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Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
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@mailman in addendum to arakish post
Why I have not watched any youtube video links of yours mailman:
The claim that there was a human being born of "immaculate conception" that was a son of an almighty being that could perform miracles like healing the very sick, and then may or may not have been killed then resurrected from the dead are all enormous claims. All examples of things that have never happened in my life time, or that even of my parents or grandparents. That everything I learned in my short time so far on earth is not possible and breaks all the "rules." It is such a wild claim, I can safely ignore any argument for such a claim, unless there is tremendous highly compelling evidence that shows it is true.
Here is an example of a wild claim:
You mailman owe me 1 million dollars US cash.
Prove to me (or anyone!) that you do not owe me 1 million US cash.
Now realize, you can't. You cannot prove that you do NOT owe me 1 million cash. Even though it is plainly obvious as day to both us you do not actually owe me 1 million dollars, you can't prove it! Does that mean you pay me 1 million in cash? Of Course not, that is ridiculous, just like the claim that you me 1 million is ridiculous. You can dismiss my claim of 1 million out of hand. You even dismiss a handwritten note (obviously forged by me) that you wrote I owe LogicFTW 1 million US cash. You would need compelling evidence that you owe me 1 million dollars before you would even begin to take my claim seriously.
Now realize the same applies to your jesus christ idea. A few books that talk about him is not enough. The claim well "prove alexander the great exist is actually an argument against jesus christ idea not for. One should be suspicious of the finer details of Alexander, certainly for example from the movie. Also Alexander the great, makes no enormous claims like resurrecting from the dead, or casting miracles or being born of immaculate conception, or being son of god/is god etc. The only claim was he was a man, a leader that conquered half the known world a large claim, but also backed by piles of real archaeological findings.
LogicFTW,
"You mailman owe me 1 million dollars US cash."
If mailman was a true Christian and if you asked him for $1 million he would gladly give it to you.
http://www.bricktestament.com/the_teachings_of_jesus/on_giving/mt05_41.html 4 pictures
@LogicFTW
The video is not about the immaculate conception or miracles. Go ahead and throw those out. The video is about evidence for the resurrection, which is a MASSIVE claim.
All I am attempting to do is get people to watch the Dr. Gary Habermas video. (If it helps Dr. Habermas almost became a Buddhist to refute Christianity.) You have posted links to Bart Ehrman and I have watched those videos. Yet it seems like no one is willing to watch a simple video. Is there something that you fear?? What is the barrier?? I thought atheists would welcome a video that they could then smash to bits with reason and sound arguments. It seems like there is an inner fear that many in this group have...
I love debating and looking at evidence and using reason to refine my thinking, but I am struggling to engage people in meaningful ways on this site. I don't see my time here lasting very long, sorry to say.
@ mailman
Give it up. I seriously doubt anyone here is going to watch a video of an apologist. I have already heard of Habermas and he is one to do as ALL Religious Absolutists will do. He perverts and distorts data to fit his confirmation bias. That is a trick ALL Apologists use. It is also the trick used in the totalitarian and tyrannical indoctrination procedures utilized by ALL Religious Absolutists and Apologists.
WARNING: This video contains FAITH (Falsehoods Assumptions Innuendos Treachery and Hogwash).
rmfr
@mailman
"All I am attempting to do is get people to watch the Dr. Gary Habermas video."
And that will not work. But you have seen the video.
So how about you present the "evidence"?
@Arakish Re: "Just wait until Tin-Man finds you. Then you are really in trouble..."
Oh, I found him already. Kinda hard to miss, actually. But it is so damn difficult to take him seriously. And whenever I think about replying to some of his posts, I start to smile.... then I chuckle... then I schnerkle.... then I start to laugh.... and then I can't type anymore. It's a viscious cycle.
@ Tin-Man
I am the same way. I have to have my laugh fest for a while then come back and answer.
Vicious cycle indeed!
rmfr
mailman And if I responded to your claim that the earth is flat and presented to you how I MYSELF have seen how ships appear to move downwards when moving away from you on the seas, how I MYSELF have seen a lunar eclipse and seen the round shape of the Earth, and how I MYSELF have noticed the Earth's curve from an airplane, THEN what?
And also, your analogy clearly is a bad one, seeing as the "evidence" that you cited is nothing but just another apologetics lecture that is basically just a bunch of baseless assertions. Argument by ASSERTION is no evidence. Argument by actual SCIENTIFIC FACTS is, however, good evidence.
I read a Spider Man comic. I gave a summary, and my friend now uses my summary as proof that Spider Man exists.
Do you see how stupid that is?
