Your top 10 reasons for rejecting Christianity

[Jarhyn]

1. Christianity is self-evidently nonsensical and internally contradictory horseshit.

2. Er

3. That’s it.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. Seriously, that’s it.

Well yeah. But here’s the problem. Try talking to a teenager in Alabama. He’s been told all his life by his parents, his school friends and their parents, his preacher every Sunday, about how there is a god and Jesus is god in the flesh and he’s up there watching every thing you do. Hell, he’s mortified by the fact that he can’t stop jerking off and he’s concerned that Jesus is watching. You can’t just say it’s horseshit. It is but you need to show them it is. What makes it horseshit specifically? What about it is internally inconsistent?

Someone who has been brainwashed so thoroughly is likely beyond help. They can get out only if they have the innate ability to do so, because the brainwashing process has been honed over 1,500 years to defend against external threats to its operation.

Such individuals are like the B-52 crew in Dr Strangelove. They have their orders, and one of those orders is to not only disregard unauthorised communications, but to configure their communications system so that such communications aren’t even received. The only ways to stop them from trying to carry out their mission are for them to be told to stand down by the people they acknowledge as authorities, or to decide for themselves that they ought not to do it, or to be killed.

No. That’s not right. These people change their minds all the time. They’re not stupid. Many privately do have doubts. Others have had doubts implanted to them and changed over a long period of time. Indeed sometimes the most fundamentalist out there are amongst the easiest to convert. But it’s a journey. Read the stories on these boards. Often times it starts with a single seed and their whole world unravels. Read about Bart Ehrman’s journey or Dan Barker. They were fundamentalists for years before they just couldn’t resolve the conflicts further.

This is why I argue what I do about finding ways to break the most egregious aspects of faith without assuming there isn't a god. Authority is withheld from the strong atheist.

It certainly leaves a pathway open, inviting even, to accepting life without belief in such but first one has to destabilize Argument of Authority.

Without that, the authority can effect corrections upon a great deal of doubt for a depressingly long time.

The cloak of ignorance, though, is a great deal harder to assail.

 

[Learner]

I have one reason.

In our life time we will see billions of people die and not one come back. There is no reason for me to go any further.

What scares me is when we raise a dead person, and I believe we will, people will soon forget that we couldn't do it and will use it as proof that it could have happened.

That's interesting. You have likes from four other individuals who also seem to believe, eventually, "man himself will raise the dead!!?"
So there is faith, among the secular. Welcome aboard?

 

[crazyfingers]

I never grew up in a christian home. I don't need a top ten reasons for rejecting christianity any more than I need a top 10 reason for rejecting any of thousands of other lame-brain claims that make no sense and have no evidence.

 

[SIB]

I have one reason.

In our life time we will see billions of people die and not one come back. There is no reason for me to go any further.

What scares me is when we raise a dead person, and I believe we will, people will soon forget that we couldn't do it and will use it as proof that it could have happened.

That's interesting. You have likes from four other individuals who also seem to believe, eventually, "man himself will raise the dead!!?"
So there is faith, among the secular. Welcome aboard?

Its not that we will raise the dead part. That's not the focus. The focus is the process of forming said belief.

yes, we all have faith to a degree. Its a matter of sorting through the beliefs to see if we can determine what one(s) are more/less reliable.
For example, I believe medicine will advance enough to bring a person back from the dead. We then compare that to a belief that a man returned from the dead 2000 years ago.

The trick here is self honesty. Can people discuss it without any "deep" agenda. Can we properly evaluate ourselves to understand how our own bias distorts what we might believe.

 

[Jarhyn]

I have one reason.

In our life time we will see billions of people die and not one come back. There is no reason for me to go any further.

What scares me is when we raise a dead person, and I believe we will, people will soon forget that we couldn't do it and will use it as proof that it could have happened.

That's interesting. You have likes from four other individuals who also seem to believe, eventually, "man himself will raise the dead!!?"
So there is faith, among the secular. Welcome aboard?

More... When someone takes on constructing the configurable-state hardware electric neuron and a switching system to scale it and construct interrelated nodes, human resurrection is going to be a lot more feasible.

It's not so much faith as the recognition that if this is ALL material, then what is described is an achievable goal that may be attained by studying and rearranging material.

It just requires work. That was not done on time to pull the same trick back in the bronze age.

