Apologetics debate

[Christlover2000]

Hello! I am relatively new to this website, and I was hoping to find one partner to engage with on this website frequently regarding Christian apologetics.

Specifically, I was looking for an atheist to have an ongoing discussion about Christianity.

One of my questions to begin with with is this: What led you away from Christ and why?

[polonius]

Hello! I am relatively new to this website, and I was hoping to find one partner to engage with on this website frequently regarding Christian apologetics.

Specifically, I was looking for an atheist to have an ongoing discussion about Christianity.

One of my questions to begin with with is this: What led you away from Christ and why?

RESPONSE: Common sense and rational thinking. To begin with you have to separate Christ and God. They are not the same. And one has to separate fact from fiction.

[Christlover2000]

[Replying to post 2 by polonius.advice]

What do you mean by "common sense" and "rational thinking"? What does that entail?

[Divine Insight]

Specifically, I was looking for an atheist to have an ongoing discussion about Christianity.

Why an atheist? Why not an ex-Christian?

One of my questions to begin with with is this: What led you away from Christ and why?

Oh, so your are interested in debating with an ex-Christian then? Many atheists were never Christians so the question of why they were led away from Christ would be a moot question.

Personally I was born and raised into Christianity.

As a child I was naive and not only believed in God, but I believed that the Bible was the story of God and "God's Word". As a Christian I was also taught that Jesus was God's only begotten Son who supposedly died to pay for my sins. I accepted all of this on the idea that my parents, pastor, and fellow church members had a clue what they were talking about. I later discovered that this was a false assumption on my part.

In fact, when I recognized that even pastors could not agree on what the Bible had to say about God I decided to look into the matter myself. My "belief" at that time was that I would be able to discover the truth in the Bible. After all I had been taught that the Bible contains answers to all our questions. However, it wasn't long before I realized that this teaching itself was a lie. The Bible does not contain any answers for anything important. In fact, it's a canon of extreme self-contradictions.

I finally realized that Yahweh cannot be true. In other words, the God described in the Old Testament cannot possibly be true. It's simply impossible for this God to exist as described because the descriptions of the behavior and commandments of this God contain extreme contradictions.

Of course, this then automatically means that Jesus could not be the son of this fictitious God since this God himself cannot exist. Not only this, but the very story of Jesus contradicts the supposed nature of the previous God. Even the stories of Jesus contain numerous self-contradictory claims that clearly cannot all be true.

I finally realized that it's simply impossible for Christianity to be true. Period.

I did not become an "Atheist" because of this, because I realized that just because one religion is false doesn't mean that there cannot be a God. So I looked to other religions to see if any of them offered a potentially meaningful description of what a God might actually be like. I found various Eastern Mystical religions that fit this bill.

However, by that time I also realized that just because a religion offer a potentially plausible picture of a "God" this doesn't mean that the religion is true. It simply means that it might potentially be true.

So today I hold the position of being "Agnostic" on the question of whether or not a "God" of some sort might potentially exist. However, at the same time I am 100% certain that the mythological God of the Hebrews described in the Bible absolutely does not exist as it is described in the Biblical Canon. It cannot exist as described because it violates its own supposed character repeatedly throughout the canon.

I now view Christianity as a religion of hatred. Sure, it pretends that Jesus is all about love. But at the very same time it holds Jesus up as a weapon of condemnation and religious bigotry that threatens to brand all non-believers as immoral people who deserve to be damned.

And I'm not talking about Christendom here. (Although much of Christendom does this as well), but rather I'm talking about the Gospels rumors themselves. It's the Gospels that hold Jesus up as a weapon of hatred and religious condemnation toward anyone who refuses to worship the bigoted authority of this religion.

Please keep in mind that I'm talking about a 2000-year-old collection of rumors. I'm not talking about any modern day people who might attempt to defend these ancient rumors. As far as I can see these rumors are indefensible, and perhaps that is what you might like to debate?

He's the condemnation of anyone who refuses to believe in Christianity directly from the Gospel rumors themselves:

John 3:
[16] For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
[17] For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.
[18] He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

See, they dishonestly pretend in 3:17 that this religion isn't about condemning people, but then they hypocritically go on in 3:18 to do precisely that. They instantly use Jesus as a weapon of condemnation.

