Jinto

Hey, gald to see you RUG

I respectfully disagree. In this example, it would accomplish the tasks of:

1. Proving his existence
2. Proving his clairvoyance, and
3. Educating his son on the futility of mockery

All of which are useful goals.
I don't think you need to be concerned - the moderators here aren't interested in removing dissenting veiwpoints, only in keeping things reasonably civil.
Some of God's commands are analagous to warnings. Others, however, seem purely gratuitous, such as his requirement of circumcision for the Israeli people. In this case, if he really doesn't like foreskins, then perhaps he should just make his people without them, rather than requiring people to mutilate their own genitals.

Hell may not have been created for human beings, but that does not negate the fact that hell is being used for human beings.

Actually, looking at the old testament, I can see a great many cases where God actually orders people to do horrible things on Earth. Case in point: Deuteronomy 7. And all the cases where God physically intervened, it was as a punishment delivered after the fact - not as neutral intervention delivered before the death and destruction took place.

I might make the point about how unlikely it seems that those people would maintain such skepticism if those miracles were as impressive as you say, especially considering that the scientific method was a complete unknown in those days.

Actually, a reasonable scholar will first and foremost investigate whether or not the books account of things is coherent when deciding on its authenticity. Even the best historical works are quite frequently embellished in order to puff up the importance of influential people. Now considering that the bible is uncorroborated by other works, and even the different authors frequently report a different account of the same events, which unlike other historical events, are not already known to happen from time to time, it's easy to see why skepticism is justified.

This is the thing: one account from a few authors with the same religous goal, which is not wholly consistent, along with a description of a God which is much less what we would expect from an enlightened deity, and much more what we would expect from a myth, where scientific evidence does not match what is said, where the deity supposedly works miracles worldwide and yet was never heard of outside of europe until Christians started their agressive evangelization, and yet, this is considered proof. Sorry, but Christian claims of overwhelming proof that people ignore out of the coldness of their own hearts don't hold water.

I don't blame God for the results of the world: I have better things to do than to point the finger at a nonexistent deity. If anything, I blame human stupidity. I also blame human stupidity for allowing the perpetuation of religion. However, I also don't beleive in creationism, so to me human stupidity is just an unfortunate fact. However, if the biblical claim that humans were created by God is true, then human stupidity is a DESIGN FLAW, and the designer bears direct responsibility for any consequences of the flawed design, in this case human suffering. And to then further punish humans for the inevitable results of the flawed design that He endowed us with in the first place is just plain evil.

Keep in mind that we don't allow flawed pharmaceuticals to be kept on the market with instructions on the best way to deal with the (sometimes deadly) side effects, we order them taken off the shelf until they are made safe.

Uh... God values our free will, but requires us not to have it in order to avoid an eternity of punishment. Did I get that right?

You've got it backwards. People accept Jesus before examining him, and then, years later when they finally crack open their bibles at the prodding of an atheist, they wonder how the heck they ever believed this stuff. Fact is, if nobody had insisted to you that the bible was true, you wouldn't believe it either.

That's alright, you're doing just fine at apologetic pontification. But seroiusly, I'd be happy to discuss hell with you in the thread of your choice. As far as I am concerned, however, it really doesn't matter what hell was intended for, what mattters is what it is actualy being used for. And from where I'm sitting, it appears that hell is used for punishment above and beyond the natural consequences of one's actions.

Philosoft

Methinks this is now more of a GRD...

Defiant Heretic

Here's a question. What would have happened if you got a server busy error when you tried to post that?

Hayden

I'd have kept trying

Everyone else, I'll try to post a more substantial reply later. We're renovating at the moment, and I'm a bit pushed for time.

HR

RUG

Before I post another reply, I just wanted to mention something weird that happened here in my office yesterday :

Since I have no way of proving it, you're just going to have to believe I'd have no reason to lie about something as silly as all this.

I've been working at my present job for the past 9 months to date. There are approx. 400 people working here.
Everyone who does computer work here is connected to a mainframe so there's often a lot of traffic, which sometimes slows things down.
Even so, in the past 9 mos. we have never had a complete server crash.

Yesterday, about 5 seconds before I was about to submit the above post, our mainframe crashed. My computer shut itself down with a "beeeeeep" (as did apparanently everyone's).
In that moment, I was literally just pointing my mouse to click the "submit reply" button.

As a result of the crash, one particular colleague had to have all her programs reinstalled on her computer. My document saved itself, but I was still prevented from posting the above message for about 5 hours.

I'm not saying this proves a thing.
It just tripped me out.
But I did suddenly catch myself asking, "What the...?! Who would be trying to keep me from posting that?!?"

Still trippin',
RUG

RUG

Hey Jinto,
It’s obvious you’ve put plenty of thought into this subject.
I sincerely appreciate your challenging rebuttal.

Cool.
And now that we’ve been moved to GRD anyhow, we can shred this even more.
Ok, so here we go:
With all due respect, if the above could be applied universally, we’d have long since solved the problem of crime on this planet once and for all.
Not so.
I’m not convinced that what you’re asserting is congruous with what we know about basic human nature.
In my experience, what you’re claiming only works if the person you’re dealing with has not previously set their heart to be rebellious, no matter what.
Any ol’ mom with a rebellious teen will confirm that for you.
But if the person has made up their mind to mock you, that is, if the intent is embedded in their nature, like a character flaw, then the use of physical intervention will only postpone the inevitable. Success, if any, will only last as long as you don’t remove the duct tape.
And you can’t keep a person’s mouth duct-taped indefinitely.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assert that no amount of physical punishment can fix a problem of the heart.Ask any P.O. or criminal psychologist, they’ll have volumes to tell about repeat offenders and human nature.
It’s practically common knowledge in dealing with the criminal mind that true rehabilitation is only possible if the person themselves is willing to yield to change.

(Understanding this is so key to understanding how God deals with people, and why there has to be a horrible thing called hell. So I’ll have to come back to this point.)

The kind of father I’ve been describing would be aware of all this.

Just take one short look at Hayden’s funny response to Defiant Heretic’s sly question in this regard and you’ll see what I mean.
Even at the most basic level, ultimately, you can’t stop people from doing and believing whatever they want.

Dude, ALL of God’s commands are warnings. This is not a matter of interpretation in my view. It’s simple logic.
Just think to the end the ultimate consequence of any single command and you’ll see that God is trying to keep people out of harm’s way. At first it may not appear to be so on the surface, but even the foreskin command holds true to what I’m asserting here (cf. in particular pt. 2 below). In fact, of all the seemingly “superfluous” commands you could have picked, I find it amazing that you chose this one. There are two aspects to the reason for my amazement:

1. Biblical symbolism of spiritual processes demonstrated by physical actions:
It may sound absurd to you, but the bible is full of symbolic rituals which silhouette parallels to spiritual development, or a deeper truth.
In brief, physical circumcision is representative of spiritual sanctification, both of which are very real.
Spiritual sanctification cannot begin until the human being has surrendered his will, the main theme of the OP.

2. Biblical instruction as preventative medicine:
I live in Germany. I didn’t know this before moving here 8 years ago but hospitals will not automatically circumcise children at birth, which is often the case in the U.S.
A number of past German girlfriends of mine have told me they hate guys with foreskins. They all agreed independently of one another, if an uncircumcised guy isn’t extremely particular about daily cleanliness, he very quickly gits yer classic stinkin’ “cheese dick”. In addition, a high rate of bladder infections can be found among undisciplined uncircumcised German men. But the removal of the foreskin is a generally voluntary (that is, in the States you can obviously also insist that your baby NOT be circumcised), it is only performed by human beings. This is the most significant example of what we’ve been discussing here all along. It may seem perverted to you, and you’re probably dying laughing already, but the foreskin in the bible represents the yielding of the human free will to allow God to perform useful surgery on our spirit being. That is, the gruesome physical act of circumcision is intended to demonstrate that if God simply made people without them, to spare us possible illness and inconvenience, he would have robots. It exemplifies how God wants us to put the scalpel into his hand. And that when we do, he rids our hearts of chronic “uncleanliness”.

Sincerely begging your pardon for me for saying so Jinto, but I detect a major flaw in this position.
Are you saying that the mere fact alone that the possibility of being jailed as a consequence of a violation of the law is enough to evidence the vast injustice of the State?
If so, this is an unusual take on things.
Serious question not intended as an insult: Are you an anarchist?
Because this would explain the above position. If you’re not though, then you’re on the verge of being one.
As, what you’re proposing is an extremely laissez-faire approach to dealing with the incorrigible, repeat offender.
Look, in all earnestness, the concept of a hell isn’t exactly rocket science.
Analogously, people who violate the rules of society, and are able to be held criminally liable for their actions (i.e. excluding under age offenders or mentally incapacitated individuals), are principally aware that they risk going to jail, or at least risk some form of punishment by doing so. Ultimately, people go to jail as a result of a bad choice they made.
However, the mere existence of a consequence doesn’t automatically make the State vicious and unjust.
In fact, I rather appreciate the existence of penal codes. I should think they serve the interests of justice in most cases to which they are applied.
But if that doesn’t convince you, then try imagining a society without them, John Lennon style (imagine there’s no penal codes ... it’s easy if you try ... child rapists abounding among us ... ), or try at least imagining arbitrary ones.
A frightening scenario.
As far as God’s law is concerned though, you’re still labouring under a gross misconception. All the actions of God described in the bible are only leading up to fulfill one single goal he had: to pardon mankind from all punishment.

But people freely choose to reject that free gift and choose to be judged according to the law.

I won’t mince words with you on this one buddy: you need to read a little more, without bias, and do a little more research.
What you’re stating above is quite simply not the case at all.
In fact, precisely the opposite is true.
Remember, the bible is not a patchwork, it’s one fabric.
And above all, it’s chronological, linear.
You wouldn’t do what you’ve done with any other chronological document, so why would you do it with this book?
Even the very first book in the entire bible negates what you’ve alleged above. Genesis begins with a covenant that God voluntarily entered into with human beings. And it contains the original “warning before the fact”.
God is consistent in giving preliminary warnings from that point on.
Human beings were the first to violate that initial covenant and have been doing so ever since.
But God persists even early on in the bible, renewing and expanding the covenant with every major figure in the bible. By the time you reach the book of Deuteronomy, the entire law had been laid down, yet it was persistently and so vastly violated by humans that God HAD to intervene in order to keep human beings from voluntarily wiping themselves off the face of the earth forever, and choking off the bloodline which would bring about the birth of Christ.
You like the book of Deuteronomy?
Then dig further about the “nations” God commands his contracting partners to rise up against in the Chapter you’ve referred to and you’ll find that those societies were rampant with disease, and more than likely genetically mutilated from co-inhabiting with fallen angels, a controversial, but existent implication the bible makes.
The bible also says God grieved at the lawlessness and perversion of people.
In addition to what you’ve referred to, Deuteronomy also says something about circumcision you may have overlooked: “The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.” !
And as for one of the innumerable covenants God concludes with people BEFORE the fact, (and since you chose the book of Deuteronomy), try reading Deut. 30, v. 11-20. There, God is once again presenting people with the choice between life and death, just as he always did from the beginning, and consistently before the fact.
One excerpt says “Now choose life [...]”!

