This is utterly incorrect. The Christian doctrine has always been that God created men and women in His image, but what did that mean? A physical image? God had two legs, two arms, a torso, a head, two eyes, two ears, a nose, and all the rest, and hence created human beings that looked like that? No, that’s no what it meant.
God is a spiritual being. Hence the spiritual portions of human beings are made in the image of God. In other words, human beings have an intellect, a consciousness, and free will, because those things were crafted in the image of God. But Christians have never believed that the physical bodies of humans were modeled after a physical body of God. Your claim that a thousand years ago everyone believed in “a big bearded dude in a toga in the sky” is simply wrong. It’s a wrong a representation of Christian beliefs, and I believe it’s equally wrong with regard to Jewish and Muslim beliefs.
Don’t believe me? Look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. You will see that the conception of God and man “in the image of God” dates back to the early days of the Church. It has not been shifted or refashioned.
So you’re saying that the members of each religion automatically accept the validity of miracles associated with their religion while rejecting all others? That’s easy enough to debunk.
The Catholic Church devotes considerable effort to separating out real and fake miracles. Among miracles that are claimed by Catholics, the vast majority are judged to be fake. For instance, there are thousands of miraculous healings supposed to have taken place at Lourdes, the site of a vision of the Virgin Mary. Yet the Church, if I recall correct, only accept 30-odd of those thousands as valid. Hence they are clearly not automatically making judgements based on whether the witness is a Catholic.
Sigh. As documented in the books of the Torah, God made a Covenant with the Jews, which included laws for the Jews to obey. These laws are presented in the Torah. They apply only to the Jews, and only for the duration of the Covenant.
Jesus Christ announced the end of the old Covenant and the beginning of the New Covenant. By doing so, he invalidated the laws that were part of the original Covenant. Thus no Christian, whether originally Jewish or Gentile, had any obligation to obey those laws. They remain laws and they remain part of scripture, but they are not binding on Christians. (Kind of like how we keep the whole Constitution even though parts have been invalidated.)
I think you missed the point. Does the Catholic Church look at Islamic miracles ever and say, “Yup, that one’s true?”
Do Muslims accept the Catholic Church’s declaration that those 30-odd miracles at Lourdes were real?
Or is it safe to say that your average Muslim believes in Muslim miracles while at the same time thinking 100% of the people at Lourdes were crazy people who saw things that weren’t there?
Any of them. Does it matter? Do you just not get the point?
Muslims believe in miracles, Catholics believe in miracles. Muslims think the Catholics miracles are hogwash, Catholics think the Muslim miracles are hogwash. Which miracles you believe in and which you think are collective delusions is 99% determined by the miracles your parents believed in.
Doesn’t that really make it seem like 100% of miracles are hogwash?
You know, last night I had a funny feeling that someone was going to mention the Sistine Chapel. I also had a funny feeling that this person would not make any attempt to explain why the Sistine Chapel overrode the Catechism as a statement of church doctrine. Both my funny feelings were right.
Sure there’s a painting of God as a wise, powerful human being. That’s symbolic, intended to emphasize that God is wise and powerful. It is not meant to be taken literally. There are also paintings depicting God as a pillar of fire, a cloud, a column of smoke, a beam of light, a lion, a lamb, and so forth. None of those were meant to be taken literally either.
Sage Rat is obviously very attached to the idea that Christians used to view God as a bearded guy in a toga. Unfortunately for him, that idea is completely untrue. I’ve provided a source which proves that it is untrue. Can you offer any source which says otherwise?
I get the point. Your point is that Christians use a double standard for miracles, accepting Christian miracles while rejecting Muslim miracles that are backed by the same level of evidence. What’s missing is any example to back the claim up.
What I don’t see is any evidence to back up the claim. The reasons for rejecting Muhammed’s miracles are well known: he refused to demonstrate any. Other Muslims added stories of miracles at a later date. See this book for further details. So I’m asking you to name a specific event and to explain why you think it meets the standards that the Catholic Church uses to judge miracles.
See, then you don’t get the point. My point is that Muslims believe in their miracles with the same conviction that Catholics believe in theirs. I don’t give a flying hoot if any of the miracles meet the standard of the Catholic church, the only thing that matters is that the followers of each respective religion accept the miracles as having happened.
So you have two groups of people, each group believe their own miracles and rejects the others, and the miracles you accept/reject is 99% determined by which miracles your parents reject/accept.
Arguments 10 and 11 are simply based on garbage that Sage Rat made up. Friar Ted has already undertaken the task of debunking it, so I see no need to add anything more except to this:
This may be a fine argument against some religions but not against Christianity, which is no less or more animistic now than at any other time in its history.
We’ve already established that the “men in togas” line is nonsense. Now, I’m afraid, you’ll also need to abandon the claim that 99% of all people follow the religion of their parents. Actually more than a quarter switch religions In America. Your idea that a person’s lifelong religious beliefs can be explained away by what their parents taught them simply does not hold water. When a person grows up, they question what their parents taught them. That’s basically the definition of growing up. If they don’t find sufficient evidence to back up their parents’ beliefs, then they stop believing. Hence your attempt to explain religious beliefs that way is no explanation at all. Whether or not parents give religious teachings to their children, there’s no adult who believes only because their parents believe. Every adult goes where they find the evidence leading.
When I have children I intend to raise them by my principles, and I don’t need your permission to do so. I wouldn’t need your permission even if the 99 percent figure were true.
The data already are available, and everyone is able to make their own choices.
