Religious arguments and analogies that really bother you

[Underseer]

Flowering plants have both male and female parts, therefore all flowering plants are sinners.

When Adam ate the apple, that introduced sin into the world, and that's why so many animals choose to be homosexuals. We should not be surprised that many plants also choose sin in this fallen world!

Ha ha... it's all so obvious now. Flowers are gay. Is that why ladies love the flowers? They're all secretly fag hags.

Clearly, Adam was not considering the souls of plants and animals when he chose to eat the magic apple. That's why what he did was so wrong. Why didn't he know better?

 

[DrZoidberg]

Ha ha... it's all so obvious now. Flowers are gay. Is that why ladies love the flowers? They're all secretly fag hags.

Clearly, Adam was not considering the souls of plants and animals when he chose to eat the magic apple. That's why what he did was so wrong. Why didn't he know better?

He would rather eat fruit that have sex with his wife... so gay. Adam was obviously a flaming queen. I'm sure that's the real reason he was expelled from the Garden of Eden. God just couldn't keep up with Adam's fabulousness.

 

[bilby]

Clearly, Adam was not considering the souls of plants and animals when he chose to eat the magic apple. That's why what he did was so wrong. Why didn't he know better?

He would rather eat fruit that have sex with his wife... so gay. Adam was obviously a flaming queen. I'm sure that's the real reason he was expelled from the Garden of Eden. God just couldn't keep up with Adam's fabulousness.

Well his partner was formed from his rib, which contains only diploid cells with XY sex chromosomes, and so must also have been male. Adam and Steve is a genetically necessary hypothesis.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

He would rather eat fruit that have sex with his wife... so gay. Adam was obviously a flaming queen. I'm sure that's the real reason he was expelled from the Garden of Eden. God just couldn't keep up with Adam's fabulousness.

Well his partner was formed from his rib, which contains only diploid cells with XY sex chromosomes, and so must also have been male. Adam and Steve is a genetically necessary hypothesis.

Right. It's not like he was having sex with his sister, Adam was having sex with a clone. Adam was having sex with Adam.

Yahweh, you pervy narcissist.

And now I know how the whole Jesus thing works.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Well his partner was formed from his rib, which contains only diploid cells with XY sex chromosomes, and so must also have been male. Adam and Steve is a genetically necessary hypothesis.

Right. It's not like he was having sex with his sister, Adam was having sex with a clone. Adam was having sex with Adam.

Yahweh, you pervy narcissist.

And now I know how the whole Jesus thing works.

How about the wives of Abel and Cain? Where the fuck did they come from?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Mail order.

 

[Underseer]

Right. It's not like he was having sex with his sister, Adam was having sex with a clone. Adam was having sex with Adam.

Yahweh, you pervy narcissist.

And now I know how the whole Jesus thing works.

How about the wives of Abel and Cain? Where the fuck did they come from?

Didn't they come from a nearby city?

 

[James Brown]

How about the wives of Abel and Cain? Where the fuck did they come from?

Didn't they come from a nearby city?

In Genesis, there's no explicit mention that Abel had a wife. But after Cain killed Abel, Cain fled to the land of Nod, east of Eden. Chapter 4, verse 17 reads, "And Cain knew his wife, and she gave birth to Enoch." Cain also was the founder of the first city, also called Enoch.

Genesis explicitly states that Adam and Eve conceived Cain and Abel at the beginning of chapter four, but doesn't state where Cain's wife came from. There's basically two theories:

1) Adam and Eve also had other sons and daughters not explicitly mentioned, and Cain's wife was actually one of his sisters who went with him into exile. Yes, it's incest, and no, inerrantists don't have a problem with that because reasons.

2) Jehovah created other people besides Adam and Eve but the author of Genesis didn't mention it because reasons. You may be forgiven for being led to believe that Adam and Eve were the only people specially created by Jehovah, but that's just because you haven't studied Hebrew. Much is made of the fact that in Genesis 1:27, it reads "God made mankind in his own image," not "God made a man in his own image." There's plenty of other instances where "mankind" means multiple people, so perhaps Jehovah created thousands of people, picked two to be his special pets, then got furious when they wouldn't follow orders. Later, Cain merely found one of these other unmentioned women and made her his wife.

Both arguments have adherents and their problems.

 

[bilby]

Didn't they come from a nearby city?

In Genesis, there's no explicit mention that Abel had a wife. But after Cain killed Abel, Cain fled to the land of Nod, east of Eden. Chapter 4, verse 17 reads, "And Cain knew his wife, and she gave birth to Enoch." Cain also was the founder of the first city, also called Enoch.

Genesis explicitly states that Adam and Eve conceived Cain and Abel at the beginning of chapter four, but doesn't state where Cain's wife came from. There's basically two theories:

1) Adam and Eve also had other sons and daughters not explicitly mentioned, and Cain's wife was actually one of his sisters who went with him into exile. Yes, it's incest, and no, inerrantists don't have a problem with that because reasons.

2) Jehovah created other people besides Adam and Eve but the author of Genesis didn't mention it because reasons. You may be forgiven for being led to believe that Adam and Eve were the only people specially created by Jehovah, but that's just because you haven't studied Hebrew. Much is made of the fact that in Genesis 1:27, it reads "God made mankind in his own image," not "God made a man in his own image." There's plenty of other instances where "mankind" means multiple people, so perhaps Jehovah created thousands of people, picked two to be his special pets, then got furious when they wouldn't follow orders. Later, Cain merely found one of these other unmentioned women and made her his wife.

