You won't answer my questions so why the hell should I answer yours?

I"m not a dog, I don't answer to you, and there's nothing productive to say to you because you'll "just ask this contradication" 1000x times and reject any authority, reject any larger structure or argument, but just keep nibbling because you've made up your mind before you even think about it.

Belief in A God ? I believe there is an entity or something similar that created everything. Being a catholic I don’t go to church.  I don’t follow catholic practices.  I believe in being a nice person, helping my fellow humans when needed. Don’t be a dick to people.

I have several Christian friends and they are wired for the afterlife! Something about some of  them though is when shit gets tough they lash out and get pissy. I find that hypocritical. I was asked by a Christian friend of a Christian friend what religion I am.  I said catholic, Don’t attend church, I don’t treat people like trash.  The guy said you sound like a Buddhist not a catholic.  I said are you judging me ? He said no ! I  said yeah right.


And one of my Christian friends use to live 2 doors down from me, he and his wife would sit in the back yard talking to god or Jesus. A monologue if you will. He by himself or his wife by herself.  

What was your question?

ETA: You can "defeat" me in an argument, but my question will still stand about accepting or rejecting Moses's order to take virgins as spoils of war. If you are that confident in your faith that you can leave unexplored topics open, then that's your faith.

"NOPE, TOTALLY KOSHER!  The more, the merrier, and make sure not to go light on the rape!"

Kidding.  Sometimes it's worth examining what came directly from God, and what came through a Jewish patriarch's filter (like Moses), because not everything preserved in the Bible is preserved for the same reason (i.e. as face value instruction).  Even instruction is not always necessarily meant as a permanent moral teaching, and God may have required the second and third order consequences of this order to fulfill some purpose.  Still, let's assume for the sake of argument that God meant it exactly the way it sounds.  Let's even assume it still applies, which is less likely than, say, the Ten Commandments (not just because they're literally carved into stone for permanence, but also because so much else reinforces them later):

If you compare/contrast this with the Old and New Testament's low view of fornication and sexuality outside of marriage, as well as Christ's words on how to live your life and what should motivate you, you can probably come to the reasonable conclusion that by now we're supposed to behave less savagely and more protectively than, say, the Red Army under this circumstance.  Would you disagree?  I'd guess we are still most likely meant to spare virgin girls in war when possible (if no one else) unless told otherwise.  And if you assume there's no welfare state to care for them, who should?  And if you care for them, should you not enjoy it?

God may still test the state of your heart by how you choose to interpret the totality of all such commands: What is it that you "enjoy?"  Are you savagely motivated by a consuming lust and hatred, or by the desire to raise the spared children of your ungodly enemies for the glory of God, and maybe get some helping hands with the chores for your trouble?  We have the benefit of a greater totality of moral teaching than the Israelites who first received the command you reference, and their implementation of it may very well have informed God's strategy for what to teach next.*

*(I take God's omniscience a bit less literally than some, because God very clearly reacts to people in the Bible, and He sometimes appears uncertain about whether any given intervention will be sufficient to make people repent.  This tells me that He probably sees the entire timeline as it is, but that He can change something by inserting an intervention at any point, and the ultimate result may be a priori unknown.  That's just my interpretation though.)

I still believe, nothing to lose, having faith is a ggod thing.
I was born in 1860, raised Catholic, altar boy, all that, never questioned anything.
Boy at age 20 when I read a KJV Bible, it really opened my eyes to what the KJV Bible said vs. Catholocism.
Not criticizing, just that so many church rituals are against the KJV, if you've read this you know what I mean.

That sounds like directions for making barbacoa.

No dude, I said this earlier,


The game atheists play is they say they're superior to religion because they don't operate on FAITH, they operate on LOGIC.

If you operate on LOGIC that means that there is a falsifiability built into your hypothesis, e.g. if it meets condition A and B then Hypothesis 1 is wrong.

The gravitational theory can be falsified by no new celestial bodies with different gravitational pulls entering the equation, no change to the earth's molten core...  and shit starts floating on earth. It might be hard to falsify, but there's objective conditions where the most hardened Gravity scientists say... guess I was wrong.

If you do NOT have falsifiability of your ideas, then it's a BELIEF. Religion ADMITS it's a belief, Atheism PARADES like it's NOT a belief. If you can't falsify it though it's a belief.

So I ask again:

What conditions, or logical arguments or logical contradictions would it take to prove your Atheism wrong?

Holy shit bro, you are 161 years old?

