Exposing Atheistic Myths

[Atheos]

I don't think you read that story very carefully. What is the sin for which the rich man was condemned?

He was damned for not caring. Not for failing to believe. He likely went to Temple every Sabbath day, much as do the Christians you describe. His doom was written in his cruelty and apathy towards the suffering that was literally laid at his feet. Hence the King's doubtfulness in the lsst line that it would matter in the slightest whether he came back from the dead to warn people. You cannot convince someone by fear alone to truly value the life of another. At best, you can talk them into pretenfing to care.

Speaking of not reading the story carefully I might add that it doesn't mention a King at all .

Believe me, I've read the story many times and quite carefully.

The nature of the sin for which the rich man was condemned is irrelevant. People put into Jesus' mouth the words in Matthew 7:13-14 which clearly indicates that the vast majority of humanity are going to suffer a similar fate for whatever the reason(s).

I was such a christian as I described for many years. I believed in God, Heaven, Hell, Jesus, an inerrant bible (which I know you don't) and all the fundamentalist trappings. I spent over 16 years of my life earning a living by preaching it from pulpits. In spite of all that I didn't give the salvation of souls the urgency it would have deserved if I truly believed in the eternal torture I preached. Why did I have a television set? Why would I have ever wasted my time with hours of mind numbing entertainment when thousands of people were dying every minute all over the world unprepared to meet their God? The answer is that I really didn't take it seriously. I kept rationalizing that one day I would give it the attention it deserved. But not today.

Edit: I see you edited the "king" out of your post while I was posting my rejoinder. I'll leave what I wrote anyway

 

[Keith&Co.]

In a way though, Gun Nut has a point. I think that Christians who really believe in the god who saves people from the horror of the Hell described by Jesus in the story of the rich man and Lazarus are few and far between. The writer of that story would have us believe that there is a place where the vast majority of humanity is going to spend an eternity in torment. The story of salvation is the good news of an escape from that horrible fate through Jesus.
...

What I want to know is how Christians can rationalize the idea that humans evolved from non-humans while also believing that all humans descended from one man and one woman.

I have been told that 'people' evolved, but The Chosen were a special creation, direct from God's hand. Then they fucked everything up and had to go out and live with the monkey people.

I have aldo been told that Genesis is allegory. The problem we face is not that we're held accountable for one sin committed in The Long Ago, but that Man struggles with our capacity for sin, a stain we can ask Jesus to wash out.

I have also been told it is a mystery that will be cleared up when we get to the afterlife so (i should) shut (my) pie hole.

 

[Treedbear]

In a way though, Gun Nut has a point. I think that Christians who really believe in the god who saves people from the horror of the Hell described by Jesus in the story of the rich man and Lazarus are few and far between. The writer of that story would have us believe that there is a place where the vast majority of humanity is going to spend an eternity in torment. The story of salvation is the good news of an escape from that horrible fate through Jesus.
...

What I want to know is how Christians can rationalize the idea that humans evolved from non-humans while also believing that all humans descended from one man and one woman.

I have been told that 'people' evolved, but The Chosen were a special creation, direct from God's hand. Then they fucked everything up and had to go out and live with the monkey people.

I have aldo been told that Genesis is allegory. The problem we face is not that we're held accountable for one sin committed in The Long Ago, but that Man struggles with our capacity for sin, a stain we can ask Jesus to wash out.

I have also been told it is a mystery that will be cleared up when we get to the afterlife so (i should) shut (my) pie hole.

None of that sounds in anyway similar to mainstream Catholic doctrine. I think Protestants can take up any story that's convenient.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

In a way though, Gun Nut has a point. I think that Christians who really believe in the god who saves people from the horror of the Hell described by Jesus in the story of the rich man and Lazarus are few and far between. The writer of that story would have us believe that there is a place where the vast majority of humanity is going to spend an eternity in torment. The story of salvation is the good news of an escape from that horrible fate through Jesus.
...

What I want to know is how Christians can rationalize the idea that humans evolved from non-humans while also believing that all humans descended from one man and one woman.

I have been told that 'people' evolved, but The Chosen were a special creation, direct from God's hand. Then they fucked everything up and had to go out and live with the monkey people.