Yeah, I have heard of those sources. However, I have not seen them as I said about the Josephus one. I am one of those who if I don't see it, it don't exist. I am all about objective hard empirical evidence since I work as a volcanologist helping to study the Yellowstone Caldera. I am not saying they do not exist, but I have not seen them. Most are locked away in the Vatican vaults where no one is allowed to see them. And that always make me wonder what the Vatican is afraid of. If what the Vatican has locked away in their vaults is irrefutable objective hard empirical evidence, then why won't they allow anyone to see them? Excepting their own clergy. To me, that tells me the evidence is probably more damning for their believes than supporting it.
And I do not want to hear this bullshit about age.
rmfr
The reference to Neptune is a terrible analogy, because unlike your God, it is possible for one to actually observe observe evidence of the giant planet’s existence through a telescope, rather than just making appeals to authority and using hearsay as “evidence”.
Howdy, Hello World. A warm and sincere welcome to the AR. After reading your OP, there is one thing that stood out to me. Namely, you sound like a pretty dang intelligent guy. Also, you seem like a fairly honest chap. Two great things you have going for you so far. Now, with that in mind, go back and read your OP. And pretend you are reading it as if somebody else wrote it and you are critiquing it. If you do so, I am willing to bet you will see the same things I saw in your story. One, you had to constantly shift from denomination to denomination in order to make the religion fit into "what felt good" for you. And, two, you regularly detected inconsistencies and contradictions in the teachings of the bible. However, instead of accepting them for exactly what they are, you devised some method or other in order to validate and maintain your belief and faith. In my mind, those two things alone should be very strong indicators for you.
Now, I will be the first to admit that I am no biblical scholar or expert. Not in any way, shape, or form. (We do, however, have a few folks on here who are.) To be perfectly honest, I have not even read most of the bible as a whole. What knowledge I do have is mostly from Sunday school when I was a kid, and from what I have learned on here over the last few months. Quite frankly, though, it is not necessary for me to do so, because the entire concept of what I was taught about the god depicted in the bible is just plain nonsense to me. My brain simply will not allow me to believe in something like that. Just as I have never read any of the Koran (other than a few verses that get posted on here now and then), the entire belief system of Islam is just waaaaay too far fetched for me to swallow. And I tell you these things for the purpose of letting you know you are actually in a FAR BETTER position than I am to be able to determine just how ridiculous religion truly is. Hope that makes sense to you.
Anyway, again, welcome to the AR. You are in a good place here, and we are glad you decided to join us to help you with any questions or concerns you may have.
RE" "I'm a Christian on the Verge of Losing the Faith"
Instant popularity around this place. Welcome to the site!!!
@ "Jesus *might* not have raised from the dead." He he he ..... He might not have existed at all.
Look at some of the work Richard Carrier has done, and he has a few debates on YouTube.
@ " I rated it at like a 1-5% chance when I played it out in my head."
If you are asserting he had a heart attack or a stroke and managed to survive and then woke up and walked away.... I will agree. If he had some sort of rare disease that made him look like he died but he was actually still alive. I will give you that one too. If you assert that he magically rose from actually being dead and floated into the sky.... I would love to know how you came up with 1 to 5% The set of people dying and rising into the sky is empty. There are thousands of stories, but at no time in history or our existence has anyone validated such an occurrence. So where do you come up with even 1%? How did you get there? One out of every hundred people who die, rise and go to heaven? Or is it just 1 out of every hundred Gods? Just asking?
@ "Now I'm terrified. I'm invested so much of my life into Christian theology, " And you are only 20 years old? You are so far ahead of the game at age 20 that you will be able to live a long and happy life without an invisible means of support. If religion worked the earth would still be dome covered and flat. Faith and Religion fills your mind with delusions to stop the questions. Keep those questions coming.
@ "I've cursed out God because I sometimes think He's abandoning me."
What you are realizing is that the invisible and the non-existent are pretty much the same thing. There really is no reason to assume he was ever there. If you think you have a reason, please post it.
Atheists ask questions that can't be answered by religions and Religions have answers that can't be questioned. There is nothing in the imagination that can not be believed with FAITH.
Enjoy your time. Post your comments. We look forward to hearing more from you.
@ Hello World
Hi mate, or g'day from Aus.
Mate you have chosen a path for yourself, and once you realise that not only is there no contemporary evidence for a Jesus/christ figure as described in the gospels, but that many of the stories are stolen from other sources (or at least bear an uncanny resemblance to them) then the possibility that the religion of christianity is very probably errant and utterly wrong is overwhelming.
Once you start on the actual history, the realisation that it is a political construct becomes inescapable.
That should haven taken about 5 seconds. Heh.
Welcome to AR!