Both arguments have adherents and their problems.

Clearly the authors of Genesis did not consider mere women to be worthy of mention, except where such mentions were unavoidable for plot reasons, or in bit-part roles as wives to the actual real people in the story.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Maybe their wives were apes?

 

[James Brown]

Don't forget Genesis 6:

¹When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, ²the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose...

⁴ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

I wonder if those passages are illustrated in diorama in Ken Ham's Ark Encounter?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

Why couldn't Abel just yank out a rib and build himself a wife? There's no need to make things overly complex by introducing new characters who weren't mentioned in the story.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Why couldn't Abel just yank out a rib and build himself a wife? There's no need to make things overly complex by introducing new characters who weren't mentioned in the story.

It doesn't say he didn't yank a rib out and make one. That's what Adam did. So obviously that would be the assumed method. In fact it should say when they stopped yanking ribs out and started having sex like normal people. That must been quite a relief for them. Sex is so much more pleasant than tearing sections of bone out, straight through the skin. They didn't have antibiotics then. Imagine the death rate from infections. It must have been horrendous.

 

[Malintent]

I heard the 'rib' story differently... nothing was 'yanked out'. a surgical procedure of some sort occurred... associated with a 'deep slumber', as I remember it told.

 

[Lion IRC]

...The common analogy was raised of how a pot never questions the potter which made it, and therefore how humans should also not question that we have a creator too, and we should never question any command it gives us to obey either.
...If there was 1 apologetic argument that I wish I could wipe out from all of human history and modern theistic apologetics, it would be the pot/potter analogy.

That's a really bad apologetic.
And as Cheerful Charlie rightly says, "its an utterly insane theology." (Which is why I think it's a bad apologetic) I don't even think it's scriptural.
God wants us to understand His laws - laws which benefit us not Him.
There's tons of examples in the bible of God (the Potter) explaining stuff to slow learners and skeptics. (The pots.)
Consider also the great lengths Jesus goes to in His use of explanatory parables.

...Also, the God of the gaps type of arguments. We don't know the answer to something, so why not just stick a god in there? Those are stupid.

Agreed. GOTG is lame.
William Lane Craig deplores it and will never use it. Me either.

And you know what?
I think the number of 'gaps' is actually increasing rather than decreasing - thanks to science.

I'm bothered by the whole, "If you deconverted, then you must not have been a True Christian. (Like I am...ahem.)"

Me too! It's a really terrible argument. (No True Scotsman fallacy.)
True Christians can have momentary lapses into skepticism just as atheists can have self-doubt...and even convert to theism.
In fact some of the most prominent (and best) Christian apologists are former atheists. Nobody is suggesting they weren't True Atheists.

Yes, the Bible is clear that once-saved-always-saved.

Hardly clear. OSAS is a very contentious doctrine. At best, you might claim that it's very hard to be truly 'saved' and then later change your mind.

Divine Command Theory.

Christians complain about moral relativism, but...

DCT is not moral 'relativism'.

 

[Tom Sawyer]

...Also, the God of the gaps type of arguments. We don't know the answer to something, so why not just stick a god in there? Those are stupid.

Agreed. GOTG is lame.
William Lane Craig deplores it and will never use it. Me either.

And you know what?
I think the number of 'gaps' is actually increasing rather than decreasing - thanks to science.

Yes, as it should. The more we learn, the more we understand how much more there is to potentially know. Where there was one massive gap in the past, new scientific information can fill in parts of that gap and leave us with ten slightly smaller gaps in place of it - or even ten massively larger gaps, since we didn't realize initially how huge that first gap actually was. Increases in knowledge bring with them complementary increases in seeing what else we have the potential to learn.

This is a positive of science, not a negative.

 

[Lion IRC]

Here's one I overheard that left me slack-jawed:

Some guy: (in a very loud voice) "Have you noticed that the whole world uses the same calendar to mark the year? Everyone refers to the current year as so-and-so AD, which stands for anno Domini, "the year of our lord, Jesus Christ". Why don't the Chinese and the Muslims have their own calendars?"

Listener, an Anglican priest: "That's because Christendom has dominated the world politically and economically for centuries."

Some guy: "Makes you think, though, doesn't it?" (leaves the building with a smug look on his face)...

Don't like this one either.
But I do think it's a handy point for eschatology discussions because it's one of the pointers you can use to establish that there would hardly anyone living in the year 2017 who didn't know about the event used to set our global count of years.
The world won't end until everyone has heard of Jesus Christ

 

[bigfield]

But I do think it's a handy point for eschatology discussions because it's one of the pointers you can use to establish that there would hardly anyone living in the year 2017 who didn't know about the event used to set our global count of years.

There are probably more people alive now who don't know the Jesus myth than there were in 1 AD.

The world won't end until everyone has heard of Jesus Christ

...or the Sun runs out of core hydrogen.

 

[Juma]

in the year 2017 who didn't know about the event used to set our global count of years.

Not eveyone uses common era...

 

[Lion IRC]

How many of those who do not 'use' the Gregorian calendar could honestly say they didn't know that the rest of the world - including Google and Facebook - thinks it's 2017
(years since Jesus was alive?)