All the problems with Christianity

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I'm going to say something slightly controversial but it might clear up misconceptions that are even more fundamental.

it seems like its inescapable that the bible itself is a very occult/esoteric book. Its not intended to be a documentary. If you've ever read the thing through and had the 7's, 12's, and 3's dancing enough circles around your head to make your eyes go googly or really had to scratch your head as to why Cherubim and the four beasts in Revelation match the four cardinal points of the zodiac - its a normal reaction. Seeing odd parallels between John's writings and neoplatonic/hermetic thought also isn't abnormal.

(can anyone tell me why I have to keep clearing web bot riddles to post something even as short as this? WP security is really starting to get out of control)

Hi everyone, sorry I've been getting behind on this thread. Anyway...

The question of the infallibility of the Bible has been brought up a few times so far and I'd like to answer it, but first let me make 1 more comment on the issue of evil:
It has been said that the world was created for our good and God's glory, and the problem of evil makes far more sense in light of this idea. If a country is in peacetime, it is difficult to see how powerful it is and how well it can stand up to adversity. It is only after it comes into conflict with another country that we can see the greater one in all its glory.

It is the same way with good and evil. We can only see how good goodness is when we understand evil.

We can only know how powerful the kingdom of God is after it stands up to Satan's massive rebellion. This means that we can't judge God too harshly on evil until we see whether He comes out victorious in the end. This is how evil things work for God's glory.

But they work for our good as well. You see, just as God's kingdom cannot be seen in all its glory without evil, God's people might not become strong without it either. An experienced soldier is not simply barely alive when he comes out of a long war; he is all the better for it. He is stronger, more tactical, and his instincts are superior to when he was less experienced. He grows in his love for his country and in the appreciation of what it stands for. The battle between good and evil is likewise: One day, the evil will be defeated, and we will come out the better for it.

Now on the question of the bible: One of the best arguments in its favor is fulfilled prophecy. The Old Testament is full of prophecies, and theGospels are full of the fulfillments of them. That means that if the Gospels are true, it gives tremendous credibility to the Old Testament. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that it is true. We know that the Gospels were written soon after the time of Jesus (i.e. soon afer the 30s). Also, the Gospels included details from prophecy that the Jewish people by that time had largely ignored, e.g. the details of Jesus's crucifixion. This means that what was written in the gospels was a historical account and not just something made up to make Jesus look real. Here are some sources:
http://100prophecies.org/
http://pleaseconvinceme.com/2012/the-ea ... -of-jesus/

This means that what was written in the gospels was a historical account and not just something made up to make Jesus look real.

and Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

And Jesus Himself had become about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, who was the son of Heli.

I'm going to say something slightly controversial but it might clear up misconceptions that are even more fundamental.

it seems like its inescapable that the bible itself is a very occult/esoteric book. Its not intended to be a documentary. If you've ever read the thing through and had the 7's, 12's, and 3's dancing enough circles around your head to make your eyes go googly or really had to scratch your head as to why Cherubim and the four beasts in Revelation match the four cardinal points of the zodiac - its a normal reaction. Seeing odd parallels between John's writings and neoplatonic/hermetic thought also isn't abnormal.

This is one of the more interesting pieces of research I came across.

In my opinion this relates to human supraorganism of mind. Reflected in the same measure of the golden spiral seen everywhere else in the Universe. I think it exists in mind as microcosm of the largest unit down to the smallest unit of measure in macrocosm.

It is reflected in all cultural byproducts of human beings. This video does a good job of drawing those connections. This guy did his homework.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L777RhL_Fz4[/youtube]

As for fulfilled prophecy, the problem is that the Bible is usually the work that says that the prophecy was fulfilled, and because authors and later readers have their own drive to fulfill these prophecies, it creates a very bad/untrustworthy system of fulfillment. I'm not going to try to go through all 100 prophecies, but from what I can see a lot of them really are cases where the authors of the Gospels could have written in order to fulfill what they perceived as a prophecy. This really makes it difficult to give a lot of credibility.

Hi everyone, sorry I've been getting behind on this thread. Anyway...
The question of the infallibility of the Bible has been brought up a few times so far and I'd like to answer it, but first let me make 1 more comment on the issue of evil:
It has been said that the world was created for our good and God's glory, and the problem of evil makes far more sense in light of this idea. If a country is in peacetime, it is difficult to see how powerful it is and how well it can stand up to adversity. It is only after it comes into conflict with another country that we can see the greater one in all its glory. It is the same way with good and evil. We can only see how good goodness is when we understand evil. We can only know how powerful the kingdom of God is after it stands up to Satan's massive rebellion. This means that we can't judge God too harshly on evil until we see whether He comes out victorious in the end. This is how evil things work for God's glory.
But they work for our good as well. You see, just as God's kingdom cannot be seen in all its glory without evil, God's people might not become strong without it either. An experienced soldier is not simply barely alive when he comes out of a long war; he is all the better for it. He is stronger, more tactical, and his instincts are superior to when he was less experienced. He grows in his love for his country and in the appreciation of what it stands for. The battle between good and evil is likewise: One day, the evil will be defeated, and we will come out the better for it.
Now on the question of the bible: One of the best arguments in its favor is fulfilled prophecy. The Old Testament is full of prophecies, and theGospels are full of the fulfillments of them. That means that if the Gospels are true, it gives tremendous credibility to the Old Testament. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that it is true. We know that the Gospels were written soon after the time of Jesus (i.e. soon afer the 30s). Also, the Gospels included details from prophecy that the Jewish people by that time had largely ignored, e.g. the details of Jesus's crucifixion. This means that what was written in the gospels was a historical account and not just something made up to make Jesus look real. Here are some sources:
http://100prophecies.org/
http://pleaseconvinceme.com/2012/the-ea ... -of-jesus/

