There’s a guy who goes to Boston sporting events (and other crowds) and has a sign that advises me to believe in Jesus or I will spend eternity in Hell. This guy claims that God told him to do this, yet he can’t explain why God chose him, and only him. Either he, like Joseph Smith, is one of a chosen few, or this guy is nuts.
But it got me to wondering … How do these bible beaters rationalize the following?
>>> If their belief system (be it Mormon, Jehovah, Buddah, Muslim, or Angelina Jolie) is the ONE TRUE belief system, why don’t people flock to it on their own? Why do they need to be “converted”? What is the Bible-beaters logic on that? I mean, if I’m too stupid to convert to Mormonism, why does the average Mormon waste two years of Gods life to teach those of us that don’t see the light?
>>> If I don’t believe in Jesus, I’m going to hell. What about all those people who died before Jesus was born? Did God punish them to hell? Did God intentionally have them born too early just so he could banish them to Hell??? With 5 billion people in this world, it wouldn’t surprise me that at least one billion have know knowledge whatsoever about Jesus. Are these people doomed to hell just because their parents never told them about Jesus? How do the fire-and-brimstone preachers rationalize that? I’m sure they have a “logical” excuse.
These are more complicated questions to answer than a quick sound bite because they require more I depth understanding of Christian beliefs. The answers below are from that perspective.
Christians believe that our natural nature is one turned away from God. This is called a sin nature that has been part of the human experience since Adam and Eve. Essentially the Bible says that we are selfish people and naturally don’t want to believe.
a common misconception, but wrong. Hell is a place of punishment for wrongdoing. Everyone who has done wrong (everyone in Christian beliefs) deserves to go to Hell. Just like everyone who has committed a serious crime deserves to go to prison. Jesus provides a reprieve from this deserved punishment. There are many ways to answer this
A) God doesn’t have to offer everyone this reprieve. Let’s say Oprah decides to pay off all debts of one lucky person. Does that mean it’s not fair that she didn’t pay off my debts? I accrued those debts and
B) God is all knowing, all powerful, etc. Some say that he knows who will truly believe and they will hear some way from someone. Or they are born at a time and place where they will hear.
Some accuse Christians of not thinking or lacking reason. I challenge you to read these sites; you may disagree, but you can’t say they aren’t thinking deeply about their faith.
So the belief is that our creator made us and deliberately made us flawed and will punish us for our flaws that he created. And we’re automatically “bad” and have to prove our “goodness” to the guy who made us, or he’ll punish us.
Do I have that right?
And you say that your god doesn’t have to offer a reprieve from punishing us for the sins he created in us and that we, with the resources and abilities he gave us, must somehow overcome the obstacles he places in our path and then MAYBE we won’t get punished?
IF your god is all knowing, why does he need or want to do this? Is he a sadistic asshole? Or is he more like a child playing with ants and matches? In any case, why should I submit?
Christians (and people who profess belief in other religions) may be thinking deeply about their faith, but I can think of other people who think deeply about things that, IMO, don’t deserve any thought at all. For instance, seriously insane lunatics spend lots of time thinking about their conspiracy theories too; that doesn’t make any of it real or a good idea to act on their thoughts. Likewise for the Heaven’s Gate people, Scientologists, etc.
Not quite right. We still freely choose to be bad. That deserves punishment. I will say that the concept of original sin is a difficult concept emotionally.
I see you didn’t read the sites. It’s more than thinking deeply, it’s making logical reasoned arguments that are well thought out. As I said, you might not agree, but the logical and philosophical arguments are reasonable.
In their entirety? You are aware, I hope, that those sites you named and linked to go to gateways that lead to vast amounts of content. Your post above was about as helpful as it would be if you wanted to find out about the current state of a particular field of scientific inquiry, and someone posted: Here ya go; it’s all in here"
I will note that the gentleman who runs one of those sites is on record as writing: The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic.cite
I looked at one article in the second site. It was about whether vertebrate animals died before the fall. It made no mention of evidence. It talked about how prey animals breed more than predators, and of course never talked about how evolution explains this quite nicely. No need for God.
Best I can tell the site is a steaming pile of crap.
Thinking deeply does not mean thinking logically. Communists thought deeply also.
If every single person is bad and is condemned to hell without the Jesus get out of hell free card, I contend that by your definition we have no choice at all. Some may be worse than others, but we all are condemned. That is a monster god at work.
Just re the above – I’m somewhat time-constrained right now, so stopped from looking things up, and am responding just “off top of head”: but, I (definitely no expert) have the impression that basically-orthodox Christian belief holds that provision is made for those who do not have the chance to hear the Christian message.
For those who lived and died “BC” – I seem to recall a thing about “the Harrowing of Hell” – they get the opportunity in the after-life, to hear the message (Christ going down into hell on the day between his crucifixion and resurrection, and giving them the news?). For those in the Christian era whose circumstances are such that they never hear the message, from anybody – some sort of mitigating deal. (Something in the Gospels to the effect of, “he who knew my will but refused to do it, will be beaten with many stripes; for him who never knew my will, and thus did not do it, few stripes”.)
