Rhaedas

I have a cat that is 100% black and 100% male and 100% cat. How can this be? Well, they are 100% of diffferent things about the same object, so it's quite logical.

You're just using the untestable supernatural argument. God can't be tested, so therefore he must exist. The invisible pink unicorn exists for the same reason - she is by definition invisible, so because I cannot see her, she MUST exist. Indeed, it isn't logical. It also has no basis for belief. Here's where faith comes in, believing despite the lack of facts.

1) either it's the unaltered word of god, and all of it must be right, or it's validity throughout is suspect. Given that much of it is inconsistant and/or goes against our knowledge today of things, either scientifically, historically, or morally, the latter has more to back it.

2) How can you guarantee that what translation changes and historical editting occurred were "insignificant"? There have been numerous discussions here and elsewhere on how a few words mistranslated change the whole message, and certainly the history of the compilation of the bible, and the omission of some works for the inclusion of others, for various political and personal reasons, brings to question how "holy" the bible really is. One could propose that all authors and editors were "divinely inspired", but that's just a bit more of that faith thing.

Mullibok

Hehehe, funny. Are you 100% son and 100% father to yourself by any chance?

Starboy

Why does the existence of god as you describe it give your or anyone else’s life meaning? If just being part of a larger whole that took some kind of interest in your existence made life meaningful then corporate life would be much better received then it actually is. Fact is if you don’t find anything meaningful in god then it will not be meaningful. And you can find just as much meaning in a sunset as you can find in some atoning sacrifice without all the fuss and mental gymnastics.

No.

What is “the logic test”?

mon chi chi, you’ll get no argument from me that as far as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Rastafarianism are concerned we are both a-theists. And if I speak with an adherent of any one of those religions we share the same a-theism of Christianity. From where I sit, the same silliness you find in Islam I also find in Christianity.

For the same reason they haven’t been able to discredit Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Rastafarianism and so forth. Those religions like Christianity do not rely on reason but on faith. The kind of faith that will ignore the obvious problems. What I find so funny about you chi chi is that you attack other religions on grounds that you are also guilty of.

You are so funny chi chi. Who could more expert on the Torah than the Jews? Yet even they did not believe that Jesus fulfilled prophecy. Read your bible chi chi. Christianity is the religion of gentiles not Jews. To the Jews Jesus was just one more false prophet in a long line of false prophets.

Starboy

Jogyo

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Originally posted by mon chi chi
Another reason would be the feasability of it all. Here you go. I wrote this a little while ago, actually, so hopefully it is as clear now as it was then.

1.) Christianity is the only one that passes "the logic test."
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Here's a question for your logic test. Can god make a rock so big that even he can't pick it up?

Wayne Delia

Quite easily, actually. None of those qualities are mutually exclusive.

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Everybody knows that all of this adds up to one thousand. Are you saying that I am 10% male and 10% son and 10% brother ect.? If you aren’t, how can I be all these things at the same time and still be the same person? You tell me.

As explained above, the descriptive qualities are not mutually exclusive. So, your different descriptions of yourself in terms of your different roles is a poor, invalid analogy to the idea that Jesus was supposedly 100% human and 100% God. Being human, almost by definition, requires possessing all human traits, drawbacks, and limitations which are not possessed by someone who would be 100% God. Those two descriptions are mutually exclusive. Perhaps a better analogy would be if you described yourself in terms of being 100% male and 100% female. Both are human, but certain characteristics are mutually exclusive, such as the number of Y-chromosomes you possess would negate the claim to being 100% female.

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Also, all of you who have pointed out how Christianity is illogical. Way to go. I think you are exactly right.

Thanks! While I don't think I'm necessarily exactly right, nobody has presented any evidence that I'm wrong.

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Even though I am a Christian, and could probably be considered a fundamentalist, I don't believe that Christianity is logical.

That would beg the question of why you place your belief in the teachings of Christianity. If logical sense is no barrier to what you believe, why not put your faith in an arbitrary non-Christian religion? That, too, would be illogical, but that would seem to be no problem for you.

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What is so logical about a person rising from the dead? That is scientifically impossible!