Isn’t this demand a little bit ironic, given how many untrue things you’ve said in this thread? Isn’t it slightly possible that you’re the one who needs a little self-realization?
Thanks but no thanks, as they say. I have books on my shelves that provide hundreds of sound arguments for Christian doctrine. I’ve never seen any coherent argument against it. My faith is buttressed a great deal by threads such as this one. You offered up the 11 best pieces of evidence and the majority turned out to be based on claims that are flatly untrue. Moreover, once the facts were known, much of your evidence actually turned in favor of Christianity.
I’d be more than happy to absolutely demolish any and all of them for you. Line them up and I’ll knock them down. And don’t bring any weak shit like Strobel or C.S. Lewis. Give me your very best stuff.
Actually, I’ll give you a question. Go to your books and find the answer. Why does God need a sacrifice to save people from himself? That’s it. Pretty simple. Now go find an answer that I can’t destroy.
Firstly, of course, 3 depends on 1 and 2, and those two aren’t standing up very well.
I do agree that there’s nothing genetic about religiosity. That theory always struck me as among the most absurd. I’m also glad that you aren’t trying to dismiss religious experiences as hallucinations, dreams, and drug-induced visions.
Nevertheless, the argument you do offer seems to sell short the complexity of religious experience in a similar fashion. Is it true that by rewards and punishments, parents gives their children a permanent “meter for right and wrong”? I would agree that it’s true to some extent, yet it’s also true that people continue developing their moral sense throughout their life. Moral understandings that parents established at an early age would disintegrate over time unless someone or something kept that up until the end.
The basics of “morality” are biological, not taught. The empathic response is a product of evolution. We are evolved as social animals. It’s all just brain chemistry. We’re as automated as bees.
*In some early religions (such as the Ancient Egyptian faith), Heaven was a physical place far above the Earth in a “dark area” of space where there were no stars, basically beyond the Universe. Departed souls would undergo a literal journey to reach Heaven, along the way to which there could exist hazards and other entities attempting to deny the reaching of Heaven.
One popular medieval view of Heaven was that it existed as a physical place above the clouds and that God and the Angels were physically above, watching over man. Heaven as a physical place survived in the concept that it was located far out into space, and that the stars were “lights shining through from heaven”.*
And why do you say that I’m talking about Christianity? You are aware that there are many thousands of different religions on the planet now and historically? The image of deities has gone from trees and volcanos to men in tunics and togas to ethereal beings in alternate planes of existence. Regardless if Christianity only ever held the last of these as the correct view–which it didn’t, as my above cite shows–you’re still only talking about the latest shift in the spectrum.
Hmm, let’s do some checking.
If we look up the Judaic God (AKA the Abrahamic deity), we will see that he has a list of several different names (at the end of the page.) Clicking through those, we’ll likely see some evidence pointing to an amalgamation of several different deities that at some point were combined to create a single, national deity.
Ugarit? Let’s click through some links from there to this page:
Going back to the seven different names of the Abrahamic deity, Elohim looks to really just be a generic word for “god”. Not much of interest on that page. Adonai has some mildly interesting stuff if you click through to A-D-N, but not worth quoting. I am that I am, not too interesting. Which brings us to Yahweh. So far we’ve seen him as both a Storm God and as possibly another name for El, the leader of a pantheon of deities. Let’s see what interesting tidbits there are:
(Bolding added)
Indeed. Why did “God” ever have a name? If he wasn’t the same deity that people had once thought of as a storm god, why did they call the new improved mega-deity the same name as the old weather spirit?
Getting back to the various names, not much of interest if we look through the others.
So now let’s go back to our Martian friend. We give him two possible choices:
A guy climbed up a mountain, held up some blank stone tablets, and these were struck by lightning, forming words, letting the Jewish people know about the existence of a single deity. (Other miracles than this one being performed as well.)
After a long history starting out with animistic deities representing nature and the basic elements, these deities eventually took on even more human visages until specifically being viewed as “men in the sky” with histories, romance, and a pecking order. Slowly the top deities start to pull forward, leaving mostly just the principal God and his consort. In a fit of national pride, a political and sociological point is reached where the need for there to be just one deity comes out and for the next few centuries, scholars work to collect religious texts and histories, and to edit this all down to only display one deity and forbid all others.
We will also make our Martian aware of “miracles” having been recorded by many other religions, previous to and after the composition of the Tanakh, leading all the way up to modern day–though becoming suspiciously few as the scientific method and the mass media thrive.
Personally, assuming a discerning Martian with no particular tie to human foibles, that he would go with option #2. There’s lots of documentation and secondary data (like asherah poles) pointing to a history of animism and then polytheism that eventually leads up to the current Yahweh and the Tanakh. There’s plenty of evidence that the Tanakh was constructed by and specifically edited by humans.
If the Jewish people were all really subjected to an array of miracles and really told on the spot to believe in no other gods (10 commandments), why did they continue to do so prevalently and openly all the way up to the Tanakh being completed? Even if you assume that the average populace were uneducated country bumpkins, why did the priests of Israel allow Asherah poles to be placed around the Holy Temple. Why would an educated king of the nation place those poles? Sure they removed them eventually, but why place them to begin with? There’s no excuse for the king of the nation to not know about Moses on the mountain, the miracles in Egypt, and the one true god’s commandment that there be no other gods.
The evidence seems to go that an evolution beliefs happened and at some point history and lore was edited down to erase that evolution.
The safe bet is that the Christian god started his life as a storm god.