 

[SLD]

I never grew up in a christian home. I don't need a top ten reasons for rejecting christianity any more than I need a top 10 reason for rejecting any of thousands of other lame-brain claims that make no sense and have no evidence.

But you do have reasons for rejecting Christianity. But more specifically, what about it doesn’t make sense? Remember you’re talking to a young impressionable teenage believer, but s/he might have doubts. I think we owe him/her specific reasons to reject his faith.

I grew up in a Christian home, but not an evangelical one. My mother took a liberal view of Christianity. I think that makes it harder to reject Christianity. I did require strong objective reasons to reject it. I found them eventually. But it took awhile.

 

[skepticalbip]

...

I never grew up in a christian home. I don't need a top ten reasons for rejecting christianity any more than I need a top 10 reason for rejecting any of thousands of other lame-brain claims that make no sense and have no evidence.

But you do have reasons for rejecting Christianity. But more specifically, what about it doesn’t make sense? Remember you’re talking to a young impressionable teenage believer, but s/he might have doubts. I think we owe him/her specific reasons to reject his faith.

I grew up in a Christian home, but not an evangelical one. My mother took a liberal view of Christianity. I think that makes it harder to reject Christianity. I did require strong objective reasons to reject it. I found them eventually. But it took awhile.

I think you are attacking the wrong problem. Someone who accepts religious claims on blind faith can not be reached by attacking their belief. Teach someone critical thinking and they will come to see on their own that many claims of religion are not only unsupported but unreasonable. Critical thinking will also fortify them against being victims of hucksters and conmen other than the religious ones. My experience is that the religious are much more likely to be taken in by hucksters.

 

[abaddon]

He’s been told all his life by his parents, his school friends and their parents, his preacher every Sunday, about how there is a god and Jesus is god in the flesh and he’s up there watching every thing you do. Hell, he’s mortified by the fact that he can’t stop jerking off and he’s concerned that Jesus is watching.

I was a teen suffering this kind of thing. I deconverted because of a change of values. I got sick of the oppression and wanted to be free of the moralistic assholes who were doing such a good job making me feel like shit. I had wanted to belong but then, when I found what the cost was, I wanted to be free.

It's easy to look back after the deconversion (the change of values that lead a person to value these "facts" instead of those "facts") and say "I reasoned my way out of it using critical reasoning". The ego does that -- it claims control after-the-fact.

However good or bad one's reasoning abilities, those are used to put values into effect. So I figure it's more a matter of finding what the person values. If you want them to share your values, then make your values appealing. If they're getting psychologically beaten down then "freedom" will appeal. If they feel like oddballs then maybe belonging to a different ingroup will appeal. If they're eggheads then convincing them that you have the most correct facts might appeal.

 

[Jarhyn]

He’s been told all his life by his parents, his school friends and their parents, his preacher every Sunday, about how there is a god and Jesus is god in the flesh and he’s up there watching every thing you do. Hell, he’s mortified by the fact that he can’t stop jerking off and he’s concerned that Jesus is watching.

I was a teen suffering this kind of thing. I deconverted because of a change of values. I got sick of the oppression and wanted to be free of the moralistic assholes who were doing such a good job making me feel like shit. I had wanted to belong but then, when I found what the cost was, I wanted to be free.

It's easy to look back after the deconversion (the change of values that lead a person to value these "facts" instead of those "facts") and say "I reasoned my way out of it using critical reasoning". The ego does that -- it claims control after-the-fact.

However good or bad one's reasoning abilities, those are used to put values into effect. So I figure it's more a matter of finding what the person values. If you want them to share your values, then make your values appealing. If they're getting psychologically beaten down then "freedom" will appeal. If they feel like oddballs then maybe belonging to a different ingroup will appeal. If they're eggheads then convincing them that you have the most correct facts might appeal.

Again, that's why I think it's important on focusing on the real aspects that allowed that control to slip.

As a person who, in their teens, was exactly as fucking annoying as JC was, in exactly the same ways for exactly the same reasons but who has a memory for their moments of existential change, it was exactly an experience that shifted away Argument of Authority.

After Argument from Authority finally lost its power over me, that's when I had to allow everything built on it to either need to find foundation on argument from evidence and observation, or to find some replacement for it that could, or just... Let it go.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

yes, we all have faith to a degree. Its a matter of sorting through the beliefs to see if we can determine what one(s) are more/less reliable.
For example, I believe medicine will advance enough to bring a person back from the dead. We then compare that to a belief that a man returned from the dead 2000 years ago.

