(Part 3) 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.

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\> 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.

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\> 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.

> I have a question pertaining to my topic about providing evidence about the nonexistence of the Abrahamic God. Namely, can this even be shown?

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TL'DR: A suggestion for your paper. Review the physical archeological and linguistic anthropological evidential sources documenting the development and growth of monotheistic Yahwehism/Allahism from a historical polytheistic foundation of revealed holy scripture to the monotheism of early (exile and post Babylonian Exile) Biblical Israelites and produce a paper that presents and defends the fallacy the God of Abraham as monotheistic, and the fallacy of the claimed monotheistic Abrahamic Religions.

And present the paper here :D

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It is interesting that you have used the example of the "Abrahamic God," or the "God of Abraham," instead of the God named יהוה/YHWH/Yahweh/Allah.

The God of Abraham/Abrahamic God refers to a specific and essential set of God attributes upon which the Abrahamic Religons (most notably Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) are based upon. And by showing that one, or more, of these essential and foundational (necessary) attributes is fallacious/false, you have undermined any dependent or contingent doctrine/dogma/traditions/tenets of the resultant Theistic Religions, thereby, nominally, showing errors in the Religion; and if the essential attribute that is shown to be fallacious/false is foundational enough to the Religion, that the entire Religion is fallacious/false (to a high level of significance/level of confidence and reliability) (see NOTE1, below).

Compare this to attempting to disprove the existence of the God YHWH. Even if one (or more) attributes is shown to be wrong/fallacious, this does not disprove the existence of YHWH (ex., the Problem of Evil does not disprove YHWH against the commonly assigned attributes of omni-benevolence/source of goodness and omnipotence - only that one, or both of these super powers may be mistaken/or YHWH's concept of Good is based upon the emotions/needs of YHWH from the POV of YHWH and not that of humans) - as many of the attributes of YHWH are non-falsifiable. Since, arguably, the level of significance of YHWH is not better then a conceptual possibility, wishful thinking, Theistic Religious Faith, the ego-concept of self-affirmation that what an adherents feels in there heart of hearts has an actual mind independent supportable truth value, or an appeal to emotion (see NOTE2), the loss of an attribute does not reduce the level of significance of the existence of this God very much - especially to those that already believe in the existence of YHWH.

So - what is arguably one of the most essential and foundational attributes of the God of Abraham/Abrahamic God? A necessary attribute upon which a great many tenets/doctrine/dogma/traditions/claims of the Abrahamic Religions is based (wholly dependent or contingent) upon? Monotheism; that there is only one God and that God is YHWH/Allah.

As this essential monotheism is 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 belief would raise significant doubt as to the Holy Book's validity as the word of God/Yahweh/Allah and to the very foundation of these belief systems. These core scriptural documents also establish the precept and precedent accepting predecessor society/culture holy scripture and documentation of revealed Yahwehism and integrating and propagating core attributes and beliefs (though with some variation and conflict with peripherals). Yet, within the Holy Scriptures of predecessor Babylonian, Ugarit and Canaanite, and early Israelite religions/societies/cultures, the evidence points to the evolution and growth in the belief of the monothesitic Yahweh Deity from a polytheistic foundation of the El (the Father God/God Most High) God pantheon. Yahweh (one of many sons of El) was a subordinate fertility/rain/warrior local desert God whom, through a process of convergence, differentiation and displacement (synthesis and syncretism), was elevated from polytheism to henotheism (a monolatry for Yahweh; Yahweh is in charge, there are other Gods to worship) to an aggressive monolatrist polytheistic belief (Yahweh is the most important God, there exists other Gods but worship of these other Gods is to be actively rejected) to, finally, a monotheistic belief system (there is and, somehow, always has been, only Yahweh) as documented in the revealed holy scriptures of these religions and cultures that directly influenced and/or became the Biblical Israelites.

In that regard, here are some references on the growth of monotheistic Yahwehism from a historical polytheistic foundation to the development of the henotheism/monolatry, and then monotheism of early Biblical Israelites (you can make your own determination of the credibility of each reference):

• 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
  
• 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
  
  While limited to starting with the Hebrew Bible as a basis, and not addressing much pre-Torah scripture related to Yahweh, the following takes a look at:
  
  
• Monotheism, Polytheism, Monolatry, or Henotheism? Toward an Assessment of Divine Plurality in the Hebrew Bible, by Michael S. Heiser, PhD
  
  While a College Senior Thesis (and the perception therefore of a less credible scholarly/appeal to authority level), the following is a good source of other reference material:
  
  
• The Ascension of Yahweh: The Origins and Development of Israelite Monotheism from the Afrasan to Josiah by Andrew Halladay
  
  Some of the on-line summaries/arguments which related to the above argument/position are:
  
  
• 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
  
  A recent discussion in /r/AcademicBiblical, Was Yaweh originally a member of a pre-Judaic pantheon of gods?, by /u/koine_lingua, also addresses the origin of YHWH.
  