The bible says that at one point, as many as 5000 people witnessed one particular miracle.
The miracle I was referring to was the raising of Jesus’ buddy Lazarus from the dead.
The text also alleges that Lazarus had been dead for 4 days.
It goes on to say that the tomb smelled.
That Lazarus’ sister and relatives were beside themselves with grief that Jesus had not come 4 days earlier to heal him of his sickness, to prevent him from dying in the first place.
Jesus implies at one point that he deliberately waited, so that he could perform a miracle in front of the whole town, and he states to the disciples that he was going to perform this miracle “[...] so that [they] might believe [...]”
Dude, according to the report, he healed lepers. You ever seen some of the effects of leprosy? People are disfigure from it, missing exterminates, covered with scars, swollen, lame. Countless people were witnesses to these healings, according to the text.
If you don’t view those as explosive miracles, which do not require the scientific method to perceive, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Middle East scholars noted that the name of the town where Lazarus was allegedly raised from the dead was changed approx. around the point in time when Jesus would have performed this miracle. Those scholars explain that the changing of the name of a town denoted that something major happened there. The town is now named after Lazarus.

But you know, in one parable in the book of Luke, Jesus himself said: “ ‘[...] if they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’ ”
Human nature.
Unbelief, a condition of the heart which can only be dealt with if the person is willing.

Peter was a coward who had denied Christ and feared for his own life, Thomas vowed not to believe until he saw the risen Jesus and could physically insert his fingers into his wounds, James and John were Jesus’ very own brothers with whom Jesus had been raised and know him as a sibling not the son of God, his mother Mary had once exclaimed Jesus to be insane and went with Jesus’ brothers to drag him out of the Synagogue and have him committed, the rest of them were cowering after the crucifixion, hunkered down in a hide-out, scared for their lives, crying like elementary school girls who had just had their pigtails pulled for the one-hundredth time.
You couldn’t be more wrong about these guys. They had NO religious goals. Many of them weren’t even very good practicing Jews. The bible depicts them as being continually confused by Jesus’ actions and words. Clueless.
Please note that none of these knuckleheads had anything to gain from making up such a story: they were expecting quite a different Messiah; they were not expecting a lamb, but a lion who would free them from the oppression of Roman occupation and rule the earth with an iron fist. This Jesus was messing up their entire view of a Messiah, and they often felt let down. Particularly upon watching their teacher silently allow himself to be spit on, beaten and killed by the very massive crowd he’d performed miracles in front of.
It’s crucial to understand that most of them were simple, hardworking fishermen with one aim in mind: catching enough fish to earn their keep for the next week.
So something must have shocked them so much that they suddenly became willing to spend the rest of their lives telling the world what they had seen 3 days after the crucifixion. Suddenly, oddly, they were no longer wetting their pants and full of doubt and confusion. They were willing to be killed rather than deny that what they had seen was real.
And their message is so basic that I don’t understand what all the hubbub is about:
All they claim is that they saw the resurrected Jesus.
I don’t know about you, but that would shock me too and change my life and understanding of the bible if I’d seen it.

Read the last two Chapters of the book of John, then come back to me and try to assert what you’ve said here. The bible claims that Jesus appeared to hundreds in his resurrected form. John claims that the miracles he performed were so numerous, that not all of them could be recorded.
These things supposedly happened over 2000 years ago.
That’s a hell of a long time in earth years. Yet the bible still exists.
There are many generations spanning the distance between these events and our ears.
Yes, skepticism is understandable. But the Gospels corroborate eternally better with one another than even some works by Plato, Homer, Shakespeare and others, not to mention better than OJ’s claims in court.

I hear you brother.
In my view there’s no one thing that did more to convolute, twist and lay ruin to the simple message of the Gospel than organized religion. In fact, I recognize the workings of these corrupt and dead institutions in your honest words of disdain against the bible. No other institution has done more to build on misconceptions than the two great Christian institutionalized religions. I dare say I nearly loathe their very existence.
If never want to achieve clarity on some of the significant issues you’ve raised here, all you need to do is nestle up close to a well-meaning, traditional Protestant pastor or a faithfully ritualistic and legalistic Catholic priest. Ambiguity, contradiction and lukewarm curdled milk, guaranteed to please baby.

[/QUOTE][...] if the biblical claim that humans were created by God is true, then human stupidity is a DESIGN FLAW, [...][/QUOTE]

You are so unbelievably close, but no cigar.
The design flaw entered in when man rejected God, right at the beginning of the book.
Humans were made perfect. And they were made with a built-in ability to choose for themselves. The initial “bad” choice they made to doubt God invited in a curse.
A curse they chose, freely.
You could call that a tweak of the original design.
I’ll let you in on a little secret Jinto: (whisper) you’re living in a FALLEN world.

Bzzzzz. Wrong again bud. Although humans actually bear the responsibility for the very first “sin”, God in His mercy took the responsibility upon himself anyway. Even though it was not his fault, even though humans chose to reject Him. God, in His mercy, provided a cure for “design tweak”, by sending Jesus to take our place. Jesus took the heat for the first human beings’ enormously poor decision.

Jesus took the punishment on himself so that humans wouldn’t have to. He bore every sin of every generation past present and future, even of those who rejected God, and would reject God. The design flaw entered in because we asked it in. And God is not requiring you to suffer for it. All you asks us to do is something very simple: believe the account of hundreds, if not thousands (Jesus fed the 5000), who would have nothing to gain from making up such a story, and you are exonerated. Simultaneous with this exoneration is a circumcision of the heart, a lifting of spiritual blindness.

The salmonella I was referring to is the sin nature of humankind. In order to take the salmonella off the market, you’d have to commit global genocide. Like in the movie “Alien”, the thing of sin wrapped itself around the face of the spirit of the humankind and planted an egg the soul, passing on it’s effects to all generation. Like in the movie, removing it kills you. That’s how powerful sin is. It’s like salmonella poisoning, or a rattlesnake bite to the spirit, and Jesus is the antidote. But the bible says Jesus descended into hell and crushed the “Alien”, and the effects of it, freeing the souls of humankind from its deadly grasp forever. Believe that and you’ll live.

Nope.
God values our free will, yes, that is absolutely right. And he values it so much, that he has to be extremely careful about not giving us any choice other than to believe. There will ALWAYS be an argument against believing. You will ALWAYS be left an opportunity to EXPLAIN AWAY everything you’ve heard about him that’s positive.
All he can do is offer us a way to exercise our will FREELY to come to him.
Remember, God’s greatest ambition is to draw people TO him, just as they are, free will and all. He refuses to violate your free will by forcing the decision. The punishment was paid for. Humankind has been exonerated, PAST TENSE, you do not need to be held accountable.

Look, it’s quite simple:

1. On the one hand there’s the free gift of the cross:
Pure mercy, a free no-strings-attached full pardon from both the written law:
that is, from all itemized charges against you;
As well as a full pardon from the law of nature: that is, a death sentence (salmonella poisoning) that’s surging through your veins at this very moment. Accept the pardon, take the antidote and you will not be judged or sentenced according to these laws to the punishments any deeds may deserve.

2. On the other hand you’ve got the CONSEQUENCES of the written law and the law of nature: if you choose to reject the free pardon and the antidote, by rejecting the cross and the resurrection, then you will be judged just as you wished, legalistically, i.e. on the basis of legal principles instead of on the basis of pure mercy. You will then be sentenced deed by deed to the respective punishments those deeds deserve.

The Principle of Mercy vs. the Principle of the Law

What’s it gonna be hotshot?

Yeah, I suppose there are both kinds. Those who accept Jesus before examination, then let life in this fallen world and the paradoxical bitterness of human action confuse them, crack open their bibles without uttering a prayer, and essentially give up before they even started. But there are also those who never actually crack open their bibles, and decided Jesus is a farce beforehand, only to then crack it open at the prodding of a Christian and wonder why they never simply decided to believe this stuff. I mean, what do you have to lose anyhow? Only everything. And what do you have to gain? Only everything.
I have difficulty understanding how atheists claim logic as their greatest resource when the logic of this basic equation only adds up to a fallacy itself:
If the bible is a big lie, and I believe it, the worst that can happen is that I die like a dog and nothing happens at all. I just freeze and disappear. So I’ve lost nothing.
But if only a small portion of what the bible says is true, and I DON’T believe it, the worst that can happen is the worst thing that’s true about it. So I’ve lost everything.
This is the greatest violation of the exercise of logic I’ve ever encountered in all my logic studies in college. I was among the top 5 in my class in logic, but still find no logical reason NOT to simply believe the Gospel. I mean it costs me absolutely nothing, not even my free will. I freely choose to believe. And I freely throw my crown at Jesus’ feet in simple submission to his Kingship. I dig what he did for humankind so much, that I’m not violated in the least by submitting to his extraordinary and utterly astonishing act of mercy.

Nobody ever did insist to me that it was true. In fact, once I started really reading it, I’ve had nothing but opposition from all sides, including the church.
I freely choose out of gratitude, out of an act of my own free will, to simply believe that what those wacky, simple fishermen dudes saw, really happened.


Oh man, I need to take a course in journalism, stat.!
The length of this post is an outrage.
Don’t leave me hangin’, Jinto, blast me.
RUG

Opera Nut

A quote from the jewsforjudaism.com website:

"Christian dogma holds that the crucifixion of Jesus at Calvary served as the final atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world. Christianity insists that this is not just a Pauline innovation, but reflects the requirements of the Jewish Bible, and tries to establish this by pointing to Leviticus 17:11 as the key to atonement in the Tanach. However, if this passage is examined, it will be clear that Jesus could never serve as an atoning sacrifice. Obviously, the shedding of blood by pricking my finger or killing my cat won't fulfill the Biblical requirements for atonement. The Torah delineates how sacrifices are to be brought.

