All the problems with Christianity

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So let me ask you a question: Does God approve of the Holocaust, The Gulag, The Great Leap Forward and The Rape of Nanking, or not?

Is the answer 100 percent Yes or 100 percent No?

Since free will is *absolute* by your own claim, there is no middle ground when answering this question... One word reply only, please....

In effect as a religion for all; Christianity is dead. The one that is all creates homosexuality as normal part of life that is necessary for the one of man to function properly.

Jesus brought a new testament of love for one and all a place for all to find their true love Will NoW! Not tomorrow or the next day and not with a magical incantation of three or four magical sentences. The path is one through the eye of the needle.

Many Christians worship the name of Jesus and his flesh but never come close to living with the Christ Spirit that is free for all and one without any structure or label of name.

In effect, for many Jesus is idol of Anti-Christ instead of Christ.

As above so below.

The problem is not Jesus or Christianity the problem is lie.

People see the lie now.

No more hidden by the powers of the Church and State.

Victory!1 of light.

By the way; homosexuality is only one example there are thousand more including our creature friends that man has put himself falsely above.

"There is no fear in love [dread does not exist], but full-grown (complete, perfect) love [a]turns fear out of doors and expels every trace of terror! For fear [b]brings with it the thought of punishment, and [so] he who is afraid has not reached the full maturity of love [is not yet grown into love’s complete perfection]." God never needed slaves cause He is omnipotent; he just wanted more people to share his Love with. What parent "needs" a child; the parent has a child so he/she has someone to share his/her love with (Ideally at least, this is not always the case in this imperfect world).

Some children fear there moms and dads and are obedient as a result. Some amount of fear may be necessary to prevent that adolescent boy from starting a heroin habit that could ruin his life- a naive adolescent may not no the dangers of a drug habit by his naive conscious (as adults our conscious continues to grow and mature, but it is always naive to at least a few experiences. We need to trust God as we continue to grow just like we do our parents as children in order to prevent inadvertent self harm. Later when some of these chidlren they grow up, they are obedient not out of fear but out of gratitude and love for mom and dad (I say "some" children for a reason; not all children have the benefit of loving parents.). If you were a mother our father, is this how you would want to children to honor you- by your love rather than your fear? I believe its the same with God; he wants us to be obedient out of love not fear. God sent us Jesus because he loves us and as a manifestation of his Love. By following Jesus's example we too can learn the mysteries of Love (that we are fulfilled by giving rather than receiving) and come to honor God out of Love and not fear. The slave reference from the Bible cannot be taken out of context with the overall desire of God to have us love him. You could argue that in some ways a child is slave to his parent, but the child is more than a slave! God freed the Israelites from slavery after all. He wanted them to know a service beyond slavery.

This is not easy, which is why Jesus sacrificed himself for us; He knew it would take our whole lives and we would still never reach full perfection in this life. But we can still try even though most of us will perpetually fall short. I believe that God rewards effort! A first challenge of faith is to believe that there is a God; one of the next, ongoing challenges of faith is to trust in the goodness of God, which is not always easy given the evil around us.

You can try Christianity through prayer, attending worship services, service for one neighbors, and-the most challenging- by giving up subconscious attachments. that hold us back from loving. For some people that attachment may be a bad habit, for others self righteousness, for others it may be an attachment to a person. Everyone is different, and that part of the journey (finding out what attachments hold us back from loving) is often a journey we make alone with God. Its scary, but that is where belief in the goodness of God comes in! The journey involves some suffering but what journey in life does not involved some degree of suffering? The peace the world brings us is at best a temporary relief from our troubles; the peace that Christ brings provides lasting victory over our troubles in due time. "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)

That was beautiful every word rings true.

My mother gave me perfect love and as such is reflected close in eyes.

I cannot imagine anyone having a mother more pure bright light than mine.

Seriously.. Everyone says that about her. She is close to 80 and still radiates like a 17 year old angel.

