This is a paper I wrote to years ago that tackles the subject of Atheism, it is “quite” long, but modesty apart, I think it is an intresting read.
Here is the Link:
http://www.thegodmyth.blogspot.com/
If anybody has the time to read this paper, or parts of it, It would be appreciated.
Feel free to post, any comment/criticism/correction, please feel free to do so.
Your thread is better-suited for our Great Debates forum, which is the place for religious debates and witnessing. I’ll move it there for you.
I just started to read it and found it to be not very clear. I think you conflate god with religiosity, and sunsequently not make either point well. But like I said, I just read the very beginning, but it didn’t entice me to read more. masybe I’ll try it again later, as the topic interests me.
I went back and read more, and I have to say that while I saw a few good points, on whole it is not well written and even less well argued. Just one man’s opinion. I suggest you read some of the threads that exist on the subject, as some very good arguments have beenput forth.
Well, for one thing, you’re not really arguing for atheism here, so much as you’re arguing against Christianity. You also seem to be all over the place…setting up strawmen and then knocking them down.
Also, your citations are weak. For example, when talking about the Inquisition, you say, " Many people died simply because they where against popular opinion. (http://www.fordham.edu) " The site is, of course, to Fordham University, which has a lot of pages associated with it, and nowhere on the main page do they talk about the Inquisition at all, it, as you might imagine, being more concerned with news about Fordham and the new school year. Also, in your three sentence description of the Inquisition:
I count five errors (The Inquisition started in the 12th century, the Inquisition wasn’t a trial, but an organization…actually a few related organizations of ecclesiastical courts, the Inquisition itself didn’t have the power to execute, not believing in God is not an “argument”, and very few people were executed merely for having unpopular opinions.)
Tell me if I’m remembering correctly:
Being found guilty of heresy was not death sentence. The heretic was given a chance to abjure and be welcomed back into the church. Only if the heretic refused to renounce their erroneous beliefs or if they went back to their old ways after recanting would they be executed.
Nor were the executed by the church-- they were turned over to the secular authorities for punishment along with a mostly-symbolic request for leniencey.
That’s generally right. Of course, the Inquisition differed at different places and at different times.
I found some other errors:
No. According to the Creation myth, God made that statement before Adam and Eve committed the original sin of eating from the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Everything was “good” until that happened.
Perhaps you’re misunderstanding the quote. Cecil wrote a column on this very issue in which the Roman records of the period mention a rabble-rouser they executed named Jesus (they claimed he was the son of a Roman soldier named Panther.)
You need to define “scholar” here. I don’t know of any serious scholars of the Christian faith who consider the Ten Commandments to be the most important of the laws of the faith. The “Ten Commandments” is accepted to be a mostly symbolic list. It’s a bit fudged to fit neatly within the nice round number of 10. (One commandment is used twice.)
It is? I’d say the majority of people are “indifferent” with minorities of “good” and “bad”.
But, then again, almost everyone thinks that they’re a good person. (Just like almost everyone can justify their own actions–at least to themselves-- and almost everyone thinks that they’re smart.)
Thanks for all the constructive criticism, yeah I realize the paper has some errors, it was for an 11th grade paper I had to turn in. I actully never wanted to post it in the “great debates” section because I know many of you are experts on this subject, and I am not, but thanks for taking the time to read it anyway.
You’re going to get the same experts picking apart your essay no matter where you post it on the boards. The boards are divided up by subject matter, not level of competency, and religious threads go in GD. Anyway, if you wanted feedback on your essay, isn’t it better to get it from people who really know their shit?
Quotation marks do not denote emphasis. When you write…
…it doesn’t mean “Danger folks, I’m serious, long-ass paper ahead”, it means something more like “Yeah, this is a long paper, and the best word I can come up with to describe it is ‘quite’ even though it’s not a great choice of words”, or “I asked someone how long my paper was, and they said ‘quite’, and I’m repeating that assertion for you now, I take no credit for it”, or possibly “I say that this paper is ‘quite’ long, but I mean something else entirely. It should be possible for you to deduce the details from context”.