Hi Hello World,
regardless of whether or not the resurrection actually occurred, the truly scary thing about Christianity is that it thinks it is moral to punish non-Christians for their honestly-held beliefs.
And not only to punish, but to also abuse, torture, rape, molest, and beat unconscious.
rmfr
Thanks for all the responses! I read all of them, and I would only comment for @Cognostic that he misread me. I did not mean I believed there was a 1-5% chance Jesus rose, but that I reckoned there was a 1-5% chance that a certain natural theory for the development of belief that Jesus rose from the dead that was purely natural (details to this particular hypothesis are unrelated to my point, and so omitted). I think my OP was sufficiently clear.
When it comes down to it, I'm going to "walk by faith" for at least another year. During this year, I'm going to try to disprove Christianity. My faith fluctuates dramatically day by day, so I might lose faith before then, or maybe I'll find greater proof for the resurrection and regain my old faith again.
Time will tell.
@Hello World
I think it is great that you arrived here to seek new and different opinions outside of the faith community on the subject of god.
I personally have always been agnostic/atheist so I can not help too much on that transition, but I know it can be a scary one at first, I promise you it gets better once you realize the incredible freedom you gain once you tear away from the religious ideas. Not a freedom to commit sin, but a freedom to live your life the way you want to live it.
I do caution you on trying to "disprove" christianity or any religion. Most religions (if not all) set themselves up at this point to be "un-falsifiable."
What do I mean by that? Well let me give you an example I use a lot:
You owe me 1 million dollars. Prove to me you do not owe me 1 million dollars.
Think for a bit on how to prove that you do not owe me 1 million dollars then read the next line below.
You can't. You cannot prove that you actually do not owe me 1 million dollars.
Why is that? It is obvious, of course you do not owe me 1 million dollars. Why can't you disprove it? Because I made the extraordinary claim that you owe me 1 million dollars without evidence.
Now realize the same is true for god, any god idea, same thing, an extraordinary claim made without any evidence. So it cannot be disproven.
Now there are a few physical real world things religions do, and on every one of them the "god claim" fails miserably.
1. Prayer, prayer does nothing outside of statistical norms. As in prayer does nothing to give advantage to people except perhaps "feel good feelings" and a convenient thing to say when you can not or will not do anything about a tragedy. ("We will pray for you!")
2. Religious organization, no religion has seen a god like, miracle like advantage over any other religious (or secular) organization. If anything the more "religious" a region is, the more likely it is to have more negative results on many measures of progress, like poverty rates, college education rates, even poor health outcomes. The bible belt in the US is a clear example of this, even within the same country the bible belt region states has higher poverty rates, obesity rates, lower life expectancy, worse health outcomes, and even higher crime rates, compared to states outside of the bible belt.
I hope at least one thing I wrote here helps. Feel free to ask me any questions or clarifications.
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▮ I am an atheist that always likes a good debate. ▮
▮ Please include @LogicFTW in responses directed to me. ▮
▮ Useful list on forum usage. A.R. Member since 2016. ▮
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I think I need to start packing up to leave Tennessee.
Have you ever been in love before? I mean really in love, where that other person could alter your emotional state (good or bad) in ways that you never even imagined were possible? I don't care if you are Christian or not. I'm not Christian, but I know God exists beyond any doubt and you should too.
Senta: "Have you ever been in love before? I mean really in love, where that other person could alter your emotional state (good or bad) in ways that you never even imagined were possible? I don't care if you are Christian or not. I'm not Christian, but I know God exists beyond any doubt and you should too."
Yep. That is why I call myself a man with only half a heart and half a soul, for lack of a better description/wording.
Funny. I ain't Christian either, and I have only doubts that God exists. My Burden of Proof: NO EVIDENCE = NO EXISTENCE.
@ Hello World
This is another person you would do well to believe NOTHING she writes.
rmfr
Senta Christine,
"but I know God exists beyond any doubt and you should too."
Crepitus makes his presence known to me several times a day. I'm sure that he visits everyone on a daily basis. No one has seen Yahweh in over 2,500 years.
Diotrephes Correction: No one has EVER seen YHWH. The only time in the Bible when someone allegedly witnessed his presence (and there's no non-Biblical evidence that even THEY actually did) was in the story about the burning bush. However, according to legend, he was only HEARD- not SEEN. And also, I find it rather funny that he didn't speak to anyone else after that ever again- that is, of course, unless that person is on drugs or is having a "near-death experience" (a hallucination that one has when they're close to death), and believes in that particular deity; I have even heard stories of people who are not Jewish, Christian or Jewish having similar experiences but for the deity/deities that THEY believe in.
Rohan M.
