till the year of Jubilee came, and they were to be treated very well, like family. The Hebrews took slaves anyway, against God's will and they were cursed for it.

When God kills off everyone involved in a Satanic religion, it is for the purpose of that religion not spreading down through the generations, causing many people to be condemned to hell by that religion. But notice that He said to "drive them out". If they resisted, they were to be killed, of course. Jericho resisted. Others ran and survived and relocated in new territories.

If God were to let the Israelis continue their own sinning, then sin would've infected their entire culture and they would have rebelled against God. In fact, this is, indeed, what happened a few times in the Old Testament. Why? because God won't infringe upon their free-will. He gives them the Law and hopes they will live by it, but it is their choice whether they will administer their country with God's Law. There were times they went away from the law, lost it completely, and were worshiping false gods and sacrificing their children to them just like the Pagans. Then they would either find the law again and a good ruler would tell them to observe it again, or God would cause them to go into captivity, they would be humbled, and God would free them and bring them back to their own land again and they would again prosper. They only prospered financially when they were observing the Mosaic Law. They crashed when they went away from it. It was a free society much like our own since our Founding Fathers used the Mosaic Law as the foundation for our Constitution.

What's interesting is that anytime a Republic (or Democratic Republic) like ours springs up in history, it has about a 200 year life span. The people enjoy great advances and financial prosperity. Then, their morals degrade, they grow complacent, the rulers make more tyrannical laws while the people let it happen because the people want the government to take care of them rather than be personally responsible, and their economy goes to crap, and then the whole system crashes and turns into a dictatorship. That's what happened with the Roman Republic before it became the Roman Empire. It's happened dozens of times in history, always the same way. We are seeing it happen here in America right now, and we are just a little over the 200 year approximation for collapse. So, we went away from God's laws, our morals degraded, and we eventually became complacent as a result, wanted the government to take care of us (more laws like universal healthcare, medicare, unemployment pay, food stamps, etc.). It always tends toward socialism or communism (tyranny). And socialism is defined as the step between capitalism and communism.

Anyway, the point is that there is kindness and love in eliminating awful people from this planet for the purposes of stopping them from spreading their destruction and evil ways to others and stopping them from causing many generations down the line to not accept God and end up in hell for eternity. So yes, that is a kindness and a loving thing to do. God can only do so much because He gave mankind free-will and completely dominion (rulership) over the earth in Genesis 1:26-28. Therefore, when we're not aligning our wills with His, we're not asking Him (praying) to interfere here on our behalf. Most people pray selfishly in their own will, not to do God's will and He says He only answers prayers which are in alignment with His will. Most people don't truly understand His will or why He doesn't answer most of their prayers. What we see as a needed intervention from God, God sees differently. He sees the future, and so He knows how answering that prayer will affect everyone involved and others and how it will affect people in the future. And if it's not what is best for everyone, He won't do it. Also, what we see as painful and hard to deal with, He sees as a situation for us to trust Him and build character and learn to handle difficult situations through faith in Him and hard work.

And for the record, real (practicing what the Bible says) Christians will ask God to BE the answer to OTHER people's prayers, and they go out and do something about what they're praying about. They don't sit around and expect God to do stuff for them. They are working hard in God's will to help others, like missionaries do.

[BrianC]

And here you go spouting more bullshit that's already been shown to be false.

When did evolution, or science for that matter, make a claim to morals? That's right, never. You've already been told that morals and ethics are a product of society, not religion.

I've been told that, but it has not been proved to me. In fact, if you look at societies world-wide, you will see that their morals are all a product of their own religions. However, you will also find that they all borrow some of their morals from Christianity, and none of them have a more comprehensive set of morals than Christianity, which I stated in one of these threads. That lends support to my view, not yours.

[BrianC]

I can halfway agree with that.

One could say that I follow most of the teachings of the bible. I do not though in anyway read the bible as a factual book of times past.

Hey, I just have to commend you for being honest and open. I could be wrong, but I don't think any of the atheists here have admitted what you just did. Thank you for that. And thank you for being civil and respectful with me.

And, by the way, the Bible is used more than any other historical document by archaeologists for finding things from the past, because of its incredible accuracy which has never once been disproved. Therefore, it has proven to be one of the most accurate history books from ancient times in the eyes of quite a lot of archaeologists. I'm not sure if there are any books which have a more comprehensive and accurate account of history. That seems to be the opinion of archaeologists anyway. It seems to be proven to be true, thus far, anyway.

