(Part 2) Top products from r/DebateReligion

Dr. John Walton has published some perspectives on Genesis 1-2 that are making a huge impact around the Christian world (https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genes ... enesis+one). I like his approach. What his analyses of the text have shown are that Gn. 1-2 are accounts of *functional* creation, not that of material creation. It is about how God ordered the cosmos to function, not about its material manufacture. In the Bible there is no question that God is the creator of the material universe (and there are texts that teach that), but that's not what Genesis 1-2 are about. They are about how God brought order and functionality to the material universe that was there. Let me try to explain VERY briefly.


Gn. 1.1 is a heading, not an action. Then, if it's a text about material creation it will start with nothingness, but if it's a text about bringing order, it will start with disorder, which is what Gn. 1.2 says.


The first "day" is clearly (literally) about a *period* of light called day, and a *period* of light called night. It is about the sequence of day and night, evening and morning, literally. Therefore, what Day 1 is about is God ordering the universe and our lives with the function of TIME, not God creating what the physicists call "light," about which the ancients knew nothing.


Day 1: the light and dark function to give us day and night, therefore TIME


Day 2: the firmament functions to give us WEATHER and CLIMATE


Day 3: The earth functions to bring forth vegetation: plant life and AGRICULTURE


Day 4: The heavenly bodies function to mark out the times and seasons


Day 5: The species function to fill the earth, creating the circles of life, the food chain, and FOOD.


Day 6: Humans function to subdue the earth and rule over it: God's representatives on the earth, scientific mandate, responsible care of the planet.


Day 7: God comes to "rest" in His Temple, meaning that He comes to live with the humans He has made and to engage them in daily life, to reveal Himself to them and be their God.

​

Look through the whole chapter. It is about how the firmament functions to bring us weather (the firmament above and below), how the earth functions to bring forth plants for our sustenance, how the sun, moon, and stars function to order the days and seasons. We find out in day 6 the function of humans: to be fruitful and multiply, to rule the earth and subdue it. Walton contends that we have to look at the text through ancient eyes, not modern ones, and the concern of the ancients was function and order. (It was a given that the deities created the material universe.) The differences between cultures (and creation accounts) was how the universe functioned, how it was ordered, and what people were for. (There were large disagreements among the ancients about function and order; it widely separates the Bible from the surrounding mythologies.)


And on the 7th day God rested. In the ancient world when a god came to "rest" in the temple, he came to live there and engage with the people as their god. So it is not a day of disengagement, but of action and relationship.


In other words, it's a temple text, not an account of material creation. There was no temple that could be built by human hands that would be suitable for him, so God order the entire universe to function as his Temple. The earth was ordered to function as the "Holy Place," and the Garden of Eden as his "Holy of Holies". Adam and Eve were given the function of being his priest and priestess, to care for sacred space (very similar to Leviticus) and to be in relationship with God (that's what Genesis 2 is about).

​

In other words, your case doesn't prove that the Bible is not from God. Maybe you're looking at Genesis from the way it has been viewed for the last 500 years and not the way it was intended by its author to be understood. Maybe it has nothing to do with light existing 3 days before the sun, anything about geology, or the order of creation of fish and fowl.

​

\> From the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ, the Bible allows about four thousand years.

​

The young earth theory is based in counting the generations of Genesis. But that's where the mistake lies. Genealogies weren't the same entity in the ancient world that they are today. In our world a genealogy is to record every person in every generation, in the right order and without gaps. We want to see the sequence. Not so in the ancient world. In the ancient world, genealogies were for royal purposes (to show who was the next rightful king), or religious purposes (to make a theological point). As such, the ancients left huge gaps and sometimes even changed the order to make their point (we're not aware that the writers of the Bible ever changed the order, but they did leave huge gaps). You know how Jesus is called "the son of David"? There are 1000 yrs between them. No matter, he was his son. This was common in the ancient world. They included the generations that fit their agenda. Even in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 10 (as well as the ones of Matthew and Luke), they include the people who make up the number that fits their theological point. In our day, we cry FOUL, but in the ancient world, this was business as usual. The genealogies weren't not primarily a way of record keeping, but to establish continuity from one era to another. Even numbers were often (but not necessarily) symbolic rather than literal.

​

\> The Hebrews represent Jehovah as resting on the seventh day, as though the arduous labors of creation had completely exhausted his energies. Fancy Omnipotence requiring rest to recruit its strength! The Bible, and especially in its earlier parts, is grossly anthropomorphic.

​

Wrong again. In the ancient world, when a deity came to "rest" in his temple, he came to live with his people and engage them as their god. It has nothing to do with exhaustion or relaxation.

​

\> It exhibits God as wrestling with men (Jacob) and sharing their repasts.

​

The one wrestling with Jacob is identified as an angel in Hosea 12.4. When Jacob says in Genesis 32.28 that he struggled with God, this is true, but the physical wrestling match was with a messenger of God. Jacob had been struggling with God his whole life. When he says in v. 30 that he "saw God face to face," we have to recognize that the Hebrew word is *Elohim*, a word that is used of deity, angels, and even at times humans.

​

\> and in one instance as giving Moses a back view of his person.

​

You must read more carefully, especially if you are going to accuse and deprecate. The text does not say Moses saw the back of God's person. What God said is that He would cause His goodness to pass in front of Moses (Ex. 33.19) and that He would proclaim His name. But, he added (v. 20), Moses would not be allowed to see Him. Then we see that the Lord's glory passes by (v. 22).

​

These verses are fulfilled in Ex. 34.5, but there is no notion that Moses saw God. He experienced God's goodness in receiving the covenant. The cloud was full of God's glory. Moses could see the glory of God. God disclosed to Him the hidden nature of his being (Ex. 34.6-7).

​

So it's just not true that these things give evidence, let alone prove, that the Bible is not from God.

1.] From my understanding Allah/Yahweh refers to the same revealed supernatural deity; the Abrahamic God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

• Given the number of times that the Word of Allah/Yahweh has been revealed, and the widely different and massive contradictions in foundational dogma from the many revelations, what evidence is there to support that the Prophet Mohammad finally got it correct?
  
  
• Why did Allah decide to encourage friendly relations with Jews and Christians and then directly reverse the omniscient Divine guidance in a seeming contradiction?
  
  Friends:
  
  Qur'an 5:52 You will surely find the most intense of the people in animosity toward the believers [to be] the Jews and those who associate others with Allah ; and you will find the nearest of them in affection to the believers those who say, "We are Christians." That is because among them are priests and monks and because they are not arrogant.
  
  Qur'an 57:27 Then We sent following their footsteps Our messengers and followed [them] with Jesus, the son of Mary, and gave him the Gospel. And We placed in the hearts of those who followed him compassion and mercy and monasticism, which they innovated; We did not prescribe it for them except [that they did so] seeking the approval of Allah . But they did not observe it with due observance. So We gave the ones who believed among them their reward, but many of them are defiantly disobedient.
  
  Wait - Not friends
  
  Qur'an 5:51 O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you - then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.
  
  If the apologetic response is that the English translation is flawed, then (1) please provide an English translation that is an acceptable translation of the perfect word of Allah, and (2) why does the perfect word of Allah require so much interpretation to explain these contradiction?
  
  2.] Allah/Yahweh as the one and only true revealed Deity
  
  A foundational belief in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is that Allah, God, or Yahweh/YHWH, is the only true revealed God. As this is also the core of the Tanakh (Judaism), Bible (Christianity), and Qur'an/Koran (Islam), questions concerning the source of, and the validity of, this monotheistic Deity raises significant doubt as to the Holy Book's validity as the word of God/Yahweh/Allah. Yet the evidence points to the growth in the belief of the monothesitic Yahweh God from a polytheistic foundation of the El God pantheon in the ancient Ugarits and Canaanites who became the early Israelites. Yahweh was a subordinate fertility/rain/warrior local desert God whom, through a process of convergence, differentiation and displacement (synthesis and syncretism), was elevated to a monolatry and then to a monotheistic Deity.
  
