Why are Christians' ideas of God erroneous?

Great Debates
21

As some of you may or may not know, when I joined the boards, I identified quite strongly with the CHurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That was 18 months ago. Since then I have progressively grown farther and farther from religion in general. Note: I was not disenchanted with the Mormon Church, of all the fairy tails re: Christianity, that’s my favorite.
Here are some of my problems:
1-The concept that we are all inately sinful. I’m sorry, but I don’t buy that. I think I’m a pretty good person, all things considered. I don’t cheat on my husband, I don’t lie, I don’t steal, I don’t participate in any illegal activities, I don’t even speed! I like myself better knowing that I don’t do these things, not because I’m scared of punishment, but because I don’t want to hurt other people.

2-I don’t like the…well…arrogance of Christianity. “I’m so happy having my life dictated, I want everybody to feel this joy!” Well, as shocking as it is to believe, I am happy. Happier now than I have ever been before. I’m essentially my own boss. It’s nice.

3-If God created us, then he created us with the ability to use logical reasoning, induction and deduction. We have the ability to learn, to rationalize, to understand. He equipped us with the brains to investigate and experiment…the world is our oyster. These are wonderful gifts. Oh, but we shouldn’t use them. We should just accept our creator’s existance on faith. Ok…that doesn’t make sense to me. Which leads me to…

4-The free-will arguement is well…crap. I think faithful Christians came up with that concept because they can’t fathom why anybody wouldn’t want to worship a God that exists. But freewill isn’t about knowing God, it’s about worshipping God. To tell you the truth, I’m not that please with him right now, and I probably wouldn’t worship him even if showed up at my front door right now.

5-I don’t like the literal worshippings of God. I’m uncomfortable defining God as God. In Hinduism, the concept of Brahman is undefinable, because to do so would be limiting. I don’t like it when people say, “I have a personal relationship with God” because I can’t understand how you would have a relationship with an essentially unlimited being. To do so would limit him. For example, I read that concept of the Trinity was created by the Greeks as a paradox to illustrate how inherently unknowable and unfathomable God truly is. Yet people are literally worshipping a Godhead.

These were just the first five things that really occurred to me…there are more reasons. Don’t think I’m stopping here though. I don’t define myself as an Atheist, but an Agnostic. I’m actually going to be a philosophy/religion minor. For two reasons: It will help me find my own personal truth, and whether I agree with it or not, religion is a part of everybody’s life. It’s good to have a working knowledge of it.

22

I saw a photograph of some fairies that used to play with children. I’ve also seen films of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

23

-No, you saw paintings of God, and there’s a difference.

24

Polycarp, I have a general idea as to what you want to accomplish here, but it might be a good idea to suggest how (or if) Christians respond, so that the thread doesn’t devolve into many subthreads.

25

That’s certainly not what I’ve seen from sources considered learned. It also seems to obviate the need for Jesus completely – why would God have sent his own son to be killed to save us if we didn’t need saving? Although I don’t doubt there are many people who consider themselves Christians who feel this way, it doesn’t seem to me to hold water.

–Cliffy

26

With respect to Polycarp, I see no need to continue with this hijacking.

27

Way I see it, the Jews invented Yahweh. They know how he works, what his message was, how his messiah would act, whether or not he could have son, etc.

Then this other group comes along and more or less redefines all that (slightly oversimplifying).

The Jews disagree with this new interpretation of their own god. End of story.
"The best surviving evidence we now have respecting this (resurrection) affair is the Jews. They are regularly descended from the people who lived in the time this resurrection and ascension is said to have happened, and they say ‘it is not true.’” –Thomas Paine

28

Three out of four gospel writers were Jews… perhaps there is a hole in that logic.

29

Okay, we don’t know who the actual gospel writers were. Most likely they were converted Christians, rather than Jews. I’d recommend reading Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton Mack.

On the whole, Jews then and Jews today do not accept Christianity’s message or definition of their god (trinity, etc). Christianity did not become popular until it changed its focus from the Jews to the Gentiles (because the Jews weren’t buying it).

30

One of the things that bugs me is the notion that a murderer could go to Heaven while his victim ends up in Hell. He kills someone who has heard of Jesus, but never accepted Him as savior. In spite of having led an otherwise virtuous life, the victim goes to Hell. Later on, repentant, the murderer accepts Jesus into his life and goes to Heaven upon his death.

