The classic musical "Damn Yankees" is literally about someone selling their soul to the devil to become a star baseball player who can help the Washington Senators beat the Yankees.
Because we keep harming ourselves. If your daughter started to engage in harmful behaviour, wouldn't you want her to listen to you and stop? I am sure God is proud when we do good and shun evil, and make beautiful things. But He isn't when we sin.
Putting aside the fact that the guy in the video was pretty annoying and relied on the viewer reaching the same conclusions as him the entire time, and that God preannounced himself SO WELL that there’s an entire branch of religion that believes in the books preannouncing him, but doesn’t see Jesus as the actual messiah.
He keeps comparing it to a relationship, and how you want your partner to choose you out of their free will. Well, the little difference is that if the girl I like doesn’t choose me, I’m not condemning her to eternal damnation. That’s called being a psycho.
The analogy doesn’t really work when it’s “choose me out of your free will, or else”.
The amount of Jews in existence are negligible compared to Christians. That, and the talmud and general mental gymnastics to get around the prophecies.
In present times, of course. Jews have been persecuted a plethora of times throughout history.
If you look at early AD Centuries, when christians were the ones persecuted, their population is estimated to be 2% of the entire Roman Empire in Year 250. That’s not a lot for being just 200 years after God supposedly, unmistakably showed himself to the world.
No, I want them eradicated for all the lies and psychotic bullshit they use to destroy lives and freedom and spread disease and poverty. What you are is evil.
"Disagreeing." and "difference of opinion" is the same shield that all Nazis and authoritarian psychopaths hide behind. You can't compete in the world of reason and reality so you have to insist that your fairy tales are true and then you genocide people over it. You killed 1/3 of Europe by burning witches and cats. You wiped out native populations for 'god's will' and divine manifest destiny.
You can't deny that abolishing Abrahamic religion wil remove most motivations for war and genocide. There is nothing positive that comes from any of those ideologies. Their only goal is to divide: Us v. Them; Good v. Evil; Saved v. Sinner.
Saved are also sinners. And eradicating knowledge of something won't make it any less true. But it seems that your anti theism is also a motivation for eradicating 4 billion people.
You killed countless numbers of babies by refusing medical care and insisting that prayer would heal them. You killed and tortured hundreds of thousands just for existing as they were born.
You claim I want to kill billions, but you already have.
Matthew 18:6 ESV
but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
You cannot use the Bible to defend Christianity. The fact that the Bible can be used in interpreted for so many different denominations, factions, colts, and even entirely opposing religions is proof in and of itself that God doesn't exist, there is no truth in the bible, and it is an utterly failed document.
Entirely opposing religions? Huh? Basically every Christian denomination agrees on 95% of things. The Bible doesn't proscribe how to practice Christianity exactly, and the differences are small things such as age of baptism, real presence, etc. I don't identify with a particular denomination, I regularly attend services across different denominations and have no qualms about doing so. By definition I am a Protestant as I am not a member of the Roman Catholic church or an Eastern Orthodox one. But I have nothing against visiting them except from them not offering me communion due to ecclesialism which was basically instituted by dead byzantine/roman empires.
They don't have the same texts. They share the Pentateuch, Psalms, some prophecies about Jesus and that's it. Judaism has the Talmud, Christianity has the New Testament and Islam has the Qur'an and various Hadiths, and claim the New Testament is corrupted
I'm sorry and I'm not defending the actions of people who believe in chriatianity by saying this but, you cant blame the actions of a large group of people on one individual. You really need to look in the mirror. Much of the things you've said are abominable. Yes the things that christians advocate are also abominable, but you really need to take a step back and look at your own beliefs. Or perhaps ive misunderstood what you've typed. If that's the case, i think you need to learn to word things less accusatory and ask more questions. Accusing someone will only put them on the defensive, and the conversation will stop there. You are putting the sins of the many, many different people and diverse beliefs on to one person that may disagree with some of them. I also dislike christianity but there is a big difference between a person and an ideology.
But here's the thing: hundred of years have been spent trying to reason with them. Now they are in political power and actively killing and persecuting others...AGAIN. I do not give a single one of them that wiggle room any more, and you shouldnt either. If they're going to insist that they're persecuted REGARDLESS of reality, then time to fucking persecute them. Give them their self-fulfilling prophesy. It's literally what they want.
This shows me how radicalized you may be. 2 wrongs do NOT make a right. Yes, there are some people who have radicalized hard into their religion to the point of zealotry. If you do the same, you'll fall into similar pitfalls. The radicalized people who are gaining political power do need to be stopped, i agree. However, you can not assume that all religious people believe the same as the radicals. There are a huge number of people you would persecute that would agree with you politically but disagree with you on the notion of god. You are falling into the same evils you seek to destroy. If you fight fire with fire, you'll see everything burn. If you claim to be morally superior, don't commit the same crimes as the accused.