  Some potential additional references (which are on my "To Read" list)....
  
  
• Diana Vikander Edelman - The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms
  
• Jan Assmann - Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel and the Rise of Monotheism
  
• J. C. deMoor - The Rise of Yahwism: The Roots of Israelite Monotheism
  
• John Day - Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan
  
• Andre Lemaire, et. al. - The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of Yahwism
  
  ----
  Note1: For this discussion, the qualitative levels of significance (levels of reliability and confidence), for lowest to highest, are:
  
  
• None
  
• Asymptotically approaches none/zero; conceptual possibility
  
• Appeal to emotion/wishful thinking/theistic religious Faith
  
• Low
  
• Medium
  
• High
  
• Extraordinary
  
• Asymptotically approaches certainty
  
• Certainty/Unity
  
  Note2: For those that claim that YHWH/Allah has been proven to exist at a level of significance higher than an appeal to emotion, I welcome your burden of proof presentation. Please:
  
  (1) make a listing (and definition) of the attributes of the God YHWH,
  
  (2) make a presentation of any notable cognitive purposeful actualizations of the God YHWH you feel are essential to the identify of this God (e.g., a common actualization claim is creation ex nihilo of, well everything [except for the special pleading that is YHWH itself]),
  
  (3) present a credible burden of proof presentation, via credible evidence, and/or supportable argument that is free from logical fallacies and which can be shown to actually be linkable to this reality (i.e., both logically and factually true), to a level of significance (or level of reliability and confidence) above some acceptable threshold [Let's use a level of significance above that of an appeal to emotion as a threshold for consideration - even though the consequences of the actualization of YHWH, or proof that YHWH does exist, and claims associated with this YHWH, is extraordinary], to support items (1) and (2), above, and
  
  (4) present a supportable rebuttal to any refutations presented to your presented burden of proof.

>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.

I believe that what makes our life meaningful is the meaning we give it. If for you that means committing to religion, then it is good for you to do that. I've personally met a bunch of people who said they felt like you did before joining the Church and that it really turned their life around.

>Just looking for reassurance that believing in God could be a plausible belief system.

I've only studied Christianity, but I would say that it definitely is plausible. There is a long tradition of very intelligent people who have thought a lot about the issues of God and religion, and whatever the New Atheists may say the answers these people have come up with can't be dismissed lightly. I would recommend this book, and especially any of the popular work of Swinburne or Plantinga (note: haven't read this one, but heard good things about it and Plantinga knows his stuff), as an introduction to the academic study and defence of theism.

>The possibility of God is all I've got, if I want to defeat my suicidal thoughts and embrace life fully.

Go for it, and I wish you the best of luck (though I also second others' recommendations of seeking counselling, it was a great help to me when I needed it).

Selfishly I will hope that at some point you might come to see the meaning I see in an atheistic world and be in a better space to consider the merits of atheism, but it sounds like that isn't what is important right now.

> I'm fine with granting that the Universe forming is a miracle.

That's cool. What is it about the Universe that leads you to think it could be a miracle? For me, it is the amazing structure of the laws of physics.

I ask you because, what is it about DNA, ribosomes and the amazing structures within biology that make you then think they are "natural"? To me, microbiology is even more amazing than the cosmological argument. Anthony Flew was the most famous atheist of the 20th century. After he studied DNA and the amazing interplay of physics, chemistry, he became a theist. He wrote "There is a God. How the world's most notorious atheist changed his mind" : https://www.amazon.com/There-God-Notorious-Atheist-Changed/dp/0061335304

> Darwin's small changes : Source, please.

See link below. Stephen Jay' Gould's "punctuated equilibrium" is where the evidence leads, and large changes are required to advanced beyond the local minimum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape

http://sciencenordic.com/suggesting-answers-one-darwin%E2%80%99s-mysteries

Here's Darwin on small changes ("slight modifications") from Origin of Species : “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.”

> Until you can show HOW it was "designed", the notion that it IS designed is nonsense.

Huh? That's my whole point. It is a miracle. Atheists often ask for signs, and in microbiology you can see many amazing machines.

Your response sounds like this logically: "unless I think it is not a miracle, I'm not going to believe it is a miracle".

> Second, variation in traits IS evolution by definition.

