I wouldn’t consider that a particularly fair summation of the ten commandments. None of the commandments mention love, and at no point does the omniscient creator of the universe even so much as hint that adherence to these commandments should be motivated by anything other than fear of death. A far more accurate summation of the commandments would be “Fear and worship Yahweh and only Yahweh or else” and “Do not screw over your fellow worshippers, or else”. Let’s take the first commandment “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other Gods before me”. A quick scan of Deuteronomy reveals that God has something quite specific in mind should your son or daughter return home from a Yoga class advocating the worship of Krishna:
I have two problems with the superficial abridgement of the ten commandments popular among your friends. The first is that it misrepresents God’s incentives for following the ten commandments as love rather than fear and awe. The second is that it does not make at all clear just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged. I would say that any of your Christian friends who believe that the summation you quoted encapsulates both the letter and the spirit of the ten commandments are scripturally ignorant.
I have used the words ‘most important’ only once in this thread. That was when I said “But the irony is that the majority of Christian believers are ignorant of precisely the thing which should be most important to them.” When I said that, I was referring to Christianity in general, and not just the ten commandments. The Decalogue is just one of many things that most Christians don’t know very much about. Apologies for not making this more clear.
As Jesus came after the 10 Commandments I believe what he said as a summation of it as valid.
Without a doubt most people would say that God would not be correcting himself. This however is simply not the case. As was given to us, free will allows us to interpret/follow the Commandments as we see fit as with that being said, is it not possible for God to have seen the acts that were comitted and realize we needed further instruction.
The problem with non-believers trying to disect <insert religions text> is that they do not see it for what we believe it is. Jesus brought love and a message of peace. This is seem many times in the New Testament.
Science has massive amounts of evidence on its side, and religion has…blind faith and passed on superstition, right? You can’t be serious in trying to equate the two sides, because to be equal you’d have to say, “We can’t prove God exists, and we can’t prove science exists” or “We can’t prove science is definite, and we can’t prove God is definite.” Skip trying to “prove” that God exists. Can you at least show verifiable evidence of his existence? This would not give religion equal footing with science, but it would be a step up from what we have now.
It doesn’t much matter whether you consider it a fair summary or not. Jesus is quoted as summing it up that way and I think most Christians tend to accept that. Since Jesus is the founder of Christianity, I don’t think it can really be argued that he was misrepresenting what is important in that faith.
See above; your beef is not with Christians superficially abridging the commandments, it’s that Christianity does so, from the very start.
I’d take issue with the question of whether it really is a superficial abridgement too, but perhaps that’s a topic for another thread.
God dictated things personally throughout the Bible. Between Sinai and the New Testament, He only spoke to individual prophets who then passed the message along, but that’s not because what He said was unimportant; it’s because the one time He did speak directly to a mob, the Children of Israel said, “Tell God not to talk directly to us again; He’s too scary.” And seeing how Christians think nothing of working on the weekend and putting icons in their churches, I’d say the ten commandments aren’t too important compared to the words of Jesus.
I don’t agree. You claimed more of less that a fair knowledge of the Ten Commandments can properly be assigned to those who only can say “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and “Love your neighbour as yourself”.
At least that’s what I understand the current discussion to concern.
The problem with believers is that somehow you can’t believe in a message of love and peace without also believing that nonbelievers will be punished in hell and the world is only 6,000 years old.
No, I claimed that Christians understand the law to have been summed up in those two instructions, and that the summary features more prominently in the understanding of most Christians than the detail.
Of course it is exceedingly difficult to offer satisfactory generalities across large populations of people. And of course, in the context of religious beliefs, describing either believers or non-believers as ignorant is best limited to matters related to that belief or non-belief - rather than the individual’s entire intellect/fund of knowledge.
I have - at times - questioned whether ignorance was a factor contributing to theistic belief. As a non-believer I find such belief so irrational and undesirable that I have difficulty figuring out why a rational being would believe. And among some believers, I do perceive what I consider a willfull ignorance of relevant matters. For example, many creationists appear steadfast in misrepresenting evolutionary theory. It seems to me that if one were anywhere near fair in their assessment of readily available, observable, and verifiable information and phenomena, at best they might believe in a “God of the gaps.” It seems to me that to maintain a fundamental theism, one must aggressively reject a considerable amount of information that simply ought not to be debatable by any sentient being. If there is a better term than ignorance to describe that behavior, then I’d be glad to hear it.