That sounds wonderful in ideal and on paper but the reality is that the zealotry and the recurring ensuing violence cannot be stopped by simply saying "not ALL believers!..."
I do not understand why religious evil is protected but defensive action is not.
And let's be realistic here: zealotry, whether its religious or ideological, will always happen. My point is that you shouldn't punish the many for the crimes of the few.
Would the foetuses of any of the damned by considered guilty? I presume there must have been a few pregnant women murdered by that malevolent deity in that fairy story of your ilk (if you're not on the wind-up, might I add).
So god could kill as many innocents unjustly as he wants, as long as he sends them to paradise after?
If so, it seems, any atrocity god commits could be justified.
So yes as long as god sends people to the good place he can be as horrible as he wants to them before they die. Is there anything god could do that you would consider evil or unjust even if the people affected go to paradise at some point after? Or is not sending innocent bystanders he hurts to paradise the only thing god could do you would consider evil?
Well, there's the Flood and the Ten Plagues (particularly that tenth one) for starters.
Then there's the various war crimes committed by the Israelites at Jehovah's explicit instructions (e.g. the genocide of the Midianites in Numbers 31).
There is no reason to believe that Noah's family were the only innocents in the Flood story. I do not know how one can pin the supposed hedonism of the world on all those young children who would have drowned.
There is also no way to excuse killing the children of thousands of people because of the actions of one man. Blaming that one man for "forcing" supposedly omnipotent being to act in that way is also unjustifiable.
And there is no way to shift blame for genocide by simply saying, "the underlings took it too far." This excuse rings especially hollow when Jehovah asks for a cut of the spoils afterward (Numbers 31:25-31).
In the Sodom and Gomorrah story and the Jericho story, innocent people were saved. How would the great flood be any different? It's illustrative of the extent of the hedonism.
You can't even keep your own stories straight. The Great Flood myth in the Bible is very explicit that all life on earth will be destroyed, except that aboard Noah's Ark. Genesis 7:23 (NIV):
"Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark."
It wasn't a global flood. It was hyperbole. 2 Peter 2:5 says it just covered the world of the ungodly. "World" is generally used locally in the Bible as well as "the earth" meaning a large area of visible land.
We can see that in Genesis 8:9
"But the dove found no place to set her foot, and she returned to him to the ark, for the waters were still on the face of the whole earth. So he put out his hand and took her and brought her into the ark with him."
When verse 5 said:
"And the waters continued to abate until the tenth month; in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, the tops of the mountains were seen."
I do not care how local you think the myth of Noah's Flood was supposed to be, as that fact is immaterial to the point you continue to miss. That flood still would have killed innocent people, and the story frames this as a morally just action. No amount of quibbling over linguistics will change that.
The amount of excuses needed to ignore the plain implications of a passage is really telling. One could take the Old Testament as it appears: a series of books written and edited (and redacted, and co-opted, and edited again) as the religious and cultural canon in the Iron Age for an otherwise obscure Levantine tribe, with morals from a different time and place unsuited to our modern sensibilities. There are many such books and traditions from all over the world that contain tales just as horrifying as any in the Old Testament, so it would not be without company.
But the apologist wants us to believe that their ancient stories are actually true, and so they have to invent all these insane reasons why clearly immoral actions by their book's main character are totally justified. This is the sort of position that can only come about when someone decides what they believe first and then looks for rationale afterwards.
You have yet to satisfactorily establish that. The most you've mustered is claiming that Jehovah would have known his victims were guilty and so was was justified in killing them. This excuse only works if one starts from a position of, "Jehovah is good", and then finds justification for his actions afterwards. In every other instance we would judge people by their actions, yet you want to make a special exception for your god where we reverse the calculus and judge his actions by his person instead.
I reject this backwards logic, and still conclude that the god of the Old Testament is a vindictive, bloodthirsty character, much more in line with his Iron Age contemporaries than with any modern conception of a god. This is one of the fundamental flaws of Christianity: that its god cannot be separated from its narrow, barbaric past, and thus cannot be easily squared with what is expected of a universal deity.
I have a question, suppose that a different god or being did all the things said in the bible attributed to god. Are these deaths and atrocities still moral? Are they good because god did them? Or are they inherent good things to do? What if you were the one who started the flood or unleashed the plagues or anything else like that? Is the act still moral? Is the death of thousands if not moral at that point?
If you create someone, a living thinking person,do you have authority to destroy them? I'd say you do not. Do your parents have the right to destroy you? No, they do not. So why does god have this privilege?