"Diotrephes Correction: No one has EVER seen YHWH. The only time in the Bible when someone allegedly witnessed his presence (and there's no non-Biblical evidence that even THEY actually did) was in the story about the burning bush."
According to the fairy tale a lot of people saw Yahweh.
Moses spoke to him face to face. Exodus 33:9-11 (CEV) = "Then they would bow down because a thick cloud would come down in front of the tent, and the Lord would speak to Moses face to face, just like a friend. Afterwards, Moses would return to camp, but his young assistant Joshua would stay at the tent."
A whole herd of people saw God at once and had a party with him.
Exodus 24:9-11 (CEV) = "9 Moses and Aaron, together with Nadab and Abihu and the seventy leaders, went up the mountain 10 and saw the God of Israel. Under his feet was something that looked like a pavement made out of sapphire,[a] and it was as bright as the sky.
11 Even though these leaders of Israel saw God, he did not punish them. So they ate and drank."
A lot of people saw God's butt.
Exodus 33:22-23 (KJV) = "22 And it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a clift of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by:
23 And I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen."
Manoah and his wife saw God.
Judges 13:22 (CEB) = "22 Manoah said to his wife, “We are certainly going to die, because we’ve seen God!”"
BTW, is Yeshua (Jesus) God? He said that he was. If so thousands of people saw him. They even buried him.
Senta Christine If you're not Christian, then what are you, exactly? A deist? Agnostic? Pantheist? Just out of curiosity.
Well the thing is, that even if there is evidence that Jesus as a person existed, that still doesn’t offer any credible evidence that he actually did the physically-impossible things that legend claims he did.
To put it into better perspective: if, thousands of years in the future, archeologists find evidence of my existence by digging up my bones, then while this would be evidence that I was once a real person, it still wouldn’t be conclusive evidence that I, say, owned a pet unicorn when I was alive.
@Hello World
"During this year, I'm going to try to disprove Christianity."
I suggest you just examine every claim and anything coming from religion with a skeptical and critical mind.
For example, that claim that anyone came back to life after spending three days dead is a very extraordinary claim. It has never been recorded to happen to anyone, and flies counter to all medical information. Thus such a claim requires extraordinary evidence. It requires more than "it was in a book that was written over a hundred years after the event, over a period of hundreds of years by unknown authors."
When faced by a claim and it's supporting evidence, I always ask myself "could this hold up in a court of law"?
@ I did not mean I believed there was a 1-5% chance Jesus rose, but that I reckoned there was a 1-5% chance that a certain natural theory for the development of belief that Jesus rose from the dead that was purely natural/
I'm dense..... I don't even get this one. "Natural Theory?"
Never mind. We are on the same page now.
@ "When it comes down to it, I'm going to "walk by faith" for at least another year. I'm going to try to disprove Christianity"
This is the wrong perception. The assertions of Christianity are "non falsifiable." They are built on fallacies of logic and assertions without evidence. FAITH is not, nor has it ever been a path to truth. Muslims have faith, Hindus have faith, Buddhists have faith. Faith is what you use when there is no evidence.
Instead of proving Christianity wrong. DO YOUR VERY BEST TO PROVE IT RIGHT!
The god hypothesis is a "null-hypotheisis." The burden of proof is on the person making a claim. "God exists" is a claim. It is the theists burden to prove the claim. If you can prove Christian assertions right, you will convert everyone on this forum.
When I was your age I took a journey to learn as much as I could about Jesus. I made it a goal to go to every Church in my town. I lived in the Bible Belt at the time. Nothing will open your eyes like really making an effort to understand religion. Good luck on your journey.
Certainly feel free to stick around and bounce any ideas you get off of the people around here/
@ Cog and all others
"Instead of proving Christianity wrong. DO YOUR VERY BEST TO PROVE IT RIGHT!"
I already tried this. Wasted 30 years of my life trying to prove the Bible true.
Why? Because I wanted to know from a scientific point-of-view why so many people believed something that was said to be incapable of being proven correct.
Well. I answered part of that hypothesis. The Bible is as correct as the Mother Goose faerie tales. As to why so many people believe it to be true? The only answer I could formulate was that they lacked the mental capabilities of critical thinking, rational thought, logical reasoning, deductive reasoning, and analytical thought.
I posted it before and I am posting it again. When I turned 13, the Age of Minority, I was allowed to choose whether I wanted to go to church or not. Guess which I chose? When I asked me dad why I found it so hard to believe and accept the Bible, he replied, "Your brain and mind is like a computer. If it is not logical or rational, it does not compute."
That made more sense to me than any other statement as to why I could NOT believe in any religion than any statement I can ever create. Thus, for me, the ONLY way to win, is not to play.
rmfr
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