I didn’t say it was god. These are alleged historical events. You don’t get to just say it didn’t happen.
Slavery was real, and the Old Testament has explicit rules about it. And Jesus never had a single thing to say about it (besides the thing about fulfilling the old law. Which, again, explicitly includes slavery).
This has NOTHING to do with fundamentalism. You don’t get to hand wave this shit away, it’s at the very core of the religion you claim to believe.
You can’t change the subject of the discussion on a whim. The original argument was that Christians worshiped a God that condone slavery and child murder. I showed that, for most Christians, it isn’t the case.
(And by the way, these events did not happen. The Exodus is a myth according to the historians, so yes, I’m allowed to say so)
How much of the Bible is false? How much of it could be false for you to not worship the god described in it?
To most christians, the whole point of the Old Testament is to point to, and explain the New Testament, right? When the OT says stuff happened, it doesn’t really matter that it didn’t actually happen. It matters that people believed it happened.
After all, if you don’t believe in the fall of man, or that god picked a chosen people and gave them the first covenant, you can hardly believe the second one, can you?
If you don’t believe god came and spoke through the prophets and promised the messiah, you can hardly believe Jesus is that promised Messiah.
And to be clear the only historical record we have of Jesus is in the Christian Bible. And that Christian Bible says Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law of Moses, and that it is in force until the Earth passes away.
It doesn’t matter if the exodus happened or not, the Torah does in fact exist. (And the Torah is the law he’s talking about.) and so, with Jesus explicitly saying that, he’s also tacitly condoning slavery and all the other awful shit in the Torah.
If you are a Christian, then you worship a monster.
The Christian god is incompatible with a god of the gaps. Afterall, a god of the gaps is not involved in human affairs where the Christian god most certainly is.
When the Bible says “Jesus said…” is it reasonably accurate?
Cuz, let’s be honest here. You have nothing else that comes close to a record of what Jesus actually taught, so if you throw the bible out, you’re throwing out baby Jesus with it.
(We don’t even have any record of his mere existence outside the Bible, not that we’d expect to.)
Or do you expect us to believe you’re more reliable than Muhhamed, or Joseph Smith or any of the billions of people who believe in something else entirely?
By the way, you know Jesus was one of those Fundies, right?
I do have to question the core concept though, consider this just me trying to make sense of the logic. I’ll admit I’ve only understood the 2 ends of the camp, I was raised a fundamentalist, and really didn’t have much of a mid point from that to atheism.
To me the idea there is like saying “I’m a big fan of Darth Vader”, but I’m not a fundamentalist, I know star wars isn’t literally true, I don’t consider him to have blown up planets or built death stars.
IE then comes the question. There’s only star wars materials to even imply a vader ever existed, and if you don’t believe in that… in what meaningful way does vader exist? Or more importantly how do you know ANYTHING about him. IE what does it mean to “believe in darth vader”, but I don’t think he did most if any of the things in star wars.
I could see “I believe in a god, but don’t think there is any way to know anything about him, I just feel like the world was made”, that I can understand. But the second you slap the label of an existing religion, how do you not inherit the baggage as well. Because well what else is there, why would I assume the bible has more godly information than the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. If I’m not ascribing something in it to be believed to be true. Whether you go with the moral parable or literal truth, say a story where god tells his people to go into a city and kill all the men women and children, and they refuse and god punishes them until they do… whether it’s true or not, the moral of that story is “do what god says, even if your personal morals tell you it’s horrible”. The message is what’s awful today.
I’ll use an actual biblical example. Moses didn’t exist, and the Exodus was not a historical event. I think the people who wrote these texts knew that to some extent. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many inconsistencies. They weren’t stupid; they knew what a contradiction was.
But I don’t care. How would the fate of a people 3000 years ago change my life today? It wouldn’t. But the story is a lesson, a lesson that can change my life today. I believe that people were inspired by God to convey a message. They did so in their own language and cultural framework, using the rhetorical tools available to them: myth. That message can be summed up in a few words: God wants God’s people to be free, and God walks with us when we try to free ourselves. I’m not a slave in Egypt, but I’m not always free. I can be a slave to my anger, my passions, or a habit, and God helps me in my struggle for freedom. When I read the story of the Exodus, I look for what it can teach me about freedom today.