Unfortunately, the word "evolution" is heavily overloaded. The term "evolution" is used sloppily to apply to mutation, speciation and even abiogenesis. Those are each very distinct concepts. Darwin's book is "Origin of Species", not "new traits". Do you think that blondes are different species than brunettes? Species are things like cats versus dogs. If you love science half as much as I do, please stop trying to confuse the concepts.

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.

> 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

\> I'm open to suggestion about how to "demonstrate" to your satisfaction that I'm acting rationally,

I hardly have an idea what you claim. How could I know what would demonstrate proof of it?

\> Given the available evidence, I've concluded that Christianity best fits what we know about the world.

Ok, what evidence?

\> the most persuasive part is the ethical system laid out in the Gospels, which best expresses a super-human morality.

This expresses why you like it, not why it's Right.

\> I have some personal experience of God as well, and a strong sense of the numinous in general

More detail on that would be helpful.

\> when I first started having these discussions online it was hard to believe that not everyone has that same feeling.

There's a good chance that with training in meditation, most people can. Certainly, what little you've offered so far is similar to the description offered across many religions around the world... and that gets us back to the question of how you know that yours is the Right one.

\> I won't ask you to demonstrate that you come by your conclusions rationally, because I assume that anyone going onto a debate subreddit has done their homework until proven otherwise.

Which of my conclusions? Evidence suggests that people don't come to their conclusions rationally. See Daniel Kahneman's work.

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.

Real essentialism is demonstrated through the fixed laws governing the relationships between the sides and angles of a triangle. You can’t “invent” a triangle whose interior angles add up to whatever you want, because the concept of a triangle is something we discover rather than invent. Are you familiar with Oderberg? https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Routledge-Studies-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/041587212X

> Where is it?

Essences are immaterial.

> I've read most of it and have a fairly good understanding of what Aquinas says on a lot of important subjects

Im calling bullshit if you aren’t even passably competent in his metaphysics to articulate the difference between essentially and accidentally ordered cause and effect relationships.

> Aquinas believes that people "assent" in faith about propositional objects because their "truth" is directly revealed (obviously divinely) by God. He claims the will disposes the intellect (i.e human reason) in accepting those truth claims, because they come from God. This all relies "the basis of testimony carrying divine authority" to use Aquinas's words.

Not quite correct.

“To be sure, a part of theology (what is generally called “revealed theology”) is based on what Aquinas regards as truths that have been revealed to us by God. To that extent theology is based on faith. But “faith,” for Aquinas, does not mean an irrational will to believe something for which there is no evidence. It is rather a matter of believing something on the basis of divine authority (ST II-II. 4.1), where the fact that it really has been revealed by God can be confirmed by the miracles performed by the one through whom God revealed it (ST II-II. 2.9). In any case, there is another part of theology (known as “natural theology”) that does not depend on faith, but rather concerns truths about God that can be known via reason alone.”

-Ed Feser Aquinas (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O0G3BEW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

So no, I still don’t think you actually understand what you’re talking about.

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.

I mostly have a lot of books that helped me, but here are the most influential ones that I've read recently:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow
  
• Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics
  
• Thinking and Deciding
  
• The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning
  
  I can't overstate their importance, but I also don't think I can do four large books worth of content justice without a very substantial amount of writing. The gist is that they're books about how our minds actually work, and how we can use that knowledge to our advantage to make better choices and have beliefs that reflect reality.

>One with the theistic claim that God is real. The other date (completely different
>case) posits there aren't any Gods. If an atheist posits the second, then they are as
>guilty as the first.

An atheist positing the second isn't guilty of anything but honesty. Gods have atrributes. These attributes have properties that effect our real world. If we look for these effects and find they don't exist, then the God in question doesn't exist. All the great monotheistic religions claim that God answers prayers. Every study we've done on this shows that prayer has no effect. Ergo, right there a rational person can claim that God doesn't exist.

On top of that, you can use rationality to prove that something doesn't exist (but not that it does, which theists try to do). It's already been shown that the properties commonly attributed to a God are incompatible. That alone, again, precludes the existence of any God.

We can go down the line with every measurable effect of a God. We've looked, and they're not there.

Victor Stenger did it already in God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.


> Treating the traditional God concept, as conventionally presented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, like any other
>scientific hypothesis, Stenger examines all of the claims made for God's existence. He considers the latest Intelligent Design
>arguments as evidence of God's influence in biology. He looks at human behavior for evidence of immaterial souls and the
>possible effects of prayer. He discusses the findings of physics and astronomy in weighing the suggestions that the universe is
>the work of a creator and that humans are God's special creation. After evaluating all the scientific evidence, Stenger concludes
>that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God.