I have aldo been told that Genesis is allegory. The problem we face is not that we're held accountable for one sin committed in The Long Ago, but that Man struggles with our capacity for sin, a stain we can ask Jesus to wash out.

I have also been told it is a mystery that will be cleared up when we get to the afterlife so (i should) shut (my) pie hole.

We were all made perfect like god and angels, didn't even have physical bodies until lunch with Devil happened. That was a new one for me too. That was from a Roman Catholic.

 

[Politesse]

I don't think you read that story very carefully. What is the sin for which the rich man was condemned?

He was damned for not caring. Not for failing to believe. He likely went to Temple every Sabbath day, much as do the Christians you describe. His doom was written in his cruelty and apathy towards the suffering that was literally laid at his feet. Hence the King's doubtfulness in the lsst line that it would matter in the slightest whether he came back from the dead to warn people. You cannot convince someone by fear alone to truly value the life of another. At best, you can talk them into pretenfing to care.

Speaking of not reading the story carefully I might add that it doesn't mention a King at all .

Believe me, I've read the story many times and quite carefully.

The nature of the sin for which the rich man was condemned is irrelevant. People put into Jesus' mouth the words in Matthew 7:13-14 which clearly indicates that the vast majority of humanity are going to suffer a similar fate for whatever the reason(s).

I was such a christian as I described for many years. I believed in God, Heaven, Hell, Jesus, an inerrant bible (which I know you don't) and all the fundamentalist trappings. I spent over 16 years of my life earning a living by preaching it from pulpits. In spite of all that I didn't give the salvation of souls the urgency it would have deserved if I truly believed in the eternal torture I preached. Why did I have a television set? Why would I have ever wasted my time with hours of mind numbing entertainment when thousands of people were dying every minute all over the world unprepared to meet their God? The answer is that I really didn't take it seriously. I kept rationalizing that one day I would give it the attention it deserved. But not today.

Edit: I see you edited the "king" out of your post while I was posting my rejoinder. I'll leave what I wrote anyway

Apologies for the typo in my original post, got crossed wires with the other popular hellfire wham parable, as you no doubt inferred. But my point stands. If you have to fall back on what people have "put into Jesus' mouth" in order to support your reading of the text, even by your own admission, you're exercising some consciously dodgy hermeutics in my opinion. Yes, I know a lot of people are bad at reading. But that doesn't make them right about the meaning of the text, simply because there are rather a lot of them. I disagree with most modern readers about the primary point of Romeo and Juliet also ("true love", are you kidding?) but knowing that doesn't make me wonder whether my conclusions are right, since I can show my work on my conclusions and I know they can't show theirs. If your reading requires you to believe that the content of the text itself is "irrelevant", you aren't reading the text at all really.

I do agree that it is quite odd to say that you believe everyone is going to burn in indescribable agony for not knowing about something, but something that you are nevertheless unaccountably lazy about trying to teach them. I just wanted to point out the inherent hypocrisy in such an orientation- the original teaching doesn't defend such people, it actually unambiguously suggests they are writing a check for their own future torment. Not caring about the suffering of others leads to your own suffering. It's a moral so simple it would be at home in a weekend children's cartoon, and has echoes in most moral/religious systems I have ever heard of. But people struggle with it to a surprising degree.

 

[Keith&Co.]

I think Protestants can take up any story that's convenient.

As good a definition of the faith as any...

 

[James Brown]

Not caring about the suffering of others leads to your own suffering. It's a moral so simple it would be at home in a weekend children's cartoon, and has echoes in most moral/religious systems I have ever heard of. But people struggle with it to a surprising degree.

Perhaps because caring about everyone's suffering is a slow path to suicide.

 

[Atheos]

Dodgy hermeneutics? That seems a bit condescending considering that I was an inerrantist. I believed every word to be inspired by the same source, "pasa graphe theopneustos." Interpreting the scriptures under that mandate Matthew 7 and Luke 16 were simply part of the same source and context in which the message was to be understood. I understand where you're coming from but remind you that others have given much more thought to their methodology and interpretation of these ancient texts than you're giving them credit for.