How do I know the Bible is truer than, say, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the IKEA catalogue? The truth is, I don’t. I do think, not just believe, but philosophically think that something beyond the world, which we might call “God” as an approximation, exists. Or, to be more precise, I think its existence is more probable than its nonexistence. I don’t know that it exists; it just makes more sense to me.
As for the rest, yes, those are beliefs, not certainties. I can live with that. Uncertainty is part of life! If we acted only when we knew something for sure, we’d do nothing. A lot of people like to lie to themselves, pretending that we can know whether God exists, that our political ideology is the best one, or what is right and wrong. Sometimes we can know these things. For example, I know that my political ideology is better than fascism; I have no uncertainty about that. But in most cases, we can’t be certain. I could stop at “a God probably exists” while continuing my life as if not, but I choose to thrive in uncertainty rather than fight it, and that leaves me freer to explore and open myself to other traditions and schools of thought.
I said that most Christians (by far) believe people can be saved without believing, while a minority believe that salvation is impossible without the correct belief. I believe something else. I belong to another minority, probably the smallest one: I believe there is more than one legitimate spiritual path. The Catholic Church still teaches that there is no salvation outside the Church; it’s just that some people are members of the Church without knowing it. I believe the Church is one path among others, and simply the one that fits me today. The Bible helps me, the liberal Christian tradition nourishes me, and the community shelters me.
God is unknowable by definition. We’re talking about a being that exists outside time and space, so our words can’t legitimately claim to describe it. When we describe things, words that seem to contradict one another may both be true. It’s like two people describing the same mountain: someone on its northern face might describe it as a different mountain from the one described by someone on its southern face, even though they’re both describing the same mountain.
If I’m wrong, if there is no God, or if I’m irredeemably ignorant of the One True Religion™, it’s not a big deal. My faith has helped me live a better, fuller, and freer life. Who cares if an effective medicine turns out to be a placebo? And if I’m wrong and only people who believe a precise set of doctrines are saved, then I don’t want to be saved by such an assholish God. So everything works out for the best. (Though that idea makes no sense to me.)
No, they were just describing events from the Old Testament.
Again, the Bible ≠ God, except for fundamentalists.
I didn’t say it was god. These are alleged historical events. You don’t get to just say it didn’t happen.
Slavery was real, and the Old Testament has explicit rules about it. And Jesus never had a single thing to say about it (besides the thing about fulfilling the old law. Which, again, explicitly includes slavery).
This has NOTHING to do with fundamentalism. You don’t get to hand wave this shit away, it’s at the very core of the religion you claim to believe.
You can’t change the subject of the discussion on a whim. The original argument was that Christians worshiped a God that condone slavery and child murder. I showed that, for most Christians, it isn’t the case.
(And by the way, these events did not happen. The Exodus is a myth according to the historians, so yes, I’m allowed to say so)
And now let me ask you this…
How much of the Bible is false? How much of it could be false for you to not worship the god described in it?
To most christians, the whole point of the Old Testament is to point to, and explain the New Testament, right? When the OT says stuff happened, it doesn’t really matter that it didn’t actually happen. It matters that people believed it happened.
After all, if you don’t believe in the fall of man, or that god picked a chosen people and gave them the first covenant, you can hardly believe the second one, can you?
If you don’t believe god came and spoke through the prophets and promised the messiah, you can hardly believe Jesus is that promised Messiah.
And to be clear the only historical record we have of Jesus is in the Christian Bible. And that Christian Bible says Jesus said he did not come to abolish the law of Moses, and that it is in force until the Earth passes away.
It doesn’t matter if the exodus happened or not, the Torah does in fact exist. (And the Torah is the law he’s talking about.) and so, with Jesus explicitly saying that, he’s also tacitly condoning slavery and all the other awful shit in the Torah.
If you are a Christian, then you worship a monster.
The Christian god is incompatible with a god of the gaps. Afterall, a god of the gaps is not involved in human affairs where the Christian god most certainly is.
Join us in the real world, unfettered by impossible to prove, supernatural hierarchies.
It’s quite a weight off the shoulders.
So, lemme ask you this.
When the Bible says “Jesus said…” is it reasonably accurate?
Cuz, let’s be honest here. You have nothing else that comes close to a record of what Jesus actually taught, so if you throw the bible out, you’re throwing out baby Jesus with it.
(We don’t even have any record of his mere existence outside the Bible, not that we’d expect to.)