Honestly, it's those atheists that continue to argue (sometimes oddly passionately) that a God could still exist that seem to be guilty of something.

>Not only is the second date an outright irrational position to take in proving a negative

Proving a negative is both possible and rational. The claim that one can't prove a negative is commonly repeated but not true - it's done in geometry, statistics and lots of other disciplines all the time. You start from the premise that X is true and then work your way from there until you find an incompatibility or logical conclusion that violates observations. You can then reject the claim that X is true and voila! shown that X is false. I have no idea where you get that this is "irrational"; is the concept of a null hypothesis irrational too?

> but they might as well start chalking up terms as well as proof for other nonexistent things such as leprechauns, tooth fairies,
>and Santa Claus.

[Spoiler alert for those under 10!]
You're telling me it's irrational or impossible to show that Santa Claus can't exist? It's been done often and involves the time necessary to deliver presents... well, that and the fact that reindeer can't fly, and a whole set of problems with chimneys....

This is exactly what we're talking about right here.

>Pascal’s Wager

>The Authority of the Bible

>Quality of Life

Calling these arguments at all is very generous. Pascals wager comes the closest to being taken seriously but has multiple fatal flaws, such as the fact that if there is no God and you take him up on his wager so to speak, you waste your entire existence, making it a poor bet. Then there's the many gods problem as well.

>The Actionable Conclusion

This is neither an argument, nor supporting of a belief in God.

>Personal Experience

Hume has an excellent response to most of what could be considered an argument in here. However most of what you've written here does not constitute an argument, and should not rationally be enough to convince anyone else. It certainly doesn't qualify as, " any rational argument, supported by evidence."

>Kalam's Cosmological Argument

For the sake of time, I'm going to refer you to the wikipedia article here. There are numerous problems with the KCA, none of which can be satisfactorily resolved, and it does not have any supporting evidence. Since the argument is not logically sound, valid, and non-vacuous, it isn't taken seriously in modern debate except for it's role in the history of philosophy.

>Aristotle’s Cosmological Argument

This is no stronger than the KCA above, and has many of the same problems. It doesn't prove a God exists even if true, has no supporting evidence, and must resort to special pleading for the "first cause" to not have a cause itself.

>The Fine Tuned Universe Argument

This is probably the only argument in the batch that's even taken seriously at all, but it has the most problems, probably due to being more well-defined and claiming it has supporting evidence (which none of the rest can).

1. This is a new iteration of the "God of the Gaps" fallacy, which is often considered by both theologians and Atheists to be logically fallacious .
   
   
2. There is not any good reason to believe that the universe is actually 'finely tuned' in the first place. The puddle analogy is a great way to think of this
   >Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!”
   
   
3. Life as we know it could exist under substantially different cosmological constants than exist in our universe, implying that the supposed 'fine tuning' of our universe is just one possible set of options in a wide band in which life and the universe as we know it, could actually exist.
   
   
4. Much like with intelligent design arguments, fine tuning arguments suffer greatly from the fact that the universe is actually pretty shittily designed for intelligent life to flourish, and it could be vastly improved even to the eye of a mere human.
   
   
5. The fine tuning argument is based on faulty probabilistic reasoning
   
   
6. Fine tuning is insufficient to prove any kind of creator with agency, even if correct. It's possible that this could be an inevitable outcome, predicated on some universal law of physics unknown to us.
   
   If you want more supporting evidence against fine tuning/god of the gaps, wikipedia has almost everything you could possibly want cited, and Victor Stenger has written a sound rebuttal to it and all common counter arguments within God: The Failed Hypothesis.

Natural selection is not defined as "survival of the fittest," that's just a colloquialism to help people understand the basic idea. The basic idea is that there is some process by which organisms who are more fit than others will reproduce more often, outcompeting those who are less fit. Natural selection is simply the mechanism that takes genetic mutation and environmental conditions and outputs organisms that succeed. It also outputs organisms that don't, hence the idea of 'out competing.'

I'm on mobile, so here's an ugly link to a good definition and high level overview:

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_25

The phrase "survival of the fittest" reduces the idea down by trimming away the details to make a nice, intuitive catch phrase. However, that loss of information does lead people to misunderstand what natural selection really is.

As for your link, I'll respond with one of my own, if you're interested. I'm not an expert and don't keep the details of evolution handy. The book "Why Evolution is True" by Jerry Coyne goes into great detail about why the Theory of Evolution does make predictions and that those predictions are testable and verifiable. That will suffice as my rebuttal to Dr. Henry Peters' forced "tautology." After all, wouldn't you rather hear it from an expert than some internet stranger?

