Amie

No I dont think they thought Christianity was better and I think it is unfortunate it was made to be a crime for holding a particular belief but Biff I do think that ones beliefs are a personal thing and no one can determine what someone else thinks. I'll have to read that book but I am inclined to think people could have maintained their own set of beliefs privately free from scrutiny. Its a sad thing that people were not able to be themselves...
perhaps they were forced to practice another religion. Maybe they can be forced to practice a different religion, maybe they can be forced to publicly worship another God but nobody could go into their minds and remove their existing beliefs. But I have never been in their shoes...
yes I believe so

Biff the unclean

If you just want to read Gibbon at the library (the book is several volumes and very expensive) the section that deals with forcing Christianity upon the citizens of the Roman Empire is chapter XXVIII. It's an interesting tid-bit of history that there are no records of Pagans putting Christians to death for their religion in the Coliseum at Rome. But there are records of thousands of Pagans being put to death there for refusing to become Christians.

Okay. Given what you know to be fact about the solar system how can these stories be non-fiction? Or is preserving your faith more important to you than facts? (Not a facetious question. I know several Christians who are proud that their answer is yes.)

Amie

poor pagans Thats horrible...
I'll read that after I finish atheism the case against God which I am currently reading.
Well I don't really think it is a matter of having to preserve my faith. While my faith is important to me certainly if I felt there was no God I would stop believing in one. I just think things are possible with God. all things.
I have a question for you though Biff, a sincere question along the lines of thread title bias
do you think you base your opinion that it could not be possible for those stories to be non-fiction based on your lack of God belief or do you base your opinion on what you know of the solar system? or maybe both?

Biff the unclean

You are working on any number of fallacies here Amie.

First when you state that it is rude to tell a person that their beliefs are wrong. That isn't manners that is just you sticking your fingers in your ears. It isn't rude; you just don't want to hear that you are wrong while at the same time parading Catholicism before the Atheists.
Then to declare that anything is possible with God is again sticking your fingers in your ears. This time to every last thing we know about science.
And you have a fantasy about where Atheists come from. Only a very few were lucky enough to be born in Atheist households.
I'm more of the run of the mill Atheist. Born and raised a Roman Catholic, altar boy…the whole nine yards. I didn't just write God off one day on a whim. I believed, I believed so strongly that to silence scoffers I set out to prove that God existed. I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in showing that he doesn't exist. I was only interested in proving that he does exist.
But being raised a Catholic I had instilled in me a love of the truth, so I finally and reluctantly had to admit that there wasn't any God.
The sun is a thermonuclear reaction that is 93,000,000 miles from Earth. The Earth spins on its axis at a rate of almost 1000-mph. To stop the Sun with a lasso or a prayer you would have to suddenly stop the Earth from turning. Inertia would destroy everything on the surface of the planet and play havoc with the core.
These are simple facts. Facts are "the truth." I am unwilling to sacrifice the truth for my comfortable superstitions. You seem not to have a problem glossing over the truth by wrongly (yes, I am saying that you are wrong, I'm not going to lie to you) declaring that anything is possible.

ExChild

Um... maybe not at the Coliseum, but do you really mean to imply that no pagan has EVER killed a Christian? There are plenty of records of Christians being martyred by nonchristians. Not that this excuses, say, the Crusades or any other examle, but this seems like another example of that bias from the OP: to throw all the stones at the evil Christians!!!!

just an observation

Silent Acorns

I'll play the role of devil's advocate and argue for the Christian perspective:

There IS a substantial difference between the Maui and Joshua stories. In the Maui story we are told exactly how the Sun was stopped, and from our current knowledge we know that this is impossible. The Joshua story doesn't have this defect because the Sun was stopped by an all-powerfull god who could suspend the laws of physics and thus prevent the catastrophic heating, and it doesn't say how it did it (it just did).

I don't think there's a single Christian out there who would argue that Yahweh is limited by the first law of thermodynamics.

edited to remove typos

Silent Acorns

You can always count on a christian to turn the facts around to make them look like the victims. I don't think anything in Biff's post implied anything about "no pagan has EVER killed a Christian". It is very common to hear christian's talk about how much they suffered under the cruelty of the paegans and use this as evidence that christians are morally superior to paegans. All Biff was pointing out is the hypocricy of this position since they ignore far more substantial evidence of far more substantial cruelty conducted by christians agains others.

This has nothing to do with christians being evil, but everything to do with christians being hypocrites (and hypocricy has to count as a bias).

Biff the unclean

Please note that I said the "Coliseum at Rome"--that's quite a specific place, a single building in a single city. Were the Christians evil to do this? Damned right they were. But that isn't showing a bias because I would say the same of anyone who committed such atrocities.
Tell me, since you aren't biased if I said that in concentration camps the Nazis killed millions of Jews but the Jews killed no Nazis would you have the same gripe you made about Christians? Or is it just okay to kill Pagans and not Jews?

Don't complain to me if you don't like the history of Christianity, I'm not a Christian.

There is plenty of bias around here, all of it being shown by Christians. Just in the paragraphs above we see a special case scenario being applied to Christian mythology. All the laws of nature that Christians apply to everything else in their lives they refuse to apply to their own beliefs. Now that's bias.

Silent Acorns

You aren't talking about my post are you Biff? I'm not a christian and don't accept the "argument" I made as legitimate. I just find it interesting to observe that the features attributed to Yahweh make it easy to construct an explanation for anything. As long as christians can play the "god can do anything" and "you cannot comprehend the wisdom of god" cards they will always win the debate in their own minds.

ExChild

Just to recap:
The discussion started as a "why don't you believe this Maui story over any given Christian story" type discussion, and turned very quickly to a "Well, in fact no one believes the Maui story any more because the evil Christians came along and forced them not to" discussion. Why was this point made? It seemed to me to be a change of subject, with the end result of drawing special attention to how Christians have wrongly murdered many pagans in the past. Since the original post dealt with Christians complaining of bias, it struck me that this is sometimes the type of picture painted by some on this board (not you, Biff, I don't recall exact instances).

Of course I wouldn't say that Nazi's were right to kill Jews because maybe sometime a jew killed a Nazi, just as I didn't say that Christians were right to kill pagans, any time.

Thanks.