NOGO

If that is the case then all humans after Adam and Eve had no choice and are therefore not responsible. Only Adam and Eve had a choice so why is God punishing everybody else. To be fair God should have given everyone a choice. But here you are saying that something Adam and Eve did imposed on us something which we cannot reject.

Wrong. Animals can also react to novel situations.

The Amalekite story shows the nature of your false God who was created in man's image. That is the bigger picture.

Even the story of Adam and Eve shows that Yahweh avenges himself on the children for something the parents did.

That is also the case with David's child.

There are many more examples like the Egyptian children who were massacred in order to punish Pharaoh and Jesus who says that Pharisees are guilty because of something the ancestors did.

It is also stated clearly that Yahweh avenges himself on children

Isaiah 14:21
Prepare slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their fathers; that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor fill the face of the world with cities.

There are others.

You see, Ed, it is not just one story. It is the overall picture which is marred.

Ed

No, their "research" showed they were subhuman, of course it was hardly objective. And you are right they hated them also because of their religion but not because they crucified Christ, they hated all Judeo-Christian principles and religion in general. Read Nietsezche. They thought belief in the Jewish or Christian God was a sign of weakness and also sociologically retarded, ie they had evolved beyond it. Sounds familiar doesnt it?

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jtb: Besisdes, according to Christianity, all the Holocaust victims went straight from the ovens of the death camps to the fires of Hell anyhow. So how can you possibly argue that Hitler wasn't serving God?

Huh? Maybe your strange tunnelvision form of Christianity.

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jtb: Exactly the opposite is true, as I have already demonstrated. We have a rational basis for why emotions exist: you do not. Ed: No, atheists believe that emotions evolved from impersonal random processes, theists believe ultimately emotions came from a personal emotional source. And that source can be logically demonstrated to exist. The impersonal has never been observed producing the personal. jtb: ...Which is, of course, bullshit. And it will REMAIN bullshit, no matter how often you repeat it. And we will keep on pointing out that it IS bullshit, no matter how often you post it. You don't understand logic or science. Stop pretending that you do.

You have yet to demonstrate that it is bs.

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Ed: Just because we don't know why God (the source) has something similar to emotions does not make the deduction about the source (God) of those emotions irrational. jtb: Yes, it is irrational. Again, you lack the ability to understand what is "rational" and what is not.

Absurd. It is similar to early agriculturalists knowing that their crops needed sunlight to live, but they didnt know WHY they needed sunlight. Not knowing WHY did not make their deduction any less rational or correct.

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jtb: But whenever those who profess to be Christians act immorally, you conveniently invoke either the "no true Christian" response or the "God has inscrutable reasons" response. Being Christian apparently makes no real difference to morality. Ed: Hardly. Almost everything good about western civilization is the result of christians following the teachings of Christ. Modern science, modern universities, modern hospitals, most charities, the ending of American and British slavery and many other things were all founded and accomplished by Christians. jtb: You should have stopped at "the result of Christians". Scientists, even Christian ones, certainly were NOT "following the teachings of Christ" during the Enlightenment. And slavers were Christians too: they even used the Bible to justify slavery.

By teachings of Christ I am referring to the entire bible. But yes they were following the biblical teaching that there is an objective reality that operates according to certain regular natural laws. Also, they were following the biblical teaching that you can learn about God by studying nature. Yes, some Christians used the bible to justify unbiblical slavery.

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jtb: ...Which is determined by the religious leaders. Heck, they even voted on which books to include in the Bible! How much more obvious could this be? Ed: Although the leaders did vote on which books would be included in the canon, their criteria had nothing to do with trying have a grip on the laypeople. If it had they would have deleted the sections about the greater accountability of the leadership and multitude of other teachings regarding freeing the oppressed and etc. jtb: These were RELIGIOUS leaders, not POLITICAL leaders. They WANTED politcal leaders to be accountable (to them). They also wanted their religion to appeal to the politically oppressed. But the Bible doesn't talk about freeing the oppressed (it endorses slavery), and there is no concept of RELIGIOUS freedom either.

No, the scriptures refer to religious leaders being under greater accountability and judgement when they do wrong things. Although the scriptures condone indentured servitude as a necessary evil in severe economic times, it is not the ideal, read I Corinthians 7:21-24. Also the Psalms refer to fighting oppression in many chapters throughout. Christ and his disciples plainly implied religious freedom by their actions, in that they never coerced conversions.

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jtb: Violence between different religions, and between different denominations of the same religion, throughout history. Ed: The good of Christianity far outweighs the evil committed in the name of Christianity, as mentioned above. jtb: Christianity is responsible for more deaths in its name than any other religion in the world, including Islam.

Evidence? But even if true, followers of atheism and practical atheism (the evolutionary pantheism of the nazis) have slaughtered far more people than those claiming Christianity and Islam combined.

Jack the Bodiless

There was NO research into the actual racial abilities of the Jews during the rise of Nazism. The only vaguely "scientific" Nazi research on race involved such things as measurement of physiological characteristics (size and shape of facial features etc). In the later stages of the Holocaust, Mengele experimented on the Jews at Auschwitz, but obviously Nazi anti-semitism could not have been based on his findings.
Nietzche wasn't a Nazi. Are you now going to label everyone who reads Nietzche a "Nazi"?
Unbelievers will be cast into the Lake of Fire. Read your Bible.

Remember, it was YOU who recently criticized "liberals". This was the historic teaching of the majority of Christianity for at least 1800 years. Only in the last 200 years have liberal theologians rejected this core doctrine. Beginning with primarily Wellhausen, according to you.