"For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls..."

Clearly, not any spilled blood is accepted by the Torah as a sacrifice. Jesus' crucifixion may qualify as an atonement according to the Greek Testament, but since his blood was not offered on the altar, it is not in line with what the Torah mandates.

There are actually several other factors which would render the crucifixion of Jesus an unacceptable sacrifice. According to the Biblical rules in Leviticus, all sacrifices had to be offered by a Priest who descends from Aaron. This was not the case in the death of Jesus, who was crucified by Roman soldiers. Additionally, Biblical law prohibited any sacrifice which was blemished or maimed (Leviticus 22:19-21). However, prior to his crucifixion, Jesus was whipped and beaten (Matthew 27:26, Mark 15:19, John 19:3) which would render him unfit. Furthermore, Jesus was circumcised in the flesh, which according to Philippians 3:2 and Galatians 5:12 is considered mutilation.

Frequently, Christians react to this line of reasoning by protesting that it is improper to be so literal, and that Jesus' death was more of a symbolic or spiritual sacrifice. This would be fine if the Bible provided for such ethereal offerings, but such is not the case. The Greek Testament, however, does insist that Jesus was a real sacrifice, literally fulfilling the Biblical requirements of such:

"But coming to Jesus, when they saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs...in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled: `Not a bone of him shall be broken.'" (John 19:33-36)

The Gospel of John portrays Jesus as the Paschal lamb which was not supposed to have any of its bones broken (Exodus 12:46, Numbers 9:12). Since the author of John insists that Jesus was a real sacrifice to the extent that the Biblical rules of the Passover were fulfilled in him, we can't dismiss the problems cited above as legalistic nit-picking.

One wonders why the Greek Testament chose to type Jesus as a Paschal lamb rather than the sacrifice for the Day of Atonement. We know from Exodus 12 that the Passover sacrifice did not serve as an atonement for sins, it commemorates the exodus from Egypt. (Even when the lamb was slaughtered in Egypt and its blood smeared on the doorposts, it did not serve to atone for the sins of anyone. It was a sign for the angel of death to pass over Jewish homes during the plague of the first born. The only people in danger were first born males, the blood wasn't a help to other people in the family, and didn't serve as an atonement for the first born). A more fitting prototype for Jesus would have been the Yom Kippur sacrifice, which was an atonement for the sins of all the people. It is interesting that according to Leviticus 16:10,21-22, the animal which effectuated the atonement for the sins of the nation was not killed, but sent live out into the desert. Again, the shedding of blood is not a sine qua non for atonement.

The Greek Testament went to some great lengths to demonstrate that the atoning death of Jesus was predicated upon the Jewish Bible. In the book of Hebrews, a verse from the book of Psalms is quoted as evidence that the sacrifice of Jesus was part of G-d's original plan for the world.

"Sacrifice and offering You have not desired, but a body You have prepared for me" (Hebrews 10:5 referring to Psalms 40:6).

In verse 10 of our passage from Hebrews, we are told that the body spoken of refers to the body of Jesus. However, the Greek Testament took some great liberties in quoting from the book of Psalms, which never mentions a body being prepared:

"Sacrifice and meal offering You have not desired; my ears You have opened; Burnt offerings and sin offerings You have not required" (Psalm 40:6).

The author of Romans asserts that the Jewish scriptures spoke about the Messiah coming in order to eradicate sin from Israel:

"And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written,`The deliverer will come from Zion and remove ungodliness from Jacob'." (Romans 11:26 citing Isaiah 59:20)

However, checking the original source in Isaiah reveals the flawed foundation of the claim made in the book of Romans.

"And a redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who turn from transgression, says the L-rd."

Isaiah didn't teach that the Messiah's purpose is to remove sin; rather, he will come to the Jewish people when they show themselves worthy by turning away from sin. "

Jinto

Am I talking to the same person? Because the impression I got of the original RUG is not the same impression that I got from reading your post...

Oh well. On to the refutation.

You are assuming that the above is an act of rebellion, which is not nessecarily true. In particular, if we go back to the OP, we are talking about someone who doesn't believe the authority in question EXISTS, in which case, rebellion is logically impossible. You can't rebel against an atuhority which you don't believe to exist. If you want to prove me wrong, please rebel against the almighty invisible pink unicorn without first believeing in her.

I should also point out that this is the most common fallacy of Christianity, largely due to the fact that it is biblically supported: confusing belief and obedience.

If you want to introduce psychology, then I'll give you the principle of reinforcement. All operantly conditioned behavior exists solely because of the existence of reinforcement for that behavior - a person will never do something that gets them nothing that they want. Now, reinforcement doesn't have to be external - it can be as simple as the thrill of spiting in the face of the prevailing authority. But - and here's the crucial point - if the behavior in question consistently fails to produce the reinforcement, people stop doing it. Even the most determined rebel, one who rebels for the sake of rebellion, does not recieve the reinforcement of accomplishing something that the establishment doesn't like, they will stop trying. In the case of God, he has more power than that to bring every offender to justice - that will still leave the rebels that are motivated by the act itself. God has the power to stop the act from being completed, and in doing so, he can render any behavior extinct. Hayden, for instance, would have given up if he NEVER succeeded in posting that, no matter how many times he tried (faster, if he could cognitively suppose that he never would succeed, as would be the case if God replaced his message with "I exist, you silly fool.") And I'm sure we can get Hayden to confirm this.

And physical rituals of inner development are A. pointless and B. elitist. Pointless, because the relevant authority (God) already knows about the spiritual development and elitist, because the motivation for such acts stems from the desire to say to other people (whose opinions are irrelevant) "look at me, I'm one of the special ones."

And this is the main theme of the bible: spiritual sanctification can't begin until you voluntarily surrender. First, I'd hardly call surrender under duress (someone threatening to kill you is considered duress) voluntary, and second, it doesn't matter if it is voluntary, it's still surrender of your free will. In other words, you cannot get to heaven while still posessing your free will. Period.

As far as the preventative medicine aspect, please show me the verse where the bible commands you to wash your hands before eating. The absence of such a verse proves that preventative medicine is not the intent of this verse. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like your argument depends on the truth of that assertation.

Unfortunately, your argument does depend on the idea that somehow you should voluntarily allow people to perform surgery on you to correct a "problem" that they put there in the first place. Sounds a lot like a car dealership that breaks your radiator and then charges you to fix it. Or claims that there is a problem with your radiator when there isn't and charges you to fix it, especially since anyone who applys ordinary care to their foreskins doesn't have that problem. Frankly, if God wanted people to have clean hearts, then he should have just given them clean hearts to begin with.

No, I am not an anarchist.

What I'm proposing is that if God has both the capability and desire to prevent evil that he actually do so rather than punishing people for it after the fact, that way instead of BOTH the victim and the perpetrator suffering, neither does. Certainly, if it were possible to endow the state with the power to prevent crimes BEFORE they happen (and simultaneously prevent them from making dissent a crime), then I would prefer that they simply use that power to having penal law, but unfortunately it's not possible and so we're stuck with an imperfect system. But I'll point out that even under this system, we still outlaw cruel and unusual punishments and punishments of people with diminished capacity. God, however, punishes all people even though full compliance with God's law is IMPOSSIBLE. Clearly, if normal capacity is insufficient to comply with God's law, then it is unreasonable to punish people for not doing so.

Again with the car radiator analogy: God invents a problem, and then demads man's devotion in exchage for fixing it.

By the way, what the hell is just about a legal system where moral responsibility is considered to be transferrable?

It's not free, it requires gross intellectual dishonesty as well as the sacrifice of free will, pride, moral fortitude, and foreskins. And your idea that somehow a forced choice between slavery and torture is a choice at all is precisely why I consider the term "Christian" to be an insult.

Well, I think I have located your misconception. I said God PUNISHED them after the fact, I did not say that God did not warn them beforehand. Seperate warning and punishment. Okay? Good.

Now, when I speak of intervening beforehand, I mean just that: prevent the crime from ever occuring. If I'm about to kill someone, teleport me thirty blocks away and my knife to New Zeland. By the time I walk the thirty blocks back to the person I was trying to kill and buy a new knife, I'll have thought of at least five different ways to solve whatever problem I have without killing the person. Result: the crime never occurs, there is no suffering involoved, and punishment remains unnessecary because the crime never took place.

Reread the bible and tell me how many times that scenario took place.

This wasn't supposed to be a major point, but what I was getting at is that if, indeed lazarus had been clinically dead for four days, AND he was raised AND cured of his leprosy, then there ought to be a non-biblical text somewhere reporting it. It's just as you say: "according to the bible, there were five thousand witnesses." That does not mean that there were five thousand witnesses, all it proves is that one person says there were five thousand. The absence of so much as one written testimony from one of the actual witnesses leads me to doubt the claim of the one person who tells me there were five thousand, and subsequently his claim that the miracle actually happened in the first place.

My other point was that the above logic would be completely beyond people in those days, and so it would be rather easy to convince an entire town that a miracle happened without offering any evidence. After all, it's not like today where the internet allows you to instantly look up pretty much anything, literacy is assumed, and people are (somewhat) educated. Back then, nobody would have thought to ask if they could actually talk to any of these alleged witnesses, let alone actually go to these witnesses, take notes on the testimonies and compare them. That's why the existence of people who were skeptical makes the existence of actual miracles seem so unlikely.

And in that verse, it is clearly the rich man who is posessing the common sense. There are people who will deny actual evidence before their own eyes (flat-earth society), but most people will believe in things that they can see. To say that someone who demands more than just the word of another before they will believe something is not going to believe regardless of the evidence is just plain stupid. Imagine if I told you I had a candy bar in my hands, and yet kept my hands behind my back all the time, and said that because you don't believe that I actually have a candy bar just on my word that you wouldn't believe if I showed it to you, and therefore I wouldn't show it to you, what would you suspect about the truth of my assertation?

This discussion is perhaps better continued in BC&A, but first: the actual scribes of the bible were not Jesus's disciples. They couldn't have been, because as you say, Jesus's disciples were jsut ordinary fishermen. And between first-hand witnesses and the person who actually writes down the damn thing, you can pour a lot of mythology.

Second, if you're going to play the martyr card, keep in mind that this validates just about every religion on the planet, given that just about every religion on the planet has their own martyrs, and many of them have a lot more to lose than just a few fishermen. People will die for what they believe. People will believe things despite all evidence to the contrary. That's especially true if you have a belief that actually justifies being a loser who can't even catch enough fish to feed himself (Mt. 19:24).

