The absurdity of Christianity

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It’s no better or worse than any other belief.They all have people that twist the teachings into what they want to believe and others that truly try to help their fellow humans.
Former Episcopalian, now Buddhist/Pagan.

Curiously, one of that tale's main ideas is death and resurrection (Gandalf) as a necessary step in the triumph of good over evil. But then Tolkien was a Christian. The story doesn't contradict itself AFAIK, and to my great relief, nobody expects anybody to believe it, being a self-confessed fiction. One thing about Christianity that I take issue with is this notion that if you don't believe their stories are true to fact, you're not getting it and you won't win the prize at the end. Some of them even try to use a stick (hell) as well as a carrot (heaven) to get people to do what nobody can honestly do - to believe by an act of conscious will.

I think that fantasy and religion both require a "Suspension of Disbelief"; but while a good fantasy story eventually ends, religion somehow takes over the mind completely, and the suspension of disbelief becomes permanent.

Yes, and I rather think the suspension of disbelief we do for fiction isn't quite complete even while watching the show. There's always a part of me that knows it's hokum.

Just perusing the concept a bit more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspensio ... Criticisms

Nothing is ever rational, though, hence why the argument over which one is correct will never ever die. Reason can only even exist if the senses are reliable, which they aren’t. Only knowledge revealed by a reliable source can inform human reason so that rational conclusions can even be drawn. That is not a matter of reason or evidence alone, but squarely a matter of faith. The real trick is having faith in the right things.

Sola indicio is irrational in that it leads to infinite regress. At some point a decision has to be reached to accept something as true despite the human inability to infinitely provide evidence for your evidence. That’s circular reasoning, though, and also irrational. However, scientists generally accept that providing evidence for evidence is unnecessary. It doesn’t make scientific conclusions somehow more rational, it just means something must be accepted as either axiomatic or self-evident. Otherwise, the only people who should be allowed to take the COVID vaccine should have advanced degrees in evolutionary and molecular biology.

Christianity is subject to the exact same principle. We don’t need less evidence than scientists. We just NEED evidence less than they do. It’s not something we’re compelled to think about because we already have what we need in terms of evidence.

The Christian experience of trying to justify beliefs based on evidence to committed unbelievers is somewhat like trying to show a YouTube video to Helen Keller. If Christian thought with respect to evidence is predicated on evidence only Christians can perceive, it’s unreasonable to expect people lacking perception yet demanding evidence to accept what we say about it. The truth is that all people have all the evidence they need to receive God’s grace. They simply lack the desire to believe it.

If only we'd clap harder, then the magic will happen?

Some things are rational enough for me, some aren't. The senses are reliable to a degree, or we wouldn't get much done. I don't know of any more reliable source of information than my senses. Sometimes I use "authorities" as an easy way of finding things out, if they seem to have a good track record, but I tend to take them with a pinch of salt and always prefer to find out for myself using my own observations, if there's enough time. Authority tends to go hand in hand with power, and power tends to corrupt. But when you can see a fact for yourself, when you can test it, that's more certain. There might be no perfect certainty, because we could always be dreaming or otherwise harbouring an illusion, but we can run with what look like strong probabilities, which seems to be the best we can do.

A lot depends on what you mean by "faith." If you mean faith as in conscious belief, I don't do that kind. I used to believe things when I was a child, until I realised that there was nothing I'd thought to be true that might not turn out to be incorrect. I asked a religious woman to explain faith to me, and she said an example was me waiting for a bus, that I had faith that the bus would arrive. But sometimes buses don't arrive, and it's useful to bear that in mind.

I remember when they were trying to load Christianity into me at school when I was about 6 years old feeling kind of guilty because I wasn't able to ignore my doubts about these things they were expecting me to believe. I felt better after considering the story of the chaps who lowered their sick friend through that roof for Jesus to heal, figuring that they won his approval even though their "faith" had only been expressed in action, not in this belief thing - the story didn't specify what they had been thinking, and it could have been something like "we really don't think this is at all likely to work, but rather than let him die we may as well give it a go." So I thought, "well, at least I can do actions, and it looks like my doubts don't disqualify me."

Later on I got more information, weighed it up and was more or less forced to the conclusion that faith healing doesn't work except as a placebo effect, and probably never did. It seems more likely that somebody made up the miracle stories than that miracles ever happened. People do make stuff up. Once I'd figured out that deities were probably all made up, I was free of the worry of having this faith thing expected of me anyway.

I learned to live fairly comfortably in the world of uncertainty, where I have no conscious faith in anything. I don't need to pretend to know what I don't know. The word "science" is from the Latin "scio" which means "I know." But if you're a good scientist, you'll do all you can to prove yourself wrong, and when you've failed, you'll draw tentative conclusions of the form "it would appear reasonably safe to assume that......" Always open to our theories being overturned by new information and new reasoning, like Newton was partly overturned by Einstein. Before him, we had a little bit too much faith in the notion that a second was a second and always would be.

