I’m chicken shit. I’d do my best to try to pretend, but I’d have a hard time actually respecting the God of the Judea-Christian Bible. The best I could do is admit my own limitations and assume that somehow God must know better. But man, would I be perplexed.
And after dying, I’d be a bit like Ricki Ricardo: “You got some ‘splainin’ to do!”
Yeah-eventually no one will be worthy of his Heaven…but that’s o.k. because he can always start all over again.
If the Christian fundamentalists are right about God, He is love, correct? I mean, that is what they teach about Him, isn’t it? Is love tyrannical to you, or do you just ignore/reject what they teach about God because you have a personal dislike of Christian fundamentalists?
That is one thing said about him in the Bible…but not the only thing.
They also teach that he frequently engages in genocide, not to mention endorses slavery, personally destroys entire cities, incites his followers to kill other tribes of humanity, demanded sacrifices, and unleashed a Devil to terrorize mankind and tempt them into evil, and created a nice everlasting lake of fire to drown us all in if we don’t accept the “love” that obviously goes into crucifying your own son. He endorses killing your own children if they disrespect you. They teach that he created us and also blames us for his design errors, and punishes us for the mere fact that we were born, due to a ridiculous story wherein people who didn’t understand the difference between right and wrong committed the terrible crime of eating fruit.
That character is a cold-blooded monster. There’s no love there whatsoever.
Cite: http://www.evilbible.com/Murder.htm
Their cite being the Bible, of course.
Did I mention he’s pro-rape?
Gosh, that one should have been up there with mass murder and slavery. But there’s just, so many atrocities that he’s committed or endorses, I can barely remember them all.
They have a very, very twisted definition of love. The “love” of the Inquisitor who tortures you to death while earnestly telling you that it’s for your own good. The “love” of the parent who tries to beat the gay out of his child, or tells his child he’d prefer them to be dead rather than not believe in God, or lets their child die in agony while praying over them rather than letting a doctor help. Their version of “love” is just a pretty word for a particularly self righteous form of evil.
And let’s be clear here, that’s what the OP is really asking. What do you do if the universe is ruled by an all seeing, all powerful being of pure evil? An insanely self-righteous, rabidly bigoted, sadistic megalomaniac without a single redeeming quality. Because that’s the god of the fundamentalists.
Of course we’re just Godless atheists spreading blasphemy. We’ll burn in the pit of hell for saying these things.
Reading and quoting directly from the Bible, the word of God himself. Satan’s trickery, that’s what it is. Blasphemy! The word of God is blasphemy!
Wait a minute…
What you said doesn’t directly address what I asked, does it?
Going with the proposed hypothetical that Christian fundamentalists are correct that Jesus is God, and considering His teachings that we should love our neighbors as ourselves, that we should respect others the way we wish others to respect us, that we should have a forgiving attitude, and that individuals should police their own hypocrisy first before they start concerning themselves with others’ errors, why exactly do you infer that the Christian God is a tyrant who expects to be worshipped like He thinks He’s Kim Il Sung? Do you believe this God would force people into Heaven, or Hell, against their wills?
Again, going with the proposed hypothetical that Christian fundamentalists are correct about Jesus’ nature, I ask you, do you believe He deserved to be executed by the Romans? If so, why?
Did Jesus advocate for the stoning of the woman caught in adultery? No?
Where exactly in the NT do you get the idea that Jesus believed in ‘beating’ the gay out of anyone?
To get back on topic, considering the whole of fundamentalist teaching about God in both the Old and New Testament, and not just the one lesson you wish us to concentrate on to the exclusion of all others contained within those two books, why do you think his response is incorrect?
Jesus claimed his father was the same God as the God of Abraham, Moses, Israel. Jesus was claiming to be the Jewish Messiah.
So he’s either a liar, or his father is the same supremely evil dictator I just described.
I don’t think you can use cognitive dissonance to just avoid the blood stains (imaginary though they are) all over the Christian God’s history.
Some random guy in Judea gets executed as a criminal when his only crime is being a false prophet. No, I don’t endorse crucifixion of false prophets.