Have you read any of the Bible!?

Evidently your cognitive abilities are so weak that you have to be "told" what is right and wrong by a moral handbook written by others, seems kind of lazy to push the hard work off on someone else.

Thank you for not name calling or devolving the argument. You have good points. I have two thoughts upon reading your response:

1) If you are going to take children for the purpose of not explicitly sleeping with them (ie: as you say for helping hands with the chores), why did it matter that they were female and that they were virgins? Certainly unchaste boys and girls could do house work.

2) The overall picture of Jesus's teachings were of acceptance and love. I won't even bring up Matthew 5:17 "Don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill.", but how are you deciding what to choose and reject (or more fully understand) from the OT? Is it your own moral judgement? Is it Jesus's teachings?

There is NO PROOF. Everything you’ve ever heard about god came from humans.  Humans are liars. Humans are superstitious. Humans explain away things with fairy tales. Humans try and control other humans. Humans are vile.

Yeah, there's also good parts too. There's a lot of bad shit mixed in and can't ever be gotten out fully on Earth anyway. Humans are shit... but also wonderful at times too.

Annnnnd here's the real truth.

OK, I thought maybe that was the question, but I ignored it earlier because it was ad hominem. I don't know that I could state I am athiest because that would make an assertion there is no god. I don't definitively if there is or is not a god. Proving a negative ('There is no god!') is much harder than proving a positive. So I guess if one were inclined to dissuade athiests, showing God could be one way. Vice versa, the athiest would have to go to the ends of the universe and time (and arguably beyond) and show there wasn't a god. Even then that wouldn't be a strong enough position to prove there wasn't a god, just that there isn't evidence of one. Both seem pretty hard to do, so I don't think either side is getting anywhere fast.


Now about the nature of my postings..... OP said he felt like he was losing his faith. A lot of people said he just needed to read the bible more and he will know the way. I bring up Numbers 31:18 because I would like to know more about how we choose to ignore these passages, but then accept other passages.

You`re the one looking for a fight. I`ll step up, just remember, every bully meets a ringer one day. Or we can have a rational discussion according to the rules of argumentation theory and informal logic.

Religion is a man made set of rules to please God, and it is not pleasing to God. God wants what every father and mother should want for their kids. He wants us to love him, respect him and know him. He wants us to know him in a personal way. I always believed the pastor of my church was us in the ways of doing right using the stories from the bible to show us how to walk in this life. Jesus said I have come that you might have an abundance of good so you can enjoy life!

I do know this, it is impossible to please God without faith. I still at 60 believe the word of God is alive and 100% accurate, and can speak to our harts, Don't give up on God, give up on religion.

Faith comes by hearing the word of God. We need what Jesus gave us through his crucifixion and reresection. We need the salvation that his sacrifice brings. Jesus isn't some whimpy guy as he has been portrayed as so often. The Lord is a warrior, and he is mighty in battle, who can stand before him?

1. Realistically, who is more likely to cause an uprising?  Boys raised by their fathers to preserve and defend Canaanite culture?  Or young girls who are not just theological and ideological blank slates but virgins, such that they are unsullied and may more easily integrate and be married off?  Of course, I'm sure God anticipated a lot of rape at the time, but preventing that has never been His primary objective.  His primary objective is teaching as many souls as possible to follow Him.  From that lens, it becomes a lot easier to see how the girls served that purpose more than the boys.  And as for the boys, we do not know what God had in store for their souls, but I simply trust it was something better than what would have happened if the Israelites had let them live.

2. It's a combination of both, really.  We're always making moral judgments whether we realize it or not, but over time I find it easier to revise and inform my own emotionally-derived opinions (or even logically-derived opinions) by applying Christ's words with the discernment of the Holy Spirit.  Aside from the dietary/cleanliness laws ended for Christians in Acts and Paul's letters, most anachronistic Old Testament passages are pretty clearly one-time deals or pretty easily softened by later OT moral teachings or Christ clarifying the kind if heart we should approach things with.

Btw, I had an edit in my earlier post regarding the Ten Commandments comparison.

Wonderful. I DID make an assumption, that turned out wrong, you were an atheist. Sorry about that. Atheists DO believe there IS NO god, and as you point out, that's a lot bigger problem than going agnostic. People who are agnostic are usually smarter, less puerile, and less militant. The militancy of your posting made me think you were pulling for atheists. Mea Culpa.

