I’ve been observing the activities of religious people and atheists on the internet, and some interesting questions have arisen.
Only a couple of chapters into the FIRST book of the Bible, not long after God creates all the people and animals, he says he’s going to destroy them because he regrets ever making them. So how is a deity who decides to destroy almost everything he created….all-wise? He admits he got almost all of the creation WRONG. He seems to have gotten the sea and the sky right, but as soon as he started out messing with living things, it was like watching my daughter try to make spaghetti sauce. You would think that once his experiments with rats, cockroaches and mosquitos turned out badly, he should have known that creating complicated creatures was just beyond him.
Why did the Christian who said “I love the Lord. His eye is on the sparrow, and he will always protect me!” follow that up with “Oops, gotta go, I’m meeting the State Farm guy to get the home, auto, life and health package!”
If god is omniscient, why did the Jews have to mark their doors during Passover? Didn’t he even know who was obeying his laws and who wasn’t?
Where did Noah live, if every species of animal was right around the corner? What crazy-ass jungle did he live in?
So first Christianity tells us that reason came to us from God, but doubt came from Satan. Aren’t they pretty much part of the same thing?
Jesus erased all the sin of the world, for all generations, for pretending to be dead from Friday night to Sunday morning? Does that really sound like sacrifice, when the rest of us have to stay dead permanently? He dies for 36 hours and we are dead forever? No wonder God ignored him in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Father, please take this cup away from me!”…”Geez, what’s the big deal, you’re dead a day and a half. I’ve had longer hangovers. Stop whining and get ready for Judas to kiss you.”
So…Christians are so persecuted in this country that they…have the freedom to bang on everyone’s doors to convert the heathen, put God on the dollar bill, protest on the streets of our cities, and put Bibles in four million hotel rooms in the country?
You people wave the first amendment in everyone’s faces when you think anyone is persecuting you in religious terms by doing horrible things like saying “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”, but at the same time, you’re constantly trying to take away everyone else’s first-amendment rights by demanding laws that transform your religious beliefs into legislation, on everything from gays and abortion to evolution and stem-cell research. Now you have people in Arizona trying to ban atheists from even attending high school. How long are you going to insist on first-amendment rights for yourselves but not for anyone else, before we have to seriously smack you people around?
Why do anti-abortion zealots insist that life begins at conception, when Genesis says life begins when you take your first breath?
So God kills a million living breathing innocent babies a year, but opposes abortion?
What if we introduced a constitutional amendment that a state can only have as many gun stores as it has abortion clinics?
All you guys who hate abortion – why don’t you get vasectomies, or pledge to give up sex entirely? Or not pressure a woman into sex when neither of you is ready to be a parent? That would absolutely cut down the abortion rate. What if your wives decided that since you’ve banned abortion and contraception, their only alternative is abstinence? Say goodnight, Mister Happy!
Why do so many Christian rednecks have tattoos, which are banned in the same book of the Bible that allegedly bans gays?
When God made millions of gay people and thousands of species with gay behavior – was that a mistake too?
The Bible doesn’t say to stop gays from marrying, it says to kill gays. If you’re not killing gays today, aren’t you disobeying the Bible as much as the gays are?
The anti-gay language in Leviticus says that YOU will not lie with a male as with a woman, which, like the rest of the Torah, assumes that men will be making all the decisions about sex; how long before your wives figure out how abominably women are treated in the Bible?
Gay and lesbian teens are five times as likely to commit suicide, because of persecution and bullying from people from you. Did you realize that your tyrannical effort to “save” the rest of us now has a body count?
So the imaginary gay effort to convert straights to homosexuality is an abomination, but the very real Christian effort to brainwash gays to become straight is critical to saving America?
A religious group which tried to take people’s money for “gay conversion” therapy has now found itself in court, for fraud and abuse. They made unsubstantiated claims about the scientific validity and success rates of their “cures”, claims rejected by the American Psychiatric Association (even other “gay converters” are finally giving up the game and apologizing). They’re now claiming that the people suing them are preventing their clients/victims from seeking their own self-deterrmination – seriously. What if the government decided that America’s churches have abused the first amendment long enough? Go track down all the churches that get involved in politics (i.e. all of them) and veer off into non-religious fields like science and medicine, and revoke their tax exemptions? File charges of anti-trust violations for trying to stop other faiths, and atheists, from doing business? Charges of civil rights violations for trying to deprive women of their rights to abortion and contraception? RICO charges, for running a criminal enterprise, which would be a very easy case to make against the Catholic church for running a global pedophilia ring for centuries? Fraud charges across the board for taking people’s money and promising heaven in return?
The goofy “gay conversion” efforts in America are even less amusing when transplanted overseas. In South Africa, white supremacists, as a sideline, have built “gay conversion” camps, where children have died. “Conversion” by means of burns, beatings, starvation, dehydration, chaining children to their beds, forcing children to eat feces and cleansing powder, torturing children who beg to leave. Is this what you hope to impose in America? Huckabee already said he wants to put HIV patients in concentration camps – do you want that for all gays??