Actually, the inclusion of that in the Christian myth is very understandable. Other popular religious myths of the time, such as Mithraism, included tales of resurrection, which became something of a standard of what a God should be, a characteristic a would-be God must possess, so the authors of Christianity co-opted it for the Jesus cult.

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What is so logical about a perfect god dying for his creation? Nothing is logical about that.

Gotta agree with you there. One characteristic of a universe-creating, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal God I'd expect would be "Cannot be killed by humans using only nails and some boards."

Further, the justification behind why God allegedly required Jesus's death is logically highly questionable. It seems to be that God was so bloodthirsty that someone had to die for all the sins of mankind, which God was unable to forgive unless somebody spilled blood. So, God arranged to require that His son Jesus gets killed, to generate guilt and sympathy among those who didn't think about it too much, offering to forgive sins only of those who believed. If a human tried that schtick, he'd be thrown in a mental hospital for the criminally insane.

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I don't think that something has to logical to be real.

Yes, you do, because (presumably) you don't believe in every illogical idea that comes down the pike. For example, even though the Christian and Islamic claims may be mutually exclusive (Christian: Believe in Jesus and go to heaven; Islam: Anyone who believes Allah is not the only True God will go to hell), in your line of reasoning, it could be "real" that they are both equally valid. Do you believe in both? No, because (most likely) in your view, that combination would be illogical, and therefore not worth your belief.

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In my TOK class at school we discussed whether love was logical or not, we didn't come to a decision, we sort of saw it both ways. But, if love isn't logical, does it not exist?

There are several things wrong with your argument here, but I'll let you start on one of them: you are arguing for the validity of your seemingly illogical premise (God exists), based on the seemingly illogical validity of a completely unrelated topic (love) - that's called a "non-sequitur". In other words, "Here's something else you believe in which is illogical, so why not also believe in my illogical thing?"

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Sometimes kindness is illogical, why would somebody give a dollar to a person on the street they didn't know? That’s illogical but nobody would say, hey, don't give him money, that’s illogical.

Why? You seem to be assuming that charity, based on human empathy, doesn't exist, but it certainly does, and there's nothing illogical about it. Since human empathy seems to be a foreign concept to fundamentalist theists, it's based on performing good, charitable acts to people in a community or society based on compassion and the understanding of what the recipient might be feeling or experiencing in their plight. Others might offer help based on the principle of "what goes around, comes around" and there might come a time in their lives when they might need some token assistance. Still others might feel that their tribe or society would be better off with the needy person as a member, and might have a tactical advantage over societies which ostracize their unfortunate members. None of those motivations are illogical, and none require a God.

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It is illogical to me that when I press a key on this keyboard it pops up on the screen. But to a computer engineer, or somebody who knows a ton about computers, it would make perfect sense because they would know and understand exactly what happens.

That's not illogic; it's ignorance.

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Just because something seems illogical to us, doesn't mean it is illogical or doesn't exist.

The keyboard/CPU/display connection is a particularly bad example, because your metaphorical ignorance can (possibly) be overcome by the presentation and demonstration of physical, tangible evidence: a keyboard, a computer, and a display monitor. Experiments can be designed to demonstrate, reliably and repeatably (unless you are using an IBM laptop! :-) that this ability is possible, and the reasons can be explained why it works in certain situations (proper connections, proper circuits, power cords plugged in) and does not work if any of those conditions are faulty. On the other hand, there is no physical, tangible evidence for the existence of gods of any kind, much less yours.

What you are arguing for is the use of the logical fallacy called "Argument from Ignorance." The general form is that the theist apologist cannot explain certain elements of life, such as universe-creation or after-death experiences, and therefore concludes it must have been performed by their preferred concept of God. Would you feel comfortable believing that the letters appear on your monitor because of tiny little keyboard fairies who push the correct letters directly to the monitor, based on your assumed inability to understand exactly how computers work?

Finally, you're equivocating on exactly what you think atheists claim does not exist because of illogicality. You are arguing that Christianity is illogical, but nobody asserted that Christianity does not exist.

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Rational BAC ------ How can you call yourself a Christain and say that your Bible is errant and not divinely inspired?