[talisman]

I was pissed until I quoted this and saw the white text. LOL

Lolz! I don't think I would even want BrianC to agree with me that 2+2=4. Of course, after skimming some of the things he posts, he might not...

[The King]

This thread needs more kowbell....

[BrianC]

3. Is god willing to prevent evil?
This is an age old argument. Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God? (Epicurus)

Alright, this is a simple lack of understanding of the meaning of life and how things are structured by God.

1. God gave us free-will.
2. With free-will, we must have choices.
3. God had to place the one rule of not eating the forbidden fruit in order to give Adam and Eve the choice to rebel against God.
4. When God gave us free-will, that is what allowed the existence of evil to come into being through choice of rebellion.
5. Because God gave us free-will, He cannot simply remove our evil from us against our will. Thus, the evil must remain unless we want it purged.
6. That being the case, God can only do so much. So He did. He defeated evil Himself so that all we must do is repent and ask forgiveness and we are saved.

God DID remove evil, but not the way you wanted Him to. Without evil in this world, we would not have free-will to choose good or evil. We also would not have the opportunity to grow and learn from mistakes and sins. There are numerous ways good can be learned from the presence of evil in the world. You believe it's God's job to remove all suffering and evil from the world for selfish reasons - because you don't want to endure them. And because you believe you are right, you judge God's method of doing things and call it absurd. So, you are God's judge now, because you clearly believe you are smarter than God, to the extent where you believe He doesn't even exist, regardless of the evidence that He does.

The fact that you can think at all shows there is a God, because information cannot spawn out of nothingness. Science has never observed that, tested it or replicated it. Scientists really try to stay away from theorizing how it happens, because they look stupid when they try to do that, because it makes no sense. The fact that things are in a perfect balance and that things are so incredibly complex is a testament to a Creator. Little kids in African tribes untouched by civilization and knowing nothing of God or religion were asked if they knew where everything came from (the kids were 7 years old I think). They all said that they know someone created everything, and that that was obvious to them. But they said they don't know this person who created everything... they just know and even feel that the person exists. I'm paraphrasing, because it's been a while since I read up on that, but I'm sure you can find the research or books about it on the net somewhere.

Romans 1 says that every man will see creation and know that there is a Creator so that no man is without excuse. Everyone knows there's a God - but a lot of people are simply rebelling... still eating the fruit.

Oh, and by the way, God says in the end, He will separate all good and all evil, placing all evil in the lake of fire, and all good in heaven and earth (He remakes the earth perfect again, like it was right after creation when people lived nearly a thousand years). So, He is able, and He has done it, but He will not bring the full fulfillment of conquering sin into play until the end. Why? 2 Peter 3:8-9 says that the reason is because He wants to give time for as many people as possible to be saved, and that it is His will that no one perishes. In fact, I would not be surprised if He has some way to give people the choice to be saved even after death. I only say that because in James or Peter (I forget which one), it says that after Jesus died, He went to make proclamation to the spirits in prison from the time of the flood (i.e. - those before the flood). So, unless Jesus is cruel and was rubbing their noses in the fact that they were condemned, He was down there to offer them salvation, and if they were in a crappy prison (hellish sort of place), I bet they all took Him up on that offer. Estimations go anywhere from 1 billion to 11 billion people before the flood, and only a VERY VERY small few (Adam's line through Seth to Noah) seemed to be godly people, and even some of them not very godly. The rest were horribly evil. The people had to live nearly a thousand years with other evil, selfish, awful people making their lives miserable, and their own sins making their lives miserable. It was a kindness to wipe them out to end the suffering of sin, and then go back and save them later once Jesus died for their sins.

[jdgregory84]

I can halfway agree with that.

One could say that I follow most of the teachings of the bible. I do not though in anyway read the bible as a factual book of times past.

I was raised to follow the laws set forth by the society that I live in.

[BrianC]

4. According to the Catholic church, we are all going to hell ('cept the catholics).
Thats right, the Unam Sanctum issued in 1302 by Bonifice the 8th which is still valid establishes that the Catholic church (the most corrupt organization the earth has ever seen) requires membership to go the heaven. Well fuck, I guess most of the world is destined to burn?