I guy didn't just come back to life after being dead for a few days, he walked through walls, flew around in the sky like superman and then flew away into the clouds. We have witnessed the dead being revived in our movies. The difference will be that in that future scenario you envision it won't happen because some grand potentate of woo says abracadabra and makes this dude wake up and start dancing the cha-cha.

 

[bilby]

I have one reason.

In our life time we will see billions of people die and not one come back. There is no reason for me to go any further.

What scares me is when we raise a dead person, and I believe we will, people will soon forget that we couldn't do it and will use it as proof that it could have happened.

That's interesting. You have likes from four other individuals who also seem to believe, eventually, "man himself will raise the dead!!?"
So there is faith, among the secular. Welcome aboard?

Its not that we will raise the dead part. That's not the focus. The focus is the process of forming said belief.

yes, we all have faith to a degree. Its a matter of sorting through the beliefs to see if we can determine what one(s) are more/less reliable.
For example, I believe medicine will advance enough to bring a person back from the dead. We then compare that to a belief that a man returned from the dead 2000 years ago.

The trick here is self honesty. Can people discuss it without any "deep" agenda. Can we properly evaluate ourselves to understand how our own bias distorts what we might believe.

Arguably we now raise the dead as a matter of routine.

Modern medicine and (most*) law no longer define death in terms of breathing and/or heartbeat, but pretty much anyone from a couple of millennia ago (or indeed any time before the enlightenment) would have no problem with declaring that a person whose heartbeat and/or breathing had ceased was dead, and that CPR was raising the dead.

Our medical professionals tend to define death today as brain death, but were that to become a reversible state, the definition would probably be changed again - death is hard to define, but most people agree that it’s major feature should be it’s permanence.

Raising the dead is something that happens every day; It’s not a miracle, we just decided to do it.



I know that a few years ago the Japanese government refused to change the legal definition of death in that nation, and I haven’t yet heard that this has been revisited; In Japan, the law declares that a person will a heartbeat is alive regardless of brain activity, which makes organ donation hugely more difficult, and which ensures that many Japanese people have recovered from being legally dead. This is one reason why we shouldn’t let scientific illiterates pass laws.

 

[atrib]

I have one reason.

In our life time we will see billions of people die and not one come back. There is no reason for me to go any further.

What scares me is when we raise a dead person, and I believe we will, people will soon forget that we couldn't do it and will use it as proof that it could have happened.

That's interesting. You have likes from four other individuals who also seem to believe, eventually, "man himself will raise the dead!!?"
So there is faith, among the secular. Welcome aboard?

He is saying that he has confidence in the scientific method, as well he should. Because the scientific method works, and doctors use modern medicine to bring people back from "the dead" all the fucking time. Praying to an imaginary skybeast we have no evidence for and believe in based purely on faith, does not. Do you really not understand the difference?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I think Learner understands the difference, hence the winkie emoji.

Some people survive catastrophic circumstances. After thousands of man hours and millions of dollars and the attention of doctors and other trained professionals they say it's a miracle they are still alive and they thank their invisible spaceman.

We should probably just start acknowledging the existence of secular miracles when they occur. Quite frankly our lives are full of secular miracles. They actually happen because of scientific knowledge and human effort. They're not just fantastic stories full of magic, superstition and ignorance like their religious counterparts.

 

[skepticalbip]

I think Learner understands the difference, hence the winkie emoji.

Some people survive catastrophic circumstances. After thousands of man hours and millions of dollars and the attention of doctors and other trained professionals they say it's a miracle they are still alive and they thank their invisible spaceman.

We should probably just start acknowledging the existence of secular miracles when they occur. Quite frankly our lives are full of secular miracles. They actually happen because of scientific knowledge and human effort. They're not just fantastic stories full of magic, superstition and ignorance like their religious counterparts.

That is what the evangelicals already think atheists do, or at least they claim it is. They claim that atheists actually worship Darwin, Newton, et. al. Although such notables certainly don't merit worship, they certainly merit recognition.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Evangelicals don't think. If they did, they wouldn't be evangelicals.