I won't speak for RBAC (whose adjective might just as easily be "Honest", if not completely "Rational"), but it seems that anyone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ as a model of how to live a life has a somewhat legitimate claim to calling him/herself a Christian. The Church of England had an official category, if I remember correctly, of "Christian Atheist" - those who follow Jesus's teachings, without believing that Jesus was the Son of God, or that any gods actually existed.

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It clearly says in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." This seems pretty straight-forward to me.

What is equally straight-forward is that the Bible contains demonstrable errors, contradictions, internal inconsistencies, and atrocious abominations. For example, the Old Testament teaches that if a rapist of an unengaged virgin girl pays her father a certain amount, the rapist can marry his victim. Is that "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness?" You've got to pretend it is, somehow, and usually, the attempted explanations are pretty amusing.

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If your Bible is errant and not divinely inspired, as you say it is, then this verse is not true.

Not necessarily. The verse in Timothy's second letter could be true! It could be inspired by a God who was something of a mental moron, who inspired men to write errors and contradictions and abominations. Those could certainly be "useful for teaching" about why particular, specific religions like Christianity are bogus.

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If this verse is not true, then how do you know that any other verse is true? You wouldn’t! Therefore falsifying your religion.

Not quite, although it comes very close. The religion isn't falsified entirely, but the authority of the necessary validity of any arbitrary Bible verse is impeached (called into question, evaluated, and dismissed), so it becomes rather unimpressive to say that such-and-such is true because it's in the Bible. In fact, what you have here is a case where the Bible makes a certain very large number of assertions, most of which are unfalsifiable and untestable (i.e. about what happens after death), but quite a number of them are demonstrable errors. One of the many Christian assertions in the Bible is the 2 Timothy 3:16 verse, which can be taken to mean that everything in the Bible is true. You're now forced to take the Bible's word on it and ignore the obvious errors, pretending they aren't errors at all.

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However, I do believe that since the Bible was translated from other languages that are very different from English in vocabulary and grammar and word-usage (and if this is what you were talking about when you said the Bible was errant, Rational BAC, then I interpreted you wrong and am sorry) so yeah, I guess there are “mistakes”

You've moved the goalposts a considerable distance. You are admitting "mistakes" but are arguing for Biblical inerrancy. As you said earlier, "there's nothing logical about that!"

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but they are insignificant and do not change the meaning of the Bible.

Hold on a second there. You've made a quick, subtle, convenient "leap of faith" in that what appear to be errors or contradictions in the Bible could be caused by the corruption of the original message through translation errors, then jumped to the conclusion that it therefore must be a translation error in your favor. The problems with that are obvious: 1) you haven't demonstrated any actual linguistic translation errors in critical verses; 2) by allowing for this possibility, there could have been errors in the original scriptures which were mistranslated into something that does not appear to be an error, 3) no original scriptures are available for examination, although fragments of very early scripture copies are available, and 4) you have not presented any qualifications of fluency in Hebrew, Greek, and/or Aramaic or any theological training which would make you more credible than the teams of thousands of Bible translators who have dedicated large parts of their lives to the pursuit of an accurate translation.

WMD

BrazenPenguin

No, Im not using the untestable supernatural argument, or at least i didn't mean too. Since God can't be tested, He can't be proven, I fully believe that. But He can't be disproved either, just like many other religous beliefs can't be disproved.

And by the way, have you noticed the green elephants that live in the trees by your house? No? They hide pretty good, don't they? hahaha

Okay, okay, i probabl should not have used "insignificant." If you can think of a better word, please tell me. Maybe "not very importnat in some cases but ocasionaly the word translation has been very important"? Yes, people devoted their lives to trying to correctly interpret and translate the Bible and peace together different pieces of it. And they didn't always agree with each other which is part of the reason why Catholics have "extra" books in their Bible. And yeah, it is a faith thing. Christianity as a whole is a faith thing.

BrazenPenguin

Ok Jogyo, you have proved that God can't do "everything." Becuase if he could make a rock that he couldn't pick up then he couldn't pick it up. Or, he couldn't make a rock that big. If anybody ever told you that God could do anything, they were wrong. God can only do everything in children's songs. Somebody wrote a book called 101 things God can't do. Ive never seen it but it sounds interesting. The only other thing God can't do that i can think of is sin, i guess that could include a lot of things though, so maybe the book isn't as interesting as i hope it is.