Not disagreeing with anything you said, I just find it mildly amusing when people call things war crimes when they took place before the Geneva convention. There was no international agreement on what a war crime is at that time, so technically nothing was a war crime back then. They were free to commit all the genocide they wanted.
Nice little qualifier you added there. Cause it's generally accepted that the God of Abraham ordained killing at least two million people prior to the birth of Jesus Christ. I get the sense that you're perspective is that if God does it then it must be just and you want to prove anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong. If that's the case, you're in the wrong place my friend.
The entirety of the Canaanite genocide. And since Hebrews were Canaanites themselves, that just makes them mass murderers who steal land through violence.
I agree, that's why I said that God, the one who sent locusts and killed innocent children, submerged the world for 40 days killing everyone indiscriminately, and razed Sodom and Gomorrah to the ground, is the evil deity.
Sodom and Gomorrah deserved it, it was made clear in that by Lot existing. Everyone in the flood also deserved it, apart from Noah which is why Noah was saved. The "children" weren't innocent or else God wouldn't have killed them.
You are living proof that religion is mental disorder and Abrahamic religions should be utterly abolished with extreme prejudice. You are the evil this world needs cleansing of.
I disagree with the notion that religion is a mental disorder. I myself don't subscribe to religion or the notion of a god, but you need to be careful with how you say things like this as this will feed into christian feelings of persecution. This kind of rhetoric is exactly what the christian god has done. Cleanse the unbelievers because they're evil. Do not commit the same failure that this other guy is. We can't commit the same crimes as the proposed yaweh and think ourselves morally superior.
Hear hear. I'm often disturbed by how many upvotes these comments that show hate towards religious people in general get, and as much as I hate blocking people, I often block the posters on sight. I guarantee that if I still followed that religion, and heard someone say my beliefs were a mental disorder, it would do nothing to change my mind. In fact, depending on what phase I stayed in, I might decide to retaliate by spamming more threads with proselytizing in hopes of getting an even worse reaction to confirm that all nonreligious people are like that, that they were the ones who needed to change or be eliminated.
I'd like to know what your definition of mental disorder is as that may make it clearer where our disagreement lies. My definition would be a condition that has a clinical effect on a persons psychological well-being as diagnosed by a professional using the DSM as diagnostic standards.
One of those things in the DSM is a steadfast belief in something that clearly is not true and can be repeatedly disproven. Patient remains firm in his delusion.
"God spoke to me" is an auditory hallucination. The religion's founder was literally going to stab his son to death over this.
Yes, some people in religions can hold delusional beliefs. However, there are also people who release their delusions and instead hold onto unfalsifiable beliefs. There are also people who try to merge their religion into reality and are willing to change their mind on the attributes of their religion. However, there are many aspects of religion that do not have proveably false natures. There are people who haven't been shown how their beliefs conflict with reality. You are just as bad as the theists if you wish to harm or outlaw the freedom of religion these people have. You are going after the freedoms of millions if not billions of innocent people because of the actions of some radicals with power. It goes back to my previous statement. You're advocating a similar thing to what they are.
The christian persecution complex is a primary reason for abolition of Abrahamic religions. That complex is caused by the religion itself; it's literally written into their canon. You're advocating for spoiling and enabling an unruly child.
I'm not saying I'm feeding into their persecution complex. I was saying that you are. Telling them that the religion they identify so strongly with should be destroyed just makes them feel justified in their belief.
I don't think that it is circular.
They believe they are being persecuted>someone does something that feels like persecution to them>they feel they have confirmed their persecution.
Im not saying it makes sense. It just is how I've seen it and even experienced it when i was a mormon.
Agreed, that does happen. It's because christians are primed to believe that outside questioning if it is done in an aggressive way is persecution. Thats why they shut down and won't hear your arguments when you come at them in an aggressive way.
In any genocide, the perpetrators always have a 'reason'. They'll always be able to tell you that the people that were killed deserved it, and that it needed to happen, and that the world is now better off etc. etc. But saying it and thinking it doesn't make it true. God can spew out justification for genocide all day. But why would I just take the word of a murderer? Especially if they are a super-powerful being who no-doubt had all sorts of other options available to them. Why would I take their word that suffering and death and destruction is justified when it is done by them - but not by others? And God doesn't even bother to attempt to explain or talk about that to me. I just hear it from you, and other fans... which makes it even less reliable.
Judging from all your other replies in this thread, your stance is that:
Good deities don't cause pain and suffering.
God did, but he was justified because they were all evil.
Maybe he killed a bunch of innocent people too, but he sent them to heaven, so it's fine.
