But you just said that you hated to hear them.
Or is it that you don’t consider them to be facts if you don’t like them?
Where?
Here:
You don’t seem to like it when the facts get in the way of your beliefs.
Have you ever wronged anybody? I sure have, and I feel better if I have their forgiveness. I don’t see god as a supreme being who is “up there”, but the light that we have in us. So , to me, if we’ve “sinned” against our fellow humans, that’s what we might want forgiveness for. If there were an omnipotent being in the sky, I doubt he/she would care much about any sins committed against him/her.
Bottom line for me (and I identify as Xian), the Bible is pretty useless if taken literally.
No, I don’t think you would. Someone linked directly to pages setting out contradictions in the Bible and you dodged dealing with it by - rather pathetically - complaining about them not writing out the contradictions in their post.
As Colonel Jessup might say: The truth? There are no signs you can handle the truth.
Okay. How’s this for direct?
And so on, and so forth. Of course, if it weren’t for your stubborn dislike of links, you could have just clicked through to read it anyways.
Hey, you asked for it. Someone said the bible contained contradictions, and you asked for a citation… so you got it. What do you expect? If you didn’t want to hear it, you should not have explicitly asked for it.
Okay. The bible contains loads of contradictions. Fact.
I would say that statement goes both ways, believers also attack Atheists, but go on belief not fact, if they could they would prove it. Not just quote a book they claim is the word of god,. but don’t follow all its teachings.
Hey, i’m an impudent atheist! Ya talking to me?
Guess!
dougie_monty why are you always so hostile around here? Seriously, it seems like anyone says anything you disagree with, you freak out. Maybe you need a vacation or something?
I think you’re taking a mighty casual attitude, considering the magnitude of the target you have chosen. I have too much respect for the Bible to use the trivializing phrasing you seem so fond of.
It’s a fucking book. A long, boring, historically inaccurate book with an inconclusive ending and a number of subplots left undeveloped.
Better?
No–considerably worse, unless you can produce evidence to support your claim of ‘historical inaccuracy.’
And what “subplots” are you talking about?
Except not everyone feels the same way about the Bible you do. That being said, you have also been dismissive of the fact that Jews don’t regard the NT as part of the Bible. That’s not disrespect on their part.
Besides, I wasn’t attacking the Bible. It’s an important book – I don’t know if I’d say it’s divine or anything, but it does have significance.
And finally, I’ve noticed this in a LOT of threads you post in, not just ones about religion.
That is a long topic that never ends well but the existence of contradictions means that at least parts of it have to be wrong. Seriously, have you ever read the whole Bible? I don’t mean selected quotes and passages that other people told you to read out of context. I mean each book as a whole. Relatively few people have because it is a real slog but it is a worthwhile exercise if you really want to put things in context.
One of the most startling things is what isn’t in it. Many of the central parts of most modern day Christianity either don’t appear in the Bible at all, they are described differently than they are treated in church doctrine or the are just given as an off-hand reference.
For example, just going by the Bible alone, what can you tell us about any of the following:
- Angels
- The concept of hell
- Who or what is Satan and when does he first appear?
- Was Mary a virgin until she died? Did Jesus have any brothers or sisters?
- What was Jesus’s life like between his birth and age 30?
That is just for starters.
The answers to all of those are quite different than modern Christian doctrine suggests if only use the Bible as your source material. Most of modern Christianity was developed in Europe during the Middle Ages and was particularly influenced by the artwork of the time. It doesn’t exist in the Bible in the same form if it exists at all.
That isn’t a knock on the Bible itself. I don’t think any of us have dismissed it as an unimportant collection of works. It does mean that most Christian denominations don’t take it as literally as they claim because the doctrine and mythology would not resemble what it is today if they did.
Why would I bother? You’ll say you didn’t ask for it as soon as I do. But, since you ask:
[QUOTE=Matthew 2:1]
After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Luke 2]
1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed.
2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.)
[/QUOTE]
Herod died 10 years before the Cyrenian census.
Not only that, the entire birth story of Jesus was almost certainly made up much later to fit a preconceived narrative based on the House of David. I am not one of the people that argues that Jesus never existed at all. He almost certainly did in my informed opinion. His ministry and crucifixion almost certainly happened but the birth and early years had to be filled in decades after his death (remember, that was close to a century after his birth had passed at that point)
Speaking of fan-fiction, try reading some of the apocryphal books about Jesus’s early life sometime; our hero becomes everything from a superhero to a supervillian in those but the Council of Nicea had enough sense to toss those out of the Bible in 325 AD. Matthew and Luke are the gospels that give the details of his birth and they conflict both with each other and the well-documented Roman history.
Joseph and Mary lived in Nazareth. There was no reason for them to travel to Bethlehem to take part in a census and especially not together because Mary was in the late stages of pregnancy. Those censuses took months to years and only the male member of the household needed to go at all…if it worked that way in the first place. However, they didn’t work that way and there was no census at the time Jesus was reported to have been born.
dougie_monty has schizophrenia and has a history on this board of bizarre rude behavior. I don’t know why people continue to argue with him. It makes as much sense as arguing with kanicbird.
Screw that. You’ve been here since 1999 and have seen the evidence presented time and time again. We’re not going to start all over again just because you’ve developed a bad case of petulant amnesia.
I didn’t know he was mentally ill. I thought he was just a dick. I’ll leave him alone now. 