Okay, reading... done. Sorry, but Christian claims of overwhelming proof that people ignore out of the coldness of their own hearts don't hold water. Wow, that was easy. Face it, when the totality of your evidence is the claims made by a few 2000 year old books bound into one volume, it should be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a sane man to get to heaven.

And about those gospels...

Matthew 1:16 - And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

Luke 3:23 - And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli.

Who is Jesus's paternal grandfather?

How can you convolute a message that is already convoluted?

Original sin. I'd hoped you would be better than this.

Standard reply 14 - Original Sin:

1. How the hell is it just to punish someone who has no knowledge of good and evil for doing evil?
2. Couldn't God have just not put the apple there in the first place?
3. Why does God want to reward bilnd faith rather than seeking knowledge?

And one addition:

4. Given that God's claims that on the day you eat the apple you shall surely die proved to be false, and the snake's claims that eating the apple would give mankind the knowledge of good and evil proved to be true, then wouldn't rejecting the governance of a proven liar be a GOOD thing? (maybe God's design was too good).

Again: how the hell do you justify a judicial system that considers moral responsibility to be transferrable?

Also: you are getting it backwards. It is not the malfunction that causes the flaw, it is the design flaw that causes the malfunction.

See above. Also: stop with the "they had nothing to gain by making up such a story." Not only is it more applicable to any atheist philosophy than any theist philosophy (considering that we don't even get the internal satisfaction of knowing that unbelievers will gain an eternal reward, so why would we make up claims of God's inexistence?), but in this case it's clearly false. The disciples got the satisfaction of beleiveing that they would go to heaven without having to regularly give animal sacrifices. Clearly, to those poor fishermen, that's an extremely good reason to convince yourself that something is true, and once you've decieved yourself, it is a trifle thing to decieve others.

Also: I reiterate that I don't have thousands of testimonies, I have one testimoniy that claims thare are thousands of testimonies.

I wasn't taking about your salmonilla analogy, I was talking about that if God saw a flaw in the design of humans, the he ought to have FIXED it, rather than giving it to every other human on earth. He ought to FIX the flaw, not write a book on how best to live. You know, if he did that, then we might actually see such evidnce as Christians leading better lives than unbelievers, but actually, all the statistics I've seen seem to indicate that the opposite is true. That's what I'm saying: if Adam and eve were broken, then recall them and make sure that your next batch of humans gets it right. God could have prevented thousands of years of suffering if he just isolated adam and eve and corrected their design flaw before allowing them to reproduce. He doesn't. Why RUG, WHY?

There are currently people who don't believe the Earth is round. They are certainly able to choose to beleive the literal interpretation of the bible instead of the evidence of their own eyes. Current-day evidence isn't a violation of free will.

Also which is it? Unbelievers won't believe even if one rises from the dead, or people will be given no choice but to believe if any actual evidence is presented?

And again: how do you justify a judicial system where moral responsibility is transferrable?

#3 - I call the moderators to have them inform you that making implied death threats is against board rules.
#4 - I refuse to be subject to a judicial system where moral responsibility is transferrable.
#5 - I refuse to be subject to a judicial system where the punishment for even the smallest crime is eternal torture (what do you call burning in a lake of fire?)
#6 - I realize that I won't be pardoned anyway since Matthew 12:31 clearly states that blasphemy against the holy ghost shall not be forgiven, and I have blasphemed against the holy ghost.
#7 - I obey the laws of nature by actually dying when I die. That means, no afterlife whatsoever.
#8 - I obey the laws of the Invisible Pink Unicorn and join the eternal beach party in the sky.
#9 - I ask what kind of God considers himself to be just while putting Hitler in heaven and Ghandi in hell?
#10 - Yes, Hitler was a Christian, read Mein Kampf sometime.
#11 - And none of that no true scotsman fallacy either
#12 - I join satan's infernal leigons in hell, given that he's obviously much more morally upstanding than God (proof: he hasn't comitted genocide yet).

Hmm. #7 looks like it's going to happen, and #12 sounds the best option if that turns out not to be the case, especially in light of #6.

Note: patient cannot grasp the possibility that people honestly reject God for reasons that don't involve bitterness or a refusal to investigate the bible. Must remember to show him extimony thread in SL&S.

I must remember to refer you to some resources on Stockholm syndrome. But in any case the refutation for that argument, known formally as pascal's wager, is very easy to refute, and that refutation is:

1. The biblical God is hardly the only God out there.
2. If I believe in the biblical God, and another monotheistic God tturns out to exist, I will have angered him greatly.
3. Because of this, choosing a specific God leaves me no better off than I was a moment ago.
4. So I have to look at all of the Gods equally
5. There are four possibilites:

1. God is benevolent, in which case I've naught to worry about.
2. God is apathetic, in which case there might not even be an afterlife.
3. God is malevolent (ex. biblical God), in which case I'm probably fucked anyway, so why worry about it?
4. God doesn't exist

6. From this, we can infer that your beliefs are irrelevant, regardless of which God (if any) exists.
7. But atheism allows me to live life without having to be a slave to a 2000 year old book, or listening to idiots that think the Earth is only 6000 years old.
8. Therefore, I should be an atheist.
9. But in any case, 1-8 is irrelevant because only the most unscrupulous dishonest sycophant would choose their beliefs based on their consequences rather than whether or not they are likely to be true.

Really? That's quite surprising. Well then, let me hope that your stay at II will shed some light on why that opposition exists.

I'll say. In fact, I'm currently having a debate with the guys who wrote the Utah penal code as to whether or not you're more verbose than they are (you're winning).

Okay.

RUG

Hey Jinto,
Whew.
I asked for a blast, and, well, I certainly got one.

Thanks, I needed that.
And again, you’ve made some excellent points.
I'm eager to see if I can address them.

But I've also got to try to actually get some office work done once in a while ...

I'm writing and tinkering away furiously at my response.
So don' chy'all go nowhere...
Because,
I'll be back (said in Arnold Schwarzenegger voice)
RUG

RUG

Hey Jinto,
So anyway, where were we?
Oh yeah...

Yes, it’s still me.
Does my style appear schizophrenic?
It may be because once somebody started quoting the bible I decided to break away from discussing the topic of free will within the confines of a strictly philosophical framework.
But it was not my intent to have us cracking open bibles in this discussion, if that’s what you meant by the above.
I have no hidden agenda.
Mine can be read in my bio.

On the other hand, if what you meant is that you’ve lost respect for me regardless of how we ended up cracking open bibles, and only because of the arguments I provided, then that’s unfortunate, but I suppose I’ll live.


Anyhow... shall we ?

I’m fairly confident that I covered this.
I stated both possibilities before deciding to finally opt for the rebellious teen analogy.
Among many others, at least 3 of the main areas I touched on in this regard were the
1. fact that we cannot measure the degree, quality or character of Hayden’s surrender;
2. question of whether God would intervene irrespective of such;
3. nature of “true” requests, which does not fall under the definition of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

Here were at least these three:

So what what’s my point?
It is simply that only a person who attempts to bridle his spirit, who is willing to learn, will benefit in your duct tape scenario.
Whereas a rebellious person will almost inevitably further harden their heart and carry on.

Then you came in with the principle of reinforcement.
As far as this is concerned, it allowed me to see a common theme running through nearly all of the points you make about rebellious persons and how to deal with them.
Mentally stringing your points together revealed something striking:
You continually ask why God does not use his almighty power to keep people from doing wrong before they even conceive of it.

This is extraordinary.

The duct tape is perfectly clear to me now.
As is your take on the principle of reinforcement.
And your position on the discussion about foreskin.
And the teleportation of a murderer thirty blocks away and his knife to New Zealand.
And the “design flaw”.
And about the injustice of hell.
And nearly (not all, but nearly) every other point you made.

No offence Jinto, the following is all for the furtherance of a fruitful dialog:

What you’re suggesting overall is infinitely illogical.
Especially in the context of this discussion.

In all sincerity, please correct me if I got this wrong, but I was under the assumption that this discussion, to a point anyway, was about how unjust it would be for God to violate our free will.
Now you may not be aware of this, and I don’t mean to patronize you by saying that, but you’re suggesting the only just act God could have performed would have been to remove choices, and the mechanism inside us (design flaw) which is the very thing that allows us to make those choices?

I don’t follow this line of reasoning, it’s highly illogical.
Be aware Jinto, this is what you’re suggesting.

Let me just go through these few and show you:

1. Duct tape the son’s mouth (pedagogy of the rod);

2. Leave off the foreskin to begin with, that way humans have nothing to ritually clean, and also do not suffer from its removal (eliminate trial by error/learning by doing; provide comfort);

3. Stop the poster from posting, no matter how often he tries (overpower the rebel);

4. Teleport you, and your knife (render the criminal physically disabled);

5. Create people without the ability to choose wrong things to begin with, what you refer to as a “design flaw” (remove choice);

6. God must manifest himself in person, completely, in a display of indisputable supremacy in order to utterly prove his existence to all humankind and exercise his omnipotence before our very eyes (force belief).

I hear what you’re trying to say loud and clear now.
I apologize for being so dense in the first place, for having missed it:

On original sin, for instance, you’re insisting that God should not have given Adam and Eve either the opportunity nor the desire to choose anything in the first place. You’re asserting that the opportunity and the ability to make that choice itself was a set up.
You view God’s decision not to have completely omitted such a choice to begin with as “evil” on his part, because he knew humans would fall, since they were made with a built-in mechanism which would lead them in that direction no matter what, yet he “punishes” them anyway.

Essentially what you’re saying is that God is a liar and a cheat.

I think I can see your point.
Especially because what you’re proposing is exactly what humans would prefer (the comfort of not ever having to even choose between right and wrong, or the excuse of ignorance of the truth), and what humans would prefer to have working for them as well:
Robots. Trained German Shepherds. Eunuchs.

But Jinto, can’t you see that if God would actually have done what you’ve suggested here, that he would be the most perverted, imperfect and unjust entity of all?
By creating beings that had no chance within them to make their own choices, even wrong ones?
The most common fallacy that atheists base this argument on is that Adam and Eve did not know what they were doing ...
...That they did not have enough information, and that God was keeping it from them.

