How are we classifying "hate", here, because there are plenty of things in the New Testament that I find to be morally questionable.

Inciting an irrational dislike of people? Interpret it however you want.
Well, you name it and I'll do my best to explain anything.

What do you mean by "explain"?

Ummm good question...

Just post your issues and we'll discuss it I guess?

1st Timothy 2 is a good example, not necessarily of hatred, but biblical thinking that is inappropriate for today.

Why do they bother with the British and Irish lions rugby team?

Doesnt it overlook the Irish Free State movement?

It seems a few ignorant imperialists have ignored all the blood spilled to continue sending this constructed team to the southern hemisphere

Yep. A passage that causes huge controversy and a lot of division. I never understood that being saved through child berth thing, because that just defeats the purpose of salvation through grace, but that probably comes down to my lack of understanding of the cultural circumstances.

In terms of the women shutting up thing. I've heard it explained that due to women not having any legal authority at the time, ie. their testimony would not Hold up in court, the church was being encouraged to let men do the teaching and running of the churches in order to maintain the integrity of the church and the message it had. In times where a story lived and died on eye witnesses, it was essential that stories were passed on correctly and in every town and city that stories went to, the had to be eye witnesses who could vouch for the story, or else it would have been discredited.

My point being that in such, the church leaders were very hesitant to let women preach a message that would lose credibility in the eyes of the public due to it being delivered by a women. Most Protestant Christians these days allow for female clergy, and those that don't are fast losing support.

Christianity would be a lot more popular if Batman was the son of god.

The Romans would have had a much harder time crucifying him.

There are ROI players in the squad. No Northern Irishmen though.

Edited by afromanGT: 16/6/2013 03:42:23 PM

Someone like him would have existed, yes. Just like Joseph Smith.


All nutters.

Notor I broke down 1 Timothy 2 for you pretty thoroughly in the old thread. Must admit that I am tempted to get active again on the forum because of this thread but don't know if I can stomach the sweeping statements that get brought out and result in the agro from last time.

I remember, although it doesn't make it any less morally questionable.

Will be good to have you back on the thread.

The one thing that resonates with me is your assertion that you get frustrated with people that have belief without a logical justification for that belief.

Can you run us through your logical justification for the existence of Yahweh?

Was Notor felt in an inappropriate way by a priest?

He probably did exist... BUT
The earliest documents about him were written 80 odd years after he died. And written in an entirely different language to what Jesus would have spoke.
Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenty of room for the story to have been changed alot.
That's also proven through the gnostic gospels.

The gnostic gospels have very differing accounts of Jesus' life to the four canonised gospels. They were written around the same time and had just as much validity about Jesus' life as did the canonised ones.

Just some 500 years later the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John sounded the nicest and were somewhat consistent with each other so they were chosen and canonised.


Anyway, when Eastern says there were eye witness accounts... It's a pretty iffy.
No one who knew Jesus would realistically have been alive when the gospels were written (If they were as young as 20 then they would be 100ish when they were written. I'd guess that people probably lived at most half that back then?). So it could only really be word of mouth.

Probably. Or possibly is a composite character made up of many preacher type people of the time.

No.

I did punch a lay preacher in the dick once, but that was entirely non-sexual.

Edited by notorganic: 17/6/2013 01:04:51 PM

:) I am not sure how well this is going to answer that question :lol:

I actually find the Old Testament depiction of God to be an easier one to justify because He very rarely interacted with the world other than through it. The miracles of the Old Testament are almost entirely miracles that involve perfect timing, rivers being blocked or parted, water being released from struck stone, the plagues that struck down Egypt etc. The New Testament miracles are almost all supernatural events, raising the dead, walking on water, quelling the storm, feeding the many etc.

This basically creates a quandary, God has moved away from His normal mode of operation within the world into another. One that does not seem logically consistent with before, but I find that my acceptance of creation as a non static reality assists me here. God in the Old Testament is dealing with relatively simplistic issues and assisting in the evolution within us of a series of moral and ethical questions about who we are and how we relate to others. It highlights how easily it is for us to fail at this. God in the New Testament is teaching us about the consequences of nation building which does not centre around His teachings in the Old Testament and which do not evolve at pace with the changes occurring in the world. He is also telling us that though we are going to continue to make massive mistakes in the way we deal with both each other and Him, He will continue to love us, forgive us and wait for us.

I have no problems with the concept of evolution, of the constantly expanding and cooling state of the universe; the fact the Earth is very old etc. As such I also have no problems accepting that how we understand God and relate to God will also evolve over time. I actually think that is more consistent with both Him as a creator of a dynamic reality and us as being created in His image and so striving to understand it, Him and ourselves through constant questioning.

...

OK, having read that again it doesn't answer your question at all and was more of a philosophical tangent :lol: though it does encourage me to actually expand on it for myself as I get the time :)

Right, logical justification for the existence of God. From our current understanding the entirety of existence and the natural laws that allowed us to eventually develop came about due to a singular event a very long time ago. The conditions of that event were required to be exact for us to arrive at the point whereby we could actually be around to be having this discussion. It is entirely possible to take the view that there needed to be no creator involved in that initial state and that we and everything else are a result of chaos, or conversely that there was a creator involved in that initial state and that we and everything else are a result of design. I personally do not see any true conflict between a belief in chaos as a progenitor or belief in God as a progenitor at this point.