Darkness is often generated in youth... I have no clue what it would be like not to be loved by family.

I'm sure this is very much related to how one views the entirety of life.... always subject to higher level of love if one pursues it with passion.

I'm getting pretty good at those captcha's anyone else...?
They are even fun to me now!! HA Ha!

I had a vision and God was a laugh1!.

Maybe I'm joking; maybe I'm not.

Did you get the punch line?

Ha HA!

Life is short.

Have some fun!

And know for the

rest of the wave...

The Golden spiral that

IS

The U.S. does worse at following the Christian moral code than less religious European countries (e.g. teen pregnancy, abortion, murder). The nicest, most morally decent people I've known have been atheist, and I have known many Christians to make such a comparison.

In the absence of a God to be slave to, we're expected to follow the dictates of human interpreters of "God's will". In effect therefore, religion enslaves humans to other humans.

Bravo!1

This rings true too.

(note: just being funny, not condescending)
I do agree.

A cat and a p**** can be the same thing.
Ha HA.

Unless the naughty nice stars capture the ussy.

It is not fair the captcha guard is 'weeding' out the participants.

Sometimes you still have to defend yourself. There is an aspect to a country's glory that can only be seen when this happens.

That's just the point: God is greater than Satan. It wouldn't give Him a great deal of glory if he was pretty much evenly matched with His enemy and just barely came out on top. His great power is one of the things that makes Him glorious.
Also, it was Satan who rebelled against God, not the other way around.

I'm afraid I've not been clear with my analogy. War is a terrible thing, and it most definitely takes a toll on people and countries, just like evil does. But it can also strengthen people. It makes them more disciplined and more able to make the right decisions. It is for this reason that people in the military start as low-ranking soldiers and move up, gradually becoming leaders of more people and commanding more resources. This is mostly what I was getting at.

There are some prophecies that are yet to be fulfilled, especially ones about the end times. But as far as I know, there have been no prophecies that have been falsified (e.g. prophecy said something would never happened and it did). If I'm wrong, please tell me.
Here is the answer to the Matthew/Luke problem: http://www.apologeticspress.org/apconte ... rticle=932

You've neglected to answer my question. I therefore assume that your perfect, infallible deity made a mistake when setting out his laws.



Assuming 'God' exists, he created Satan to rebel against him (omniscient, remember?). There is no glory in manufacturing a puppet enemy and then slaughtering him and his people wholesale in order to make yourself look "glorious". In fact, your assertion is evidence that the god you believe in is guilty of megalomaniac levels of pride - thus 'God' is evil.




Without consulting my bible, the stand-out unfulfilled prophecy is God's promise to David, regarding the throne of Judah. This promise was broken with the death of Zedekiah.



This article wilfully disregards the fact that neither Hebrew nor Greek cultures recorded or respected the maternal bloodline.

Those last two quotes are a perfect example of yet another problem with Christianity - Christians like to have their cake and eat it. They will point out a quote from the Bible, then tenuously link it to another passage from the same unverifiable source material, claiming that prophecy has been fulfilled. Highlight an example of how prophecy has failed (see my example) and Johnny Christian will spin further interpretative dogma.

In this instance, Christian apologists will likely suggest that Jesus himself was of the line of David. Even if we were to accept this ancestry - which was only revealed by the two Gospel authors we have already shown to be terrible historians and who, upon closer inspection, seem to have made the whole thing up without consulting each other - it does not explain the 600 year gap without an heir of David on the throne.

Regardless of what your 'faith' tells you, common sense and intelligent discernment tells the rest of us that The Bible was written by men, as a means to control other men.

I say we're all slaves to nature.

Bingo! :)

But seriously it's true, in elements as simple as instant gratification and intermittent reinforcement. Animals are not evolved for instant gratification. The reward is in the looking forward. not the destination.

I just add to add another sentence so I could do another captcha!