Contrary to your arguments, there is no evidence of this.
You’re choosing to make an assumption about the character of an entity that you do not even choose to believe in in the first place.
Thus, your viewpoint can only be based on sheer bias, since they do not reflect the statement of the facts (Source: Genesis).
But let’s stay on track regarding free will:
Don’t you see that you yourself would have had absolutely no other alternative, that you would have had no CHOICE but to believe and serve God, simply by the sheer fact that you would not have been presented with both sides? You would not have had the mechanism, not would you have been presented with the temptation.
What kind of supernatural being would go out of his way to create such complex beings, without instilling in them the ability or placing them in a setting to be able to choose nothing else except him?
Talk about eliminating free will.
You’re suggesting eliminating the whole kit-n’-caboodle.

Let me first say that this is the exact reason I think I’m home here at II, like Dorothy must feel in Kansas. I’m serious. This is not meant to be patronizing.
I love the honesty and the boldness of these questions.

Look, Jinto, first of all, YES you were talking about the salmonella analogy.
Let me explain why.
The “salmonella”, according to the record, was in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God did not lie to the first humans.
He said if they eat that stuff, they “will surely die”.
Did they not die?
What you’re saying is that God was unjust for putting such a choice in front of them in the first place. Why?
Should they not have had the right to choose for themselves?
All God did was tell them what would happen if they made that choice, he did not rig the test, he did not set them up to fail.
Adam and Eve were not broken, they were made with a perfect mechanism that gave them the ability to choose, which a feature of true justice.
To make them any other way would have been unjust on God’s part.
But God is not unjust, his justice is perfect and complete.
Because of this, because of his own work ethic, if you will, he had to create them complete.
That included allowing them to also have an opportunity to disobey instructions.
Which they did.
And they knew full well what the consequences would be.
As for your sincere question “why” did God not create Adam and Eve without this ability to choose between what the serpent had told them and what He had told them, “before allowing them to reproduce”: what you’re missing is that free will is what makes us human. The ability of the human being to choose to make a pact with a serpent is in us, genetically. By intervening, and removing that ability, God would have made perfectly obedient, immortal robots.

This is a common theme in your arguments, and a common paradox.
What you’ve suggested as a solution to the God Test, for instance, is that God would intervene IF he were just.
Again, the entire position you’re arguing from is highly paradoxical, and illogical.
Especially since you’re expressing the desire to have God eliminate his most mysterious and precious invention: the human will itself.
Jinto, what you’re missing is that God wants YOU to choose to believe, he doesn’t want to make the choice for you.

I wonder if you have kids, or are planning to have kids?
This would interest me.

Especially since everything you’ve asserted suggests forcing people to do things until they learn, and removing all things around them which could tempt them to make the wrong choice against all instruction.

Thus, this comment in regard to original sin

and the implication that Christians use it as a copout, is unwarranted, since
1. Your assertions undermine the very thing you argue against: violation of the free will;
2. Your assertions do not match the biblical record, nor are they congruous with what we know about the nature of the supernatural being that supposedly created humankind.

Irrespective of what you’ve said from a theological viewpoint though, all these arguments also reveal a consistent logical flaw (pt. 1 here).
Maybe you can explain what you mean when you implied that e.g. God should stop the poster from posting no matter how long he tries, utterly laying ruin to the possibility of reinforcement of rebellious behavior. Would that not be a violation of free will???????

This observation has led me to a great many others.

On rebellion:

In this regard, what you’ve said here ...

...keeps getting reiterated.
I have also already addressed this point as being logically flawed.

But no matter, I’ll repeat it.
Please read carefully:

If you argue that you cannot rebel against an entity you do not even believe exists, then you must agree that is equally impossible to surrender your will to an entity which you do not even believe exists.

This renders the pink unicorn analogy utterly pointless.
Jinto, the God Test itself is guilty of the exact same thing you’ve accused “Christians” of.

HERE’s why: We MUST conclude that the test’s “failure” cannot have necessarily proven the non-existence of God, nor an “existent God’s” disinterest, at least not logically.

In fact, on the basis of your own maxim, the test itself proves absolutely nothing except perhaps that the poster does not believe in God, i.e., pink unicorns.
Which we knew to begin with.
So the reader does not profit from this test except through discussing the futility of it.

My contribution to the discussion was to suppose that the concept of God is much different than that of simply believing in a pink unicorn.
Especially since God promises that if you believe in him and call on him, he will answer. I have not read any such assertions made by the invisible pink unicorn.
But I did read such assertions in the bible way back when. And when I did, I decided to test the proof of them for myself. I’ll save my anecdotes on what happened after that for another time.

Originally, in my previous posts, what I supposed was that a relationship with YHWH, which is based on an initial belief in him, can only come with the fulfillment of prerequisites he set forth.

This is something I have been meaning to correct from the onset of this entire discussion.
In fact it has been leading us astray all along:
PLEASE NOTE FOR FUTURE REFERENCE:
When you profess a belief in God, you do NOT surrender your will.
Just so that’s clear once and for all.
Defiant Heretic explained this in one of the shortest posts on this string to date.
You do not turn over your will, you use it. You set it in motion, for a particular purpose.

Furthermore, I did NOT mean to imply that obedience is a prerequisite to the conscious act of the free will to believe, I clearly and carefully argued that obedience is merely a logical consequence of it (cf. the misconception behind the surrendering solider analogy).
Obedience is the next step after choosing to believe.
Soldiers put up their hands because they were told that if they do, the dominating force will no longer shoot to kill. This they must first believe will happen before throwing down their weapons. If for whatever reason, they do not believe this, logically, they obviously do not obey any commands made by that dominating force.

A choice is made to surrender, then obedience must logically follow.
E.g., “IF I am in you, and you are in me, THEN you may ask what you wish of my Father in heaven and it shall be given you.” ---Jesus Christ

First, before you can receive a request, Christ must be in you.
Christ cannot be in you unless you invite him in.
You cannot invite him in unless you believe in him.
This believing in him is an act of your will, not a surrendering of it.
Ok?
Now that this is clear once and for all, let’s build on it.
Again, I admit that I have also been guilty of using the word surrender loosely.
I meant to use it synonymously with:

A conscious choice to cease, or “give up” in DIS-believing.

Either an agnostic, or a disbelieving, or a rebellious heart has, in fact, chosen NOT to activate the will to take either of the 2 consecutive steps above,
neither a) the conscious abandonment of disbelief,
nor b) the conscious act of the free will to BE obedient.

Another thing that needs to be cleared up:
The notion of a mocking or rebellious petitioner to God actually sprung from the need to rule it out as a possibility, which in my view cannot be accomplished only by way of logical argument.
We needed Hayden.
Here’s why: since we cannot peer into Hayden’s heart, we are forced to go only on what Hayden has revealed to us.
And this was done, quite humorously I might add, in answer to a clever question posed by Defiant Heretic.
Hayden playfully pointed out that he would have kept trying no matter what, thus driving home his standpoint: he has made up his mind not believe, no matter what.
The implication, therefore, was that his post was in fact an act of some degree of mockery.

However, you argue against this by bringing up the principle of reinforcement.
The premise of which suggests the elimination of Hayden’s ABILITY to rebel through persistent and relentless force against his will.


Again! This is illogical because it suggests introducing the very thing you claim to be God’s greatest injustice: exacting force as punishment to crush any form of opposition.

This also drove me back to your catch-22 for closer examination.

Here, you have essentially concluded that the God Test was doomed to fail.

However, the central point you’ve built a bridge to in doing so is that God is unjust, since he has not provided measurable evidence of his existence, yet he exacts penalties for not believing.

First, you’ve hastened to a conclusion about God’s lack of intervention and have used false inferences to assert that God is unjust.

Although the God Test’s failure has not proven one iota that God does not exist, which you even agree to above, it’s success could also not have proven to you that he does.

Here’s why:
If the test had worked for Hayden, how could Hayden have proven it to you? Anecdotally?
I think not.
You have rejected every piece of anecdotal evidence I’ve presented.

But let’s examine your inferences more closely.

1. Sane people will not believe in something without measurable evidence.

Aside from implying that people who believe in something without measurable evidence must be insane, this premise is an example of Argumentum ad ignorantiamcan and can be said to be false.

Illustration:
For lack of measurable, scientific evidence to the contrary, you could assert that I cannot possibly love my wife since my loving her does not produce any evidence of an occurrence which would leave traces of evidence which could be collected and strung together to support my claim. All evidence of this is circumstantial and could be feigned.

Although I do love her, I will never be able to produce measurable evidence to actually prove it.
Therefore, I am the only person who can confidently assert this claim, and utterly know of its indisputable truth.

Not even my wife can truly know it.
At some point, she is forced to believe it, and to continually weigh my actions, examine my behavior in order to arrive at her own conclusion.

This empirical lack of evidence which would rule out the possibility of my feigning love for her, however, has still in no way disproved that something which I have defined as, and understand to be, “love for my wife” de facto exists inside me.

In addition, I am aware even before you say so that you did not mean to imply that all people who experience a thing called love, or who believe themselves to be loved, must be insane for lack of the kind of measurable evidence most often used to prove things in a court of law.
The fact is, even sane people believe in things despite a lack of measurable evidence.
Love is one example. Therefore this inference is indisputably false in the form in which it has been phrased here.

2. God cannot provide measurable evidence unless people surrender their free will.

This statement begs the question that was put forth in the OP, and then moves to lead us to a conclusion in the final sentence about the nature of God (my emphasis is on the word ‘cannot’).

Illustration:
Although I do not even believe that miniature yellow monkeys live in George W. Bush’s socks, I begin to characterize the nature of what these monkeys can and cannot do.
E.g., “I am convinced that there are no such things as miniature yellow sock-dwelling monkeys living in dubbya’s socks. However, I do know that since miniature yellow sock-dwelling monkeys will refuse to manifest themselves to you unless you’re wearing wool socks ... etc.”

Here, I am using a presumption about the nature of the very thing I am trying to refute in order to then arrive at a conclusion which attempts to refute the very thing itself about which I have presumed something. Thus, there is also something mind-bogglingly circular about this illogical line of reasoning.
That this brazenly traverses the parameters of logical integrity goes without saying.
The bottom line is, how can you presume to know something very specific about the quality and character of a thing you do not even believe exists, much less something about its abilities to do or not do something?

The conclusion:
3. God is unable to convince us of his existence unless we already believe he exists
See 1 and 2 above.
Whilst contesting the validity of any and all anecdotal evidence to the contrary, you have asserted that God has never convinced anyone of his existence who did not already believe in him to begin with.

This cannot be true unless you’ve interviewed every “Christian” who ever lived.
You cannot say for a fact whether or not there may be a portion of believers who actually came to know Christ because God revealed himself to them in some way despite their unbelief, thus UTTERLY convincing them of his existence.

