Clivedurdle

My brain is rusty! Maybe this should be a separate thread - who can remember what apologia!

Decypher

??

What else?

spamandham

I think I've seen every imaginable apologetic response to this quandry, all aimed at showing that what Jesus said was technically not incorrect.

But what the apologists miss is that communication is not simply the transmission of technically correct strings of words. It is the imparting of meaning. The New Testament makes it blatently clear that early Christians expected all this end times bullshit to happen in their day, not at some time thousands of years into the future.

If Jesus was god, then he would have known that his words would be misinterpreted. To tell someone something you know they will misinterpret and to allow them to misinterpret it anyway is still a deception.

There are verifiable lies attributed to Jesus in the Bible that can only be handwaved away by claiming that the lies don't mean what they say (no justification is ever given for this. They simply incant their favorite magic word, "hermaneutics", as if that somehow resolves the problem).

John 14:13-14 NAB
"And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it."

Let's test it.

I hereby ask Jesus, in the name of Jesus, that everyone who reads this will immediately find a gold bar sitting on their keyboard.

Clearly, if this request is honored, the father would in fact be glorified in the Son. Who reading this would continue to deny the truth of Christianity if this request were honored?

Did you find your gold bar? If not, this is a verified lie.

Ben C Smith

Some feel that this generation applies to the generation contemporary with the author, as if Jesus is stepping off the page, as it were, and speaking directly to and about the readers of the gospel.

Ben.

Tiberius

[Fundie response]

Let's look at how you messed that up...

First, you didn't say "Amen" at the end, so we know that it just doesn't count.

Secondly, you failed to mention WHEN the gold bar would appear. How do you know it won't appear tomorrow? Or in a week? or a year? Or maybe when everyone dies and goes to heaven?

[/fundie response]

They'll always twist your words to form an excuse. My advice is not to even try. if you stop paying attention to them, maybe they'll go away. but responding to them just gives them the attention they want so desperately.

haight

Ahh,it never ceases,my head is in ruins over so called "Christian Rational"......could there be a bigger contradiction of words!

The TRUTH is NONE of us know the Truth,but we must make a sincere attempt to find it.Now if one looks for the truth in a book of lies, he has failed before he begins.However, if one avoids those lies and looks elsewhere,then surely he is closer to the truth than everyone else.


This,i think is an adequate quote to describe religion:
"Christian Rational" is so stupid,it is an embarrassment to humanity!

spamandham

For every fundie playing word games, there are two moderate theists who see those word games for what they are and realize the fundy has no substantial response. If I can help moderate Christians see that people like Kent Hovind are nothing but clever frauds, that's ok too.

Decypher

The point I will make against Christians (they will never accept it of course) is that we are supposed to judge Jesus on the criteria of whether he gets his prophecies correct (Deut. 18:18-22). It is the responsibility of Jesus to give clear and precise prophecy, so that we can judge him. If he doesn't do so, then he is wasting our time and we should assume that he is a false prophet. Jesus was using metaphor? Well he shouldn't have been because it creates ambiguity. Jesus came back invisibly? Well he shouldn't have done because it can't be verified.

Roland

Although they certainly strike me as unfulfilled prophecies, why didn't the men who canonized the books into the Bible "fix" them to make them less obviously unfulfilled? In other words, why didn't the men reading the texts two to three hundred years after they were written see these statements as a "problem"? Or did they somehow interpret them differently from the way we are interpreting them?

Atheos

Can't argue with you there. Of course apologists will say that Jesus accurately and precisely predicted the destruction of Jerusalem, so he gets a pass for his more ambiguous predictions. Obviously they have to argue that the Synoptic accounts of said predictions weren't fabricated after the fact, which of course is a tall order.