Faith

Then I'm curious how you ascertain that Jesus taught of hell and the need for salvation for a fallen humanity, yet didn't encourage universal love.

Biff the unclean

The same way that I can tell that Harry Potter said something. I look in the book he's a character in. Everything the fictional Harry ever said is in those pages. Everything the fictional Jesus said is in the pages of his book. All you can know about Jesus and Harry is inside of those books, and only inside of those books.
The early Christians had other books and we have found a few of them. The Jesus in them is quite different than the Jesus you know and love. And I should make that plural Jesui (sp?) because among them there are several different Jesusssss.
But no universal love in any of them. Univeral submission is a common theme though. Universal love was an idea whose time had not yet come, and would not come until almost the present day.

converted

No, true Christians would be sad. Only the judgemental hypocrites would rejoice. Also in my opinion God/Jesus will likely have mercy on Judgement Day. It would just be easier if people didn't deny God throughout their lives.

Sauron

Not surprising. He's lost the arguments. Exaggerations and ad hoc is all Magus55 has left.

converted

So you are saying that because man freely chose to do the one thing that Man told him not to do, that Free Will was the sin? WRONG!

Adam and Eve had free will to do anything they wished to do except to eat the apple from the tree. They could have slept late, ate apples from every other tree, etc..., but instead they disobeyed the only rule God defined. Free will is not the sin, but their choice to disobey God's one rule to become equal with God was the sin. It is a fine parable and is just as applicable today as then. Me / me / me thoughts. "If I were God I would do this..." thoughts. Self-pity, Self-loathing, Self-Centered. Selfish thoughts. Going through life thinking you can live without God thoughts. It is all tied back to original sin.

As for finding contradictions and confusing statements in the Bible, knock yourselves out. Jehovah's Witnesses do this to to the other extreme (e.g. can't get a blood transfusion because some sentence somewhere implies that your soul flows through your blood...). If you stood back and look at teh Bible as a whole, rather than ripping on it you might actually find that there is meaning.

Biff the unclean

Sigh….Converted, go back and read that silly story again. Man didn't freely chose anything.

So what? Is it evil to disobey God? Is it good to obey Him? Did they chose to do evil instead of good?
No, they didn't because they couldn't have. They lacked the knowledge of good and evil.
If I put before you two identical six-inch gray cubes and said if you pick the wrong one you will be punished. Can you use your free will to pick the correct one? No, because you cannot tell the difference between the two. You don't have free will, you only have random chance.
Your free will comes from your knowledge of good and evil. You can make an actual choice between the two because you can tell the difference between the two.
Adam & Eve had no way of knowing. From their reaction the second they gained the knowledge of good and evil they obviously would have chosen good had they known before hand what good even was.
God comes on the scene and makes it clear that their punishment is because they now have God-like powers. He never mentions that He is upset by their being disobedient. All He is concerned with is that they have powers like He does and they might become Gods by eating from another magic tree that the story teller forgot to mention before now.
Original sin is the gaining of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil is your free will.
That's why God spends the rest of the book demanding that people not use their free will but become like the robots, it was claimed in this thread, that He didn't want.

Most of we Atheists here began life as Christians. Only a lucky few were born into Atheist families. We did stand back and look at the Bible as a whole. We stood close and studied it intensely too.
Then we got up on our own two feet and threw the silly thing into the trash where it belongs. We became Atheists BECAUSE we studied the Bible.
You should try it. Perhaps you would stop considering yourself to be the unworthy idiot that your religion tells you that you are. Without your Bible you might come to understand that there is nothing wrong with you, you aren't fallen, you don't need to be saved from anything. And you have worth just because you are you. No need for an invisible magic potentate in the sky to rule you, you can think quite well for yourself, by yourself.