  Online evidential sources related to the development and growth of Allahism/Yahwehism:
  
  
• Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the Religion of Israel
  
• The evolution of God
  
• Ugarit and the Bible
  
• The Ascension of Yahweh: The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism from the Afrasan to Josiah - PDF warning
  
  Other:
  
  
• The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel by Mark Smith
  
• The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts by Mark S. Smith
  
• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong
  
• The Religion of Ancient Israel (Library of Ancient Israel) by Patrick D. Miller
  
• Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches by Ziony Zevit
  
  Allah/Yahweh/God is claimed to be the only true God (ex., “There is no god but Allah.”), yet significant physical archeological and linguistic anthropological evidence documents the mythological growth of Allah/Yahweh from a subordinate rain/fertility/warrior Deity in a large polytheistic pantheon of revealed and worshiped Deities into a politically motivated monotheistic Deity belief system. In other words, the evidence points to Allahism/Yahwehism as a human-made concept and not as a self-revealed monotheistic Deity.
  
  With the revealed early history of Allahism/Yahwehism as a subordinate Deity (to the El Father God Deity), what evidence does Islam provide to refute the physical archeological and linguistic anthropological to support that Allah/Yahweh has always been the one true perfect monotheistic Deity?
  
  Thank you for your well considered reply.

>A predicted a couple of things when I posted my previous reply. One was that you would only respond to my last point. And the other was that that point would trigger you to no end.
>
>Look, you're just one of those people who thinks their views are universal. The things your pointing out as evidence of a morally degrading society aren't anything new. There is evidence that we're living in the best time ever in the history of mankind.
>
>Let's look at you points:

You probably thought Hillary would win the election too, because of all the scientific polls done to prove she would win..

There is no arguing that we live in the best time to be alive, the entire point of my post, was that as we lose sight of religion we lose the actions that provided all of the prosperity you are pointing to. What is the source?

You are tearing down the building, then trying to use the bricks of that building to make a house..on sand....

>Has that happened? Has Miley Cyrus been nude on TV? But that's not important. Almost 70 years ago, people were saying "Marilyn Monroe is showing her cooter!" (who talks like that anyway?).

Have you seen any of her live performances at award shows? She might as well be fully naked...I mean come on could you be any more pedantic?

>Horrible, or course. But not new. Remember when people used to drag people behind their truck until they were dead?

I won't need to remember, because I will be seeing it again in this lifetime the way things are going...

>Not true, but poverty isn't new.
>
>You can't be older than me, and I'm not even close to "kids these days" as you are. Here's a relevant quote:
>
>“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”
>
>Who know who said that? Socrates. 2500 years ago.

You know the funny thing about Socrates right? He didn't have Jesus either! So funny the problems he was encountering then in a rational advanced society without Jesus, is the same things happening to us as we lose Jesus! Super cool point thanks for making that.

Great thing all those Greek people converted to....Christianity!!! here is a wonderful excerpt from the Urantia book. The Greek Scholar Rodan of Alexandria. I suggest you read the entire chapter on him in the book, and then the next chapter titled "Further discussions with Rodan"

But the greatest of all methods of problem solving I have learned from Jesus, your Master. I refer to that which he so consistently practices, and which he has so faithfully taught you, the isolation of worshipful meditation. In this habit of Jesus’ going off so frequently by himself to commune with the Father in heaven is to be found the technique, not only of gathering strength and wisdom for the ordinary conflicts of living, but also of appropriating the energy for the solution of the higher problems of a moral and spiritual nature. But even correct methods of solving problems will not compensate for inherent defects of personality or atone for the absence of the hunger and thirst for true righteousness.

160:1.11 (1774.3) I am deeply impressed with the custom of Jesus in going apart by himself to engage in these seasons of solitary survey of the problems of living; to seek for new stores of wisdom and energy for meeting the manifold demands of social service; to quicken and deepen the supreme purpose of living by actually subjecting the total personality to the consciousness of contacting with divinity; to grasp for possession of new and better methods of adjusting oneself to the ever-changing situations of living existence; to effect those vital reconstructions and readjustments of one’s personal attitudes which are so essential to enhanced insight into everything worth while and real; and to do all of this with an eye single to the glory of God—to breathe in sincerity your Master’s favorite prayer, “Not my will, but yours, be done.”

You know I predicted a few things too.

1. You wouldn't be able to see any sense in anything I say because your reality is crooked.
   
2. You would argue even the most basic simple obvious worldly truths, or try and conflate them to meet your narrative.
   
   Edited to reference who was talking in the quote.

>"Don't be so quick to put us (theists/spiritualists) all in the same boat. There may be many more like me than you realize. Unfortunately, the more close minded, irrational among us tend to be the more vocal."

Also, more numerous: http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/hold-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx

>"Yes I realize that the latter hold place in certain historical religions, but I really don't care about them, as they don't have anything to do with my beliefs. I do get that you are making the point that my beliefs now, ultimately, are just as fictional as those beliefs then. But I would say that it is a false equivalency, a slippery slope, to compare them. Any belief must be tested and judged on its own merit."

It's not so much "Dead religions are untrue, so currently relevant religions are also untrue" as it is "If you exhaustively study other religions you will see pervasive shared themes and implied psychology that the "somewhat smart" mistake for proof that all religions are divinely inspired and that the slightly more clever realize is proof that they were all authored by human beings."

Part of judging a belief system, in particular a holy text on it's own merits is giving it a read-through without the a priori assumption that it's correct on some level. Look at it instead as an anthropologist and psychologist, it is very revealing.

>"In fact, I'm suggesting that contemplation of this other realm is purely optional, that you don't need it for fulfillment in this realm, and that any conclusions about this other realm should not fly in the face of what we know about this realm."

In an ideal world. But what you've said is another way of saying "Don't treat it as if it's true, and it won't create problems". Other sincere, devout religious people you try to convert to this approach will sense that about it right away, like a cow catching a whiff of the slaughterhouse it's being led into.

>"Who am I?"

A mostly hairless self aware primate, part of a thin film of primates currently coating the globe for however long the oil holds out.

>"Why am I aware of myself?"

You have a sufficiently complex brain.

>"Where does my experience as an individual come from?"

The fact that your brain is physically separated from others and does not exchange information with them except by speech and writing.

>"How did the universe begin?"

Spontaneous particle and antiparticle separation events in an endless sea of quantum potential. "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain', into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." -Richard Feynman

>"Why is there something instead of nothing?"

Nothingness is maximally ordered. Collapse into somethingness was guaranteed by entropy. As for why entropy still applied back then, see the Feynman quote above.

>"I don't think science can answer these questions."

It's actually explained most of that and is working hard on the rest. I recommend picking up a copy of http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Design-Stephen-Hawking/dp/055338466X

>" It only simply gets at the fact that belief in a spiritual....something....may well satisfy certain philosophical questions that science can not. "

But does it? Simply offering up a story is not the same as explaining something. An explanation which cannot be shown to be true is not an explanation, it is a story. If you need to know a big bang occurred I can show you pictures of the lingering background radiation from it. If you need to know that matter and antimatter can spring from nothingness (insofar as we can tell at the moment) I can show it to you in a particle accelerator or at the event horizon of black holes in the form of Hawking Radiation. There's such a wealth of provable explanations on offer from science that the idea that some people take a story and treat it like an explanation because it's religious in origin is profoundly frustrating.

>"But I don't think these questions will ever be answered in any quantifiable, measurable way."

Even if that were true, it doesn't make a story legitimately equivalent to an explanation. Treating the story as true just because we don't have an explanation yet ignores the other, more sensible option of simply saying "we don't have it all figured out yet, and may never". I'll admit, "We don't know" is not satisfying. But that doesn't justify replacing it with pretend-knowledge.

>"But for those who chose to contemplate them, they must be answered spiritually. At least for now."

If, indeed, what they are doing can truthfully be called 'answering'.

No premise of any cosmological argument defended by legitimate philosophers requires that literally everything requires a cause. Rather they say what is contingent has a cause, or what begins to exist has a cause, etc.

The easiest way to justify those principles (usually called 'the principle of causality') is in virtue of PSR. For instance, if something contingent exists (and contingency implies it is not self-explanatory) then if it has no cause, its existence is inexplicable in the sense that nothing intrinsic to it or extrinsic to it accounts for its existence, and therefore has no explanation for its existence. So by modus tollens if PSR is true, the principle of causality is true.