Correct which is why I do take on a strongly hostile ad hominem tone with atheists because it's such an objectively stupid position.



Sure, and I'm FAR more happy to answer this, because it addresses the issues at a higher level than being asked to answer 1000 unrelated questions and there being no realistic or logical way to deal with more inevitable questions.

I prefer to address questions with a higher level language, like C# or Python then be expected to debug things at the machine code level.

Anyway, how do you "choose to ignore passages" and "accept other passages"? I'll admit, it's an art rather than a science. All the offshoots of Christianity are evidence of this. First, there has to be humility. Calvinists say that predestination is a thing- NO QUESTIONS. That seems rather assumptive, and so a big problem. It takes a few vague references and says this must be gospel and if you don't believe get out. That's a little wonky to me personally.

How do I take that? The israelites were a people who literally cut throats of cows and sheep every friday and dripped blood on altars but were excruciatingly careful to not consume blood of the cows in the meat; nor to mix milk and beef, and 611 other commandments of mosaic law. Paul did a favor and basically wiped these things out so mixed fibers of cloth isn't a death penalty. So first, a lot of old code (literally, Mosaic code) was wiped out in the Jesus-Paul patch.

And as I stated previously, there clearly were commands earlier, especially in the war-like period of the Israelites to genocide enemies like the Amalekites so thoroughly even their cows were killed, and people were completely wiped out. Those were explicit orders for explicit peoples in explicit times. None of which generalizes. So, using common sense that when god said thousands of years ago "Do X to Y people for Z reason" and there's been patches and no orders close to that nor ordained holy wars with prophets literally getting commands from god with divine proof to back up their words...

I sorta think you're getting weird to try to resurrect one example from thousands of years ago specifically delineating a circumstance and asking why that's not the general command. It never was... and trying to say it was is just torturing words to say what you mean. You'd get along better with the Maimonides school of Talmudism at that point.

I personally take the part about "by your fruits you shall know them" as one of the strongest and most important parts of the bible, where things that don't work are burned for a bad tree shall never bear good fruit and so should be thrown into a fire". And understanding you're gonna fuck up, that your civilization and people will fuck up, but moving forward and not getting hung up about that cuz you're not perfect is pretty good.

OK, OP. It's your loss.

First: Condolences for the loss of your father.
I came to salvation later in life than some of y’all. I did go through the motions as a child simply because I didn’t want to go to hell. My actual “entry” into Christianity came later.
I listened to all the hype from both sides and studied Islam, Buddhism, etc. Nothing in the other religions felt right to me.
As a retired LEO and judge I had a lot of time to study human behaviors.
Applying what I saw to the Bible and other factors, I came to be follower of Christ.
There are things that people say are contradictory that really aren’t. They are accounts given by eye witnesses. If you ever written a report on what people have seen you’d know that you will get a different version from each of them. If someone was trying to fake a religious text I’d have to believe they’d not leave anything in that was contradictory such as the descriptions of Jesus feeding the masses.
Someone mentioned translations. An example : The Bible does not mean killing in all forms. The Greek word for “killing” from the Septuagint means to not lie in wait and kill your neighbor.
In my study of human nature I don’t believe that eleven men could follow someone for three years who said he was the Son Of God and not desert him and his teachings when he died on the cross UNLESS something miraculous happened (The Resurrection). Each of these men continued to be followers and teachers of The Word with each of them dying horrible deaths as a result.
You do have free will. You can walk away. You can can also turn around and walk back if you change your mind.
I am probably the worst Christian in history.  I have a daughter with a brain tumor, my dad had a stroke and has Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. I’ve been mad at God and struggled with these issues and others.
Bottom line is this: God is NOT a genie granting wishes nor an ATM.
He will be there for you if you change your mind…

Amen

No kidding, he should do a AMA about reconstruction.

What would be your reason for being good and moral if there was no higher power to answer to? And who would say what is good or evil? What makes you the judge of anyone or anything if there is no God?????

Double tap

Belief is a flawed concept, a heuristic assessment for the sake of convenience. What you don`t seem to understand is that Atheist don`t have beliefs, we calculate the probability of a premise with the understanding that there may not be enough information to arrive at a definitive answer, whereas religion gives 100% credence to something that may only have a 50% probability. "close enough for me!"

I know what you are saying and agree to a point. God invented the tithing system to support the Levites (modern day pastors) who took care of the church side of things and the people in need. In modern times that has been perverted in some instances.