Clivedurdle

Magus55, I was surprised to see your comment that you needed to go and recheck this story. It is about almost another religion, one of true equality. It is quite a simple one, a farmer needed workers and hired them throughout the day. At the end of the day he paid them all exactly the same, saying they all needed a day's pay to feed themselves and their families.

A twelth century monk and Karl Marx said a similar thing - from each according to their ability to each according to their need.

There are two ways of interpreting this, one that when we get to heaven we all get an equal reward, the other, in line with they held all in common in Acts and the earlier discussion of if someone asks, the xian attitude is about equality.

It is important to remember context. This idea of equality was being discussed in the Roman Empire. Approximately 100 years previously the slave's revolt under Spartacus had almost established a far more egalitarian society.

These ideas are now held by some christians - and anarchists - in the seventies I briefly worked with an equal pay collective.

About hell, I was told by a practising xian that God would not allow xians in heaven to see hell - their memories of their loved one's would go...

That's another contradiction, between some early not properly thought through ideas of equality, love and justice, and all this guff about king of kings, judgement days, and all the theatre of everlasting hell.

Interestingly, this conflict reflects the Roman world then, with the crumbling of the Roman Republican ideals - that were founded on slavery but were actually democratic and - the contrasting Eastern ideas of Godkings and fabulous wealth and power.

jbernier

You are right: Christianity does not have a good track record. However, let us qualify that: Christianity does not have a good record when it either is concerned with either becoming or remaining a dominant social and political force. I would argue (based primarily upon my reading of Paul and other contemporary readings of Paul) that Christianity becomes fundamentally non-Christian the moment it is in a position of trying to exert power from the top of the sociopolitical structure downwards. Christianity, rather, should be at the bottom critiquing those at the top. By critique I mean that Christianity has an obligation to challenge the powers-to-be to treat the weakest in society in an ethical fashion (note that I have not said that this is a moral critique - I do not think that Christians need concern themselves with a president's extramarital affairs; I do think that they need to concern themselves with health systems in which people do not receive vital medical services simply because they were born into the wrong class). I would argue that the problem with Christendom was not that it was an expression of Christian values but rather that it contained within itself a fundamental betrayal of those values as we find in Jesus and Paul.

Not so sure. I think that Owen Chadwick's work on 19th century secularization have shown that the relationship between humanism/secularism and social justice movements (etc.) was incidental - in short one could have humanists who were unconcerned with social justice and Christians who were. I think that the relationship between secularism and social justice is quite complex.

Clivedurdle

jbernier.

Excellent post. But why try and recreate a xianity without its power trappings to achieve social justice? Why not use all these ideas from wherever they are from, check their value, to build a socially just world in anycase? Deep ecological thinking, taoism, anarchism, marxism, buddhism and humanism have just as good ideas, without believing Chadwick had the last word - he didn't!

Imagine no heaven...

Biff the unclean

Then that would cover the entire period between when General Constantine said "Holy crap I'd need a miracle to beat Maxentius" and his buddy Eusebius replied "I'll get right on it boss", up to and including the Bush re-election campaign.

That's Humanism, not Christianity. Christianity has no interest what so ever in the relief of human suffering. In fact they go out of their way to glorify human misery.
The values of Jesus and Paul are contempt for humanity. According to them mankind is sin-natured, corrupt, fallen, deserving of damnation, "totally depraved."

Humanism began during the Renaissance as a reaction to the Catholic Church of the Borgia Popes.
By the 19th century the undeniable superiority of Humanism was recognized by Churches in the more secular urbane areas of the world and partially adopted as their own. In the more rural areas, such as the American South (Bible Belt) the original contempt for humanity based Christianity was not discarded for the more secularized version of Christianity. That's why the Christians who post here appear to be of (at least) two diametrically opposing philosophies, God-is-love vs. hellfire and brimstone.
The Humanism doesn't sit all that well with most of the group that holds it though. They still find the self-loathing of Classic Christianity appealing. But they love to claim the virtues of Humanism for their religion even if it is not actually practiced.