 

[Bomb#20]

My top 1 reason for rejecting Christianity: it's evil. It's fractally morally wrong, immoral on every scale in every detail. Adam sinned by disobeying before he'd been given a chance to know disobeying was wrong? "Original sin": guilt by inheritance from somebody else's sin? Thou shalt not kill but God gets to kill all He pleases and is still called good? Job was stripped of all he had and proved he was still loyal so God rewards him by restoring him to his good life, well isn't that nice, but all Job's original family and servants are still dead, but that's okay because they're just chattel so who cares about them? God drowns the entire human race apart from one family? And on and on in the same vein. Did God have some good reason for being a massively parallel killer that we just don't know about? God tells the Israelites to murder all the Amelekites, including little kids, why? He says why: revenge. Revenge, against little kids, for what their tribe's adults had done? And last and worst: hellfire. Infinite torture as punishment for finite crime, and for the non-crimes of ignorance, disbelief and nonworship? And this outrage against every form of justice is called a morality? How can any thinking person with a conscience not recoil in horror from such an ideology? If there were a God and if He wanted us to be Christian, then as conscious moral agents we'd have a duty to judge that He's a villain, that He is exactly what Erdos called Him: "The Supreme Fascist".

 

[Jarhyn]

@Bomb#20 I'll pose that in some respects a lot of it seems like what you would expect as a misinterpretation of something someone actually intelligent would say, and of the sort that of thing intelligent folks might recognize in any age and be spoken with words in a language that is lacking.

Original sin (wrong) seems a ready misinterpretation of birth in ignorance (true), for example.

And indeed "love 'god' and love neighbor as self" makes a lot of sense when "god" is also self.

But without the foundational work that proves it out, there is a lot of wiggle room to just ignore it.

Even certain doctrines of afterlife and reincarnation have grounding in material concepts, in addition to groundings in speculations to which the common game theory is severely lacking.

But yes, much of it is as you pose, fractally evil, twisting any truth of such concepts to a parasitic end

 

[Bomb#20]

@Bomb#20 I'll pose that in some respects a lot of it seems like what you would expect as a misinterpretation of something someone actually intelligent would say, and of the sort that of thing intelligent folks might recognize in any age and be spoken with words in a language that is lacking.
...
And indeed "love 'god' and love neighbor as self" makes a lot of sense when "god" is also self.

If you mean that to be an example of something quasi-intelligent in the Christian moral theory, it doesn't look like that to me. It looks like just another piece of fractally wrong garbage. Love is an emotion we experience, not some voluntary act like making graven images. Subjecting it to moral judgment is a guilt-tripping power play, not a sane moral philosophy. Christians preaching that it's legitimate for an authority to command whom we must love held up Western civilization's escape from that tyranny by about 2,015 years.

 

[Learner]

I have one reason.

In our life time we will see billions of people die and not one come back. There is no reason for me to go any further.

What scares me is when we raise a dead person, and I believe we will, people will soon forget that we couldn't do it and will use it as proof that it could have happened.

That's interesting. You have likes from four other individuals who also seem to believe, eventually, "man himself will raise the dead!!?"
So there is faith, among the secular. Welcome aboard?

Its not that we will raise the dead part. That's not the focus. The focus is the process of forming said belief.

yes, we all have faith to a degree. Its a matter of sorting through the beliefs to see if we can determine what one(s) are more/less reliable.
For example, I believe medicine will advance enough to bring a person back from the dead. We then compare that to a belief that a man returned from the dead 2000 years ago.

The trick here is self honesty. Can people discuss it without any "deep" agenda. Can we properly evaluate ourselves to understand how our own bias distorts what we might believe.

Thanks SIB for decently responding back. A fair point of view as you see it.

 

[Learner]

I have one reason.

In our life time we will see billions of people die and not one come back. There is no reason for me to go any further.

What scares me is when we raise a dead person, and I believe we will, people will soon forget that we couldn't do it and will use it as proof that it could have happened.

That's interesting. You have likes from four other individuals who also seem to believe, eventually, "man himself will raise the dead!!?"
So there is faith, among the secular. Welcome aboard?

More... When someone takes on constructing the configurable-state hardware electric neuron and a switching system to scale it and construct interrelated nodes, human resurrection is going to be a lot more feasible.

It's not so much faith as the recognition that if this is ALL material, then what is described is an achievable goal that may be attained by studying and rearranging material.

It just requires work. That was not done on time to pull the same trick back in the bronze age.

Fair viewpoint Jahyn, thanks for your decent response, ( I was really intrigued that Atrib and Bilby liked SIB's post, which suggested man being ressurected.)