Abel Stable

Considering that evil = sin, as is the general consensus, what does this verse mean?:

23 And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him. (1 Samuel 16:23)

What is God's evil spirit? I thought it was God who was supposed to bring refreshment, not torment.

Because God wasn't happy with Saul's job as King (even though Saul asks for forgiveness and worships him) he sends an evil spirit down. It wasn't just enough that God takes back his blessing, he needs to make Saul suffer. Again, this isn't even Satan doing the dirty work....

How does this fit with a loving, forgiving God? Or a God who will not tolerate evil in his presence...although he has evil spirits in his possession that he can send down to transgressors?

BrazenPenguin

I never said that logic isn't a barrier for my beliefs.

You're right. Jesus said that if he wanted he could have thousands of angels come and rescue him from the roman soldies. He probably could've pulled a neo and flew out of there but didn't say that. However, there is the question of how omnipotent and omniscient Jesus was while he was on earth, while he was a man, while he was God. Thats confusing, yes.

Schtick is a really cool word, I should start using it, if only i knew how to pronounce it correctly.

If I did, I didn't mean to say that charity doesn't exist. What do you mean that human empathy seems to be a foreign concenpt to fundamentalist theists? Do you know how many christian charity organizations there are? Plenty, why do missionaries go to foreign countries and sometimes risk their lives in these places? Well for one reason they were commanded too, but also, besides spreading christianity, many of them also work as schoolteachers, doctors, some of the stories are incredible. Have you ever been to a church service and seen an offering plate passed to raise money for something other than the church, say an operation on a member or to help out a family who'se house burned down or to send money to another country. I would think that christians would be the most empathetic, they should be, but maybe you have just seen bad examples. I wasn't arguing against the "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" principle. That is logical. I was speaking of giving a dollar to a bum on the street, it is very unlikely that you would gain anything from that kindness (unless you belived in karma).

Yes, it is ignorance (im not that ingorant though, i do unerstand the basics of how a computer works, sorry that it was such a bad example). But, maybe you are just ignorant of God and the truth then?

Yes, but what that means is that God and his actions are illogical to us.

So could I be described as an Atheist Christian if I follow athesit teachings, without believing that no Gods exist? Just wondering, I think I can be.

The Old Testament also says that in order to have forgiveness for you sins you have to sacrifice animals. Obviously, Christians today don't sacrifice animals. That is because Jesus was the sacrifice, He changed a lot of things when he came, which is why they split the calendar. He also came to do away with the old laws, the laws of the Jews, one of which you mentioned. But not all of the laws, you can still be a christian even if you only have the New Testament to go by. No, "pretend" isn't the right word, "faith" is. Which is sort've like pretending but not really becuase when you pretend you know that what you are pretending isn't true so i guess its the opposite.

well, i don't know of any liguistic translation errors in critical verses but I do know that the greek word for love is either erros, phillos, agape, and onother one but i forgot it. All four of these meanings are different types of love, but when translated to enlish they all mean the same thing, only differing in their context use. This is why hebrew and greek should be taught in children's sunday schools, yeah, that wouldn't go well at all. There is another example, I'm sure that your familiar with Cindarella? Well, the story is russian and in the orignal story Cindarella's slippers were actually fur. However, the translator mistranslated it and said that they were glass. Even though there is a huge difference between glass and fur, this does not change the story at all. And no, I don't have any of the qualifications that you mentioned. I apologize for just being an ignorant kid who hasn't even graduated from high school yet and for not going to seminary. And I never claimed to be more credible than the thousands of Bible translators, I'm pretty sure that I have not been arguing against them. But I have been going to church all of my life, and that is a long time spent studying the Bible. Someday I would like to study the other religious books though.

JEST2ASK

Is not the defination of Sin pretty much just Disobeying God or acting outside of God's will so DUOH

My first spotting of a Tautology ...



Oh by the way Brazen One welcome to the neighborhood