PSR can be motivated by several arguments. For instance, there is the inductive argument, i.e. when we look for explanations, we tend to find them, and even when we don't, we usually suppose there is an unknown explanation rather than literally no explanation whatsoever. There's a related abductive argument, namely that the fact we tend to find explanations is better accounted for on the hypothesis that PSR is true as opposed to PSR being false. These can be considered broadly empirical arguments in the sense that they do not deductively prove PSR yet provide evidence in its favor.

There are also retorsion arguments, referring to arguments that show denying PSR leads to absurdities. For instance, we suppose when we take some claim to be rationally justified, we not only have a reason for accepting the claim (in the sense of a rational justification) but also that this reason is the reason why we accept the claim (in the sense of causing or explaining our acceptance of it). But if PSR is false, we can have no reason for thinking this is the case. For all we know, we believe what we do for literally no reason whatsoever, rather than in virtue of good reasons. And even the fact that it seems we believe what we do in virtue of good reasons could itself be a brute fact, lacking any explanation in terms of the truth of the matter. So if PSR is false, we don't know we believe anything because we possess good reasons for doing so. Yet it seems obvious we do know at least some things in virtue of the possession of good reasons, which commits us to the truth of PSR (unless you're willing to bite the bullet and accept that we know nothing in virtue of reasons, which raises a problem of self-defeat or incoherence, since it's hard to see how such a view could be justified by appealing to reasons).

There are a lot of other arguments you can give for PSR. See in particular Alexander Pruss's book on the subject. But for now that should be sufficient to demonstrate there are at least plausible reasons for holding PSR to be true, which would justify appealing to some version of the principle of causality.

Sorry, I forgot about this post. A question isn't offensive and your post was not offensive in the slightest.

Perhaps that was confusing. I began to read about Philosophy of Mind during my undergraduate years, and have always had a singe of neoplatanism in my blood since I read about Plato's theory of forms. Today, I'm a hylemorphic dualist. I could go in depth, but I actually have to go to sleep as I've got an appt tomorrow morning (EST). On top of that, I'm actually getting off Reddit today and am staying off indefinitely except for /r/medicalschool (med school life, ha). Regardless, I'm glad I caught this when I did (coincidence or divine providence?^^^joking )

As to why I'm Catholic, put simply: I find nothing wrong in Catholicism, and "everything checks out," so to speak (I find the common criticisms vapid). Becoming Catholic was a tedious process that involved many steps, but there are quite a few that have ended up where I am through a similar path.

Anyway, I could go more in-depth here, but I'd recommend just reading what I read. The basis of my adopting a deist perspective is very similar to the reasons why Antony Flew, one of the 20th century's most famous atheist philosophers, adopted a deist persepective--if you want to check that out.

Regarding phil of mind/dualism, I suggest:
The SEP article on dualism:
Note in the intro paragraph:
>Discussion about dualism, therefore, tends to start from the assumption of the reality of the physical world, and then to consider arguments for why the mind cannot be treated as simply part of that world.

Mind/Brain Identity SEP article


If interested, read likewise for "consciousness" and for the other point of view, "physicalism." I currently reject a completely physicalist perspective.

I recommend reading contemporary philosopher Ed Feser's blog (vibrant combox if that's your thing). Here is a post on the above subject.

Lastly, these two books are excellent, I'd start with the first:

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-A-Beginners-Guide/dp/1851684786

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Jaegwon-Kim/dp/0813344581

And lastly, the commonly misunderstood Cosmological Argument.

Let me know if you find anything interesting to challenge my beliefs (perhaps I'll respond some months from now, ha), always a truth seeker. Best of luck in your search for Truth.

> I recognize that your view of God is set in stone

... only until someone shows me a single shred of hard scientific evidence that there is such a being.

> and so I won’t waste our time trying to convince you that God is God.

God is a tautology??!!? You don't have anything more positive to say about him that YHVH, He is? Wow.

> He can’t make any wrong moves he is absolute and so we puny humans can’t even begin to understand and as a result judge him.

Interesting. So, you don't claim to know whether God is good or evil? I claim the fictional character described in both the Torah and the New Testament is demonstrably evil. I do so by pointing to the words of the Bible. You claim not to even know if you're worshiping and following a force for good or evil. What if God is evil? Would you still follow?

> But while your opinion of God is grim don’t you at least agree with the teachings of Jesus many of which are the foundations of western society morals?

This is a loaded question. Your assumption that western society is built on the teachings of Jesus is false, see part B of my answer below.

A) No. I don't agree with the teachings of Jesus. Of course, I'm posting deliberately cherry-picked statements from the Bible. But, these are all legitimate statements in the Bible.

Scroll down to the list at the following link starting with number 1158, which should be the start of the New Testament's cruelty, unless anyone has edited the list since the time I am typing this.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html

Here's a list of intolerance in the Bible. Scroll down to Matthew again started at 538, for instances of intolerance in the New Testament.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/int/long.html

And, this is a list of misogyny. Scroll down to number 330 for the start of the New Testament here.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/women/long.html

Here's a list of some of the wonderful family values of which the Bible speaks. Start at number 360 for the New Testament.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/fv/long.html

Here are some interesting Biblical views on sex. The N.T. stuff starts at number 231 this time.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/sex/long.html

B) No. Western civilization is actually founded on views from the period of the enlightenment.

From wikipedia (emphasis mine): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

>> The Enlightenment (also known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason; in French: le Siècle des Lumières, lit. '"the Century of Lights"'; and in German: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment") was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, "The Century of Philosophy".

>> The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on reason as the primary source of authority and legitimacy and came to advance ideals like liberty, progress, tolerance, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state.[4][5] In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. The Enlightenment was marked by an emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism, along with increased questioning of religious orthodoxy—an attitude captured by the phrase Sapere aude, "Dare to know".

Compare the Bill of Rights to the Ten Commandments. Which one gives rights? Which one takes them away?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments

If western society is founded on Christian values, why is it that only 3 of the 10 commandments are actually illegal?

> is there any other reason for compassion other than Jesus telling us to be servants and to love others as yourself and to do to the lowest as we would to Jesus?

Yes. The reasons are the same ones that caused Jesus to say what he said. We evolved as a social species. All social species have morals.

Humans have performed some horribly cruel experiments on animals. One of them was performed on rats. They taught rat #1 to press a lever to receive food pellets. This is easy to do. Rats are quite smart and have no trouble at all making the connection to pressing a lever for food. Then, they put a cage with rat #2 (a rat that rat #1 does not even know) in sight of rat #1. When rat #1 presses the lever, s/he continues to receive food. But, rat #2 receives an electric shock. Seeing that the lever visibly causes pain to rat #2, rat #1 stops pressing the lever and may even starve him/herself to death.

Not all humans are so caring and empathetic.

But, the point is that morals exist to varying degrees in all social species. These are an evolved trait. Even social fish have morals. This is far from unique to humans. And, it sure as hell didn't begin with Jesus.

https://www.livescience.com/24802-animals-have-morals-book.html

> I’m sure you know of all the great missionaries of the last centuries that under the threat of death flew to the most hostile to western civilization countries and helped the people there not only with the good news but also with material goods.

And also with homophobia within the last century.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-kaoma-uganda-gays-american-ministers-20140323-story.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/18/us-evangelicals-africa-charity-missionaries-homosexuality

When African wackadoodles say that homosexuals "eat da poo poo", they're getting that crap from American missionaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Ssempa

> I myself as a child spent five years with my family in Haiti helping the people that had previously suffered from the earthquake 2010.

That is truly wonderful and I applaud your efforts. Not all Christians are so nice. Many vote Republican!

> There is no moral or social reason to do anything out of selflessness in today’s society.

That is false. The reason is that we evolved as a social species, as noted above, and that all social species have morals and whatever it is you're calling social reason.

> In the end there is no moral ground at all, everything is subject to people’s opinions at the time.