Or do you expect us to believe you’re more reliable than Muhhamed, or Joseph Smith or any of the billions of people who believe in something else entirely?
By the way, you know Jesus was one of those Fundies, right?
I do have to question the core concept though, consider this just me trying to make sense of the logic. I’ll admit I’ve only understood the 2 ends of the camp, I was raised a fundamentalist, and really didn’t have much of a mid point from that to atheism.
To me the idea there is like saying “I’m a big fan of Darth Vader”, but I’m not a fundamentalist, I know star wars isn’t literally true, I don’t consider him to have blown up planets or built death stars.
IE then comes the question. There’s only star wars materials to even imply a vader ever existed, and if you don’t believe in that… in what meaningful way does vader exist? Or more importantly how do you know ANYTHING about him. IE what does it mean to “believe in darth vader”, but I don’t think he did most if any of the things in star wars.
I could see “I believe in a god, but don’t think there is any way to know anything about him, I just feel like the world was made”, that I can understand. But the second you slap the label of an existing religion, how do you not inherit the baggage as well. Because well what else is there, why would I assume the bible has more godly information than the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. If I’m not ascribing something in it to be believed to be true. Whether you go with the moral parable or literal truth, say a story where god tells his people to go into a city and kill all the men women and children, and they refuse and god punishes them until they do… whether it’s true or not, the moral of that story is “do what god says, even if your personal morals tell you it’s horrible”. The message is what’s awful today.
I’ll use an actual biblical example. Moses didn’t exist, and the Exodus was not a historical event. I think the people who wrote these texts knew that to some extent. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so many inconsistencies. They weren’t stupid; they knew what a contradiction was.
But I don’t care. How would the fate of a people 3000 years ago change my life today? It wouldn’t. But the story is a lesson, a lesson that can change my life today. I believe that people were inspired by God to convey a message. They did so in their own language and cultural framework, using the rhetorical tools available to them: myth. That message can be summed up in a few words: God wants God’s people to be free, and God walks with us when we try to free ourselves. I’m not a slave in Egypt, but I’m not always free. I can be a slave to my anger, my passions, or a habit, and God helps me in my struggle for freedom. When I read the story of the Exodus, I look for what it can teach me about freedom today.
How do I know the Bible is truer than, say, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the IKEA catalogue? The truth is, I don’t. I do think, not just believe, but philosophically think that something beyond the world, which we might call “God” as an approximation, exists. Or, to be more precise, I think its existence is more probable than its nonexistence. I don’t know that it exists; it just makes more sense to me.
As for the rest, yes, those are beliefs, not certainties. I can live with that. Uncertainty is part of life! If we acted only when we knew something for sure, we’d do nothing. A lot of people like to lie to themselves, pretending that we can know whether God exists, that our political ideology is the best one, or what is right and wrong. Sometimes we can know these things. For example, I know that my political ideology is better than fascism; I have no uncertainty about that. But in most cases, we can’t be certain. I could stop at “a God probably exists” while continuing my life as if not, but I choose to thrive in uncertainty rather than fight it, and that leaves me freer to explore and open myself to other traditions and schools of thought.
I said that most Christians (by far) believe people can be saved without believing, while a minority believe that salvation is impossible without the correct belief. I believe something else. I belong to another minority, probably the smallest one: I believe there is more than one legitimate spiritual path. The Catholic Church still teaches that there is no salvation outside the Church; it’s just that some people are members of the Church without knowing it. I believe the Church is one path among others, and simply the one that fits me today. The Bible helps me, the liberal Christian tradition nourishes me, and the community shelters me.
God is unknowable by definition. We’re talking about a being that exists outside time and space, so our words can’t legitimately claim to describe it. When we describe things, words that seem to contradict one another may both be true. It’s like two people describing the same mountain: someone on its northern face might describe it as a different mountain from the one described by someone on its southern face, even though they’re both describing the same mountain.
If I’m wrong, if there is no God, or if I’m irredeemably ignorant of the One True Religion™, it’s not a big deal. My faith has helped me live a better, fuller, and freer life. Who cares if an effective medicine turns out to be a placebo? And if I’m wrong and only people who believe a precise set of doctrines are saved, then I don’t want to be saved by such an assholish God. So everything works out for the best. (Though that idea makes no sense to me.)