Someone explain to me how this is just, right, and fair.

31

Oh, it gets better with some fundamentalists (incl the church I belonged to), it wasn’t enough to believe in Jesus! You had to be baptized correctly, recruit (er, “make disciples”), believe the bible was God’s inerrant word. Only people who belonged to this kind of church followed Jesus correctly.

How many murder, disaster, and terrorist victims were baptized correctly? Looks like both the perp and victim are sharing the same eternal fate.

32

Cause too many people read it differently, then they fight about it.

Look at the Native Americans, they never wrote their religion down. How many religous wars did they fight amongst each other? 0

33

First off let my state my background. I’m an agnostic, but I was raised christian (Catholic). Now on to my points.

First off is the argument some people on this thread have made that it is possible to go to heaven if you’ve never known Jesus as long as you were a good person, so why complicate that person’s life by telling them about him. Well two reasons: one, because their religion tells them to, and two: because they believe that knowing of Jesus will make that person’s life more complete. And yes I can see the arguments against the second point.

Also there have been comments about how christians seem to have the compulsive need to jam their religion down everyone else’s throat. Yeah, gotta admit, that is pretty annoying. People seem to forget that when Martin Luther nailed his points to a door one of them was that the individual should interpret the bible and alot of protestants forget this. But that’s what I want to point out: most christians (in the U.S. anyways) don’t have a beef with someone who doesn’t share their beliefs or even believes in Jesus for that matter. They take an extrapolation of the “not knowing Jesus” argument: if you don’t believe in him just be a good person. Hell, even the Catholic church at the Vatican II in the sixties stated they MIGHT not always be right. Although they don’t bring that point up too often nowadays they’ve never retracted it either.

Ultimately my point is that while there are christians out there who are complete jerks, they’re mainly fundamentalists and not representative of the majority, only a hell of a lot louder. In other words, it’s not fair to categorize all christians behavior by the comments and actions of a few; that’s sterotyping.

Oh, and Mercutio, there’s another thread in the GD that talks about wars started due to religion that you might want to look at. The bottom line on that argument is that people will always find reasons to start wars, and religion is just a handy excuse.

34

Nope, I think Hubzilla is on to something, even ignoring the whole concept of the Messiah.

Judaism and Christianity differ on the core concepts of the nature of God, original sin, the origin of good and evil, the theology of dualism, the purpose of this life and the concept of an afterlife. This is my biggest problem with Christianity, it claims to be rooted in Judaism, but yet almost every fundamental tenet of belief is different. Christianity took one tenet and reinterpreted everything because they couldn’t believe that their messiah had died (kind of reminds me of Gore voters :p). The Jews didn’t buy it, so the early church mixed in paganism galore and presto!, a whole new religion that the masses would accept. It’s the most successful cult the world has ever seen.

I wouldn’t accept a black and white copy of a $20 bill, why should I accept Christianity and it’s bad forgery of Judaism. For the record, I’m not Jewish. I just think they have a better interpretation of their own scirpture, history and theology.

35

But you could, this very day, buy a plane ticket to France and verify with your own eyes whether Paris exists or not. Is there any way, short of death, that I could personally verify God’s existence? If a person says they have personally seen God, even most Christians would doubt them.

Your example doesn’t do much to help the argument.

36

Hi Polycarp

I don’t usually get into religion much, and I don’t plan to much in the future. It’s a sure way to offend the most people in the least amount of time :wink: But here goes.

Agnostic here.

The thing is, many people are raised in at least some religion. I was raised completely outside religion. We didn’t go to church. I was not baptized. I attended church several times with friends of mine as a child, so I knew that’s what some people did on Sundays. Looking back, most of my values sync pretty well with basic Christian mores. Though IMO the golden rule is very easily arrived at independently for anyone with an ounce of empathy for living things. Broadens it a bit, actually.

Also this was in Amish/Menonite country. So you’ve got the Amish, the Menonites, and various other Anabaptists. And to please god they use various anachronistic clothing/hairstyles/tools, etc.
Then there’s the Baptists and various types of holy rollers. And to please god they don’t dance. Or drink (in theory, saw that one being broken a lot). And they really think a lot of Billy Graham.
Then there’s various other protestants: Church of Christ, Lutherans, Methodist, Free Will Methodists (as opposed to the press-gang variety I suppose), Presbyterians,Episcopalians, Anglicans, etc.
Not to mention all the Seventh Day Adventist, Mormon, Jehova’s Witnesses, and of course, Catholics, which some of the previous denominations don’t think are actually christians at all.