I’m not saying that any of this makes any sense; only, that in my understanding, Christianity tells of justice / mercy provided by God, to those who never had the chance to hear / know: they are not just told, “Tough shit – you suffer eternal torment, end-of.”
My answer to this, which would differ from theirs is that is what they need to do to come to God, so God lets them as the end result is that they will know God better - God will also use this man in some capacity, perhaps not for you but for others. In Acts 9 it does show God’s use of Paul for Paul’s refinement:
[QUOTE=Acts9:]
15 But the Lord said to Ananias, “Go! This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel. 16 I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.”
[/QUOTE]
Covered in scriptures, seek God and you will find him. Also God does not change - ever, and Jesus is the way. So Jesus was always and always will be, even before we know Him to be born, even if we don’t see a people exposed to him - Jesus always is the way and the way has never changed as God does not change.
How I take this is it is not the man, the physical person, that died on the cross that we need, but we need to know that we are God’s children, we are all Jesus (this is why we can pray in the name of Jesus) and have the rights and inheritance of a child of God - we do not have to accept death as final that was never made for us. We all have the capacity that Jesus has, including dieing for others sins out of love and being raised again, but for many of us we need to see that goodness in others before we can know that we too are that child of God.
You don’t see the problem here? Our nature is sin - even if we do nothing wrong, we still carry “original sin” with us - it is impossible for a human to live a perfect life and avoid hell without asking Jesus to forgive us. But God set it up that way! If you force someone at gunpoint to take out a loan, you can’t then say, “Well, he had no reason to complain, he knew the consequences of not paying up in time” when the people you bring along to collect break his ankles. At any point, God could change this horribly immoral, unethical system. But he doesn’t. Instead, he condemns countless people, many of whom may in fact never have heard of Jesus in the first place, to eternal torture. That’s not the work of an omnibenevolent creator, that’s the work of a fucking monster.
The best I can say about reasons.org is that it doesn’t straight-up deny science. It does try to defend Noah’s Flood to some extent, at which point I just sort of tuned out. I’m sure there are all kinds of reasons Christians have for believing. I’ve heard quite a few of them; they’re mostly crap. Like, William Lane Craig’s signature argument, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, fails on multiple levels - it’s special pleading, it doesn’t lead to the Christian god (indeed, the entire section on how it has to be a mind is a complete non-sequitur that is totally unsupported), and physics completely demolishes at least one of its core premises. Perhaps he’s moved on to a different logical argument, but I’m left not caring, because WLC is an intellectually dishonest buffoon, who has quite literally said he could be taken back in time to watch Jesus rot away in his tomb for months and still believe that Christ rose from the dead after 3 days. I mean, looking at his writings, he offers this as a reason that god exists:
Are you for real? The best explanation for anything at all existing lies within physics - at this point, the models we have seem to indicate that if a universe did not exist, then one would pop into existence due to the way reality is inherently structured. No, seriously. Not only that, but “God” is only an explanation for the universe in the same way “Magic” is an explanation - it has no explanatory power; it is explaining one mystery with another mystery. This is Kindergarten Theology. We haven’t even established that God is an explanation for the universe!It’s a big fat argument from ignorance. No, just because we have no other alternative does not immediately validate your completely unjustified answer whose existence we have not even established. You still need to provide evidence that your answer is valid. And Craig does no such thing. And then he goes on to make exactly the same mistake 3 or 4 times in the article, at which point I stopped reading.
It’s making logical, reasoned arguments that all ultimately fail. The fact that Craig is still clinging to the Kalam Cosmological Argument long after it has been debunked does not give us a good indication of how “reasonable” such Christian philosophers are.
Meanwhile, attempts to unify science with the bible basically end up as pathetic attempts at twisting the words of the book around, looking for any possible interpretation that doesn’t directly contradict the facts. I applaud reasons.org for not explicitly denying science (as far as I read, anyways) but their apologetics are simply weak sauce. If you start from the premise “This book is perfect” and go from there, then you can twist yourself into as many knots as you want trying to justify it, and maybe even succeed. But it’s utterly unimpressive, because in the big picture, there’s no reason to believe that that is what the authors of the bible were talking about. It’d be like reinterpreting the Season 1 finale of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic as an allegory of how classism leads to a malcontent proletariat resulting in catastrophe - you could do that. You could absolutely shove the episode into that little box. But it wouldn’t make sense to do so, because in the context of the show, how it was written, and indeed the details within the episode, it’s pretty clear that that’s not what we’re talking about, and you’d probably get an F on your book report. Similarly, maybe the authors of the bible didn’t mean literal days. Of course, I’m not sure why they’d talk about it getting dark at the end of the day, but hey, that’s just my uncultured, non-PHD-apologist opinion.
If you examine the bible without the blinders of “this book must absolutely conform to reality” all these contradictions and errors suddenly start to make sense. The cognitive dissonance fades. You don’t have to explain away all these errors; it’s a storybook that tells a story that simply does not match to observable reality. Why twist yourself into knots defending the indefensible?