There are plenty of other books like Dr. Coyne's that would do just as well, however. I was able to check out his book for free at my local library, but here is the Amazon link ($14), so you have the details:

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Evolution-True-Jerry-Coyne/dp/0143116649

No, you're making the jump from mathematics as a formal system to mathematics as The Universe again. If you're bringing up Godel in a philosophical context but haven't read [GEB] (http://www.amazon.com/G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach-Eternal-Golden/dp/0465026567/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344628050&sr=8-1&keywords=GEB), you really should. It sounds like you have a genuine interest in this stuff. The jump you're doing is even addressed in the second chapter.

You're doing what Hofstadter describes as an isomorphism -- you recognize a similarity or pattern between a formal system (mathematics) and reality (physics), so you assign an interpretation of the symbols as they relate to reality. The way you manipulate the symbols may tell you something about the (isomorphic) reality concepts it mirrors, but, as Hofstadter put it, "what portion of reality can be imitated in its behavior by a set of meaningless symbols governed by formal rules"? You really don't know. For all you know, "absolute zero" is just a mal-formed, meaningless symbolic string in the context of physical reality (even though it's a well-formed meaningful string in pure mathematics).

At the end of the day, our ability to think in terms of isomorphisms -- we assign symbols or thoughts to represent other symbols or thoughts, even the thoughts themselves self-referentially -- is one of the beautiful capabilities of the human brain. Under this interpretation, your sense of "I" or "ego" is just the symbolic machinery of your brain being self-referentially pointed onto itself. In your case, the symbolic machinery of pure mathematics has certain properties (e.g. Godel's incompleteness theorum), but you need to be careful when you're asserting properties of the symbolic system versus properties of the isomorphism you assign as an interpretation.

>If you're programmed to accept an idea, you don't have any objective way of telling whether it's true

I don't think it's that black and white. Consider System 1 vs System 2 thinking, in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Our intuition can predispose us to certain types of thinking, and we can still be capable to rationally examining these beliefs. Education on our susceptibility to cognitive biases, and education on statistical thinking, can improve our ability to compensate for the weaknesses in our intuition and force our minds to shift to more rigorous decision making.

On a broader level, evolution predisposes us to racism and tribalism. But our capacity for abstract thought and language enables us to improve, to present and entertain arguments and shift beyond a merely instinct-driven existence. Which is why humans are capable of moral improvement, yet chimps and dolphins remain the same. We have culture and philosophy and the capacity for moral progress.

>once you accept that one or more ideas were implanted in you, it's not clear to me how you would tell which subsequent ideas you arrived at based on evidence and which ideas you are programmed to accept

Critical thinking, examine your beliefs and the arguments by which you can support your beliefs. That's the entire purpose of Socratic dialectic, making people explicate arguments so they are forced to more closely examine what they believe and why. We aren't "programmed" in a fatalistic, deterministic sense, rather we have propensities and biases. We still have the capacity for improvement, the capacity to change our minds. As you must recognize at some level, otherwise you wouldn't be trying to persuade anyone of anything.

So I'm pretty familiar with the modern version of "Jesus mythicism", which is what you're talking about. I'll try to summarize without writing too long of an essay.

(For further reading, look into books or presentations by Richard Carrier, author of the peer-reviewed scholarly work On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt or David Fitzgerald, author of a much more approachable Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All. Here is a 60 minute presentation of the theory laid out in Carrier's book.)

There are two major thrusts of this argument:

1. The purported "evidence" for Jesus' existence, when actually examined in detail, is severely lacking
   
2. There is another plausible explanation for the origins of Christianity and the New Testament books besides Jesus being a real person.
   
   Arguments around 1) have been around for a long time (although there are interesting recent developments), but 2) is where Richard Carrier, specifically, is making some significant contributions. Unfortunately, the publication of his work is very recent, and it is as-yet-unclear whether it will be broadly accepted.
   
   So with regard to the evidence, let's list a few and their problems:
   
   

• The NT gospels are highly mythologized, and can't be accepted as a reliable historical narrative (even the non-miraculous parts)
  
• The NT epistles were written years later, and up to half of Paul's letters are considered to be forgeries
  
• Paul's (authentic) epistles were some of the earliest NT books written, but Paul never even claims to have met a physical Jesus, just had a vision/spiritual encounter. In fact, Carrier claims that a proper interpretation of Paul's writing shows that he viewed Jesus as a celestial being
  
• There is nothing else contemporaneous. Literally nothing, nada, zip. Jewish records about Jesus stirring up trouble? Nope. Roman records about Jesus' trial and crucifixion? Nope.
  