There is tons of moral ground that evolved over hundreds of millions of years! That this moral ground is changing and improving over time is a good thing. I'm proud that my morals are not dictated by my sheepshagging ancestors who wrote the book on genocide. My morals reflect the improved moral zeitgeist of western society that has been improving morality for centuries.

Good book on our improving morals: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Paperback by Steven Pinker

Sure, so apart from a lack of reason to accept those extraordinary claims I listed before, I would also defend the statement that we have firm evidence that Christianity is a human invention, a simple product of human culture.

This should not be too outlandish a claim, as even Christians can probably agree that most of the worlds religions are creations of our changing society (after all, Christians probably would disagree that Hinduism, paganism, Nordic, Hellenistic, aboriginal religions were divinely inspired/authored).

By looking back into the origins of Christianity, and the origins of the Judaic system from which it is derived, we can very clearly see changes in religious deities and stories, as the religion began incorporating myths from surrounding areas and as general patterns of beliefs changed. From what we can currently understand, it appears the the origin of Christianity started as a polytheistic pantheon with at least Yahweh, El, Baal and Asherah. It then moved slowly from polytheism to henotheism to monaltry to monotheism, as was relatively common in the Axial Age.

All of this points to the religion not representative of singular divine inspiration, and instead being representative of being a product of human culture, changing along with society.

This is a rather large topic of course, and if you want further reading, I recommend:

• [The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel](http://www.amazon.com/The-Early-History-God-Biblical/dp/080283972X) by Mark Smith<br />

• The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts by Mark S. Smith
  
• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong
  
• The Religion of Ancient Israel (Library of Ancient Israel) by Patrick D. Miller
  
• Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches by Ziony Zevit
  
• Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (Library Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies) by John Day
  
• God in Translation: Deities in Cross-Cultural Discourse in the Biblical World by Mark S. Smith
  
• Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible, by Michael S. Heiser, PhD
  
• The Ascension of Yahweh: The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism from the Afrasan to Josiah by Andrew Halladay
  
• Are Yahweh and El the same god OR different gods?
  
• Ugarit and the Bible
  
• Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the Religion of Israel By David Steinberg
  
• The evolution of God

>Yes, there should be no there. Why would a benevolent god shield a few animals in a garden while the rest were susceptible to diseases and cancers and genetic disorders. Not to mentions the necessity of ending the life of another animal to eat is pretty miserable too. Both living things want to keep living but neither have sinned to warrant their own deaths.

I think you're kind of feeding into OP's assumption here, that suffering = result of sin. I'm arguing that isn't the case.

What Genesis 2-3 could be referring to is that time when God started revealing Himself to creation in a direct way, at a time when it was deemed humans were ready to respond. A fascinating part of the book The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate by John Walton was that some parts of the story seems to indicate that the adam (literally , "the human") was given priestly tasks. Perhaps it was the role of these first pair to start dishing out information on God, and people would come to Eden to meet with God. Certainly we get that impression from the rest of the Bible: that God isn't content with only a few knowing about Him, but that the whole world should come to worship (and of course, this kind of finds its climax in Christ, in the story of the Bible).

> Advice recall, In Genesis it implies God doesn't want them to live forever if they know the secrets of the world. So are you saying had they not eaten the first fruit they would have lived forever?

I would rather say, if they continued eating the second fruit. But eating the first fruit (from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) disqualified them from access to the second.

Now whatever that first tree represented is still up in the air. There's a number of good guesses. My personal favourite is that it's an idiom for "wisdom without reference to God". Kind of like how we might say "we searched high and low". We don't mean there's only two places we looked - it's everything inbetween. So too this first tree might be a metaphor for living without God, and instituting moral decisions without God's authority. It was, in effect, a mutiny.

>Assertions from church fathers and theologians have NO BEARING bearing on what textual scholars have discovered over the past 19 centuries my friend.

That is a ridiculous statement. The gospel of John for example was completed around 98CE. You believe what contemporaries of John wrote just a few years later in the early 2nd centuries doesn't matter? That is ridiculous. You say you believe in textual examination to determine the author, then why did you dismiss exactly that. Here's what certain textual scholars have said:

>Since Matthew had been a tax collector, it was natural that he would be explicit in his mention of money, figures, and values. (Matt. 17:27; 26:15; 27:3) He keenly appreciated God’s mercy in allowing him, a despised tax collector, to become a minister of the good news and an intimate associate of Jesus. Therefore, we find Matthew alone of the Gospel writers giving us Jesus’ repeated insistence that mercy is required in addition to sacrifice. (9:9-13; 12:7; 18:21-35) Matthew was greatly encouraged by Jehovah’s undeserved kindness and appropriately records some of the most comforting words Jesus uttered: “Come to me, all you who are toiling and loaded down, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am mild-tempered and lowly in heart, and you will find refreshment for your souls. For my yoke is kindly and my load is light.” (11:28-30)

I also mentioned how 42% of Matthew's account is not to be found in any other gospel.

>I love the way you emphasized the Matthew specific material while leaving out the fact that 50% of his gospel is copied WORD FOR WORD from Mark

58% of what he wrote is also written about by one or more of the other gospel writers. However, the claim that he copied word for word from Mark has no basis.

>On top of that there are verbal cues in the text that show beyond doubt it was originally composed in Greek..with many of the so-called OT prophecies referenced by Matthew worded (and mistranslated) exactly as they were in the Septuagint, which was a Greek version of the OT that the author used for a source.

Matthew was actually written in Aramaic and Koine Greek. So when the book of Matthew refered to OT prophecies it used the Greek septugent OT translation. I do agree with that but I fail to see how you are claiming this proves Matthew did not write the book that bears his name.

>There are a myriad of other reasons why mainstream scholars believe that all of the gospels were composed by anonymous Greek-speaking Christians long after the death of anyone who knew Jesus. If you are sincerely interested in how the NT came together, rather than bolstering conclusions you have arrived at for other reasons, this book is a good starting place: http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330919177&sr=8-1

I have in fact read a good part of that book as well as other books of Bart Ehrman. He takes things people have known all along and tries to sensationalize them. His basic argument is that the new testament has hundreds of differences with many early manuscripts. What he doesn't tell you prominently is that almost all the differences are attributed to trivial things like misspellings which don't in fact change the meaning of the words. I invite you to share with me two or three points that absolutely convince you that the Bible was altered. You will quickly realize the book is largely designed to make huge claims through sensationalizing of things we already know.

> I refer you to this site, created by Christians, maintained by Christians, and used by students in every major seminary on earth for research purposes. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com

I fail to see why you refered me to this site. A majority of it is talking about writings of early christians after the first century. Are you claiming these writings are also part of the Bible?

Keep in mind that the vast majority of the comments here are from staunch materialists who rely on the evidence of their 5 senses and seek to explain phenomena in terms of natural physical laws Atheism has nothing to say about consciousness but contrary to popular opinion there are many atheists who see consciousness as a property existing independent of what the 5 senses can describe and which must be accounted for in any theory of reality. A great and erudite book on this subject is Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos.

>The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all. Even though the theistic outlook, in some versions, is consistent with the available scientific evidence, I don’t believe it, and am drawn instead to a naturalistic, though non-materialist, alternative. Mind, I suspect, is not an inexplicable accident or a divine and anomalous gift but a basic aspect of nature that we will not understand until we transcend the built-in limits of contemporary scientific orthodoxy.

Yes. I have heard atheists say that Dawkins book was an important source of information for them and it helped lead them to atheism.

Here is a website called Amazon.com

They allow users to review the book.

http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/product-reviews/0618680004

The top comment is by someone who might qualify as "EVIDENCE" that you are looking for.

So here is some evidence, anecdotal and 3rd party.

Versus you saying:

>I don't think Dawkins was very good at converting the religious to non-religion.

>I suspect that most of Dawkins readers were already in agreement with him.

Well.

Yes.

Conjecture.

>The earliest written records of Jesus were written within 40 years of Jesus's life, which are some of the earliest records when compared with other historical figures.

The dating of Mark to around 70 is contentious; it could easily be an early-2nd-century document. It's also not true that more contemporaneous records are not common; many figures from history we know from things they or their contemporaries wrote. And the stories about Jesus aren't histories, so comparing them with things that are histories, like Arrian's work about Alexander, is disingenuous.

