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120 Reasons to Reject Christianity

Lion IRC said:
If you accept that a person (mother) has the right to end the life of her unborn baby you are assigning her that right on the basis that she (her wishes) take precedence over any LESSER rights of the child. She has dominion over her unborn baby. And in that sense a heirarchy is established; Good. Better. Best.
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Why is degree of dominion equivalent to degree of goodness? That is a non-sequitur.
 
The best of the best of the best, sir!

Well if one is going to play what is better, maybe one should take it to the ultimate end. Let's build the Best of the best of the best god. But who the fuck would build a god that is going to have an eternal Auschwitz for the masses? Why build a god that destroys all life (almost) on our tiny little speck of dust within the galaxy, only to sort of start over? And what is with all that angry end times shit? After all, don't we deserve the best of the best of the best?


http://www.mbird.com/2016/05/everybody-elses-biggest-problem-lets-build-a-god/
Why would we take the time to build our own god and if it will not get us something? That’s the point, right? If we can’t score actual, material benefits, surely we deserve to get at least a cozy sense of well-being, or a hint of stress-relieving spiritual wonderment that is only surpassed by a visit to lululemon. At least we can hug our too-cute Build-A-Bear!
<snip>
Maybe today we don’t need a personal assistant; we need a cheerleader build-a-god, a compliant “yes man” to confirm our actions and whisper in our ears how great we really are. Tim Keller calls this god a “Stepford God,” a robot that won’t challenge or contradict or participate in our decisions, much less our lives.
<snip>
Perhaps we build a god because we assume we must, because we were raised in an oppressive church, and our consciences can’t bear the thought of the alternative. This god is the Build-A-Bear equivalent of a grizzly, occasionally in hibernation but always ready to pounce on us when we do wrong, ready to heap guilt and fear on us, to condemn us in our weakness, to bury us in a hole we dug for ourselves. Eventually most of us tire of this “grotesquely fraudulent” Frankenstein of our own creation, and we turn our backs not only on the monster, but on the urgency of our aching need for the real thing.

In the end, there are as many reasons to build-a-god as there are of us, and that is what we all ultimately create. Our build-a-gods are cookie-cutter versions of ourselves. Instead of being stuffed with soft, safe, high-grade polyester fiber, our gods are stuffed with fears, anxieties, aspirations and desires.
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In a way, the ontological existence of supposed human 'rights' provides a good parallel to the idea of good, better, best and the MGB.

We take away the rights of a person when we incarcerate them. We determine that their rights are lesser than another human who hasn't sinned...err ...I mean committed a crime. We subordinate the criminal making them a lesser being. And how do we justify depriving them of their right to liberty? There's certainly nothing scientific/empirical about the existence of human rights. Those 'rights' exist or cease to exist ontologically.

Now, is someone here going to say that humans rights don't exist anywhere for the same reason that maximal greatness supposedly doesn't exist? Is the MGB detractor going to argue that just because we don't agree on same sex marriage or abortion that nobody has ANY rights?
 
Lion IRC said:
Is an unborn baby a 'greater' being than a 12 month old baby or are they equivalent to the extent that detractors here claim theres no such thing as one being greater than another?
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I think most of the detractors here would just keep asking for a definition of 'greater,' or a list of the criteria used, before trying to answer the question.
I mean, Lumpy seems to think that the definition of 'greatest' being is the ability to give Jesus the power to do miracle healing. If the unborn and the 12month old baby both lack that ability, then there's no way to say that one is greater than the other.
Surely the abortion-on-demand lobby would have you believe that the mother is a greater being than the life inside her womb.
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Could you point to anyone who is using 'greater' being as part of their argument for abortion on demand? Maybe they could provide a definition of 'greater' that we can actually discuss?
The point about the ontological existence of an MGB is not about what criteria you use to decide upon 'greatness' but that superlative 'greatness' must exist in any case.
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It does depend on how you define 'greatness,' though. If you cannot come up with a definition of greater, then there's no reason to believe that there must be a greatest being. And if various things are greater depending on various criteria, how do we comfortably assume ONE must be THE GREATEST in all respects?
If you accept that a person (mother) has the right to end the life of her unborn baby you are assigning her that right on the basis that she (her wishes) take precedence over any LESSER rights of the child.
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You really like putting words in other people's mouths, don't you?