That's some olympic-level mental gymnastics. I hope that, one day, you'll think back to this discussion and realize your hypocrisy and free yourself from the religion of a god that has committed genocide multiple times, gatekeeps eternal life behind the worship of an evil entity and threatens all the others with eternal damnation for the only "sin" of not thinking like him.
Killing people is wrong, even if they are evil. It becomes even worse when it's not a single homicide, but a large scale genocide of people whose majority (but not all) are evil.
If going by Christian theology, literally every atrocity in human history was caused by Satan. Even if fictional, there's literally no redeeming qualities of Satan
Interesting, so who created the fruit of knowledge? Who then decided that we would die and feel pain? Who flooded the earth? Who took up a bet to torture job? And that's barely scraping the old testament
Meanwhile, who offered food and water to a starving madman in the desert?
We decided we'd die and feel pain. We deserved the flood, and it was literally satan who tortured Job. satan didn't even offer Jesus food, he just told Him to turn the rocks into food with His own power.
Follow Jebus if you don't want to die - is just extortion. Than again - old testament god was a bad boy himself, he would definitely approve, I mean he was really into murder.
I did not commit any crimes and don't have any sins, so there is nothing to forgive - and if so only people I wronged can forgive me. Also it's not free since it's coupled on a ton of conditions.
Sins is not a universal concept, it's a christian thing to make people feel bad about themselfs. Often just basic human experiences like lust are somehow defined as bad and than moral apostles like you claim everyone is a sinner.
What “conditions” concern you?
Something is not free if you tie it in with conditions, I know you struggle with meanings of words an logic - but try to keep up.
Basically every religion has some idea of sin. It's atheism which tries and removes that by claiming objective morality doesn't exist, and that morality is merely just subjective and what people agree upon.
I asked you what conditions you were concerned about for salvation, and you didn't mention one but tried to demean me again as if I don't know what "conditions" mean.
It’s atheism which tries and removes that by claiming objective morality doesn’t exist, and that morality is merely just subjective and what people agree upon.
That has nothing to do with atheism. All atheism does is stating that there is no god.
and that morality is merely just subjective and what people agree upon.
You might not like it, but that's how it is - animals are not concerned with morality, it's something we human came up with. Does not mean it's any less valuable than morality derived from magic creatures and imaginary friends.
I asked you what conditions you were concerned about for salvation, and you didn’t mention one but tried to demean me again as if I don’t know what “conditions” mean.
You are the one who claimed it was free. I just said it had conditions and was therefore not free. I'm not concerned about conditions to beginn with since there is nothing I need salvation from.
Buddhists still believe in a universal moral code.
Ethnologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf explained,
In Buddhist thinking the whole universe, men as well as gods, are subject to a reign of law. Every action, good or bad, has an inevitable and automatic effect in a long chain of causes, an effect which is independent of the will of any deity. Even though this may leave no room for the concept of 'sin' in the sense of an act of defiance against the authority of a personal god, Buddhists speak of 'sin' when referring to transgressions against the universal moral code.
If there is no God, then there's no moral code, and no objective morality.
Ahh makes sense, you think that humans are evil and depraved - which is kind of telling on yourself. So maybe for you specifically it's cool that there is a book explaining that murder is bad. Most people just need a bit of empathy to get such a complex idea.
We are evil and depraved. Don't you see what we have done to this earth? And our moral compass has been ingrained in us since Eden. You don't need to be a Christian to have morals. We have them because it's true.
I am one of the most depraved and disgusting people I know. There's no redeeming qualities about me. That's why I thank God every day for saving me and forgiving me. He is the only one who can redeem me.
You missed a very, very important keyword there: "deserved."
Theologians miss a key point of rational debate where they don't provide proper definitions and make big assumptions that aren't great.
Who defines what the "correct" effect of an action is? Who defines what consequence is deserved by a choice? If God is the almighty being, he decides what is right and wrong. In Abrahamic tradition, God defines all of these arbitrary rules and expects humanity to obey them without question. Shit, God ordered Abraham himself to murder despite that supposedly being against the rules.
God is like a kid that holds a magnifying glass focused on an arbitrary point near the anthill. He set up the conditions for us to hurt ourselves according to his arbitrary rules. Why didn't he tell Satan to fuck off with the fruit? Why did he allow Satan to exist in the first place? If God created everything, then he is responsible for everything by our human logic. So God can fuck right off
So god isnt all powerful is he? If he is omnipotent js change how reality works so that it can be true free will as well no bad in the world if hes omnipotent it should be easy for him
I thought it was common to believe that you had free will in paradise yet there be no evil. Which one is it you believe to be in paradise, free will or evil?
While Zoroastrianism existed before Christianity, it changed it's beliefs overtime to follow suit. Such as their holy book, the Avesta, dating to around 500AD with the earliest copy being from the 1300s.