>They are also very consistent, which would seem unlikely if Jesus's life had been exaggerated.

No, they're not. And in almost all the places where the Gospels agree, they're identifiably using an earlier Gospel as a source, often Mark. That doesn't mean that source is any more reliable.

>Somehow, Christianity survived for 300 years while being actively punished and rejected by the Roman Empire.

Not really.

>Since then, Christianity has taken a huge part in western civilization.

This is in no way an indicator that its historical claims are true.

I think Jesus began as a preexistent celestial being, an archangel granted special power by God, crucified in the heavens by Satan and his demons, just as Paul presents him. The stories placing him on Earth were a later invention, probably originally meant as allegories, or to use a familiar Christian term, parables. Taking them literally proved to make them convincing, which proved to be politically advantageous.

Not the person you were talking to but Atenism is very similar Second Temple Judaism. I can dig up some books on it if you're interested, but here is a series of five mini lectures (should start at ep 108 if I got the link right).

Regarding the origins of Judaism, I would recommend The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, Yahweh and The God's and Goddesses of Caanan and anything by Thomas Römer. Links to his classes and others you might enjoy here. And here's a PDF of From Gods to God that shows how Israel interacted with the religions of its neighbors through myth.

Basic semiotics teaches that all communication requires interpretation; everything we say or write is a sign in some way. If we follow your line of reasoning, we would have good cause to not trust anything we hear at all.

I'd recommend reading the first 2-3 chapters of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion where the author offers a pretty good defense of metaphorical language.

> I've had spiritual experiences I believe are from God, so in a way, yes.

but you've never met him. the answer is no

> I've never met President Obama. Should I believe he doesn't exist? That's your best evidence?

neither have I but others have and we can prove his existence. are you trolling?

> I'll agree with the ones other than Christianity that I've researched.

ah, so you are an atheists towards other gods.

> Can you provide what convinces you of this in regards to Christianity?

this is going to require some research and time which sadly I dont think you'll do. but here are a few. I could go on and on and on if you'd like.

this, this, this, this, this, this

Assertions from church fathers and theologians have NO BEARING bearing on what textual scholars have discovered over the past 19 centuries my friend. I refer you to this site, created by Christians, maintained by Christians, and used by students in every major seminary on earth for research purposes. http://www.earlychristianwritings.com

I love the way you emphasized the Matthew specific material while leaving out the fact that 50% of his gospel is copied WORD FOR WORD from Mark, who was most certainly not an eye witness. This is not what you would expect from someone who actually witnessed the events. On top of that there are verbal cues in the text that show beyond doubt it was originally composed in Greek..with many of the so-called OT prophecies referenced by Matthew worded (and mistranslated) exactly as they were in the Septuagint, which was a Greek version of the OT that the author used for a source. There are a myriad of other reasons why mainstream scholars believe that all of the gospels were composed by anonymous Greek-speaking Christians long after the death of anyone who knew Jesus. If you are sincerely interested in how the NT came together, rather than bolstering conclusions you have arrived at for other reasons, this book is a good starting place: http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330919177&sr=8-1

Genesis is not a Gospel. It's the first book of the Old Testament (and therefore the Bible). Beyond that, I don't know what a "a know-it-all/always right" is. It's certainly not something I'd write.

As for the things you quote: Genesis was written to a bronze iron age culture. That doesn't mean they were idiots. They could ask the exact same questions -- and certainly would have. They also had practical knowledge and common sense; they understood God wasn't telling them to eat poison berries. So Genesis is saying something else; it's not giving a play-by-play scientific description of the origins of material existence. It's very likely talking about God's establishing an order to creation and placing man in the divine economy.

John Walton has two books on this idea, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate and The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (with N.T. Wright). I've read both, and they're a good introduction to a better contextual understanding of Genesis and its purpose as Scripture. I personally prefer something with a little more theological and (modern) cosmological depth to it, but they're aimed at a general audience and in that respect I think they're worth reading.

EDIT: bronze -> iron.

> Okay, and there's people much smarter than you or I who, after years of research, disagree with you. This shouldn't surprise you. Saying "Gospels are a complete mess" tells me you don't really know the other side very well. Probably still asking questions like "Well then who was at the tomb? One woman or three", yeah?

And there are a lot of smart people, smarter than you or I who say that the gospels have lots of historical problems for instance...

> A great recent addition to this discussion is Bauckman's "Jesus and the Eye Witnesses" - https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906

There were no eye witnesses to Jesus. The gospels were written at least two generations after his death and the verification for the life of Jesus is pitiful. Meanwhile, some of the verifiable events (earthquake, eclipse, Harod's actions, etc.) are shown to have not occurred.

Anyway, good luck with your appeals to authority.

>With that in mind, can someone direct me to an english translation that would make it's miraculous nature most evident?

No

But here is a translation that is recommended by many:

The Qur'an (Oxford World's Classics) - M.A.S. Abdel Haleem

Free PDF:

https://yassarnalquran.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/the_quran-abdel-haleem.pdf

~$7 Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Quran-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199535957

Edit: Actually Nouman Ali Khan attempts to convey the linguistic miracle to a non-Arabic audience its not perfect but without learning a new language this is pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-ULa2JzPG0

> Also, monolatrism was present in a number of belief systems throughout Europe and the Middle East. Its not a stepping stone to monotheism.

evidently it can be. monotheism is not necessarily the terminal state of religious evolution, and you don't necessarily have to have monotheism come from monolatrism. for instance, in greece, monotheism seems to have come from a philosophical tradition unrelated to the polytheistic/henotheistic/monolatrist cults. in egypt, monotheism very briefly existed rather suddenly when one pharaoh just rejected all the other gods, with no monolatrism in between.

however, in the ancient near east, there was already a tradition of monolatrism across just about every canaanite culture in the bronze age, with similar traditions in babylonia/sumeria/akkad. the israelites were monolatrist because the people they descended from were monolatrists.

> Now how did Judaism become monotheistic? Probably conquest and forced conversion.

that's, uh. i don't even know what you mean here. but it wasn't the answer to the question i was asking. of course there was probably some conquest involved, as one monolatrist cult became monotheist and struggled for power against the other cults. this may have happened under the reign of josiah of judah, shortly prior to the babylonian exile of 586 BCE. it's also possible that something similar happened around the return from exile a few years later, when the more persian influenced jewish aristocracy came back with some new ideas. this is the generally accepted model in academia. it's also possible that the babylonian invasion effectively eliminated the non-yahwist cults in judah. hard to say. but what nobody in academia doubts is that prior to being monotheist, the tradition that led to judaism was monolatrist, with yahweh as the patron god.

we don't doubt this because we have the stuff they wrote down about it.

> The obvious fact that they've directly stolen from their neighboring religions demonstrates the invalidity of their claims.

uh, okay. and? religious traditions borrow from others all the time. the israelites/judeans were canaanites, they have mythology similar to other canaanites, yes. not a surprise here. it's just that instead of worshiping hadad, or melqart, or hammon, whom other canaanite cultures called "baal" (lord), they worship yahweh, whom they call "adonai" (my lords).

> You continue to insinuate deeper meaning, as if the conclusions of monothiests are true and obvious, but if they are... prove it. Support your statement. Don't insinuate false knowledge.

i'm not sure what you think i'm arguing, but i suggest starting at the top again, and re-reading my posts. this time, don't assume i'm defending some particular religious tradition, and note that i say things like "we have no reason to" "take religious traditions at their word", and that i'm arguing for a relatively late shift towards monotheism around the time of persian contact.

> Prove this. Prove that they were yahwists.

kay.

>> אָנֹכִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, אֲשֶׁר הוֹצֵאתִיךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם מִבֵּית עֲבָדִים: לֹא-יִהְיֶה לְךָ אֱלֹהִים אֲחֵרִים, עַל-פָּנָי.

>> we are yahweh your god, that brought you out of egypt, from the house of slavery. do not have yourself other gods in my presence.

the person who wrote this is a) a yahwist (see the name יְהוָה there?) and b) monolatrist (see how he says not to have other gods, rather than that there are no other gods?) this text was compiled around the time of the babylonian exile, 586 BCE, or shortly after from component sources that antedated the compilation. the components are probably in the range of 800-700 BCE for J and E, 600 BCE for D (probably written specifically for josiah), 500 BCE for P, and all over the place for R.