But neither does it mean his stories were true, or that his supposed God was in any way good.
Tell me, do you believe Christians are taught by Jesus to stone gays, and women caught in adultery? If not, why not?
Ever read the Old Testament? That’s part of the Bible, too.
You can pretend all you want that fundamentalist churches are exclusively all about vague “God Is Love” messages, but I don’t think anyone here is going to buy what you’re so ineptly selling. A lot of us know better from personal experience, and a lot of us have actually read the entire Bible and know what it actually contains.
I don’t agree that those are the only 2 possibilities, sorry! 
Just because I express my position in a manner that isn’t meeting your expectation doesn’t mean I necessarily am ignoring anything objectively significant, does it?
This is a *hypothetical *proposition, remember?
There is an undeniable problem with your hypotheticals, Johnny.
You want to focus on the NT, which is the nicer testament. Of course, because you know full well that the OT is full of lies and idiocy. You cannot possibly defend the OT as being in any way good.
But the problem is, the NT is about a guy claiming to be the perfect godly son of the god of the OT, and his word is supposed to be absolutely true. So, if he’s claiming to be the son of the same sociopath in the OT, then he’s endorsing the OT as truth and a source of morality, and claiming that his father/his God is how he’s described in the OT.
So you cannot dismiss the OT as if it doesn’t matter.
And then you also run into the problem of this same son of God contradicting the OT. If Jesus claims to be the son of the same god of Abraham, and the God of Abraham endorses the stoning of prostitutes and witches, and Jesus contradicts that, then we have a problem. Either sonny boy is running around telling lies about his dad, or the prophets that came before him were running around telling lies about their God.
Which means the NT is a lie, or the OT is a lie. And if the OT is a lie, the NT must also be a lie because it endorses the OT as being the truth.
The only logical conclusion is that they’re both lies. They cannot both be telling the truth.
Sure, and he’d gloat all the while like Snidely Whiplash. You keep waving around a version of God that has no resemblance whatsoever to the God of fundamentalists. These aren’t warm-and-fuzzy, “God Is Love and everyone hold hands & sing kumbaya” Christians, these are the sorts who waylay homosexuals and beat them to death for being sinners.
I’ve heard that used as a defense of capital punishment by fundamentalists, yes. I think it was Jerry Falwell I last heard it from; that capital punishment is good because without it Jesus wouldn’t have been executed, and without that Jesus would not have been resurrected.
Jesus has little to do with Christianity, much less fundamentalist Christianity. He’s just their version of Mickey Mouse, a corporate logo; Christianity doesn’t reflect Jesus any more than Disney does Mickey.
Fundamentalists often think that and similar brutality is a great idea, and I’ve heard them gloat in anticipation of going back to the good old days when they can kill unbelievers and sinners of all sorts. They aren’t taught anything by Jesus though, because he’s dead.
What exactly am I ineptly selling? Did Jesus not teach that we should love one another? Does that sound like a tyrannical teaching to you?
[ul]
[li] If the NT contradicts the OT, and[/li][li] The OT is the basis of Jesus’ claims to be the son of the same God of Abraham, Moses, Israel, etc, and[/li][li] Jesus supposedly never lied, then-[/li][/ul]
You have a logical paradox. Only one testament can possibly be true. And since the NT claims that the OT is true, that means the New Testament cannot possibly be true, due to contradiction.
Both cannot be true if one claims to be more true than the other. And since the Jesus of the new Testament claims he’s the same messiah foretold in the OT, and backs up the words of the Old Testament prophets, that means he’s saying the OT is true. Then he goes and begins radically changing almost all of the rules, in effect, saying that the ways of the Old Testament are total crap.
So you have a liar paradox. One (NT) is claiming to always tell the truth, and saying that the other is telling the truth, and then going ahead and saying that sometimes the other does not tell the truth, and the other (OT) is claiming to always tell the truth as well, and is the basis of all NT claims. You can’t be the same God of Abraham, Moses, and Israel if there never was an Abraham, Moses, or Israel.
So either the NT is false and the OT is false as well, or just the NT is false, and God is a sadistic psychopath.
Those ARE your only two options.