Advice for atheists? Try Christianity for two weeks. And when I say try, I do not simply just following a law. But try to go out of your way to help someone out. Maybe volunteer a few hours at a soup kitchen or a hospital. Do something for the sake of being loving, and I am willing to bet your life would be enriched because of it. Try not to see Jesus's directions as arbitrary punishments or restrictions, rather see them as instructions to help us learn to Love again.

God does not want us to be obedient stricty out of fear. If he did, he would call us slaves rather than brothers or sisters. Some amount of fear is necessary to prevent humans from doing really bad things (murder, genocide, etc.).

God does not want us to be obedient stricty out of fear. If he did, he would call us slaves rather than brothers or sisters. Some amount of fear is necessary to prevent humans from doing really bad things (murder, genocide, etc.).

Err... assuming that libertarian/acausal free will is even a reasonable view of how our moral agency works(something I don't even see strong reasons to take for granted).
Even further, granting acausal free will, it seems like the only free will that would exist would be bounded. There are definitely things people don't really tend to ever do. And probably a few that are nearly inconceivable save for the mentally ill among us.
That being said... I have no reason to even think this is a relevant or good notion. I mean, what good does it do mankind to say that our actions are the result of the flip of a metaphysical coin? If there are lines of causation, then the matter is deterministic. However, in the absence, what is actually making the determination? A vagueness. Something with the logical properties most similar to a coin flip. Let's just face it. If you have "free will" such that your actions are not determined by preceding facts, then if you were faced with the exact same situation again, you could make an utterly different choice, it wouldn't be rooted in your character, it wouldn't be rooted in the context, it would be no different than flipping a coin twice: one time it may hit heads and the other time it may have tails. If you'd like to dispute that, then could you please tell me what substantive procedural difference there is between your free will and that coinflip?

The third is not a result of logic. Free will being an absolute says nothing about how God must value it. Suppression isn't contradictory to creating something either, so I may have a goal state, and this goal state may be best actualized through some middle combination.

Christians (who are not alone in this) believe their god to be omniscient, omnipotent and infallible. If such a being exists, he must therefore transcend time in order to have complete knowledge of all that was, that is and that will be. The existence of any such being with this sort of knowledge completely precludes free will, as our deeds and actions are already known.
Free will relies on a future that is pliant, not one which is set in stone. An omniscient being is therefore incompatible with the existence of free will.
This also means that an omniscient being who is also omnipotent is logically impossible. If the future is already set in stone, men nor gods have the power to change it.

3) Following 2) why must the ability to choose involve much potential to choose evil things? I mean, do many people choose to leap off of cliffs like lemmings? No, and the few that would are usually diagnosed with a medical problem. Do most of us choose to cover our bodies with feces and walk all the time in such a state? No, and the idea wouldn't even occur to us. Do most of us solve 2+2 by saying it equals 5? No, and largely this would be impossible for us.
So, why couldn't this have been a matter where the failure state was implausible or even where rational coercion would keep us from it.

The same thing accounts for our data, and actually makes more sense in light of the fact that human evil actions usually aren't as stark as imagined, but rather involve real people on that other side who think they're doing the right thing in that context. I mean, if "free will" were actually the explanation then why don't we have more people who we say are evil who acknowledge that they made the choice to do evil? If they don't experience the "choice to do evil", then what makes us so certain that we really have the right explanation rather than dogmatically holding to some myth about how the world works?

So, if God *can* do evil, how do you know he HASN'T?

Even further, aren't the problems of agency really brought to the forefront if we say that God can exhaustively control the set of possible actions a human can undertake? I mean, while we may generally deny culpability in cases where we deny control. It seems clear to me that if we give control solely to another agent, that we do give some responsibility for those actions to that other person. If I purchase the services of a hitman, for instance, then I am responsible to some extent for his killing. Well, the problem here is that by God's divine plan, he has prescribed the role for each and all of us. If he didn't prescribe these roles in a relatively exhaustive sense, he would not be able to have a divine plan. The problem we run into is that God has set up the world in a such a manner that certain bad things will definitely happen. It seems to me that this undermines the very moral separation people need for that kind of argument, as it's no longer so clear that we're independently moral agents, so much as simply blindly executing God's plan through his unfathomable manipulations, and so... how is God NOT like the man who ordered a hit on his wife?

Right, and Skynet's creators would not have acted unevilly if they knew creating skynet would lead to evil. The problem here is that God knows the consequences, and he has known from the beginning and foreseen everything out according to his divine plans for the world. As such, it seems less fit to focus on our moral freedom than to recognize that we are effectively pawns in his chess game. To say otherwise would seem to require us to deny divine omniscience.