> You keep citing yahwist monolatrists, but that was never a thing.

they literally left us a book about yahweh and monolatrism. we know they existed.

> You're inventing history to satisfy your need for deeper meaning.

i am not!

> But it's a blatant fabrication, and when directly addressed, you simply refute a semantic misinterpretation as if that's a valid rebuttel instead of supporting your claim with evidence. All red flags.

would you rather i throw the books at you?

• https://smile.amazon.com/Early-History-God-Biblical-Resource/dp/080283972X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
  
• https://smile.amazon.com/Origins-Biblical-Monotheism-Polytheistic-Background/dp/0195167686/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
  
  > I genuinely don't understand how people can purport deeper meaning from these belief systems.
  
  i... really don't care? that's not what i'm trying to do here. i was trying to present a model for how persian zoroastrianism influenced early judaism-proper, but you came in an objected to the fact that used the term "monolatrist yahwist" as if such a thing didn't exist, because... you think i'm looking for some deeper meaning here? defending christianity? what? i don't think you've read my posts to carefully, and i don't think you're at all familiar with iron age ii mythologies or cultic systems...
  
  > The stories of the Abrahamics are shared by older polytheistc religions.
  
  no, older monolatrist religions. the enuma elish, for instance, from babylonia, is a monolatrist text heralding marduk above the other gods. it has some things in common with the later israelite creation myth. the canaanite baal cycle is a monolatrist text heralding baal above the other gods. it has some things in common with several later biblical texts. we generally lump "monolatrism" in with "polytheism" in some discussions, so it's unclear why you're objecting to it above as it i meant "monotheism". the ancient greeks, for instance, were generally divided into different monolatrist cults, but we consider greek mythology in general polytheistic.
  
  > To this day they are filled with numerous historical inaccuracies,
  
  it's much worse than simple inaccuracies, i assure you. much of it is outright mythology.

Yes, actually there is a pretty cool book on this

>The Argument from Change

Even if I were to agree with the article, it in no way points to a Christian God, or any God worshiped by humans.

>The Argument from Efficient Causality

If everything needs a cause (SUCH a religious train of thought), and God gave us that cause, who gave God cause? Of course, you think he's timeless and exempt from the rules you put on everything else.

I'm going to stop reading here. As far as I can tell, these are arguments to prove there is A god; not a specific god, certainly not the one you worship, just a god. And the arguments are not convincing anyone with half a brain.

You should check out this book. It will help make sense of religion, the bible, everything that is hard to understand about "god".

I don't have a theory of everything, no, but I am referencing books like Laurence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing amd Stephen Hawkings' The Grand Design


Here is a youtube video of Krauss explaining it.

>On the emotional side of things, the Qur'an is the only holy book to have moved me.

That's a very personal thing though. I know plenty of (pseudo)Christians and former believers (including myself) who are just unmoved with Christianity and the bible. The reasons are numerous but a lot of the time its seeking out novelty, something new. I think a lot of people are moved by buddhist, daoist or hindu scriptures as well.

>The first time I picked a translation, and started reading, it struck at the heart of me.

It had the opposite affect on me. It really felt like a struggle. I couldn't make it through the first chapter (though its probably rare for someone to read scripture cover to cover). Which translation did you use? I have digital access to this one and i'll probably end up buying the hardback, what do you think?

> The Qur'an consistently denounces blind observance, stating not to just follow the religion of your fathers.

Thats good in theory but the vast, vast majority of muslims around today, especially in less developed countries, believe precisely for this reason.

The historical records of Muhammad are a lot more solid than Jesus though, i'll give you that. We even have letters sent by him.

Sure, ok then.

You seem to not have any interest in looking at his writings to see for yourself. If you want to stick with what an online article says about him, be my guest, but there are actual peer-reviewed books and articles that treat him as a serious philosopher who changed the course of 20th century philosophy.

But you're right, a single SEP article is probably the definitive word...

In fact, and I just realized this, the author of the SEP, Michael Tooley, even co-wrote a book with Plantinga, in which they debate the existence of God. Knowledge of God.

The bottom line is that taking the SEP page as the bottom line is not exactly intellectually responsible if you claim to have taken a final position on the matter.

>Exhibit A: The Flood
>Exhibit B: The Amalekites
>Satan makes good points.

I would primarily direct you to this book Is God a Moral Monster? by Paul Copan as it uses respected scholarly information to help explain the appearance of a wicked Old Testament God.

As for the flood, supposing that God is real and authoritative, doesn't he have the responsibility to be just? Sin requires punishment, so God as the righteous judge enacts that punishment when he deems fit. Every instance of judgment (including the flood) is preceded by many attempts by God to get people turn back from evil and trust in him.

>Inasmuch as "you have the 'free will' to prostrate yourself before God (the architect of exhibits A and B above) or be punished" goes, I suppose.

Hell is commonly described as punishment but it is simply God giving us exactly what we want, total separation from him.

That's your opinion, but it's simply not true. El was indeed a separate Canaanite deity. The name El and the term El are very different.

Archaeologists and Israeli anthropologists have found plenty of evidence showing that they were a tribe of Canaanites worshiping the same gods and goddesses. They eventually evolved from worshiping El to worshiping tribal war god named Yahweh. Their religion was primarily monotheistic. This isn't some conspiracy theory. It's widely known among ancient anthropologists.

Theology does not automatically trump evidence from archaeology and anthropology just because you'd like it to.

It sounds like you are upset because you have some sort of opinion on how the religion developed. I don't really care about opinions. The evidence is there for all to see.

> By the way, I am not trying to show that you are wrong, I am trying to understand how you think about this subject.

All I am doing is giving you a general description of the dualist position. If you're interesting in digging into the subject in greater depth, you might want to pick up an introductory text to the philosophy of mind, such as Jaegwon Kim's.

> Are you saying that the mind doesn't have spatial location or weight? Under identity theory (or functionalism) it certainly does.

This is the classic Cartesian formulation of substance dualism. It doesn't have anything to do with identity theory or functionalism.

> Would you say that identity theory of chairs, as I have defined it, is accurate or not?

I would say that your made-up theory is nonsense, for reasons I've already given.

The Atheist Afterlife: The odds of an afterlife - Reasonable. The odds of meeting God there - Nil

Haven't read it. Looks interesting, though.

The simple answer is because religion is not necessarily 'reasonable'. Yes, it may be reasonable in the eyes of the person of a certain religion, but that is personal reason, rationalizations for ones own ease of mind.

At the end of it though, at some point of that religion you will be faced with 'reason', or what is masked as it. If you believe in a religion then it is fairly reasonable to assume you would concede that there are some things of the religion that you cannot physically show me, I mean that's why it's called faith isn't it? You simply choose to believe in it.

I agree that it isn't very... adequate, to outright label religion as illogical or without reason, that fact depends on the type of faith the individual himself holds (that is to say any faith, including atheism)(after all, to label an entire act as reasonable or not is a generalisation, for both theism and atheism, which is in itself not reasonable). But it is also sensible to say that atheism is largely comprised of a 'logical' (relative to physical practice) method and setting to it which has led to such an entitlement.

If we were talking philosophically, then yeah you're absolutely right, mostly because now all knowledge is 'liquid' and nothing is 'certain' (relative to the person) because everything is now infinitely subjective.

But in the strictness of looking through what we can physically define, there is no doubting that religion has a blank spot in it which you can never know, yet you choose to believe.

Sidenote: The Atheist Afterlife. As far as I know atheism doesn't have (nor has it ever had) a problem with the afterlife reasonably, because, as you said, there is no proof for either argument, therefore so far both sides are possible. Atheisms issue is the existence of 'heaven' and 'hell' and the entire judgement argument in such an afterlife.