But this isn't the first time we've been incapable of having a harmonious hermeneutical discussion. Klingon vs Bocce.

 

[Politesse]

Dodgy hermeneutics? That seems a bit condescending considering that I was an inerrantist. I believed every word to be inspired by the same source, "pasa graphe theopneustos." Interpreting the scriptures under that mandate Matthew 7 and Luke 16 were simply part of the same source and context in which the message was to be understood. I understand where you're coming from but remind you that others have given much more thought to their methodology and interpretation of these ancient texts than you're giving them credit for.

And you still see this as a good idea, despite having left the community? We have a former career of theological study in common, but not our outlook on it, it seems. I certainly do not read the Bible now exactly as I did when I was a seminarian.

 

[Politesse]

Not caring about the suffering of others leads to your own suffering. It's a moral so simple it would be at home in a weekend children's cartoon, and has echoes in most moral/religious systems I have ever heard of. But people struggle with it to a surprising degree.

Perhaps because caring about everyone's suffering is a slow path to suicide.

This is sort of how the book ends, actually. Presumably Jesus could have avoided his fate if any of his claims about himself were true, but he went willingly to his death. If that's not suicide, it's at least in the same neighborhood.

 

[Rhea]

This is sort of how the book ends, actually. Presumably Jesus could have avoided his fate if any of his claims about himself were true, but he went willingly to his death. If that's not suicide, it's at least in the same neighborhood.

You might not have read all the way to the end.
SPOILER ALERT!
... he doesn’t die
... and is he really willing if he yells out, “why have you foresaken me?”
(Presumably he knew that he would not actually die before he went “willingly” to his “3-day non-death,” though he still decided to call out like he was foresaken. Maybe that’s the ultimate plot twist - even he did not “believe.”)

 

[ideologyhunter]

BTW have you heard Christians rationalizing how God Incarnate could call out to a heavenly father, asking why he'd been forsaken? You get all kinds of oatmeal about how this was the human side of JC, not the god side. Bipolar = divine.

 

[Wiploc]

You can probably get away with characterizing the causal principle as "everything has a cause" (and thus contradicts an uncaused God) on an atheist board like this, but if you presented that objection to an apologist you might get in trouble. The reason is that cosmological arguments tend to qualify the causal principle in some way. For example, they won't say everything needs a cause, they'll say that things that begin to exist need causes, or that things with unactualized potentialities need causes, or that contingent things need causes, etc.

Your apologist could probably get away with that on a theist board, but if she presented those specious distinctions to a rationalist board like this, she might get into trouble. The reason is that rationalists will tend to point out her equivocations. For example, they won't let her use one definition of "begun" to show that gods are unbegun, and a separate and incompatible definition to show that the rest of the universe is begun.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

This is sort of how the book ends, actually. Presumably Jesus could have avoided his fate if any of his claims about himself were true, but he went willingly to his death. If that's not suicide, it's at least in the same neighborhood.

You might not have read all the way to the end.
SPOILER ALERT!
... he doesn’t die
... and is he really willing if he yells out, “why have you foresaken me?”
(Presumably he knew that he would not actually die before he went “willingly” to his “3-day non-death,” though he still decided to call out like he was foresaken. Maybe that’s the ultimate plot twist - even he did not “believe.”)

Probably the best scriptural example of being able to have it both ways, which is of course what makes it all pure fantasy. It can obviously be healthy fantasizing.

 

[Politesse]

This is sort of how the book ends, actually. Presumably Jesus could have avoided his fate if any of his claims about himself were true, but he went willingly to his death. If that's not suicide, it's at least in the same neighborhood.

You might not have read all the way to the end.
SPOILER ALERT!
... he doesn’t die
... and is he really willing if he yells out, “why have you foresaken me?”
(Presumably he knew that he would not actually die before he went “willingly” to his “3-day non-death,” though he still decided to call out like he was foresaken. Maybe that’s the ultimate plot twist - even he did not “believe.”)

Suicide attempt, then? Lots of people survive the moment of their medical death somehow, but that doesn't change the character of their decisions, or other people's decisions, leading up to it.