Great, if you're the atheist here, give me you logical model for atheism then, and what parts are unknown vs. known, and what you're replacing it with I asked questions above of an atheist, feel free to give us the code that runs better and replaces belief and does a better job to boot.

Tithing was OT, and there's no call in the NT that it's required. Most powerful sects of christianity do get gifts, but tithing was superseded iirc, I'll see if I can find the reasoning on that.

You didn`t notice the cognitive dissonance between his words and the shitty meme he posted? lol.

I've heard it both ways. Same with whether the Ten Commandments are still in effect or the 7th day Sabbath established at creation. When God established something, if I'm not sure I'd rather go with the conservative approach. Obviously, it's clear the sacrificial system in history.

I mean, if the Sabbath day being observed friday night-saturday night, saturday, or Sunday is a deal-breaker and you get cast into hell for a good faith attempt, then that's sorta shitty pharisaical rabbinism that Jesus seemed to preach against and sorta ridiculously makes god's powers constrained by dumbass humans.

I can rib and even virulently argue these points with Christians without real anger, but enjoying the fun of it. It's more the wholesale rejection or refusal to meet debates logically i have a problem with.

When Peter replied to Jesus, Lord where else would I go. I can relate to that. I'm almost50. I have tried many paths in life. This path is not easy and I don't understand everything because I'm not God but this is my path. Not always but all too often people suck because we are all flawed. Religion is made up of flawed individuals so you know the outcome.  Your personal relationship to God is all that matters. To be honest many in this thread are reaching to blame God for mans failure.

Insult, instead of saying anything at all about what was posted.

You haven't even managed to disagree with what I wrote.

How does "well I came up with it myself" (not true if you examine it, but who cares about truth, right?) make irrational answers ... not irrational?

You can't even prove you exist ... to yourself.

Your point?

This whole time I thought faith alone in Christ alone was the essence of being a good Christian. OP, did you really not once read the bible?

Welcome to the real world.

I read the bible front to back 30 years ago.
I had the same wtf moments that you listed and many many more.
It's beyond my comprehension that people follow that stuff.
But it doesn't matter to me and makes some people happy, so whatever.

The new testament god is at least a little nice...kinda.
but the old testament one is a total asshole.

I like what Jesus teaches though.
Love, kindness, forgiveness, humility and the occasional ass-kicking.

That's why I can and love Christmas, because of Jesus the teacher and, of course, Santa.

So "this is my experience with atheists and it's universally bad" (in reply to a slander) doesn't mean "this is my experience and it's bad" it means ... "I want to have a fight just to have a fight" ...? If you don't have anything you have an honest desire to interact about, than we don't have anything to talk about. Just like everything else in life between people, unless you like wasting time and flailing. If you have something to discuss, post it ...? If not can we stop it with the catwalk level posing?

Good points. I was being a little hostile in my earlier tones. I want to get at people telling OP he needs to read the bible more to understand or his understanding of it wasn't good. I bring up Numbers 31:18 as a question of how does one judge or not judge a passage. How can OP be "wrong" in his understandings, I am assuming he just re-read the bible.

If I am wrong about God OP, I have wasted my life. If you are wrong about God, then you have wasted your eternity.

Grace works best for the ignorant. I need it.

Sure. I find that discussing with intelligent, open, inquisitive people is itself a godsend, which is why I offered to chat less from a scriptural basis but from a different perspective/more unorthodox one.

He's also had his world knocked for a loop by other events and so it's understandable why he'd question foundational myths and things about honoring thy father and mother. Not to say he should throw the baby out with the bathwater... but I understand, and frankly, most virulent ex-Christians I've talked to came from a "dogma down the throat" rather than a more scholarly open inquiry where questions were welcomed. I guess I got lucky, but there are plenty of brilliant theologians to talk to; however a lot of seminary teaches dogshit marxist universalism. So I like to give people some perspective :)

Because we wish for others to treat us the same way, also because evolution has programed empathy into our genetic code as an instinct, It is essential to the survival of all higher order pack animals. In humans, evil is the lack of empathy.

But why? Wouldn't the ultimate thing being able to overcome your "programs' by genes and make truly free will choices to overcome those instincts? If you're just following instincts you're no better than a dog or ant; whereas if you hate murder and are disgusted by torture, but can make yourself do those things, isn't that truly liberating yourself and using your conscious brain to overcome and become a higher being than a gnat?

