Theologue, could you give a fuller explanation of your view (and perhaps a summary on other conservative/evangelical/fundamentalist views) of scripture? Is it* inerrant*, do you read it literally, and what exactly do those terms mean?
This has already been shown to be nonsense: You are assuming the conclusion. Yes, I agree that if there was a man performing undisputed miracles, that would be a different story. But the fact is there is no such person.
No; as I said, you don’t agree. That’s fine; I was just trying to give you the traditional Christian answer.
[QUOTE=FriarTed]
Unless in the Judgement process, you were shown every moment you could have chosen to trust God/Jesus & instead rejected Them (unless there were no such moments).[.quote]
I’ve never had such a moment. Such a moment for me requires absolute proof of God’s existence. I’ve never seen anything close.
But I know for a fact that they don’t. I’m not guessing. I can PROVE that they don’t. Where does that leave me?
You have several mutually contradictory stories, all of which contain factual and historical inaccuracies, none of them from eyewitnesses and all of them alleging things which are physically impossible. A story in a book is not evidence. If Jesus wants to come down now and do miracles right in front of me then I might consider that to be evidence (after I get my CT scan). But I’m not taking anybody’s word for anything and I’ve never been shown a reason why I should take the gospels any more seriously as history than myths about Buddha or Krishna (both of whom are alleged by their adherents to have been real historical figures who did miracles).
Might does not make right. If the God who ordered the Israelites to slaughter Amalikite babies is real then he is evil. Being powerful would not make him any less evil or worthy of worship. I refuse to worship a God who is not good and I can not be cowed into it by threats of divine wrath.
In the course of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth [Matthew 6] taught folks how to pray: “After this manner therefore pray ye: our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…” (etc).
a) What’s your interp of “after this manner”? Do you consider it significantly important, or merely tradition, to repeat what he said verbatim (well, verbatim translated into English or Latin at any rate)? If not “say this”, was he indicating that this is the form that prayer should take, or was he focusing attention on the content that prayer should have, or something else?
b) Insofar as I’m male and Jesus of Nazareth indicated here and in various other places that I should conceptualize God as my father, do you have any theological objections to my referring to myself as son of God?
c) If one person goes forth and teaches the lessons taught in the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain, mentioning only that these things were taught by Jesus of Nazareth a couple millennia ago, and teaches nothing else about Jesus; and a second person goes forth and teaches that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God, the Messiah, died for our sins on the cross and rose from the dead, and if you accept him into your heart as your Lord and Savior, but does not recap any of the lessons taught in the Sermon on the Mount or the Sermon on the Plains or the various other instructions in living and parables, etc., taught by Jesus of Nazareth during his lifetime, is one of these people doing the proper work of God, or both of them equally, or neither of them? Is the content that they teach of equal importance, or does one bear the more important and central message, and if so could you elaborate and say why do you think so?
Hi, Theologue .
During my early years as a Christian, I had several questions that have never really been answered.
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Where did Cain’s wife come from? I’ve heard everything from “she’s just a character in an parable” to the theory that she was one of his sisters born after the banishment and the bible isn’t all that hot on the time line involved. I gotta admit, when you read Gen. 4:16-18, it sure sounds like Cain was married by the time he arrived in Nod. And if she is just a character in a parable, why was the parable presented as fact and not as a parable?
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Did Jesus really exist as the bible describes him? At the core of every myth, there is usually a grain of truth. There probably was a live human being back then that we know as Jesus, but was he really a demigod? One of the better theories that I’ve read on this is that he actually existed and actually was the king of the Jews. As such, he was a pain in the Roman ass. They caught him and executed him, but his followers faked his death by drugging him. He lived until the siege of Masada where he committed suicide.
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Was he crucified or hung? Is the crucifixtion story the result of a mistranslation? In Deut. 21 is the passage about how someone who hangs from a tree overnight is cursed by God, which would indicate why it was so important to get his body down before sunset. Paul, writing in the Greek, uses a word that basically means to hang and was used to refer to hanging someone from a tree; there’s another word that is used in the Septaguint that indicates hanging as in having built gallows. The indications from the language are that he was hung from a tree, not crucified.
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Why are there no contemporary records of his life? There is nothing written about him during the time he was supposed to be alive; nothing shows up until mark, 40-some odd years after his indicated death. The Romans were anal about recordkeeping; if the trial story is true, there would have been some mention of it somewhere. If we can find lists of the names of men killed in the arena, why can’t we find a single thing written during his lifetime? For someone that was so famous, with multitudes of followers far and wide, it seems strange that no one bothered to write anything about him.
These questions (and many others) lead me to ask this question:
- Given that there has been more research done on Christianity than any other religion ever and that no one has been able to prove that the bible story is true and factual, how does one then avoid the conclusion that Christianity is just another in a long line of con games known as religions?
Are we actually supposed to accept this as the product of a thought process, or should we just assume it to be the total cop-out that it appears to be?
“Oh, you disagree with me? Well, instead of trying to offer an intelligible argument, let’s just wait and see what happens after you’re dead.”
If Theologue gets to half of these questions in a month, I will be most impressed!
My questions re: prosletyzing can wait–and they aren’t really theological–more practices and customs.
Is it true that Jesus never claimed to be Divine? That that came from Paul et al later?
As I move thru my life, I can see Jesus more and more as a prophet, but not as a god.
A religion that ignores half the worldI(women) is a bit too much for me to support.
Can you address the misogyny of Christianity?
, Diogenes, don’t disappoint Friar Ted! Let’s hear a good obscene joke about Jesus!
Well, I won’t speak for the OP; but I think he’s already said that while he’s happy to explain his beliefs, to any who are curious, he’s not really interested in defending them here. That question is a whole thread unto itself.
I’ve got nothing against Jesus.
From Kalomiros’s The River of Fire:
That was a parable, a made up story.
Indeed it was; that does not mean that it cannot be used for explanatory purposes.
The prodigal son knew his father existed. The analogy doesn’t work for me.
I expect to spend many mutually profitable hours arguing points of moral theology with you, down the road a piece. But let me say that that is probably one of the best descriptions of entering into grace I have ever read, and one in which I find nothing to quarrel with, and would gladly endorse as my own, ceteris paribus.
I’ve suspected for some time that the sort of experience you describe is no more “real” than the sort one might have taking a psychoactive drug, though in your case endogenous processes and substances may be responsible. By this I mean, it’s quite possibly a spontaneous product of your mind, and no other; and to assume another mind is responsible is a logical extravagance, at best. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you are insane, but your experience could still be of a hallucinatory nature, and hence your beliefs delusory at their foundation.
What, if any, is the theological means of weighing the significance of either possibility, and what is it that makes the spiritual explanation necessarily more compelling than more prosaic hypotheses, which, I might add, empirical evidence already exists to support?
Presumably you will know God exists after you die and He makes His presence clear to you.
Mohammed had an encounter with divine and was told directly by an angel of God that Christianity was a false religion. What makes your experience more credible than Mohammed’s? What do you say to those who have had equally convincing experiences with Vishnu or Isis or Kokopeli? Is your experience more valid than theirs? How do you know?
After I die, it’s irrelevant. I still would have committed no crime in not believing while I was alive and won’t feel the slightest bit of guilt or chagrin. There can be no sin in unbelief without proof.