  Aaaaand then we have like a huge gap before other documents start appearing. And most of these other sources are evidence of Christianity or Christians, not evidence of Jesus, per se. For example:
  
  
• Josephus is frequently mentioned, but both references in Josephus have been shown to be interpolations.
  
• Did the astronomer Thallus mention the darkness at Jesus' death? No, he did not.
  
  Getting a little long, so for part 2 (how did we get Christianity, then?), I'll mainly refer you to Carrier's Presentation. In short, Carrier thinks that the original conception of Jesus was of a celestial Jesus in the heavens, and he was later euhemerized (put into stories on earth), and then the latter stories became popular as the gospels, and the original stories/ideas were lost/discarded.
  
  Hope that makes sense.
  
  (Edit: replaced presentation link with a better quality video. Also, fixed links to Carrier's new blog.)

> Anyone have a good resource or something?

Yes. Close YouTube. Hit the books.

• An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion by Brian Davies
  
• God?: A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist by William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
  
• The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions by Alex Rosenberg
  
• The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart
  
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume
  
• Aquinas by Edward Feser

> 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

That was an unsatisfying answer, I suppose. You want me to make a genuine play before we continue, fine, I'll give it a shot. But the supposed delineation between literal and symbolic is the first thing you'll have to discard. It is entirely wrongheaded. It's not even wrong. On one end a literal interpretation has Christians eat the body of Christ and drink his blood, and you end up painting them as vampire cannibals. Which was probably your agenda anyway. On the other, everything is symbolic and the new testament might aswell be referring to Jesus' covert war against clown reptiles. These answers are silly because the question is silly.

In the early 20th century, mathmetician Kurt Gödel set out to create his incompleteness theorem. The theorem was originally intended to show Russel and Whitehead's system for working with natural numbers as complete. This is important, because what use is an incomplete system? Not only did he end up proving the system as incomplete (humiliating two people he actually admired), he ended up proving no consistent system of logic can ever be complete, and vice versa. Neither can the system prove it's own axioms, any more than you can lift yourself by pulling your hair. Why is this crucial to a debate about religion? Because divinity is complete.

Source: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

So math and science arrive at what religion already knew. All is one. Duality is false. Symbolic and literal interpretations do not exclude one another, they show aspects of the same complete divine thing. They are shifts in perspective. An unsolved rubix cube does not disprove the solution. One implies the other.

And so the singular divine splits itself into male and female. One becomes two. And the coupling of two will beget a third. But duality is false, division is false. Man is fallible and incomplete, so he stifles the world through his ego. The benevolent king becomes the tyrant. The mighty creator becomes Holdfast, the enemy, the dragon.

It's been awhile since I've actually seen a bible, but as I recall the new testament does not start with Mary or God. It was Herod who called the census and set the whole thing in motion. The bad, unjust king strangles the land in an attempt to secure his reign. Thereby his actions create the very thing he fears most: the hero.

The tyrant-father is just a different face of the holy creator. When the arch-enemy holds the entire world in his stranglehold, new life springs from the void itself. The story of the savior is the story of every single human being. It shows the hero ascending the dominance hierarchy, dethroning the evil tyrant, slaying the dragon and reuniting with the divine. The hero's special weapon is the ability to tell good from evil in all their different guises. And again good and evil are just a perspective shift away from being truth and untruth. What difference does it make if the dragon is an actual dragon, mankind's sin, or the duality of all existance itself? All of it is symbolic. And in the sense that all of us are heroes, all of it is real.

Source: Hero with a thousand faces by Joseph Campbell.

>Clearly we can infer the Apostles and many early Christians believed that these things literally happened, and whether or not you think this is zealotry, the number of Christians who believe this literally is greater than those who see this symbolically.

This part brings a particular quote to mind, and besides there's a third book that I can show off as having read:

>The sun signifies first of all gold. But just as philosophical gold is not common gold, so the sun is neither just the metallic gold nor the heavenly orb...Redness, heat and dryness are the classical qualities of the Egyptian Set (Greek Typhon), the evil principle which, like the alchemical sulphur, is closely connected with the devil. And just as TYphon has his kingdom in the forbidden sea, so the sun, as sol centralis has its sea, its "crude perceptible water" and as sol coelestis its "subtle imperceptible water." This sea water (Aqua pontica) is extracted from sun and moon...
>
>We can barely understand such a description, contaminated as it is by imaginative and mythological associations peculiar to the medieval mind. It is precisely this fantastical contamination however that renders the alchemical description worth examining- Not from the perspective of the history of science, concerned with the examination of outdated objective ideas, but from the perspective of psychology, focused on the interpretation of subjective frames of reference...The alchemist could not sperate his subjective ideas from the nature of things, from his hypotheses (emphasis by prof. Peterson)...The medieval man lived in a universe that was moral- where everything, even ores and metals, strived above all for perfection.