You are arguing that the Nazi Christians "went bad" and started stuffing Jews into ovens because they no longer accepted the literal truth of the doctrine that the Jews would burn in the Lake of Fire!
I used your "argument" to prove that Americans cannot exist.
You claimed, falsely, that Christianity provides a superior rational foundation. But I know WHY good and evil exist: you do not. I know, not just that we HAVE emotions, but where emotions COME from: you do not. By analogy, you know that plants need sunlight, but you don't know why: whereas I understand photosynthesis.
This is not a Biblical teaching. This is the later assumption, made after the discovery of natural laws, that God was responsible for them.
There is nothing unbiblical about slavery.
...Which, of course, says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about indentured servitude being a "necessary evil in severe economic times", or about it being "not the ideal". What it ACTAULLY says is "For he that is called in the Lord, being a servant, is the Lord's freeman: likewise also he that is called, being free, is Christ's servant". In other words, God doesn't care either way: his standards of "freedom" and "servitude" are entirely independent of society's standards.

So, by implying that the Bible speaks against slavery, you were lying.

Again.
The statement stands. The Holocaust was not done in the name of any religion except Christianity. There is no such religion as "evolutionary pantheism".

Nor can it be claimed that Stalin killed "in the name of atheism": at best, it might be argued that he persecuted the Russian Orthodox Church "in the name of atheism" (even that would be quite a stretch), but they were only a tiny fraction of Stalin's victims. He wasn't personally driven by atheism, nor did he use it as a tool to motivate others: his ideology was his own brand of Communism instead. Yes, he happened to be an atheist (just as he happened to be a round-Earther), but communism is not inherently atheistic. It certainly isn't a "denomination" of atheism.

He probably would have been WORSE if he'd been a Christian. All those Muslims to massacre in Soviet Central Asia.

Ed

It doesnt matter what most preachers say. James 1:17 states that God is light and there is no shadow in him. In other words there is nothing antithetical in him or his actions. So he cannot do evil, he cannot go against logic, he cannot not exist, and etc. So he cannot do absolutely ANYTHING.

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Starboy: Ed, that wasn't the question. What difference would it make? What is the point? The punishment appears to have little or no effect. What good is it? wj: The biblical god is a sadistic, bloodthirsty maniac who delights in suffering, torture and sacrifice. Hope this clears it up for you

That conclusion is the result of a very superfical and tunnelvision reading of the scriptures.

Starboy

Ed, I can't wait till you catch up to my last post. If the past is any indication of the future it may take months.

Starboy

Ed

Part of the punishment is to make sure the victims do not die in vain and the other part is to satisfy justice. If they were able to slaughter people with no accountability that would be unjust. And also to help turn those still alive to Christ and heaven.

Starboy

Ed, that's not it. Keep reading.

Ed

Hardly, I just have a real life unlike many here.

Any evidence witches can heal the sick with witchcraft? But anyway, primarily witchcraft is idolatry. And since the ancient hebrew theocracy was held to a higher standard, any idolatry had to be removed from ancient Israel because the entire nation was God's representative on earth. But after the coming of Christ, God showed more grace and relaxed his standard for his new representative the church. So while witchcraft is still a sin the church is not allowed to mete out OT punishments. Because the church in the middle ages had corrupt leadership that was primarily power hungry, they rationalized using OT punishments.

There is no such thing as truly innocent babies, all humans are in rebellion against God from birth. And as Romans 6:23 says the wages of sin is death, we all deserve to die, but sometimes God is gracious and lets us live for awhile. If God used persuasion in person it would take away our free will so he commands his human representatives to use persuasion. And there is some evidence that Noah did preach to the people to repent but they refused.

Sexual preference is not like liking a different flavor of ice cream. Male homosexuality is one of the most disease ridden behaviors known to man. And some of those diseases harm people who have not even engaged in that behavior. And it is not a "natural" desire, prior to 1973, the Amercan Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness. All the research up to that time confirmed this assessment. In 1973 the APA caved in to political pressure, NOT scientific evidence, and changed their view to it not being an illness. This is a historical fact, read R. Bayer, "Homosexuality and American Psychiatry:The Politics of Diagnosis." Also, even if it is a "natural" desire, not all natural desires should be acted upon, such as alcoholics, kleptomaniacs and etc.

winstonjen

Then he is not all-powerful. The book of Isaiah states that god also created evil. Isaiah 45:7: I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. That also implies that he enjoys letting people suffer, and he has made innocents suffer, take the example of the Egyptian people in Exodus. Egypt was an AUTOCRACY. The people had no influence over what Pharoah did, so why were THEY punished? Oh that's right, they were Egyptian. :boohoo:

Even if they couldn't, it is not a reason for killing them for 'idolatory'. The majority of the accused witches used herbs and plants to cure sickness, which was much more effective than the church's 'faith healing'.

So why bother creating us at all? To be the slaves of your god?

Actually, there is more evidence now to suggest that sexual preference is genetic, not a result of choice. What evidence did they use to determine that it is a mental illness? Next you'll be saying that only homosexuals are pedophiles, which is patently false. Why shouldn't all natural desires be acted upon? Is religion 'natural'? Why allow sex for straight couples and not for gay ones?

Jack the Bodiless

A profoundly ludicrous statement. Newborn babies have no CONCEPT of God! This argument is a clear example of the mind-crippling effects of religion.
No, we do NOT deserve to die, because this situation (even if it existed) is NOT our fault. GOD is to blame. This argument is a clear example of the morality-crippling effects of religion.