I have also repeatedly been surprised when an ostensibly intelligent, well-read, and educated believer tosses out some idea such as irreducible complexity as some impressive new idea that “proves” their belief. It really isn’t that hard to identify the major arguments for and against belief - they really haven’t changed all that much over the past millenia or so. I was able to understand and make up my mind concerning them some while back when arriving at my position of non-belief. It strikes me as a form of ignorance if someone proclaims to believe in something so important and with such tremendous implications, but not to have done what I would consider a minimal level of investigation into their chosen beliefs. Many folks will put more thought and effort into choosing a new dishwasher, than in deciding what is the right path to eternal salvation.
I’ve almost definitely called theists ignorant, but it’s always been in a specific context.
Generally, it’s when I hear arguments from theists who are talking about things they clearly don’t understand. Things like ‘evolution says we evolved from monkeys’ or ‘god has to exist, theres no other explanation for X’. I would call anyone who argued about something they had no knowledge of ignorant, but I tend to hear stuff like this from the religious a lot.
A lot of times they don’t even want hear an explanation. I spent an hour trying to convince someone that evolution does not state that humans evolved from monkeys, but he kept insisting that ‘thats what I heard, I know its true’. I got into an argument with a Muslim who stated that all iron came from space. When I brought up things like iron ore deposits and the earth’s iron core, he told me I was wrong, that I had to be, because the Koran said differently.
I would be hesitant to say ‘All religious people are ignorant’, but I kinda think that if people learned more about their religion, other religions, and science in general, there would probably be less religious people.
I don’t accept your absurd argument for a second. I have just asked three devout Christians to “sum up the Law or the Ten Commandments”, and none of them came anywhere near what you so ridiculously asserted they would know.
They are most clearly ignorant of the Ten Commandments AND your ostensibly well-known summary.
If nothing can come into existence from nothing, then God cannot come into existence from nothing.
Theologians thousands of times seemingly less ignorant than you may be have asked: “Why does anything exist? Why not nothing?”
We atheists have at least two replies: (1) If “nothing” is the default, then whence God? Why God instead of nothing?" and (2) “Nothing” is physically unstable.
Does anyone else here get irritated by the ceaseless anthropomorphism of the word ‘science’ by theists? Science is not an edifice or a belief system, it is simply the name given the process of observation, hypothesising, testing, and induction by which we explore our surroundings. The words “we can’t prove Science as definite” is quite literally meaningless. It is as meaningless as saying “we can’t prove purple monkey dishwasher is not haemoglobulous”. The words you used when arranged that order simply do not mean anything. The capitalisation of the word ‘science’ is not necessary either.
Now, you are correct that scientists do not know how the universe came to be. Consequently, scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. The religious generally do not extend everybody else the same courtesy, however. The faithful have a far clearer idea of where the world came from. Empirical observations be damned, they have the edited, redacted, translated, retranslated, mistranslated, and remistranslated word of a bunch of agrarian, sandstrewn, goatherding primitives to go on! So beyond reproach is this evidence that it is considered the height of impolitic to suggest that religious certainties are somewhat misplaced.
And so laughable false equivalencies are drawn between those who acknowledge the lack of empirical data informing questions concerning the origins of the universe and refuse to draw any firm conclusions, and those who are also aware of the paucity of evidence and attempt to fill the gap with God based on the lunatic rantings of bloodthirsty messianic fanatics so primitive that the wheelbarrow would have represented an exemplar of technological innovation.
We can’t prove God doesn’t exist. We also can’t prove “Science as definite” (whatever that means), but the idea that, consequently, people are justified in taking faith as a fallback position on questions of our origins is entirely specious.
Religion also has libraries full of erudite analysis of its “superstitions,” and people who’ve had perceptions of God which, although not reproducible at will (unless maybe you’re a Buddhist ), are none the less convincing to them. Neither of these are scientific evidence, but I defy anyone to prove scientifically that it’s wrong to murder or that Shakespeare was a good writer, either. Truth is not the same thing as fact, and people who occupy themselves with non-scientific things are not necessarily toothless men named Cletus waiting to dance on the altar with a rattlesnake.
Firstly, Is there any particular reason to frame your responses in such hostile terms?
But OK, you’ve surveyed a sample consisting of three individuals. Surely you’re aware of the dangers of generalising from such a small set of data.
And finally - maybe you’re even right - all I can say is that most, if not all, of the Christians I know would answer by quoting or paraphrasing that passage in Mark 12, if asked to sum up the commandments. <shrug>
), are none the less convincing to them. Neither of these are scientific evidence, but I defy anyone to prove scientifically that it’s wrong to murder or that Shakespeare was a good writer, either. Truth is not the same thing as fact, and people who occupy themselves with non-scientific things are not necessarily toothless men named Cletus waiting to dance on the altar with a rattlesnake.