Is anyone actually making that argument?
She has dominion over her unborn baby. And in that sense a heirarchy is established; Good. Better. Best.
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Not according to any pro-choice argument I've come across.
 
bigfield said:
Lion IRC said:
If you accept that a person (mother) has the right to end the life of her unborn baby you are assigning her that right on the basis that she (her wishes) take precedence over any LESSER rights of the child. She has dominion over her unborn baby. And in that sense a heirarchy is established; Good. Better. Best.
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Why is degree of dominion equivalent to degree of goodness? That is a non-sequitur.
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No it's not! 'Dominion' is a very effective criteria to use.
Pecking order. Strong. Stronger. Strongest.

But you miss the point entirely.

I said, no matter WHAT criteria you use in any category of greatness - there will and must exist a superlative. The worlds greatest UFC fighter exists somewhere and if they die in a fight, the person who defeated them therefore becomes the greatest.

Yet for some unknown reason, ppl here persist in saying there's no such thing as the greatest ANYTHING!
 
funinspace said:
The point is that the authorship is this weakly known. The Gospel assigned names are based upon tradition, not on some substantial paper trail.

Except that in court they don’t like people faking shit into the record, as it is called perjury. As with Mark, someone(s) didn’t like the ending so they added a better ending to fit in with the later Gospels. We have other instances where it is known that verses were tweaked to make things like the Trinity better substantiated. We don’t tend to like it when police add details to make the suspect look guiltier for good reason. It tends to reduce the credibility of the witness. Every church across the empire was claiming founding disciples and relics to bolster their perceived importance and status, not seeming to care about “honesty”. Some Christian(s) forged information into the writings of Josephus as they didn’t like Jesus being left out of his writings. It seems that the early followers of The Way acted just like all other humans….
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Bolstering the perception of the 'belief' would understandably seem likey with the early church. Your description of bolstering the importance of status by a dishonesty may seem so but is more likely with some of much later denominations appearing after. It is acknowledged that Josephus mentioning Jesus is true according to a concensus of scholars, granted not accepted by all. Forgeries is misleading when applied here even when there is that one controversial noted area where he writes in good light and favour of Christianity bringing a natural cloud of suspicion to scholars.Even then this is not considered a forgery but rather an 'interpolation' according to scholars. Unlike his other mention of Jesus and Christians in the usual manner of dislike and unimportance.
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One of Josephus' quotes is plausibly accurate, where he refers to the stoning of James the 'brother of Jesus the so-called Christ'. However, the more important one to Christians is most likely not. But it would be fun to see a real 'scholar poll' on it from people qualified to have a learned opinion...
http://www.catholic.com/blog/jon-sorensen/is-this-mention-of-jesus-a-forgery
Josephus was certainly not a Christian, and so it is unlikely that he would have used phrases like, “if it be lawful to call him a man,” or “he was the Christ.” The majority of scholars of early Judaism and experts on the writings of Josephus believe this was likely touched-up by Christian scribes at a later time.
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I'd like to point out having studied this for decades that I'm virtually certain that none of the canonical gospels were written by the people to whom tradition ascribed authorship. I'm not going to derail the thread with this but if folks want to discuss it again for the umpteenth time we can start a thread about it in the Religious Texts area

I wish the old thread Diogenes the Cynic started back in the good old days was still around. That was a really excellent treatment of this subject.

For what it's worth I don't think that the anonymity of the authorship of the gospels is evidence of anything other than the authors chose not to be identified. Anonymous texts can contain truth and named writers can lie. Stuff like this sticks in the craw of fundies, but few others really care.

But I do believe that the pious fraud of the 2nd century in attaching names to these anonymous documents was little else besides an attempt to add legitimacy to them. Even if you just think you know who wrote something it makes it easier to trust what is written (or distrust, depending on the reputation of the "writer.") Like all other religious beliefs it's simply a matter of getting it out there and getting enough folks to swallow it. From that point forward all you have to do is appeal to popularity.
 
I think the dating of the Gospels is a very important apologetic issue.

What I would like to know is why we presume that the oldest extant text is the first one ever written. Whether AD70 or AD60 or AD50, there's no reason to think that is the first time anyone put pen to paper (so to speak.)
 
Lumpenproletariat said:
Keith&Co. said:
No, i do not need to claim that no two things are distinguishable in order to say that your argument is untenable to establish ALL things in a hierarchy. I merely have to wait for you to demonstrate the validity of the concept

If this hierarchy reaching up to a maximally great being is a valid concept, it should be possible to actually demonstrate it with beings we already know to exist.