 

[Politesse]

BTW have you heard Christians rationalizing how God Incarnate could call out to a heavenly father, asking why he'd been forsaken? You get all kinds of oatmeal about how this was the human side of JC, not the god side. Bipolar = divine.

It makes a lot more sense from a Gnostic perspective; the entire universe was begun in the first place by the seemingly irreconcilable divorce of certain aspects of God from Godself. Of course Jesus really failed to die in that version, it was just a husk or an illusion left hanging on the cross by that point.

I think a lot of theology and cosmology gets "borrowed" from older traditions that most Christians don't even realize existed. The second Christian century was a busy time.

 

[bilby]

This is sort of how the book ends, actually. Presumably Jesus could have avoided his fate if any of his claims about himself were true, but he went willingly to his death. If that's not suicide, it's at least in the same neighborhood.

You might not have read all the way to the end.
SPOILER ALERT!
... he doesn’t die
... and is he really willing if he yells out, “why have you foresaken me?”
(Presumably he knew that he would not actually die before he went “willingly” to his “3-day non-death,” though he still decided to call out like he was foresaken. Maybe that’s the ultimate plot twist - even he did not “believe.”)

Suicide attempt, then? Lots of people survive the moment of their medical death somehow, but that doesn't change the character of their decisions, or other people's decisions, leading up to it.

Nobody (by definition) survives death.

The grey area is due to the unavoidable use by the medical profession of proxies for death, which is not itself readily detectable.

One archaic proxy that still stubbornly clings on in the popular imagination is the cessation of heartbeat, but as we now know that life and death is a phenomenon of the brain, and not the heart, this is clearly only a very crude proxy for actual death. Nevertheless, people love to brag about how they had a heart attack, and were "dead" for several minutes. They weren't - brain death isn't something one can recover from, no matter how skilled ones surgical team might be.

That it is increasingly popular, as medical care has improved, to claim that one has survived death, is just an observation about the imprecision of language. But make no mistake, death is not something anyone survives.

A person who is, to all appearances, dead; But who later is clearly alive, wasn't dead.

Jesus's recovery from death (assuming the whole tale isn't pure fiction) is either a banal instance of something commonplace - a misdiagnosis of death. Or it's a unique miracle.

Sane people, when presented with evidence that conforms to these two possibilities, don't plump for 'unique miracle' as the more plausible scenario.

And omnicognisant incarnations of God don't need to wonder how it will all turn out, nor can anything surprise or be unexpected to such an entity.

 

[James Brown]

Not caring about the suffering of others leads to your own suffering. It's a moral so simple it would be at home in a weekend children's cartoon, and has echoes in most moral/religious systems I have ever heard of. But people struggle with it to a surprising degree.

Perhaps because caring about everyone's suffering is a slow path to suicide.

This is sort of how the book ends, actually. Presumably Jesus could have avoided his fate if any of his claims about himself were true, but he went willingly to his death. If that's not suicide, it's at least in the same neighborhood.

If we take what was written about him as true, then he knew that his death was going to be temporary, and he was looking forward to his glorification.

Harry Potter also gave up his life to save his friends, but unlike Jesus, Harry didn't know that he was going to be resurrected. That makes his sacrifice more substantial, in my view.

But putting Jesus aside, we see in the parable of Lazarus that, in your own words, "Not caring about the suffering of others leads to your own suffering." If that's true, then all of us will end up suffering like the rich man, because there will always be someone else in our sphere of influence that is suffering.

Just as the omni-benevolent God wanted.

 

[ruby sparks]

It makes a lot more sense from a Gnostic perspective; the entire universe was begun in the first place by the seemingly irreconcilable divorce of certain aspects of God from Godself.

'Makes sense' plus superstitious woo, generally involves using some kind of oxymoron. One way to resolve is to put in a qualifier, such as saying 'it can make sense to a superstitious woohead'.

 

[Politesse]

It makes a lot more sense from a Gnostic perspective; the entire universe was begun in the first place by the seemingly irreconcilable divorce of certain aspects of God from Godself.

'Makes sense' plus superstitious woo, generally involves using some kind of oxymoron. One way to resolve is to put in a qualifier, such as saying 'it can make sense to a superstitious woohead'.

I try to keep above.. quite that level of human interaction.