The nearest I have, then, to faith is that I'll act as though some sources are fairly reliable, though I'll always remain open to question and doubt them. I don't view priests or scripture as reliable about much that I have any great interest in - there are a few things, but they have very little bearing on how I would behave towards others or towards these deities they say exist. I probably view Christianity much as you view Islam, and much as I view Islam and every other religion.

Merriam-Webster define genocide as:



So now you want to dance around the subject by nitpicking semantics.

So what difference does it make if someone eradicated 100% of an ethnic group vs only 40% or 20% of that group? Does that make it okay to only slaughter 2 million out of a population of 50 million? The Nazis clearly did not succeed in eradicating all Jews. Does that mean we should give them a pass as well? Seriously, do you even listen to the sh!t you say?!





Oh well. I guess it's technically not genocide because they only killed everyone but the virgins. And that makes it perfectly okay to only kill all the women and children that they did kill, right?! And even though it's painfully obvious what the virgins were being kept alive for, you're still going to mentally bend over backwards to not have to accept reality like you always do. Or are you just going to say that rape is also acceptable when God decrees it?



So I guess that if the Bible doesn't specifically use the word genocide, even if it explicitly described it, then it never happened. And if I break into your house and take all your stuff, but I never say I stole anything, then I didn't steal anything?! Great logic there, genius!



It was not "their" territory. The Israelites had no special claim to the land other than the one they made up. The other Semitic peoples were not occupying "their" territory any more than Native Americans were occupying the territory of Europeans.



So if they negotiated peace treaties with some peoples, that makes it okay for them to slaughter others?! And you yourself just admitted that whenever violence didn't take place, it was because the Israelites were disobeying God's instructions.



Numbers 31-33. See above.

Seriously, man! You're defending mass murder, slaughter of children, and even rape. Is that what you set out to do? Look at what your mindless hardheaded insistence of denying the reality of the Bible is turning you into. Is this what you want to be?

A lot of those tales of genocide and mass rape are very disturbing and one of the reasons I stopped reading the OT or wanting anything to do with it, and started having reservations about regular Christianity. I grew up in a fundamentalist church and later attended a charismatic one for some years. Many modern Bibles only contain the NT plus Psalms and Proverbs, thus leaving a lot of questionable stuff out.

No. You could simply answer that the moral choice is to disobey God's command. You'd only violate the rules is you say you have no moral objection to slaughtering Muslims. Am I to take it that that's your answer, then?



Irrelevant. The Old Testament is still as integral a part of the Bible as the New Testament. According to Christian doctrine, all of the Bible is the Word of God. You don't get to pick and choose. And the Old Testament contains many examples of God commanding his followers to slaughter entire populations, explicitly including women and children. I have already demonstrated this. This is just an excuse to dance around the question and avoid answering it, exactly as I predicted.



There are currently millions of Muslims residing within the boundaries of the land of Israel. So there is no need for anything extra-biblical here. This is just another excuse to avoid answering the question.





So you're saying that you would have no problem slaughtering children if God commanded you to do so. Got it!

And to think that Christians have the nerve to say that atheists lack a basis for morality.

Seriously? You'd even CONSIDER thinking of killing innocent people is right, if God says so?

Now you've completely shown EVERY evidence that Christians are indeed bad people.

Do you have no opinion on this matter yourself? Really?
Are you really going to park your brain and conscience in the parking lot, while attending church service?

Last edited by thinkinginpictures on 13 Jul 2021, 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Not unlike the command given that Abraham should sacrifice his son Isaac and fortunately for him there was a very unfortunate ram standing by caught in a conveniently nearby bush...

There's another tale I recall reading about once in the OT, much more obscure but concerning someone who promised to sacrifice the first thing he saw, which just happened to be his daughter.

Not pleasant reading material at all...

^
I've often wondered, what is it with religion and this sacrifice thing? I guess it was a stage of human evolution that hopefully we're growing out of. Crops fail - the gods must be angry - let's try giving them a decent meal and then they might be nice to us - how do we do that? - set fire to a good bit of livestock - the smoke goes up there where they live. How many animals (and people) did they waste like that before they finally twigged that it doesn't work? With modern ways of figuring things out it looks like the ancients must have been a pretty stupid lot, but they had to evolve a long way, and this tendency to see inanimate forces as somehow living and intelligent, as quasi-human, seems to be wired into the human brain. I hear a noise downstairs while I'm in bed - my immediate gut reaction is fear, that it's an intruder. Usually it isn't, but my brain is wired to think it is, because it's a survival thing, better safe than sorry. Crop failure presumably used to provoke the same sense of a living agency behind an effect, but we understand more about the real causes now, and have developed ways to intervene that are more effective than setting fire to a goat.

Wait...am I missing something Fnord, don't you go to church?

I guess we can cross-off "vegan" as one of god's qualities

One more time ... I am not an atheist, I just hate religion.  Besides, at my age, most of the people I know spend most of their time in church-related activities, as if they are all pulling a last-minute cramming session just before the final exam...