Misquoting Jesus is a good one

There is not an academic consensus on the definition of atheism. People here who promote a particular definition from a particular academic source are cherry picking and dishonestly misrepresenting it as agreed upon.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199644659/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8

>Even today, however, there is no clear, academic consensus as to how exactly the term should be used. For example, consider the following definitions of ‘atheism’ or ‘atheist’, all taken from serious scholarly writings published in the last ten years:

>1. ‘Atheism […] is the belief that there is no God or gods’(Baggini 2003:3)

>2. ‘At its core, atheism […] designates a position (not a “belief”) that includes or asserts no god(s)’ (Eller 2010: 1)

>3. ‘[A]n atheist is someone without a belief in God; he or she need not be someone who believes that God does not exist’ (Martin 2007: 1)

>4. ‘[A]n atheist does not believe in the god that theism favours’ (Cliteur 2009: 1)

>5. ‘By “atheist,” I mean precisely what the word has always been understood to mean — a principled and informed decision to reject belief in God’ (McGrath 2004: 175)

>"How, in this particular culture and time, was this story inserted into history, and how did it survive?"

Please read the other side of this:"

http://www.amazon.com/Not-Impossible-Faith-Richard-Carrier/dp/0557044642/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321837165&sr=8-1

Richard Carrier is a scholar and has written about what you mentioned.

You may like this book by Thomas Nagel: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755/

He describes the unity of the self as something so obviously true that materialism can't be true.

>I'm not jumping to conclusions on zero evidence.

Well then, I look forward to reviewing the evidence on which you are relying. I assume it will come from neutral, reliable sources, not Christian propaganda, right?

​

> historical facts which no reputable historian denies.

Like Candida Moss, Paul Hertog, Laurie Guy, and Joseph Lynch, all of whom agree that

> Despite mountains of contrary evidence, many myths are so deeply embedded in consciousness that they are almost impossible to dislodge. Such is the case with the mountains of myths surrounding the topic of the persecution of the early church.

​

> The fact is that Christians were told to recant on penalty of imprisonment, and other not so pleasant forms of punishment.

Do you have a neutral, reliable source to support this "fact"?

> The author of John's gospel was exiled to the island of Patmos.

We don't know who wrote the gospel of John.

​

So you agree that Christians were not "persecuted" as Christians, but just the same as all the Jews?

> Contingent things need explanations for their existence by the definition of contingent. It doesn't need to be deduced since "needing an explanation for its existence" is the definition of contingent. It's just a tautology to say that contingent things require explanations for their existence, like "all bachelors are unmarried"

No, it isn't. You're wrong about this.

To be 'contingent', in philosophy, is simply to be not necessary. Is it a controversial question whether all contingent (i.e. non-necessary) things have an explanation for their existence. That's why the Principle of Sufficient Reason is so controversial.

If you want some quick examples, start with a look at Alexander Pruss's book. I'm pretty sure it's the best-regarded work on the PSR and cosmological arguments from contingency. His whole book is dedicated to defending the principle that "necessarily, every contingently true proposition has an explanation". He doesn't just shrug and say it's a tautology. He spends 110 pages considering objections to the PSR, and then 221 more pages trying to justify the PSR.

Or take the SEP article linked above. It briefly discusses an interpretation of Descartes, where he holds that God's willing of the eternal truths is an unexplained contingency. Is Descartes simply contradicting himself? No, he's saying some contingent truths have no explanation.

Or take the SEP article on the cosmological argument. Here it sketches a version of the argument from contingency. It has a separate premise for "This contingent being has a cause of or explanation for its existence", and correctly notes that this premise "invokes a version of the Principle of Causation or the Principle of Sufficient Reason". It then notes that the premise is challenged by Russell and Hume:

>Interpreting the contingent being in premise 1 as the universe, Bertrand Russell denies that the universe needs an explanation; it just is. Russell, following Hume (1980), contends that since we derive the concept of cause from our observation of particular things, we cannot ask about the cause of something like the universe that we cannot experience. The universe is “just there, and that's all” (Russell, 175).

Can we respond to this view by blithely citing the definition of 'contingent' and accusing Russell of denying a tautology? Of course not. After all, it's simply not part of the definition of 'contingent' that something contingent has an explanation.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Not-Great-Religion-Everything/dp/0446697966

http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618918248

I suggest you have a look at the book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony. There might be a little more evidence of the Resurrection than previously thought.

http://astore.amazon.com/supportcarrier-20/detail/0557044642

before assuming anything about the Qur'an I suggest you actually read it

As u/segFault11235 and others have pointed out, the Problem of Evil is to do with why evil things happen at all, given that an omni^3 God exists. Usually, the theist will give the vague explanation that 'God works in mysterious ways', which can probably be structured a little better by arguing that God is a utilitarian, and this evil we see will in some way be outweighed by the greater good that it will bring about.

Keeping this in mind, your maths would have to be altered so that g(t) + e(t) = Z, where Z is the net good/bad done in this world (not counting heaven). Now, the issue here, as I'm sure many other would agree, is that quite evidently g(t) isn't outweighing e(t). Or put in another way (as a counterargument to the theistic thought), e(t) doesn't seem to be bringing about this alleged greater good. That is to say, we should expect something like g(t) + e(t) + g(t + n), where the last function is a sort of potential good to come after time n (i.e. after the evil event has occurred). But if we look around us, e.g. tsunamis killing thousands of people, there doesn't seem to be this alleged residual good at all.

Maybe g(t + n) is a function that we're not directly aware of, since we don't understand God's ways, and thus the explanation that 'God works in mysterious ways'. But I'm of the thought that Occam's Razor should be applied here, and it's simply a case that g(t + n) doesn't exist i.e a tsunami will always inherently bring about net evil.

If you want further reading on this very topic, I suggest Knowledge of God. Here Plantinga and Tooley discuss the problem of evil, among other things. The book is quite dense (it was the recommended reading for my philosophy of religion unit) but it's an excellent read.

Plenty of academics, when engaging in scholarship, accurately and without misrepresentation present the ideas of peers with whom they disagree precisely for the purpose of entering into dialogue with those ideas or the edification of readers. I was recently reading an introduction to philosophy of mind by Jaegwon Kim, in which Kim forcefully disagrees with what we call "dualism"; despite the fact that he holds a contrary opinion, Kim accurately reports dualist arguments and treats them with great seriousness.

A world in which being fair is precluded by having an opinion is sad.

I just mean they're not stipulating PSR to be an axiom such that it is taken to be self-evident (in the sense that it can be assumed without argument). Philosophers that defend the cosmological argument usually aim a significant portion of their argumentation toward justifying the PSR. Pruss, for example, wrote an entire book defending it.

First of all, that's not agnosticism.

Secondly, Huxley and Spencer's agnosticism made a fair bit of sense in the 19th century, but they've not aged well with discoveries on the limits of knowledge in the 20th. That is, you don't get the formally agnostic Will to Believe from James (inexpertly presented recently as Life of Pi) and get to banish Russel's discussion of the matter.

Note that the overlap between atheism and agnosticism isn't new, radical, or limited to reddit. It's reasonably well documented by both the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the recently published Oxford Handbook. The former should be required reading on the topic, you can view how the latter discusses this debate using Amazon preview.

See Thomas Nagel Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. Nagel is a world class philosopher of the mind and a staunch atheist. This is not punting to theism to explain evidential gaps in science. It addresses an intractable problem for the physical science of the mind which no amount of evidence can resolve. Hence my repeated refrain, "exhaustive physicalistic description."

Please engage with the actual arguments instead of trotting out tired slogans.

No. You didn't do your homework. I'll pay after you read these:

​

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ekremer/resources/Flew%20The%20Presumption%20of%20Atheism.pdf


https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-God-Alvin-Plantinga/dp/0631193642

>Really, how many religious conflicts are not, at their core, about politics, nationalism and ethnicity?

Some would say all

>The "professional philosophers" who use incorrect definitions, on the other hand, I couldn't care less about.

First off, let me be clear again, you're the one using the incorrect definition. We can know that because we have rational minds that can understand rational arguments. And luckily, we have redditors that are very proficient at providing just the rational arguments we need to show that weak atheism is not intellectually viable.

>. If you could be so kind as to point out some of these "professional philosophers" - with sources - so I could dismiss anything they have to say on the matter, it would save me a lot of time.