And for those who are born without empathy, why should they hold back their hand from atrocities? They don't even have the genes to tell them no, so why in the world should they not figure out how to commit atrocities without being caught? Especially if offered advancement in the world by Epstein like figures? I mean, it's survival of the fittest, and you happen to have a leg up because you're connected to blackmail compromise networks, you're just following the market forces and actually superior to superstitious people with their slavish adherence to outdated genetic code that makes them less fit for the current prevailing market conditions.

The scientific method is an algorithm that performs better than any religious belief system ever has, as it incorporates both formal and informal logic.

People were created with a sense of right and wrong. Adam and Eve went and hid after eating the forbidden fruit when God came down to walk with them. Cain fled when he killed his brother. First murder in history and before the word was coined. How did he know that was wrong?  Anything in our DNA that is moral came straight from the guy who made us. Somebody in 2021 that thinks they just came up with treating people well etc. have it hard wired into them.

Tithing was put in place to help the poor and possibly build meetinghouses. It was never put in place to support a paid ministry. Nowhere in the Bible does it say we need preachers or pastors to start churches and be paid. The Twelve Apostles were called to preach Christ and keep his doctrine pure, because they had the authority to receive revelation. They were not paid. They went around to the various branches and wrote letters to correct incorrect practices and beliefs. No church on earth, especially some podunk corner church, can lay claim to this power or authority, as evidenced by the millions of churches that teach different things. This was not Christ's intention, and it will be corrected when He returns.

24 ¶ No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
30 Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?
31 Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?
32 (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.
33 But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.
34 Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

I am 62 and cathoilc since birth, firm believer in Christ and the Holy Trininity....Try to live my life as Jesus wants me to....

I have a lot of faith and times in the past I have questioned the validity of the church and if a higher entity was up there and then came back....

Lost some of the faith for a period of time last year when our pastor, a man I respected very much, was arrested for molesting a boy some years back and the same day another priest at another church we attened every once in a while was arrested for having sex with some hookers on the church alter....yeah, that kind of crap will test your faith....

Every Monday at 3AM I go to our chapel at church and sit with the exposed Holy Eucharist for an hour and started reading the bible for about the fifth time in my life while I am there for the hour....and I will say, the early readings, the Pentateuch, are crazy with the killings, burnt offerings....so I dont take the readings too seriously, but take my faith very serious....

When I saw the ultasounds of my first grandchild, a boy, due in August, only a higher being can be responsible for that and I thank my Lord Jesus Christ everyday for what he has done for me and my many blessings....

I told myself to never talk religion here and after 8400+ post this is the first time....

Happy Fourth of July and may God Bless Yall

Bronc

I tried to, for my entire life up until 18.  When I never "felt" anything, I started to question all that I was taught.  What I realized is that the Bible is just another book, written by men.  There isn't anything I can put my hands on, 2000 years later, that tells me that Jesus was the son of the creator of the universe, other than a book, written by men.  A book that I was taught is the perfect word of God, but is far from perfect.  

If faith (which I don't have), and a book written by men are the evidence, I'm not buying it.  There are a lot of other people with faith and other books written by men, who believe completely different things.  Their belief systems all suffer from the same logical flaws, simultaneously.

The scientific method merely tests pre-existing hypotheses and is vastly prone to misunderstanding, including the recent idea that peer review is the gold standard rather than a new innovation that has coincided with a massive drop in scientific quality and the reproducibility crisis, the issues with the Sokal Squared scandal among others. The fact is, the scientific method simply fails when faced with malicious and mendacious actors, and in fact requires a generally honest society to continue to work. The fact that the Catholic Church financed and was behind most of the important scientists up through the 1600s, and also inculcated the honesty necessary to deal with it; with a few overblown examples like Copernicus and torture for specifically slandering the church, is part of the much overblown case of scientific atheism.

The fact is the scientific method and most scientific advances coincided with Christianity, and in the absence of Christianity, are remarkably absent. In fact, the Catholic church was the reason that cousin marriage was outlawed through Europe, leading to greater genetic diversity and lowering the inbreeding in Europe, and further is strengthened by the Monk Gregor Mendel who gives us much of the genetic and hereditary basis other scientists built off.

Further, all the scientific method offers is a way to inquire and investigate ideas, rather than how to formulate new ones. It is a form of critique, useful for winnowing down possibilities, but is itself parasitic as it offers no way to build or create new ones. Sorta busy on the 4th, either will write more thoughts on the insuffiency of the scientific method to replace religion or will respond to the replies to get those thoughts in there.