First of all, the creation of Catholicism was what happened when Constantine mixed Paganism into Catholicism and removed all Jewish practices out of Christianity (around the 4th century). Constantine hated the Jews. So, he made it illegal to meet in homes, so people had to meet in temples (mostly temples which were previously Pagan temples). He made it illegal for people to teach one another unless a person were trained as a priest (just like the Pagans of the day). They removed the Jewish holy days and changed to observing the Pagan holidays instead, but just masked them with Christian meanings. So the Jew was taking out of Christ and the Paganism was inserted.

The "Dark Ages" first began with the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 AD (however, many things happened before this date which are seen as endings of the Roman Empire, as well, depending on how one defines the end). With Rome collapsing, education would not be nearly as available to people. This caused illiteracy to grow and it caused less writings to be produced. It did not help that around the end of the 4th century, Constantine had mixed Catholicism with Christianity which mixed government into it all. Then in 962 we had the first Holy Roman Emperor crowned ruler, thought to be the political and religious ruler. It didn't help that the Muslims, in the 7th and 8th centuries conquered quite a few countries and destroyed all of the literature either. What's interesting is that the "dark ages" were ended because the Muslims decided to try to invade Europe, and did to quite some extent, until they were finally defeated in quite an amazing way. In the Battle & Siege of Vienna in 1529 was the end of the Muslim expansion into Europe. The siege lasted till 1683 at which point the battle began and ended. This stopped us all from speaking Arabic right now and being under Sharia Law.

It was the Muslims driving the Greeks out of the East into Europe that brought the age of enlightenment, because in Europe, we had only about 1,000 different publications where as they had about 10,000 in Greece. All of the Greece knowledge and writings came over, even the biblical texts they had which the Europeans did not. The printing press also ended the Dark Ages. Also, William Tyndale created an alphabet for Middle English and began teaching people how to read and sent his students out into public to read pieces of the New Testament to people to spread the Word. Before this, the Bible was only translated into High English, if I'm not mistaken, so the peasants couldn't understand it anyway, because they did not speak High English. The Bible was the first thing printed by the printing press, and these Protestant Christians are the ones responsible for starting the movement of teaching people how to read and learn for themselves rather than listen to and trust what the Catholic priests were telling them about God.

Also, if you look back into all of the pioneers of our different branches of science, they were all Creationists. Evolution was barely known back then. Sure, an evolution-type theory existed as far back as Socrates, if you look at some of his writings about the subject. But Evolution didn't get its foothold till Darwin popularized it in the mid-1800s. And even after Darwinism/Evolutionism took hold, many of our major advances in science have come from professed Creationists. Kent Hovind's videos names a list of them. Also, the highest concentration of technological advances come out of Israel. Though, keep in mind, Israel is so small that the concentration has to be high, but still, Israel is responsible for tons of technological advances. Their government is built on the Mosaic Law, similarly to how our US goverment is built on the Mosaic Law. Also, our country, founded as a Christian nation by all but three Christian Founding Fathers and built on the Mosaic Law is responsible for most of the major scientific advances of the age, many discovered (or inventions invented) either by Christians or Deists (people who believe in God, but not Christianity - i.e. - not atheists).

Creationists are responsible for tons of technological and scientific advances. The Catholic church's sheer evil and abuse of power is just one contributor to the Dark Ages, but not the only source of its lack of advancement. When empires are dispersed and broken up and rebuilding, technological advances are not top of the list for nations. To blame Christianity is absurd. To blame Paganism mixing with Christianity to corrupt it and form Catholicism and tyrannical rule is a little closer to home, though.

Did you know that we have found Roman artifacts from either the 200 BC era or the 300 AD ear all the way in New Mexico? They find them buried in places where no one could have planted them. They are genuine artifacts from those time periods. The Romans were crossing the Atlantic it would appear and trading with the Indians. We find some interesting things you don't hear about for some reason. We also find all of the technology in ancient cultures like the Egyptian culture, some of which we're just not matching today. For instance, the Great Pyramid took incredible technology to build, especially for men back then. In fact, our researchers say that our finest technology today is what is required to produce the incredible accuracy of the stones used in building the Great Pyramid. That's how precise the measurements and cuts are for those stones. And we still can't figure out today how they were able to move those stones and construct the pyramid in all of our grand scientific knowledge. That's just downright hilarious to me.