On preview: and, all grammar Nazi-ing aside, it’s good to have you here.
I wasent emphasisng the word “quite”, I was saying that the “quite” in that sentence is relative. To some members of this board, reading that paper may be a quick read. Thanks for tha adivce anyway, yeah, next time I want to emphasise a word I’ll use italics, or CAPITAL LETTERS. Good advice though…
So you’re saying nobody would know what to expect?
It’s chief weapon was surprise…surprise and fear.
C’mon… nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
Well, their chief weapon is surprise.
Surprise and fear.
Surprise, fear, and ruthless efficiency.
DOGAMMIT!!!
I see. I wasn’t impressed as I read it but when you explain the context I consider it fairly well done. If you’d been a junior in college I would have expected much more.
A couple of points. As a believer I have no problem seeing the Bible as a book written by men, or acknowledging that we don’t know for sure if Jesus even existed. Those facts may help my beliefs evolve but they certainly don’t end them.
then there’s this
IMHO this argument needs to be considered when trying to understand the nature of God but does not end in the conclusion, “God doesn’t exist” It may mean that certain concepts of God are illogical and need to be abandoned. That means other concepts of God can still be very viable.
I agree that religion has evolved. My own beliefs have evolved quite a bit in my life. I can see that same principle at work in mankind in general as the centuries pass. In the quest for truth and our grasp of reality and how it all fits together we are still evolving. IMHO the first myths of man flying had to be in order to get to Kitty Hawk. God is much the same. As generations pass our concepts of God evolve as we pursue the truth. Mankind is slow to abandon certain myths and traditions but it is happening and will continue to happen. I think the intelligent arguments posed by atheists serve as an aide to this evolution, but that doesn’t mean they are completely correct.
No, the OP was actually right about this. There are no contemporary records of Jesus, Roman or otherwise. The documentation you’re referring to comes from a couple of passing references in Josephus (late 1st century) and Tacticus (2nd Century). You’re also conflating them with something from the Talmud. The Josephus passage is widely believed to have been at least partially interpolated (forged), but both mention that someone named Jesus had acquired a following, was executed by Pilate and that his movement had continued after his death. Tacitus, in particular, was written late enough that he could have just gotten his information from Christians themselves and it’s not a given that he had any independent source for it.
The Ben Panthera thing is from the Talmud, was written several centuries after the time of Jesus, and may or may not be a reference to the Jesus of the Gospels. If it is, it’s probably a medieval Jewish response to Christian smears.
This is a (perhaps even the) classic argument against the existence of God, and hence has been discussed quite a bit, both here on the SDMB and pretty much everywhere else people discuss such things. Needless to say, not everyone accepts it. Those who reject the argument generally disagree with premise #1, #2, and/or #4 (though a few people deny #5, claiming that “evil” is an illusion).
#1: This argument, even if it’s valid, doesn’t prove that no God could exist, only that a God who has those three properties can’t exist. It still leaves us free to believe in a God who is limited somehow (either in power or in moral perfection).
#2: Those who deny this premise point out that omnipotence does not extend to the ability to do things that are logically impossible or contradictory (like God making a burrito so hot even He can’t eat it). As IIRC C. S. Lewis said, nonsense does not cease to be nonsense just because you put the words “God can” in front of it. How do we know that eliminating all evil isn’t a logical impossibility?
Or maybe it’s possible to eliminate evil, but not without at the same time eliminating some other desired thing (like human free will). Which leads to premise #4…
#4: There are two ways to reject this premise. One is to claim that God, though morally perfect, allows evil to exist (at least temporarily) to bring about a greater good than would otherwise be possible.
The other is to claim that our expectations of what a morally perfect God would do are flawed. We may think we know what “good” is, but our perspective is limited and could be flawed or inapplicable to a being like God.
Of course, these points could all be explained and discussed at much greater length, and there are plenty of things that can be said both for and against them. This is just to give you an idea of why the argument isn’t universally accepted, and people who know about it go on believing in God.