Re: a code behind the bible
Bladestorm360, back when I was still a Christian I was one of those who didn't believe in the rapture of the church, and believed that the church, the saints, would be here but protected from harm. So as a result I felt the people who believed they were going to be raptured away were a bit narcissistic in their belief that they would be taken up into heaven while the rest of us were down here suffering during the tribulation. You are welcome to your own opinion on the end times, but as for myself I have always maintained that the rapture is not a doctrine supported by the first century Christians.
As for George Carline I definitely enjoy his sense of humor. Yes, I agree for a Christian his views may seem pretty harsh, but from an agnostic/atheist point of view he does raise a number of issues which cuts to the heart of the conflict between the two extremes between evidence based rationality and faith based belief.
As for Genesis I don't think there is any con flict between Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 on when God created the animals. As I was taught to understood it Genesis chapter 1 is suppose to be an outline, an overview, of creation where chapter 2 goes back and gives the reader more detail about the events of the 6th day of creation. I was always taught that the animals were created first, and then after God created Adam he brought the animals he had created to him to name and take possession of them.
In any case I do agree that the bible is a complex book to read and understand. That is why after thousands of years it is still debatable what certain things mean because it is difficult to know when something is literal and when the author is speaking metaphorically. Sometimes the only way to figure it out is to read the entire bible and compare books, verses, and authors to get a sense what the general opinion is on a given topic. Plus it helps to use a bit of common sense when interpreting certain passages.
For insta nce, in the gospels Jesus uses a lot of parables and metaphorical wording to get his points across. So when he says something like "when your hand causes you to sin cut it off" he is not being literal there. It is a metaphorical example of cutting yourself off from sinful behavior rather than mutilating your physical body. A bit of common sense would tell anyone that is not to be taken literally.
However, interpreting something like Genesis chapter 1 is a little more problematic. We know that the bible is not exhaustive, and at best Genesis chapter 1 is an outline or overview of creation than a detailed minute by minute account of creation. Even St. Augustine was willing to admit that the Genesis story was incomplete, and chose to take the stories about creation as a metaphorical truth rather than a literal truth. If more creationists had his insight into Genesis we might not have such a disagreement over things like the Big Bang and Evolution since creationists woul dn't be inclined to take every word and line in Genesis absolutely literal.
Assault_freak, you are correct. A lot of Christians such as yourself claim to have personal experiences that attest to their faith, things that convinced them their faith is justified, but since those are personal experience, are not reproducible, there isn't anything a skeptic can do to test and research the claims beyond taking the person's word for it. The methodology behind the scientific method is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness, because it can only test that which is testable and make an informed opinion based on that evidence. As Dark has adequately pointed out at other times on this list the scientific method is flawed in the way it can go about gathering evidence and proving a hypothesis.
That said, I don't think it is so much skeptics think certain things are impossible I'd say most open minded skeptics would say improbable rather than impos sible. Given the room for error in evidence based scientific study and research the best one can do is make an informed statistical likelihood for any given hypothesis to be true or false. So rather than saying God is impossible the best hypothesis one can make with the data right now is unlikely which is not the same as impossible.
Bladestorm360, I think you hit the proverbial nail on the head when you said that preaching at someone and telling they are going to hell is not the way to go about making converts. I do realize that Christians are worried that people will needlessly go to hell if they don't get saved, don't pick up their bible, and convert right away but what they consistently fail to realize is that trying to scare people into accepting their faith is the absolutely wrong way to go about it. Instead of accentuating the positives of their faith they go straight to the one topic that makes non-Christians, particularly atheists and agnostics, cringe. Not because they believe it to be true, but they find it barbaric.
To give you an example all throughout the New Testament God is said to be merciful and just. Except we have a problem with the description of God here since those are by definition opposites, and leaves a skeptic in some doubt which is the case.
The term merciful means that a person is not given the punishment due to him/her for the crime they committed. If someone commits a crime, goes to court, and is given one year in jail instead of the five due for that crime we would call that mercy.
The term justice means that someone gets the punishment for the crime he or she deserves for committing a crime. Therefore if someone commits a crime and gets five years for a crime and that is the maximum sentence possible for that crime we would call that justice. That is the opposite of mercy.
So with that in mind it is difficult to understand how God can be both just and merciful at the same time given that those are not interchangeable characteristics. As a result the bible tends to accentuate one or the other aspect of God depending on which book and author one happens to be reading, and God is either vengeful and out for justice, or he is merciful and forgiving. Either way, starting with preaching about the vengeful, angry, peed off God who is going to roast people in hell is not going to influence anyone in any positive way about someone's faith. It seems to me preaching about the more loving and forgiving aspects of God is a better tact.
BryanP, although I grew up reading the bible there were certain aspects of it I hadn't read until I was older, and when I did I was shocked, amazed, and disagreed with the God in the bible I was reading about rather than the one I had been taught to believe in as a child. That goes hand in hand with what I was saying above how there seems to be two different views of God in the bible. There is the loving, caring, mercifu l, God we are taught about in Sunday school, and there is the angry, vengeful, peed off God who resides in the Old Testament. When one looks at it God seems to be bipolar or suffers from multiple personality disorder and it is inconceivable that God can be all loving and all merciful while he is roasting people in hell for an eternity for sins that may not be that bad.
For instance in the book of Leviticus it specifically and unequivocally states that homosexuals should be taken out and stoned to death. As a humanist who believes in the rule of doing no harm I find such a statute to be barbaric, cruel, and completely inhuman. That has to be one of the worst ways to kill someone, and for what?
Yes, I may not agree with homosexuality, may find it weird, and not something I'd personally want to do myself, but murdering someone because they are gay or lesbian is ridiculous. Having known gays and lesbians in college and elsewhere I realize that they are people like anyon e else with hopes, dreams, and are both good and bad. I certainly have no desire or wish that they be killed. Yet according to the bible, the Old Testament, they are to be taken out and stoned just because they have unusual sexual preferences. Its not as though they stole something, raped someone, or murdered someone, or done any harm worthy of capital punishment.
The point I am getting at here is when I began venturing into those parts of the bible I began to compare what I thought was moral and right and compared it to the depictions of morality in the bible and found I no longer had any respect for the God of the bible. He and I were no longer in agreement on what was right and wrong. I had already began to embrace humanism and I found various concepts like hell to be completely and absolutely appalling. It was things like that which pushed me away from God towards atheism, because I could no longer justify its sense of morality compared to my own sense of right and wrong.< /p>
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=177528#p177528
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