Source: Maps of meaning by Jordan Peterson.

If you'd like to understand evolution better, I'd suggest Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne. He gives a very good explanation of it that even a layman can understand. For that reason, it's the best book ever written on evolution in my opinion. I know Dawkins can be a little technical.

Edit: Screwed the title up.

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.

> Evolution/ Intelligent Design - Telological argument

I'd recommend Why Evolution is True by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, which is the best book I know of on evolution (and in fact maybe the best popular science book I've ever read). It doesn't specifically address the teleological argument, but it is written with an eye toward refuting religious notions of creation.

> It's entirely possible that you had a professor with a specific view of mathematics and told you that their view was right and dismissive or other views, and that you've internalized this attitude.

I formed my views on the matter after I had left school - no professor opined on any philosophical underpinnings of the field that I can remember.

In the same vein, it's entirely possible you have only studied this topic so far as to justify your already-held beliefs in a god, and no more. It's more than possible since you are not using language common to the field, and are talking about formal systems in ways that are radically different than experts.

> The point is that when math and science conflict we believe the math. This would not be the case of math was invented to describe reality.

This is demonstrably false. We believe the observations. When observational evidence conflicted with Newton's laws of gravitation (which were a completely consistent mathematical system), well...we needed new models of gravity, new math.

> You are not a square circle.

Ha, I'm sure this seems self-evidently true, but define what you mean by "you" and I'm sure you'll see that it refers to something that you have empirical evidence for. Unless you are claiming "you" is also an abstraction, and not a real object?

> You need to read this -

I will read it. For an introductory look at formal systems and many other related topics, I would suggest the fantastic GEB by Douglas Hofstatdter.

>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

>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".

>This reminded me of the book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. It explains Ireland's (Christianity's) role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe.

It's a fun book, even though it probably overstated the case a bit.

>He believes that without the Christians, the transition of Europe evolving from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era could not have taken place.

Maybe. But it's not like the Roman Empire suddenly ceased to exist. Constantinople didn't fall until much, much later.

>Irish monks and scribes maintained the very record of Western civilization – copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers (both secular and Christian) while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost.

Part of the continent. Constantinople was on the European continent.

And various Islamic states over the years did a lot to preserve writings of the ancients.

>I suspect this was also the case with monasteries and Christian universities in Europe during the medieval era.

Sure. The Church was intimately involved in education for centuries, to everyone's benefit.

>No one's saying the Medieval Church didn't persecute the science/scientists that came from their own institutions and universities

Who are you referring to?

> What I don't see is why this distinction is particularly relevant to the point that information is a particular arrangement of matter and energy, as opposed to a third fundamental component of the universe...

You need matter and/or energy for information to be encoded, but it is something separate from any particular arrangement of matter and energy. The same information can be encoded in many different ways, and it is still the same information. Beethoven's 9th symphony is still Beethoven's 9th symphony whether it is encoded in pits burnt on a CD with a laser, an MP3 file stored on my hard drive, or a book of sheet music.

I recommend reading The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick for an introduction to history of information theory as a science.

>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.

I would start with Edward Feser's introductions to Aquinas.

1. Aquinas: a Beginner's Guide- https://www.amazon.com.au/Aquinas-Beginners-Guide-Guides-ebook/dp/B00O0G3BEW ; and/or
   
2. The Last Superstition (this one is a bit polemical, so one will have to be charitable if one is an unbeliever, though one will likely enjoy it if one is a believer) https://www.amazon.com.au/Last-Superstition-Refutation-New-Atheism-ebook/dp/B00D40EGCQ/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+Last+Superstition&qid=1568081318&s=digital-text&sr=1-1
   
   If you're a total newbie, this should serve as a good launching point to begin to study Aquinas himself. There are of course more thinkers than Aquinas (I'm very partial to Anselm over Aquinas in many matters), but the skills and habits of mind you acquire in understanding Aquinas are useful for reading other thinkers in the tradition.
   
   
   There is of course also no substitute for getting to know your pagan philosophers, in particular Aristotle and Plato. Try Aristotle's Eudemian ethics or the Republic by Plato.