What empirical evidence do you have that God has NOT EVER convinced and CANNOT convince ANYONE of his existence who did not already believe he existed to begin with?
And besides, how would such evidence be measured by others?

Without answering these questions, you expounded on this preliminary conclusion to further assert that God must therefore be unjust for having created a place called hell, in which human beings are allegedly being punished without due cause.

Although it is possible to arrive at true conclusions from false premises, this is not an example of such a case. The conclusion is also false.
God’s system of providing humans with choices, and granting them the ability to make them, by warning them specifically ahead of time to tell them what choice would be the wrong one, then informing them of the consequences of such a choice, is not unjust.
It is perfect in its justice.
Sheltered robots cannot choose, therefore they cannot choose to love God of their own “free will”.

The only way to prevent evil is to destroy it completely.
Again, you’re suggesting God use his power in order to shelter himself from the possibility that his creation might reject him, regardless of his well-meaning instructions.
This is simply not in line with what I understand to be “supernatural”. It sounds like a “natural” need.
That’s not to say that God did not and does not grieve at our poor choices.
I’m simply pointing out that God will not use his power to shelter himself from the possibility of rebellion.
Suffering enters in because humans make bad choices. Period.
God could give you paradise.
He could buy your love, shower you with gifts, use his overwhelming power to keep you from choosing evil by forcing the choice down your throat.
Then, sooner or later, if you still had any similitude of a free will left, you would ultimately see through God’s bullying ruse, accuse him of buying your love, sheltering you and forcing choices down your throat.

Again, it would interest me if you have kids or are planning to.

Your point A. Pointlessness:
Circumcision: Arguing the flat-out uselessness of rituals in all cases is illogical.
You have not demonstrated how you arrived at the conclusion that they are useless to everyone.
I immediately think of two basic kinds of people:
Type 1.:There are those who get something out of it because they have come to understand the deeper truth of it. For these people, such a practice becomes a simple pragmatic function which is done with pleasure. E.g.: When children are still very small, you teach them to get into the habit of brushing their teeth. Only after many years of teaching and practice do they understand the so-called practical “meaning” behind brushing their teeth. Later, they want to brush their teeth in order to avoid tooth decay, because they like their teeth and respect themselves, and feel better afterward. For this type of person, what was a “ritual” of “the brushing of the teeth” in childhood, makes good practical sense later in life. These people no longer require strict religious discipline in order to have nice teeth. They are grateful for the patient instruction of their parents and follow it gladly later because they have come to understand that it is good.
The underlying spiritual truth of the “ritual” of “the brushing of the teeth” can be applied to God’s commands.
Quite simply: If you want to avoid harming yourself, you will follow God’s commands because you have understood that the “commands” are actually more like instructions: they are there for our protection, further development and good. Therefore you are grateful for the “commands” and to God for helping you to understand them, and you follow them voluntarily.
Type 2: Then there are those who only see “the brushing of the teeth” or the “washing of the hands”, without ever understanding their respective purposes. They perform their functions in a “pharisaical” manner by making a big deal out of “rituals”. This circumstance may be unfortunate that the particular individual is ever practicing yet never coming to the full knowledge of the truth, but that does not make its practice useless.
I.e., people who practice “the washing of the hands” purely as a ceremonial ritual without ever seeing that the actual purpose of washing your hands is to prevent illness become fools who profess themselves to be wise, I agree with you.
But that does not eliminate the possibility that there are those who will eventually “come to the knowledge of the truth” actually by way of performing the act, Like a child beginning to brush its teeth as a small child without understanding what it is doing.
Or a swimmer who later becomes grateful for “pool rules” which tell you how deep the water is, but could not read them, or understand their purpose as a child.

Therefore you cannot logically argue that all rituals are flat-out useless.
Perhaps they’re useless to you.
Perhaps you’ve come to the knowledge of the truth of them, and no longer require a “habit” or a “ceremony” or a “ritual” to understand them.
Still I think your previous post demonstrates that you at least either
a) do not understand, or
b) do not care to understand
the spiritual dimension to them.

Your point B. Elitist:
Jesus reprimanded the high priests and scribes for acting elitist, particularly when it came to ceremonial washing.
Jesus accused them of only performing the ceremony without having come to the full knowledge of what it was made for in the first place.
The Jewish priests turned a simple command to remain clean into an overblown ceremonial ritual, which they then used to criticize others for not adhering to.
Jesus came to
A. Fulfill the law, i.e. the commands of God in the Old Testament, and
B. Explain and demonstrate their actual purpose.

Try reading Mark Ch. 7 v. 2-23, John 2:6, 3:25, for starters.

This is the most common misconception in existence that is pushed by unbelievers, and believers alike:
Your assumption that God is using hell as leverage.
Studies on international systems of law have clearly shown that the death penalty has not been effective in deterring crime.
Yet, although the U.S. is supposedly a civilized country, it continues to argue that it is, because of the pressure of, inter alia, the right-wing lobby.
Studies show, however, that people who commit crimes worthy of the death penalty are generally not going to allow themselves to be hindered by its existence. According to your argument, if the two perverts who recently kidnapped, raped and murdered an 11-year old boy and his 9-year old sister here in Germany had not done so simply because they were afraid of being sentenced to the death penalty, they could argue that the court was keeping them, by threat of duress, from exercising their desire to kidnap, rape, and murder children. This would be absurd.

God also knows all this.
And neither does he use hell as leverage in order to deter our crimes, anymore than the death penalty will deter a child rapist from their goal.
Though the knowledge of the existence of a penalty for our crimes may help some to correct their behavior and come to know of God’s actual merciful nature, God would rather that we not commit crimes simply because we hate crime.
And that we would come to a belief in him because we want a relationship with the one who made us, not because we’re scared shitless of the one who made us.
In fact, I would assert that most Christians who only believe in God because they are afraid of hell, have an entirely wrong image of God, and this grieves him.
As I said above, God wants us to use our will to believe that he is good, not under duress, but with a sound mind, and a conscious decision to see that God’s love and mercy is great.
In order to get to heaven, according to the bible, you have to set your will in motion, to achieve it. You have to choose to believe through an act of the will, not by shutting it down.

Ok.
Read the book of Numbers Chapter 19 starting with v. 7 ending at verse 22.
The command you will find here includes not only the cleansing of hands, but of “all flesh”, and clothes, and utensils, and dishes etc. etc. etc. Read also Leviticus Ch. 11, Exodus 19:10. This is what those pompous and pious Jewish priests in the New Testament had turned into “ceremonial hand-washing”, which Jesus criticized because these legalistic fools had not understood the purpose behind it, nor the deeper spiritual truth of “cleanliness before God” which it represented.
There is much you do not understand about the physical-material-substantive make-up of God and his “Holiness”, or perfect purity.
This is what I meant when I told you that you need to read more and do a little more research. Actually, almost all your arguments demonstrate a glaring lack of knowledge of the bible, its symbolism and the nature of God reflected in it.
But don’t worry about it, I still got your point.
It is refuted above in the teeth-brushing scenarios regarding your assertion that all rituals are useless.

You misunderstood my argument if that’s what you thought I was suggesting.
1. The foreskin is not a “problem”. If it were, Paul would have agreed with the quarreling churches on the topic of “the circumcision” and would not have allowed the gentiles to become part of the body of Christ until they had been circumcised. Paul argues against those believers who had not understood this and states that a foreskin in and of itself is not a “problem”, or a hindrance to being saved, and that the gentiles who still had theirs, should keep them if they wanted to.
2. The foreskin is there to “protect” a boy’s penis until his “coming of age” when he is ready to get married and have sex. It is removed only after it has served it’s purpose of getting a boy into a rigorous routine of washing that area carefully and of “protecting” the tip of the organ. Once it has SERVED ITS PURPOSE, it may be removed. It is not a broken part, inserted to cause grief, requiring the owner to return to the factory for more repairs.

Your analogy, again, is a gross misrepresentation of the practical functions of things which can be found in nature. It is another example of your conscious choice to set your will in motion in order to twist obvious truths, false premise after false premise, in order to support a conclusion you have already arrived at before you began the argument. These arguments are circular because the proposition and the conclusion are identical:
God is unjust and is interested in causing human suffering. He created foreskins. Foreskins are a “problem”. Therefore God is unjust and is interested in causing human suffering.

This argument is illogical and lacking in integrity since it does not seek to expand on any possible positive aspects of possessing a foreskin, nor any reasons why it would become unnecessary later in life. The argument is based on a proposition that, although not proven to be true, is asserted as a basic truth.

1. Background: God provided humans with the law for their own protection.
Our law, “Thou shalt not drink and drive”, for instance, is there to keep people from killing themselves, as well as others. God knew, in spite of the law, that people would abuse their privileges. A lot of right-wing puritans claim something along the lines of “alcohol is evil in and of itself”. Yet they overlook the fact that Jesus Christ not only drank wine at most of the meals depicted in the bible, he even performed a miracle whereby water was changed to wine for a huge wedding celebration. I.e., Jesus drank wine.
But he also knew that people would abuse alcohol. That they would drink, get drunk and later in world history, drive, and maybe kill themselves and/or others.
2. The fallacy I’m addressing here is that it is IMPOSSIBLE to abide by the law.
I’ll step back, many Christians don’t even know who they believe in.
Jesus came as a man.
A man with human limitations. The miracles he performed, he asserted over and over, were because he had faith in GOD the Father to perform them. According to Jesus himself, he did not perform those miracles because of his divinity.
The bible clearly states that he laid aside his divinity in heaven in order to come to us as a man. Yet, as a man, he still managed to lead a “sinless”, or perfect, life according to the law. He fulfilled the law and proved its worth.
3. Jesus, as the only man who ever lived to successfully abide by the law all his life, fulfilled the law on our behalf, procura, so that if we slip, we can claim our righteousness in him and be exonerated from the fine that needed to be paid for not having fulfilled the law. God, even though he demonstrated to us that it was possible to fulfill the law if we truly love God with our whole hearts, minds and souls, has mercy on us anyway when we slip, and allows us to invoke the act of Christ who, in our weakness and unbelief, fulfilled the law on our behalf, and paid the price for our sin.