My conflict arises when we talk about mankind, about us. Are we purely gene driven chemical factories with a very complicated series of courtship rituals in order to determine the best mate and continue the propagation of our particular sequence or are we something different? If there is no creator then that is all we are. If there is a creator then we are not. I do not see the way that mankind behaves as a result of chaos, I see that behaviour as a result of intelligence. We appreciate beauty, and can make it. We can both interact with and act upon the reality around us. We can ask questions about that reality and then we can discover ways to answer them. We can guide our own development as both an individual and as a species; we can also guide the development of other species. We can choose our behaviour and understand the consequences of that behaviour on both ourselves and others. We are able to comprehend the difference between something being right and wrong. We can make choices which have nothing to do with our own personal survival and opportunities for breeding, and why would we need to if we were no more than that complex chemical factory? It is this that caused me to fall on the side of the theists. I have not seen a compelling argument in favour of atheism that can talk about us and the way we are.

And I still don't think I have really answered your question :)

He may have existed but not in the way the Bible depicts him. The story of Birth till Crucifixion is an age old folk tale that is told the same way amongst a broad range of cultures. Research Dionysis, Horus, Attis, Krishna & Mithra. All born of the virgin, crusified and resurrected and all date BC.

So if he existed there has been some fuckery a foot!


The question was did he exist?

NOT are the stories true?

Did he exist? Probably.

Are the stories true? I would say most are not.

Edited by leftrightout: 17/6/2013 02:35:03 PM

All of these examples you've given can theoretically be explained by evolution.

They either exist to give us an advantage in getting to the stage of reproducing or are just misused offshoots of other biological functions that give/gave us advantages when used in another way.

i.e. "making beauty" could be a misuse/offshoot of two things.
1) Creativity developed possibly for hunting amongst other things.
2) Appreciation of beauty which possibly developed in order to be attracted towards things/places that are beneficial to survival.

Put them together and we are artists. This brings no obvious biological advantage but arose incidentally due to other interacting human traits.

Edited by neanderthal: 17/6/2013 03:04:45 PM

from my understanding Jesus did exist, however he was not the son of a Carpenter but the son of a Rabbi. Jesus went about preaching and was turned to a martyr to further push another religious sect.

It is my understanding that Jesus was this person "Yeshua bar Josi",this is based on factual evidence available and compared with biblical history. quite possibly it is now out dated and other more relevant details have arisen since I last cared to look.

And while on a similar topic..... did Moses exist?
I think that is much less likely than Jesus.

Some people theorise that his stories were like ancient versions of modern day superhero flicks. Purely fictional stories of his heroics. They explain how he gets his superpowers through one of the gods who favours him (Yahweh).

Kind of like Thor I guess... Maybe in 5000 years everyone will be praising Thor as a prophet? 8-[

in talks about believing the stories etc - this hits me hard also.

hell, reg date played football in the 40s in newcastle, and when i read his biography i question the accuracy of the stats and facts provided, like when he scored 10+ goals against certain opposition, descriptions of some of his goals, etc. that was 50 years ago, in an age when we spoke the same language and radio/tv/computers became in fashion.

You wouldn't be the first person to hypothesise this.

And that's the most brilliant part of the spread of the early church! The fact that when these stories were passed around from town to town, by word of mouth or by letter, people in the towns were able to varify what had been recorded, or else the stories would have been disregarded and forgotten.

The rapid spread of the early church is a great credit to those who saw and recounted the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Son of God or not, many people saw things he did and thought it was worth recording.

Anyone interested in the book of Judas? it tells the same story basically of MMLJ, just with Jesus asking Judas to betray him and in return he would travel with Jesus back into space and across the stars to where Jesus was from.

Not sure if real or just a great ruse, but interesting that the Jesus/Alien myth has roots dated to 30 A.D

Like walking on water and turning water into whine?

I completely disagree that the stories would have been disregarded and forgotten if they weren't true.

There's stories backed up by several sources about Jesus and Muhammad both performing amazing miracles infront of large crowds.
So if these didn't happen then they would have been disregarded?
Obviously not.
In a time where so few people read or write and people were not so sceptical, history shows that it isn't very hard to falsify these things.

Christianity spread amongst speakers of Greek who would not have known Jesus or lived anywhere near where he preached.
It would be quite easy to spread a false story in another country in another language where there's noone to discredit the stories.

Also there are various contradicting tales of what Jesus did in the non canonised gospels

So they were hypothesising that he was an alien prior to his crucifixion? :-k

Give or take a few years but yeah, Judas and Jesus having a chat pointing to the shiny cloud in the sky (possibly high or the Milky way) see the brightest star, that is your reward in death you will journey with me (this is paraphrasing and quite possibly all malarkey.)

Those crazy Christians and their martyrdom.

This.

-PB