There's a great book called The Puzzle of Ancient Man: Evidence for Advanced Technology in Past Civilizations by Ph.D. Donald E. Chittick documents tons of ancient technologies which are amazing. For instance, we know the ancient Egyptians hydro-plated things with gold, which requires electricity. We find ancient batteries and capacitors they made and we see the hydro-plated materials. So we know they used electricity back then. We also find that "cavemen" had stronger bones, stronger muscles, larger brains and even better eyesight than we do today. The eyesight is proven by the fact that there are cave paintings and carvings, sometimes even three-dimensional, in locations where they could not have gotten sunlight in to use to create them. They find no carbon residue from torches either. It means they could see very well in dark places, well enough to create good artwork. Oddly enough, we find silver airplane figurines as much as 1,000 years old in Aztec graves. One of them is in the Smithsonian if you'd like to see it. It is an aircraft with a fuselage, a tail rudder, elevators and wings. No bird looks that way - no bird has a rudder that stands up. This clearly is not a carving of a bird. It is an aircraft just as we would build one today. How did they know about these things?

The fact is, ancient man seems to have been extremely advanced and then there was a decline due to empire struggles back and forth, and then we had to rediscover many things known to cultures in the past. That's very much against the theory of evolution which says we are advancing continually, and so earlier versions of man are less advanced than us. What I find interesting is they still put that aircraft figuring in the Smithsonian and just claim that it's depicting an insect. LOL Wow... those are some really clever scientists.

[BrianC]

I was raised to follow the laws set forth by the society that I live in.

The laws set forth in your society here in the US were created by our Founding Fathers and they said they created these laws from the Bible's Mosaic Law. Thus, you learned the morals and laws of the Bible and they are what you live by today.

[BrianC]

5. Why do we need a "Savior"?
God is all powerful, why cant we just be good unto him and be "saved"? From what I can gather it goes something like this- God says, "Im going to create man and woman with original sin, then I am going to impregnate woman with myself as her child, so that I can be born. Once alive I will kill myself as a sacrifice to myself in order to save you from the sin I originally condemned you to." Doesnt make a whole lot of sense to me.

No offense, but wow... that was all kinds of inaccuracy right there.

1 - God created mankind without sin.

2 - God gave us free-will and ONE single rule to follow (don't eat of the fruit of the treat of the knowledge of good and evil) so that we had a choice to make with our free-will.

3 - Man chose to sin, and that corrupted the world with sin by bringing sin into it and causing it to be cursed, and due to this, sin is passed down in our blood to our children through our fathers (the blood in a child is gotten from the father's blood, not the mother if you research into it).

4 - The Bible says a person must sin with their free-will before they are held accountable for sinning (thus, even though sin is passed down to us in our blood, we are not held accountable for any sins unless we commit them ourselves, and since we all sin, we are all fallen man by choice.

5 - God gave HUMANS sovereign rule here on earth, thus only man could bring sin into the world and only man could take it out of the world. Therefore, God had to go through the process of becoming a human so that He would have the human sovereign right to remove sin from the earth.

6 - He defeated sin in the spiritual realm, but has not removed it from the earth yet, because He needed to give us plenty of time to spread the good news of salvation to get a lot of people saved before returning to remove sin from the earth in the physical realm.

Did you grow up Catholic? (Just curious)

A lot of Christians don't even consider Catholicism a "Christian" religion, because they have so many Pagan beliefs - hence, the Protestant Revolution.

[BrianC]

6. Religion has impeded progress.
Throughout the middle ages/Dark ages, the church dominated the political landscape. Kings constantly were at odds with the Vatican for control and to gain power. Here is a graph of how religion affected technological progress-

I answered this one in my other posts already.

[jdgregory84]

The laws set forth in your society here in the US were created by our Founding Fathers and they said they created these laws from the Bible's Mosaic Law. Thus, you learned the morals and laws of the Bible and they are what you live by today.

Once again, the "morals" in the bible didn't start in the bible. There were laws WAY before the bible. I'd also like to see where the founding fathers said they founded Americas laws based on the bible. I'm definitely not saying that the basic guidelines of what's right and what's wrong in the bible are wrong. They just didn't originate from the bible.