That's nice to assert, but my issue of it either being deterministic or random seems to follow from the logic. You can try to invent a third category, but can you tell me how this is in practice different than randomness? Can you describe to me the logical outcomes of free will in a manner that are distinct from randomness? It strikes me that you really can't, and if we just redid any of my actions, I could just decide differently each and every time. What then is the meaning of this wholly arbitrary choice then?

I'm not merely asserting my position, but rather I'm pointing to an absurdity going on with the concept of free will distinct from other philosophical and empirical concerns.(and there are plenty of others. The notion of free will you're talking about has fallen out of favor among people who feel like their ideas have to make sense.)


No, you're using bad logic. God being "absolute in his nature" doesn't entail that God affirms free will absolutely. Nor does God curtailing free will count as God contradicting himself.

I didn't say anything about God's fallibility either.


That's fine, but using BS to prove BS doesn't prove that this BS isn't BS.

Free will, as defined, ultimately when pressed both runs into problems both philosophical and empirical. This "Christian" notion simply does not exist. The notion that God cannot curtail or control the outcomes of free will does not follow from your logic and you need to re-examine your premises as premise 3 is at minimum phrased incorrectly, but I suspect it is wrong as stated.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 20 Jul 2013, 1:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

It's a clever trick to set up unrealistic expectations, e.g. that even a lustful thought is worthy of eternal torture in hell, then offer their own "redemption" of the "debt" this unnatural rule inevitably creates: total surrender & enslavement to unfounded beliefs.

You fail to recognize the criticism.

My point isn't that people don't do EVERYTHING. My point is that the set of freely chosen actions is really within a pretty narrow band relative to the set of logically possible actions an agent could engage in, as such talk about changing the narrow band of actions human beings will engage in is not silly but rather a serious criticism.


Err.... the claim is to go contrary to the "choice between good and evil". If the "choice between good and evil" does not seem to clearly exist as a reality people face, then using free will to talk about moral choice is not a very good model for it.

Also, different perspectives is neutral to the existence of an indeterminism.

Finally, I think my claim goes deeper than "different perspectives", I'm not introducing a matter of cultural relativism, I'm introducing a challenge to the entire model of moral choosing you're portraying as fact. Rather, I'm saying that when most people "do bad things", they are generally doing them for reasons that seem good, reasonable, comprehensible, or at minimum responsibility mitigating and suggesting that the world doesn't move in black and white so clearly, and that really what we label evil is banal and what we seek as evil is mythical.


The comment stands even within the Christian tradition though. If you cannot say that God hasn't done evil, then how do you know that even the things in the text that seem obviously terrible aren't just God doing evil? How can you be certain that the Christian hell isn't an abomination? How can you be certain that the Flood and the genocide of all of mankind except Noah wasn't just a case worse than both Mao and Hitler?

Frankly, proving that an idea of Christianity can be internally consistent isn't actually relevant to any concern of mine. Any root idea can be made internally consistent by giving up enough connection to empirical reality and allowing the right kinds of reinterpretations of original claims.


Then I think you have utterly FAILED to understand the problem.

My problem is that so long as a divine plan exists, or even foreknowledge, there is no COHERENT WAY that human beings can have MEANINGFUL AGENCY outside of God's pre-existing plans for their lives. And God, so long as he knows the future and all else, and is a purposeful agent, is going to inherently plan out what free willed actions will take place, how could he not?


It's unsatisfactory. Do you actually NOT understand the criticism?

Err.... generally no. I mean, people become more experienced soldiers but... part of that is being hardened to the horrors of war.

You may want to isolate out "well, people rise in rank", but generally war is a LOT WORSE for the people who enter than anything else. It makes people better at war, but not better psychologically, morally or much else. The issue is that if evils are generally degrading more than character building, then the "evil builds character" line won't work. I would argue that evils do not build character with anything approaching the reliability under which we'd generally say that "evil builds character". For so many evil acts, one of the major things left behind are just the scars.

You can't figure it out with logic alone. That's only 'one hemisphere' of thought.

If anyone wants to know how it works I know.

Just ask.