Now that we’ve covered that, we can ask the question you asked twice in your post:

I hope you never have to go to jail. But if you do, and bail is set, I hope you can afford it.
But if you can’t, I hope someone is merciful enough to get you out of jail on bail until your trail. Is someone else paying your fine for you or posting your bail mean the law is transferable? Does the court care who posts your bail?
Point is, if you choose, by an act of free will, not to believe that God is benevolent, then you can never profit from him having posted bail for you through Jesus Christ on the cross, and you remain in jail until your trial.
That’s step one, the price of bail: the unbeliever is in jail, and the bail is set so high that he cannot afford to pay it without help of a benevolent person to post it.
Step two the actual transfer: Many Christians also forget that even Christians will be judged. I even made the mistake of using the word “judge” synonymously with “held accountable” in my last post.
So just to correct that and make this perfectly clear: Every human being that ever lived, is living and will live, will face the judgment seat of God some day. Everyone.
Christians too.
So now pay attention, because this is crucial:
Transfer of accountability, not responsibility, is the legal system God uses.
The claim you make when you come to Christ is that, in your ignorance of God’s benevolence and his merciful nature and his acts of love, in ignorance of his true character and willingness that we not die, you did not know what you were doing, and are not held accountable, although you are responsible.
When Jesus was dying on the cross he uttered these words in regard to the soldiers and other bystanders who were mocking him “Father forgive them, for they know not what they are doing”. This is the precise role Christ fills for the believer:
He is the one who acts as intercessor on our behalf, for our having committed hateful acts of rebellion during our time of ignorance.
When I was very small, we lived in Utah. One day I took a hammer to a pile of pumpkins our Mormon neighbor had piled in his yard. I busily punctured the surface of each and every one of them because I liked the popping sound the pumpkins were making when I struck them with the hammer. I was barely 3 years old. When my parents and the farmer finally discovered what I was doing, they stopped me.
I remember not realizing that I had destroyed perfectly good pumpkins until this was pointed out to me. The farmer had mercy on me because I was three.
Although I had committed the offence, and was responsible for it, my parents wanted to pay for what I had done by buying all the pumpkins from the farmer.
But he even refused to take money from my parents. Mercy upon mercy. My accountability was waived due to ignorant folly.
But I learned my lesson.
You say you know what you’re doing, Jesus says you don’t.
However, once someone points out your sin to you, and you come to a knowledge of the true nature of God, you call on him, in belief that he actually wants to forgive you, and he will answer you in some way.
At that point, the only prerequisite is that we acknowledge that what we have done is sin and that we confess it to God.
If we suddenly wake up, and see the wrongfulness of our actions, and confess that to God, then he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Jesus intercedes on our behalf. Asking the Father not to hold us accountable, due to our ignorant folly.
And he acts as your intercessor before the Father at the final judgment.
The only thing that is required, is to claim this transfer of accountability to your big brother intercessor, i.e. the belief that Jesus is the son of God who came to live a perfect life and pay the price we could not afford to bail us out.
It is possible to claim that you committed sins while living in ignorance of his goodness, and he will close a blind eye to (cf. book of Acts: God blinks and eye).

No, I must still insist.
It is free.
You can keep your foreskin.
You can keep your will.
You can keep your moral fortitude.
And if what you mean by “pride” is dignity, then you can retain that too.
And above all, choosing to work from the premise: “let’s first assume the gospel account is true”, instead of “let’s just first assume it’s false” does not require gross intellectual dishonesty.
Both are equal, since we were not there.
In fact, you are required to perform possibly the most challenging intellectual task of your life.
Solve this simple riddle:
What if everything you’ve asserted turns out to be false, in spite of all this excellent dialog?
What if, even though I could never prove it in a court of law, I DO love my wife.
And God loves you?
Just ask yourself this one brain-busting question:
What if Jesus did, against all arguments to the contrary, raise from the dead?
What I’m asking you is intellectually challenging, not compromising.
What if the account of the Gospels is true after all?
It doesn’t cost you a thing to choose to assume their story was true, and to begin examining the rest of the book from that premise, any more than it costs you to assume the Gospel story is a farce.
Because when the rubber meets the road, you do not KNOW, Jinto, so by insisting that it’s a lie, you’re making a choice simply not to believe the account.


Ok.
I reread it and found something very similar:
Saul of Tarsus, on his way to murder some more Christians on the road to Damascus.
He did NOT believe in Jesus Christ.
He HATED the gospel story and HATED Christians.
He implies this in many of his writings.
Sword at his side and documents in hand, he was off to slice up some more lunatic believers.
Before he got where he was going, Jesus Christ manifested himself to Saul in a flash of light, knocked him of his horse, blinded him, and asked him why he was persecuting believers.
Believe the account, or don’t believe the account.
The choice is up to you.
As for the core of your argument, however, I’ve already addressed this numerous times above.

I never said Lazarus had leprosy, but that’s ok.
The source I referred to IS a non-biblical source.
I told you, the name of the town where this was believed to have happened was changed, denoting something major.
Check on it yourself.

Skepticism is one thing, even I’m skeptical.
But you asserted much more than that.
You asserted that it could not have happened at all, because they did not have the “scientific method”.
I argued that you do not need the scientific method when someone’s finger that had fallen off due to leprosy, suddenly grows back before your very eyes, or if your dead brother emerges from his tomb wrapped in his grave clothes.
Still, I agree with the direction you’ve spun your defense into though: just because someone says that there were so many people, does not mean that there were that many people.
But even if there was an absence of a neutral record to support it these claims (which is also not true because there are countless other sources which have substantiated historical, political, and religious events in the gospels), it still does not mean that it did not happen.
Neither of us can prove anything one way or another.
So why immediately work from the extreme negative premise of impossibility?

This is a major gap in logic.
Ever heard of hostile witnesses? The greatest opposition to Jesus’ miracles, words and resurrection were the Jewish priests of that day. They weren’t only skeptics, they were vindictive opponents. Yet they DEMANDED that Christ be crucified on account of blasphemy. That was the charge. He had called himself God and brought the death penalty upon himself. These characters never once claimed that Jesus had committed fraud, chicanery, counterfeiting, or the like. Even after Lazarus was up and walking about again, they did not ever attempt to write anything about fakery, they simply said “ok, that’s it, he has become a threat to us, for the sake of the nation, this Jesus must die”.
Hostile witnesses.
Yet they not only never dispute the miracles, they later never disputed Jesus’ resurrection either, they just began killing Christians.

I appreciate your example, but we’re not talking about candy bars here Jinto.
The bible verse I quoted says that even if someone is “raised from the dead” they would not believe.
Again you’re confusing contexts without doing any of your own reading.
The context is that the rich man is outer separation from God for being so stupid as NOT to have simply believed.
Yet, in that place called “hell” he can still speak, remember his family, remember his religion, and he feels compassion! In that feeling of pity for his family, he petitions to be raised from the dead himself so he can go back and warn his five brothers to believe so they won’t go to that place of separation from God.
But Abraham says, (paraphrasing) “even if you were to be raised from the dead, and tell them about hell, they still wouldn’t believe you”.

I know a guy from my old neighborhood in San Diego who was a drug addict. He broke into a pharmacy to steal codeine and the pharmacy owner came in and caught him. The pharmacy owner blasted the guy with a shotgun and the guy died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. The guy was revived several hours later and lived on a machine for a while until he recovered. When he got out of the hospital, he started telling everybody that when he was dead, he left his body.
And that he left the ambulance and went to hell.
He changed his life for a few years, kept off drugs.
But only about 6 or so years later, he was a full-on drug addict again.
And he claimed to have been to hell and back.
Weird story, totally anecdotal, impossible to prove in every way, easy to explain away with discussions on the human brain etc...

Nonetheless, this story of a guy from my neighborhood proved the principle in this bible passage to be true.

People will die for what they believe. People will believe things despite all evidence to the contrary. That's especially true if you have a belief that actually justifies being a loser who can't even catch enough fish to feed himself (Mt. 19:24).

So your argument against the fact that the disciples were willing to die for what the believed is based on two points:
1. Any ol’ religious fanatic, suicide bomber, can claim to have seen the risen Christ. Well the fact is, no other martyr I’ve ever heard or read about did so.

2. Many of the disciples were losers. This is a logical fallacy called Argumentum ad hominem, which is an abusive, defaming argument directed at the person themselves. It is one of the worst fallacies and cheapest arguments there is. It can be found on II under http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism....html#hominem.


Is this really the best you can do with the “the bible is full of contradictions” approach?
If you continue along this line of argumentation, it will not only become more and more clear that you often rely on as many logical fallacies to support your beliefs as Christians do to support theirs, but that you also are as much of a poor bible scholar as most Christians.
At any rate you are doing an excellent job of revealing that you really do not know what you believe.
Anyhow, here’s your answer, if you were really interested in one that is:

NIV Study Bible:
“There are several differences between Luke’s genealogy and Matthew’s (e:2-16). Matthew begins with Abraham (the father of the Jewish people) while Luke [a historian], traces the line in reverse order and goes back to Adam, showing Jesus’ relationship to the whole human race. From Abraham to David, the genealogies of Matthew and Luke are almost the same, but from David on they are different. Some scholars suggest that this is because Matthew traces the legal descent of the house of David using only heirs to the throne, while Luke traces the complete line of Joseph to David. A more likely explanation, however, is that Matthew follows the line of Joseph (Jesus’ legal father), while Luke emphasizes that of Mary (Jesus’ blood relative). Although tracing a genealogy through the mother’s side is unusual, so was the virgin birth. [...]”

The bible message boils down to one thing: either Jesus rose from the dead or he didn’t.
If he did, then his claims to be the son of God are true and so is the whole bible.
If he did not, then they ain’t and it isn’t.

[/QUOTE]Original sin. I'd hoped you would be better than this.
Standard reply 14 - Original Sin:
1. How the hell is it just to punish someone who has no knowledge of good and evil for doing evil?
2. Couldn't God have just not put the apple there in the first place?
3. Why does God want to reward **bilnd** faith rather than seeking knowledge?
And one addition:
4. Given that God's claims that on the day you eat the apple you shall surely die proved to be false, and the snake's claims that eating the apple would give mankind the knowledge of good and evil proved to be true, then wouldn't rejecting the governance of a proven liar be a GOOD thing? (maybe God's design was too good).[/QUOTE]

I already covered most of this above, but I’ll recap:
Original sin may be standard bible answer, but you have not shown where believing this account utilizes a logical fallacy. This bible truth is based on belief.
Belief that mankind is in need of a savior.
The belief that mankind is in need of a savior is actually a logical conclusion.
Particularly since, despite the existence of laws, and even under the most ideal conditions, there are people who, sometimes out of the sheer thrill of rebellion (as you said in your argument invoking the principle of reinforcement) will spit in the face of authority, even if they’ve enjoyed an excellent upbringing.
The heart of man is wicked and deceitful, who can know it?
Original sin makes sense to me when I look at people, even close friends of mine.
Even with the most loving father and mother, the most balanced, structured and loving household, a friend of mine just “decided” to go punk and start messing with drugs in High School. Twenty years later, as a result of some of those decisions back in High School, you could say he has since totally ruined his life. His sister is fine, balanced and happy, his family still loves and supports him, even with tough love, the whole nine yards.
He’s told me he since that he doesn’t know why he had so much fun pissing off his parents : maybe they were too good to you?” I said.
In my view, my friend proved that he was just an ungrateful, decadent jerk, who still doesn’t know how hard some people have it.
But whatever the case may be, the burden of proof does not lie with me to prove that there is such a thing as original sin, the onus in on the person who claims that the heart of the human being will automatically always choose to follow rules freely and not to break them, even if they know the difference between right and wrong, to prove it.
Because I have seen no evidence of this in any society I have ever lived in, seen, read or heard about.