First, I do so love the overconfidence. You've clearly proven my point there. You're completely unaware of even who these philosophers let alone what they argue, yet you're absolutely convinced of your ability to dismantle whatever it is they have to say.

The question is why would you want to? Clearly you're attached to the label atheist, and you're here so you at least like the impression of being intellectual, so why would you be interested in dismissing the arguments of professional atheists philosophers out of hand? Surely you'd want to at least see what they had to say. In fact, I'd say that you'd want to study and really understand their arguments. But maybe that's just me projecting what I want onto you.

Just in case, here are a few atheist philosophers of religion you ought to be reading up on.

• Julian Baggini
  
• Raymond Bradley
  
• Theodore Drange
  
• Nicholas Everitt (also here)
  
• J.L. Mackie
  
• Stephen Maitzen
  
• Michael Martin
  
• Matt McCormick
  
• Kai Nielsen
  
• Graham Oppy
  
• Robin Le Poidevin
  
• William Rowe
  
• J.L. Schellenberg
  
• Quentin Smith
  
• Victor Stenger
  
• Michael Tooley
  
• Andrea Weisberger
  
• Erik Wielenberg
  
  >And just because "professional atheist philosophers" make arguments that gods don't exist, that doesn't change the definitions.
  
  Read all of those links (remember to check your local library or your local university's library!) and you'll see that atheists who aren't a part of the cacophony of the unsophisticated group think do not argue for weak atheism. They do not simply argue against the theist's argument and, convinced they have sufficiently undermined that argument, declared themselves free of any belief. They believe there is probably no God and they argue there is probably no God.
  
  You take pride in your belligerence, but it's a shame that belligerence comes from a position of ignorance. I worry about the status of atheism not because I think the theist arguments have won but because people like you are so completely ignorant of the topic that they can't even get straight what atheism even is, what arguments actually support it, and what obstacles there are for atheists to overcome. And yet you feel justified in spewing your nonsense in the most jackass way you can muster.

> It's all bronze - age myths copied from other bronze - age

The New Testament was written well after the Bronze Age. It is mid-antiquity.

> a frankly terrible plotline about a deity who's worse than Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler combined

Read Is God a Moral Monster?. While I can't endorse all of the hermeneutics employed by the author, I can definitely say two things:

(1) It's difficult to blame God for using violence when violence is sometimes just. In fact, pacifism is evil because it's completely unjust.

(2) Most of the Old Testament is poetry and therefore has very little violence.

> I'm not going to accept anything you can tell me about it until you prove to me that the entire document is literally true and faithfully depicts events. Which you can't.

No historian accepts the admissibility of documentation under that criterion. I can show you that much of the Bible is corroborated by external sources and is reliable history, but I can't prove every. single. statement by means of external sources, especially given that much of the Bible concerns Israeli politics, which doesn't have much interest among other nations that would have survived for 3000+ years.

> As in, the early days when Christianity was illegal and Christians were frequently jailed or martyred

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, by Candida Moss

>Encyclopedia of Wars (2004) edited by American historians Charles Phillips and Alen Alexrod considers 1763 wars over five millennia, and conclude that 123 (7%) involve a religious conflict.

http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Encyclopedia-of-Wars-Charles-Phillips-Edited-by-Alan-Axelrod-Edited-by/9780816028511

> The Encyclopedia of War (2012), edited by Gordon Martel, concludes that 6% of the wars listed can be labelled religious wars.

http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-140519037X.html

> William T. Cavanaugh concludes in Myth of Religious Violence (2009) that all wars that are classed as "religious" have secular (economic or political) ramifications.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Religious-Violence-Ideology/dp/0195385047

> Matthew White has done an assessment of killings from wars and genocide (not exactly the same question as we are considering, but related). I don't know anything about Matthew, but while he hasn't documented his information as well as the above study, he appears to be a fair minded atheist whose conclusions are worth considering.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/gunsorxp.htm#XP

> We have eye witness testimonies.

We supposedly have eye witness testimonies, because almost none of the witnesses (besides the apostles) are named, nor are they alive, and their "testimonies" were recorded many decades after Christ's supposed ascension. Besides that, witness testimonies are not enough to prove that supernatural events are even possible.

> There was a detective who works cold cases, and would convict people of crimes based on people's testimonies. He was an Atheist investigating the case for Christ. He found that the people's testimonies lined up, and he would consider them as viable evidence in court, and he came to the conclusion that it was all real.

There are many authors like this one, who think they have the silver bullet that will prove their religion, be it Christianity or Islam, who eventually engage in all sorts of fallacies and provide nothing of substance. I haven't read this guy's book to be honest (Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels), but I have read other books by Christians who claim that they can prove the "truth" of Christianity. Short summary: they haven't.

The fact of the matter is that these books do not stand to scrutiny. Have you ever read anything written by Bart Ehrman, or other real scholars? They would vehemently disagree with that guy's conclusions.

Bart Denton Ehrman is an American professor and scholar, currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of North America's leading scholars in his field, having written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also achieved acclaim at the popular level, authoring five New York Times bestsellers. Ehrman's work focuses on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the development of early Christianity.

-- from WikiPedia

You should also read stuff by:

• Richard Dawkins (i.e. The God Delusion, The Greatest Show On Earth, Unweaving the rainbow, etc.),
  
  
• Lawrence Krauss (i.e. A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing),
  
  
• Sean Caroll
  
  and other scientists if you want to see what science actually has to say about reality and about how grossly wrong the Bible is when it tries to make pronouncements on our physical reality.
  
  > Why do you not believe in the gospel accounts? They were hand written accounts by people who witnessed an event, or people who spoke to those people.
  
  That's the claim, not the evidence. It's people claiming to have witnessed supernatural events for which they have no evidence, and even more than that, all these witnesses are long dead. We have nothing but third hand accounts of people from 2000 years ago claiming to have seen or heard wildly fantastical things for which we don't have any evidence that they are even possible.
  
  Heck, we literally have millions of people still alive who swear that they have encountered aliens or have been abducted by aliens - this is a much better evidence than your supposed witnesses who are long dead by now - and it's still not nearly enough to prove that these aliens actually exist and that they have indeed been abducting people.
  
  > Some of the things Jesus spoke about is verifiable today. As I have pointed out about the Holy Spirit guiding people, and people being able to heal and cast out demons in Jesus' name.
  
  Many of Buddha's teachings are verifiable and valid today, yet that does nothing to prove Buddha's claims of the supernatural. Besides, you first have to demonstrate that there are such things as demons before even making a claim of being able to cast them out. Bring one of these "demons" into a research facility and then we'll talk. Otherwise, you're no different than the alien abduction people or the Bigfoot hunters.

A predicted a couple of things when I posted my previous reply. One was that you would only respond to my last point. And the other was that that point would trigger you to no end.

Look, you're just one of those people who thinks their views are universal. The things your pointing out as evidence of a morally degrading society aren't anything new. There is evidence that we're living in the best time ever in the history of mankind.

Let's look at you points:

> Hannah Montana is over here on TV showing her cooter to the world and you wanna talk about degradation of moral values?

Has that happened? Has Miley Cyrus been nude on TV? But that's not important. Almost 70 years ago, people were saying "Marilyn Monroe is showing her cooter!" (who talks like that anyway?).

> We got people running up and knocking out elderly people in a 'game'.

Horrible, or course. But not new. Remember when people used to drag people behind their truck until they were dead?

> We have entire generations of people not working and living off of the government

Not true, but poverty isn't new.

You can't be older than me, and I'm not even close to "kids these days" as you are. Here's a relevant quote:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

Who know who said that? Socrates. 2500 years ago.

You've asserted a lot in this thread. You've proved yourself incompetent in your attempts to support any of it.

Yes, it's loaded, but it's fair, considering that many mainstream Christian apologists explicitly do act as genocide apologists. William Lane Craig, for example, says that the Israelites did the children of their enemies no harm because they were instantly transported to heaven, and that we should feel more sorry for the soldiers who had to go through the trauma of committing genocide.

>So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

Paul Copan does much of the same in his book Is God a Moral Monster. See Thom Stark's review of that book, entitled Is God a Moral Compromiser, for more details.