[sub]that list is off the top of my head, all of the above are merely impression I have picked up and any and all are likely to be completely wrong.sorry[/sub]

Okay, now pick one.

Then of course there are all the other world religions besides Christianity that have been doing what they do to please god (or attain Nirvana, keep their ancestors spirits happy, etc)for thousands of years.

I have no major problem with any denomination of religion, except, what many have stated before, how freakin specific they are, even within Christianity. From my perspective, there is no overwhelming reason to believe that any religion has it exactly or even mostly right, and I have a nagging suspicion that maybe none of them do.

That’s my answer to your OP. I don’t know that Christian’s ideas of god are erroneous. For all I know, the next tract I get could be EXACTLY RIGHT. Considering the infinite possibilities of how the universe works, the odds are that it’s just a working theory. And calling it anything else is erroneous. ‘Idea’ is actually a great thing to call it.

And honestly, would you suddenly become a Christian if all roads were alike* to you?

An omnipotent, omnipresent god, would have to be so outside what we understand as possible, as reality, that no complete understanding is possible. Had a lot of trouble understanding the infinite with my finite brain. Doesn’t quite fit. Haven’t really gotten too much feedback from my soul.

To whole-heartedly join any branch of Christianity, I would have to throw a freaking dart, and from then on refuse to consider any other worldview. If that’s what Christians mean by faith, then I’m not ready to develop mine .
*[sub]though that is a vast simplification, and there are quite a few ideas in religion that are beneath humans and most animals, and I refuse to associate them to any higher power. Like holy wars, the inquisition, and the idea that clitorectomies are a good thing[/sub]

37

I have to agree with HubZilla. That nicely sums up my biggest problem with the Christian God. That and I also simply don’t believe it makes sense to be both human and divine. The whole Jesus thing is a huge stumbling block with Christianity. He may have lived, he may have been one hellava guy, but “son of God?” Sorry I’m not buying it. I can visit my local mental health facility and find a dozen people who think they are God - I’m not buying it from them either.

Or as a mental health nurse I knew once said “I have three Jesuses on the ward right now. I’m pretty darn sure at least two of them aren’t the real thing.”

On the other hand, I have no problem with anyone else’s belief in the Christian God. Long as you respect mine, and respect my right to raise my children as I see fit.

38

< joke>

How do you tell a Baptist from a Methodist?

The Methodist will say “Hi” to you when you meet him at the liquor store.

</joke>

39

But you presuppose that God’s mode of existence is the same as that of Paris, and that the totality of the means by which he is knowable are the same as those by which Paris is knowable. Given Christian presuppositions about God – which is, I take it, the given under which this thread proceeds – your counter to frankhoma’s point doesn’t actually apply.

Moreover, your implicit demand that God must make himself immediately, unquestionably and physically apparent for your inspection is not only arrogant – given Christian presuppositions – but fails to take into account the fact that the actual, physical intrusion of God himelf – in his holiness and perfection – into finite and sinful human experience is not an experience from which any of us would emerge alive.

Under Christian presuppositions, the fact of the matter is this: You could, this very day, have experience of God’s reality; though not in the same sense that you can have experience of Paris’s reality.

Of course, you can simply reject all of that – out of hand – as fiction. That’s your own business, and I’m not going to tell you what you have to do. But if you do simply reject the presuppositions of Christianity – which sort of amounts to a refusal to seriously engage in Polycarp’s OP – then the honest answer to the question of why you reject Christian presuppositions about God is simply that you have different presuppositions about God.

Now…the question of whether or not you actually will have experience of God’s reality is a different question, which does not – under all understandings of Christian theology – actually have much to do with whether or not you think you want to have experience of God’s reality. There, you would have a beef that you’re going to get somewhere with under the given of the OP, since you could object that what scripture seems to reveal about soteriology doesn’t seem fair to you. However, your beef wouldn’t necessarily preclude Christian theism either, since there are plenty of Christians who do believe – not without scriptural support of their own – that if you really, sincerely seek knowledge of God for long enough he will eventually make his presence known to you. Read anything you can find on Calvinism (or Augustinianism) and Arminianism (or Wesleyanism).

OK. Carry on with the objections.

–B

40

I am not always the sharpest crayon in the box when it comes to details.

–B