There is actually pretty overwhelming evidence that Jesus is a myth. If you assemble the books of the NT in chronological order you can actually follow the development of the myth, from Paul, for whom Jesus was an abstract deity sort of like a Greek god, to Mark, for whom Jesus was a real person full of doubts and uncertainties and who never claimed to be God (indeed, at one point wondered why God had forsaken him), to Matthew and Luke who just copied Mark and a lost source called Q, to John, whose Jesus was a sort of superhero, performing all kinds of miracles that had never been recorded before. Christians will tell you that there are other contemporary references to Jesus written by non-Christians, but this is not true. All of the alleged references are either known forgeries (Josephus) or references to Christians, not Christ. To state the obvious, the existence of Christians is not in dispute.

This is also a good resource:

https://www.amazon.com/Nailed-Christian-Myths-Jesus-Existed/dp/0557709911

This reminded me of the book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill. It explains Ireland's (Christianity's) role in maintaining Western culture while the Dark Ages settled on Europe.


Cahill writes that St. Patrick not only brought Christianity to Ireland, he instilled a sense of literacy and learning that would create the conditions that allowed Ireland to preserve Western culture while Europe was being overrun by barbarians. He believes that without the Christians, the transition of Europe evolving from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era could not have taken place. Irish monks and scribes maintained the very record of Western civilization – copying manuscripts of Greek and Latin writers (both secular and Christian) while libraries and learning on the continent were forever lost.


I suspect this was also the case with monasteries and Christian universities in Europe during the medieval era. No one's saying the Medieval Church didn't persecute the science/scientists that came from their own institutions and universities, but yet modern science may or may not be what it is today without these institutions. It's certainly worth discussion.

>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.

Books like this from Hitchens or this from Nietzsche develop a doctrine of non-belief for those that are convinced by the atheistic arguments. I wasn't, so I stopped the practices of unbelief which vary like those of believers.

As a panentheist (not pantheist) and a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist, I would recommend:

David Bentley Hart

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300209355/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526005966&sr=1-3&keywords=david+bentley+hart

Marcus J. Borg

https://www.amazon.com/God-Never-Knew-Authentic-Contemporary/dp/0060610352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006014&sr=1-1&keywords=borg+god+we+never+knew

Alan F. Segal

https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Convert-Apostolate-Apostasy-Pharisee/dp/0300052278/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006077&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=segal+apostleship+apostasy+of+Paul

Rennyo's Blog

https://rennyo01.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/god-immanent-and-transcendent/

John Paraskevopoulos

https://www.amazon.com/Fragrance-Light-Journey-Buddhist-Wisdom/dp/1597311456/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526006153&sr=1-3&keywords=paraskevopoulos

Here is a text book for you to read. Not to mention these two as well.

Once you've done that you can get back to me on why it's ok to give illogical explanations while excluding others from doing the same.

Mostly just from reading Thomist philosophers. Ed Feser is a good place to start. Try this.

You should check out this book called The Information. it talks about information theory and how all material interactions are really just transferring information in the form of momentum and spin.

While I was hallucinating on 2C-E, after reading about schroedinger's cat, I had actually theorized that quantum interactions are, at a base level, information transfer. It was interesting to see that come up in a book way after I had thought of it.

/boast

>"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.

I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520/

The author makes the case that god IS a testable hypothesis, and when consistent scrutiny is applied, the hypothesis can be disproven beyond a reasonable doubt.

>I only bring Russell up because he seems to me an example of an honest seeker and genuine nonbeliever. He was someone who seemed to pursue the truth in a fairly unbiased way, but came away from that search a nonbeliever.

Antony Flew, another atheist philosopher who upon examining the evidence rejected atheism and embraced theism.

Further I think your argument fails on the fact that it rests upon The idea of genuine nonbelief is that of authentic, unbiased, nonresistant, and sincere nonbelief. How do you propose to ever provide the evidence that anyone has authentic, unbiased, nonresistant, and sincere nonbelief?

Would probably been better to compare a theistic worldview to a naturalistic WV and then see which one can account for the world as we know it.

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

http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235

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

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

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

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.

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

Some would say all

God isn't an object first of all......He can't be proved in the sense that I can show you some 'thing'. He is proved within yourself, NOT outside your self. It's really so very clever, because that way, all the wise asses can carry on denying him until they finally croak, and yet all those who really want to know him can do so too. Everyone wins....How awesome is that....God gives us all exactly what we want. Anyway, nothing anyone says here is going to make a big dent in what anyone else already thinks, but what DOES intrigue me is how Antony Flew, former self-proclaimed: 'most notorious atheist' had a complete 'volte farce' after articulately articulating the case for atheism for an entire lifetime: http://www.amazon.com/There-Is-God-Notorious-Atheist/dp/0061335304/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335701365&sr=1-1
‎Please read and try to understand that the very latest microbiological research has vastly strengthen the argument "intelligent' design and it consequent theological rammifications.

> 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.

>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

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.