If you cannot establish where two beetles fall in this hierarchy, why would anyone accept the hierarchy as a valid concept?
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No, not two beetles, which are too similar. A dog and a lizard. Or a dog and a centipede. Do you have a problem recognizing that the dog is superior? You wouldn't give priority to saving the dog over the lizard?
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That looks like a silly question to me. You are only asking what most people prefer. Why not ask what god thought was most important? He made only one species of human (according to creationists), five species of great apes (including the human ape species), about four thousand species of mammals (including the great apes), but when it came to beetles he apparently thought they were so damned important that he made over 350,000 species of them.
 
Lion IRC said:
bigfield said:
Why is degree of dominion equivalent to degree of goodness? That is a non-sequitur.
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No it's not! 'Dominion' is a very effective criteria to use.
Pecking order. Strong. Stronger. Strongest.

But you miss the point entirely.

I said, no matter WHAT criteria you use in any category of greatness - there will and must exist a superlative. The worlds greatest UFC fighter exists somewhere and if they die in a fight, the person who defeated them therefore becomes the greatest.

Yet for some unknown reason, ppl here persist in saying there's no such thing as the greatest ANYTHING!
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Greatness is a measure of magnitude. There isn't necessarily a single greatest thing for any given property that is being measured.

What property are you measuring that puts a god at the top of some hierarchy of greatness?
 
Lion IRC said:
In a way, the ontological existence of supposed human 'rights' provides a good parallel to the idea of good, better, best and the MGB.

We take away the rights of a person when we incarcerate them. We determine that their rights are lesser than another human who hasn't sinned...err ...I mean committed a crime. We subordinate the criminal making them a lesser being. And how do we justify depriving them of their right to liberty? There's certainly nothing scientific/empirical about the existence of human rights. Those 'rights' exist or cease to exist ontologically.

Now, is someone here going to say that humans rights don't exist anywhere for the same reason that maximal greatness supposedly doesn't exist? Is the MGB detractor going to argue that just because we don't agree on same sex marriage or abortion that nobody has ANY rights?
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If "rghts" can be taken away, they're not rights - at least not inalienable rights - they're privileges.
 
Lion IRC said:
I think the dating of the Gospels is a very important apologetic issue.

What I would like to know is why we presume that the oldest extant text is the first one ever written. Whether AD70 or AD60 or AD50, there's no reason to think that is the first time anyone put pen to paper (so to speak.)
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Uhm....those are some of the estimated dates for when they were written, by mainstream Christian theologians, primarily based upon the words with said texts. Those are not the dates for the oldest extant texts; for that one needs to tack on at least another century for the most part. We (the mouse and I) are presuming the integrity of Christian theologians in their learned opinions. Feel free to argue with them...
 
After checking the list of past and present titleholders, I can confirm that no god has ever won even a UFC title, therefore there is not a god that is the greatest at everything.
 
Lion IRC said:
Really? What can go faster than the speed of light?
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Um, if 'speed' is your measure of greatness, and the Speed of Light is the upper limit for all matter and energy in transit, wouldn't that actually DISPROVE your point? If nothing can exceed that speed limit, then everything that travels at light speed is equally great, and none is greatest.
 
bigfield said:
After checking the list of past and present titleholders, I can confirm that no god has ever won even a UFC title, therefore there is not a god that is the greatest at everything.
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I think you are dissing Thor and Elli :cheeky:
 
Keith&Co. said:
Lion IRC said:
Yet for some unknown reason, ppl here persist in saying there's no such thing as the greatest ANYTHING!
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Nope. Wrong.
I said there's no reason to suspect there's a greatest EVERYTHING.
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Oh well that's good to know we agree that the category of great, greater, greatest works for "things". :joy:

As for whether it works for the metaphysical "everything" or not, you might be right because that would imply that you and I and God are all simultaneously at one with the universe.

That reminds me of the joke about the Dalai Lama walking into a pizza shop and asks can you make me one with everything.
 
Lion IRC said:
Keith&Co. said:
Nope. Wrong.
I said there's no reason to suspect there's a greatest EVERYTHING.
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Oh well that's good to know we agree that the category of great, greater, greatest works for "things". :joy:
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No, no, no. I'm saying that various criteria we have suggested produce various 'greatest' examples. Kind of hard to prove one God is the greatest possible being if there's several categories where he might be exceeded.
 
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