Oh, and for extra credit:
Can you prove to me there are no mermaids or centaurs?
Prove to me there are no dragons or unicorns?
Prove to me there is no Santa or Easter Bunny?
Prove to me there is no Voldemort or Darth Vader?
Oh, you can’t? Then STFU about demanding that I prove there’s no God.
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Those are the reasons why I'm no longer a Christian and I believe that most biblical stories are just tales and legends that came from humans' imagination. I used to hold the bible very dearly believing that it was from god until I realized that I was a fool to believe that way.
It's that crucial point when you realize how foolish it is, that your cynical side starts to rise up and must be quelled. I just sat through a baptism tonight and it was hard to listen to most of what was being said as it doesn't make any more sense now than it did when I first began to dis-believe.
I'm not a Jesus person, but I am a person who likes questions :) So, here's what I've got -
According to core samples, this earth has gone through at least 6 totally normal, predictable ice ages. In most (possibly all?) of these ice ages, the entire Earth does not freeze and there is a small strip of land around the (new) equator that remains liveable. I'm sure you can imagine if such a freeze happened right now, the tropics would be jam packed! There'd be a lot of every animal... or at least every animal that was left. And it's not like it only stays that way for 20 years or something. We're talking several centuries at least, which leaves plenty of time for that mishmoshed ecosystem to sort itself out
Given the timeline of the old testament, if we assume that Adam and Eve began procreating under the observation of a behavioral analyst called God shortly after the stabilization of an ice age (don't assume it was the last one), then by lineage (forgiving their epic lifespans, which would be reasonable if measured in moons and not suns) Noah would be living at the tail end of such a time, which would also explain the great flood.
I'm not going to get too into Satan here, but God and Satan sound remarkably similar. I don't believe in either of them, but if I did I'd probably believe they were the same person, or at least neither one sounds like a better man than the other. Satan thought humans were a horrible idea the whole time! Who was right?
Not a biblical thing, but the Catholic church calls to annul a marriage that can't produce children. So, no vasectomies or tubal ligation. Why they feel that that must apply to temporary birth control is beyond me, but so is Catholicism in general. They're not even supposed to read their own bible, just follow what the pope says. So their interpretation of biblical "proof" is bound to be a bit more intuitive than factual...
Leviticus and gay people... it's wonderful that God had the respect for men to actually tell them what *they* should do or not do. You should read what it says about two women who lie together... geez.
And if you're going to get into gay conversion, what happens in the US is ignorant and shameful, but not nearly so much so as the violent reform camps that have been found in Central and South America :(
Yet again you have taught me something! I didn't realize that there were reform camps in Central and South America for gay people nor did I know that Satan thought humans were a bad idea. Definitely food for thought!
Not to get to much into the Satan thing in accordance with your wishes Sammy, but has anybody on here read the Devil and Billy Markham?
I haven't, but I have read the Devil and Daniel Webster several times... is there a "The Devil and..." series or something?
I'll have to look it up :)
Satan have to exist because of the biblical god. There should always be opposites just like the north-south poles, black-white, god-evil etc. If god is the creator of everything, it means that if Satan is real, he also created Satan. There's a story that Satan was once an angel, rebelled and became Satan. It's so mythical.
Lucifer, now Satan, was the highest of the angels and the leader of his army (why God needs an army when there was supposedly no one to fight against... well, you Christians will have to come up with your own answer). That name was also used by pre-Christian religions as the name of the Morning Star, who was the God of new knowledge and discovery.
I can easily see why such a figure would be demonized by the ideology of the bible, since believers are not supposed to seek out their own knowledge, which Lucifer always encouraged.
Definitely no one can answer all such questions as well as it is hard to convince someone to believe on something he/she already stop believing for too long. :P
I personally do not take the bible words by word, it could be symbolic and some might been edited or mis translated. :P
It's the symbolism and figurative wording of the bible and other holy books that make people fall away from their particular religions. You can't keep changing up the rules and still expect everybody to play along.
Excellently stated :)
The first thing I noticed is all of your questions pertain to a 4,000 year old book.
Secondly, I an prove that there are no dragons, fairies, leprechauns, or anything of the such. There exists no evidence within the fossil record of such beings existing. We have observed no fossils or remains from said species or their habitats. Thus, they must not exist.
I can prove Santa Claus doesn't exist as we have been to the North Pole and have seen no sign of human life anywhere; and certainly not of an overweight toy-maker and his elves.
I can prove the Greek Gods don't exist because we have been to the summit of Mt. Olympus, the said residing place of the Greek Gods, yet have not seen any sign of divine beings.
There exists evidence for the Christian god within science and history, that is why he still stands firm as a belief today.
Sorry to go off on a tangent but what is this evidence you keep mentioning?
Words right out of my mouth, Zaphod.