Your points above
1. Adam and Even had no reason to doubt God’s character, the bible says the serpent [/I]deceived[/I] them. That is, he told them something other than what God had said, and, although they had no logical reason to doubt God, they chose to.
2. Cf. my comments on removing choices from people to keep them safe from the truth.
3. I added the emphasis to the word blind. This is another monstrous misconception unbelievers have about Christians. Faith is much more complex a thing than even 99% of Christians understand it to be. Faith isn’t simply believing. Believing is believing. Faith is a much more mature progression of belief. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, it’s the evidence of things not seen. Faith cannot be blind. It is a contradiction in terms to say so. It’s like saying Ghandi used “blind pacifism” to achieve his goals or Martin Luther King used “blind political determination” to achieve his. This is nonsense.
Faith , by definition, has vision. Clear, mature, structured vision.
But I wouldn’t expect you to understand this concept as it applies to Christian “faith”.

I reiterate: (this applies to your quote above, as well as your comments on the Flat Earth Society)
1. People who have hardened their hearts will not believe no matter what they have seen or experienced, they will explain away everything, even physical proof. I have experienced this in my life as well.
2. When Jesus reappears, those people who believed in him will not learn anything new, and believe it or not, hatred of Jesus and unbelief will actually flourish greater than ever. I’ve read so much about the deceit that is preparing the path to explain that coming event. Talk of aliens kidnapping people etc. Paul said clearly: “If our gospel be a mystery to anyone, it is only because the god of this age has blinded their minds so that they cannot see the truth.”
The god of this age is self.

And as for your underlying attempt to insult by comparing Christian faith to the underdeveloped claims of the Flat Earth Society, I’ll assume you meant no offence because I’m sincerely convinced that you have not understood.
Christianity only boils down to one thing, either Jesus arose from the dead or he did not.
I hardly think your comparison is fitting.

Oh come on Jinto, I thought we were having an open discussion here. That’s what I love the most about II.
Also, you agreed to continue the discussion on a string of my choice.
Moreover, just as another reminder, I’m not the one who cracked open a bible and started quoting Deuteronomy. And I didn’t tell you anything about the contents of the bible that you don’t already know in the section of my text you reacted to “The Principle of Mercy vs. the Principle of the Law”, so give me a break.

Covered this, see above.

By utilizing free will to disbelieve, even though it cannot be PROVEN that Christ did NOT arise from the dead anymore than it can be PROVEN that he DID, every person will be weighed according to their deeds, since that’s what they’d rather have than activating free will to believe. But here’s another misconception, regarding hell, which I’ve been meaning to get to all this time.
First of all, as I said (and you said you don’t care, but it DOES make a BIG difference):
Hell was not created for human beings. Hell was created for a fallen angel previously named Lucifer and his fallen angel followers numbering in the billions. According to the bible, there is no place in heaven for beings who hate God. So they were cast out by the other two-thirds who remained. And when these fallen angels were cast out, they determined to take mankind with them, to deceive mankind, in an act of vengeance against God. And to hide the gospel, distort the truth, slander the reputation of God, lie about his character and nature. Now, what happened in the garden of Eden at the beginning, was that a covenant, a pact, and agreement was made, inadvertently, between humans and this fallen being. In essence, the used car salesman you were referring to in one analogy, well that’s what fallen angels did and are doing.
It’s very important to understand that God’s laws function on similarly to the best legal system you can imagine here. That these fallen beings had to acquire the “right” from humans to enter the planet and start doing business. Jesus act on calvary was, among other things, a legal act which broke humankind from the bond of that covenant made by Adam and Eve. So, God allows those people, who by choice, whish to remain under that contract, to join their contracting partner in another place called hell, which, in spite of all the imagery of fire and such, in reality only means complete and utter separation from God, outer darkness, away from His light, for all eternity, the very thing they wanted.
God’s act of judgement at the end will be according to two contracts which mankind had the right to choose from. And He is faithful to fulfill contracts which people have concluded of their own free will.

Ok this is a very serious topic.
What you have believed here, and I don’t know who told you this, but it’s a lie.
In order to blaspheme against the Holy Ghost, you have to have accepted Christ as your savior to begin with. You have to have had full knowledge of him and have been in a relationship with him, the Holy Ghost has to have already been invited into your life. If this has not happened, then in a sense you are still living in blindness to the truth, and if you were to come to God right now and ask him to forgive you and reveal himself to you in some way as you exercise your will to believe, he WOULD forgive you. And I have the scripture to prove it. I take this topic very seriously, so if you are interested in the scripture I’m referring to, let me know an I’ll look it up for you. It’s in the book of Acts.


Do the laws of the Invisible Pink Unicorn state that she is standing at the door of your heart and is quietly knocking at this very moment? Has she promised to answer you when you open the door to your heart to let her in and has she promised to reveal herself to you in some way once you’ve grasped the concept of active faith in her and begun exercising it? Can I find and read the book of the laws of the Invisible Pink Unicorn somewhere?

Hitler was baptized but he later renounced Christ openly.
The no true Scotsman fallacy does not apply.
In order to be a Scotsman, you must at least first come from Scotland, I’ll just start there.
But, just so you know, I have read parts of Mein Kampf, and there is hardly a thing in Hitler’s life that did not reveal that he bore one of the most deranged, lying, criminal hearts in any body to ever walk this planet.

I explained a small portion of the passages you’re referring to here. You can either choose to utilize your keen intellect, brazen determination and obviously well-honed critical thinking skills to investigate whether there might at least be [/I]some[/I] truth in what I’ve stated, or you can choose not to do so.

You don’t have to respect me as your equal, or see me as a worthy opponent the likes of whom someone as clever as yourself should even be debating, that’s ok. I presented the bitterness of this life aspect as one possibility for some people choosing to turn away from God after having enjoyed a Christian upbringing. I am aware that this is not the only possibility, but thank you. I’ll check out the thread myself in my free time, if you agree to read this horrific violation of journalistic integrity I’ve created in yours.

Stockholm syndrome and Pascal’s wager:

I would be interested in reading whatever resources you wish to refer me to for the former, and will now refute the latter:

1. The biblical God is hardly the only God out there.
This is correct. There are many false gods appearing as angels of light, proclaiming themselves to be as merciful, beautiful, mighty and just as YHWH, and there are many vicious god, deceiving with fierce, hateful rage, and blaming their perverse act on YHWH in order to slander his reputation, blame the ills of this world on Him, but Jesus Christ says that YHWH sent him. If what Jesus said was true, and if Jesus did in fact arise from the dead, then the rest of the points in Pascal’s wager are moot.

The fact that you presented this frail wager as an argument against the words of Jesus demonstrate clearly that you have not understood the gravity of them.
Let me make this perfectly clear to you: Jesus claimed that he, and only he, regardless of what other gods may claim otherwise, is the Way, the Truth and the life, and that nobody would be able to come to live in the presence of the Father except through a belief in him. In order to understand Christians, you must realize what Jesus was claiming here, and you cannot discard the fact that it was one of the very reasons for the charges of blasphemy against him which led to his crucifixion. He claimed to be the only true God. No other god that has ever presented itself on earth has claimed that other than Jesus Christ in the flesh. Check the record.
Pascal forgot to consider this: if there is another God other than YHWH, who sent his son Jesus to die and arise back to his former place at the right hand of the Father, then he has not come to earth to claim that, and prove it the way Jesus did, through the resurrection.
And any other god who would not come to earth to provide such evidence is either
A) a liar
B) unjust.
If A then B.
If B then A.
Therefore, such a god can only be evil. I refuse to follow such a god.
Funny little wager, though, an amusing children’s experiment.

This is interesting.
What do you read?
Where do you draw the line on old?
And I find it interesting that you use the word slave. Nearly every person I’ve talked to about God’s commands had difficult grasping the concept that they are there to help, not hinder us, as with my “pool rules” analogy, out of mercy, love toward us and a genuine interest on the part of a just God in having a relationship with mankind. God asks us to follow a few basic principles, respect, love, etc. to come to Him through a conscious act of our own free will, not to turn it off, but to turn it on, and we view it as slavery because we want to live our lives as we see fit, even if it hurts us or others.

I never claimed this and I don’t. Though you’re obviously free to do so if you wish, it would behoove you not to lump me in with what you’ve heard from other so-called Christians. Again, the “no true Scotsman” fallacy does not apply since this is not an issue upon which a person’s redemption is dependant.

I agree and yet I do not.
I agree that it is unfortunate if there are those who have chosen a belief in Christ because they fear death and hell. As I have mentioned, these people, in my view, have a poor image of God, being that God is love and loves people more than they will ever be capable of comprehending.
I do not agree with the implication that the latter half of the last sentence of my paragraph above is not likely to be true. It is indeed very likely, that God is benevolent. And it is at the very least possible that what the bible says is true, that He loves people more than they will ever be capable of comprehending.
This is at least the reason why I believe in God, and Jesus. I simply choose to believe the account, that God loved the world so much that he gave his son to die on our behalf, so that whoever would simply believe in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life (John 3:16).

I’m very eager to find out. Maybe you can shed some light on this?
Or did you mean to do so with your most recent blast?
If so, I fear I’m going to require just a tad bit more info than that, Jinto.

There are a number of things I commented on in your post that I’d like your feedback on.
But of all of my dizzying, circumlocutive ramblings above, the thing I’d appreciate a response to the most is my statement on what you said about blaspheming the Holy Ghost.

If you really took the time to respond to this, I’ll be checking the string next Wednesday.

If not, I’m sure I’ll see you around here.
RUG