So not only does this religion contain numerous resolvable contradictions, but it also spews religious bigotry and hatred in the name of Jesus as the "Christ".

This is a fundamental problem at the core of this religion that no follower of this religion can reverse. You can't go back 2000 years and rewrite this stuff.

And you'd really need to go back some 4000 years to rewrite the obviously false Old Testament as well.

So there is no defense for this religion. It has already carved its own death in stone.

[Christlover2000]

[Replying to post 4 by Divine Insight]

Thank you for responding!

Yes, I was interested in debating non- Christians because I have an assignment at school where I have to find a debate partner that would like to engage in discussions with me concerning apologetics. I said atheist because I assumed there were people who were Christians at one point that abandoned the faith and became atheist because that was common to me.

I have a few questions to your response:

1. What do you mean by "extreme contradictions" and "descriptions of the behavior" in regards to God?
2. When you say, you view Christianity as a weapon of hatred, what do you mean by the word hatred?
3. Who were your influences in your life that made you reject Christianity?

I appreciate you being willing to have a important yet respectful discussion regarding this issue.

[wiploc]

Hello! I am relatively new to this website, and I was hoping to find one partner to engage with on this website frequently regarding Christian apologetics.

I'm available.

Specifically, I was looking for an atheist to have an ongoing discussion about Christianity.

One of my questions to begin with with is this: What led you away from Christ and why?

I was never a Christian. But there was a time when I wanted to be.

Then I read the ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments. They were so lame that I became content in my atheism.

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 4 by Divine Insight]

Thank you for responding!

Yes, I was interested in debating non- Christians because I have an assignment at school where I have to find a debate partner that would like to engage in discussions with me concerning apologetics. I said atheist because I assumed there were people who were Christians at one point that abandoned the faith and became atheist because that was common to me.

Well, an important thing to realize is that it's a mistake to think that just because someone comes to the realization that Christianity is a false religion that this would automatically cause them to become an "Atheist". In fact, that mentality is actually encouraged by Christian theists and apologists because they want their students to be thinking that either Christianity is true, or there is no God. This kind of false dichotomy actually favors keeping Christian theists believing in the religion since they have been "mentally conditioned" to think that if the religion is false, then there cannot be any mystical or spiritual essence to reality. And that is clearly not the case.

1. What do you mean by "extreme contradictions" and "descriptions of the behavior" in regards to God?

There are far too many serious contradictions in the Bible to mention them briefly. But I already see more than enough to reject the Bible by the time I get to Chapter 3 of Genesis. One obvious one should be when this God curses the serpent in the Garden of Eden to crawl on its belly and eat dirt for the rest of its days. Already we have a God who is making demonic curses. Surely you can "apologize" by making up all manner of pathetic excuses for why a supposedly omnipotent God couldn't do any better, or you can make excuses for why you think this would be "justified". But the bottom line is that already you're making excuses for this God. That alone speaks volumes. And we're only 3 chapters into the Biblical Canon and we're already making excuses for this God.

It only goes downhill from there.

2. When you say, you view Christianity as a weapon of hatred, what do you mean by the word hatred?

They are using Jesus as a weapon of condemnation. I personally consider that to be a hateful religion. You can no doubt dream up "apologies" for why you don't see this as being hateful. But once again, you end up having to make apologies for this religion.

This entire religion is based on the idea all humans deserve eternal damnation. Do you believe that you deserve to be damned for all of eternity? I certainly hope you feel that way about yourself if you are going to support this religion. Because if you don't feel that you deserve eternal damnation, then you're attempting to support a religion that you can't possibly support.

Remember before you can place faith in Jesus as your "Savior" you must first place your faith in the idea that Yahweh is out to damn you AND that you deserve to be damned.

There's no way that you will ever convince me that I deserve eternal damnation. Yet this is what Chrsitianity demands that I must believe. It's a truly sick religion when you stop and think about it.

3. Who were your influences in your life that made you reject Christianity?

The Bible. Period.

In fact, I had absolutely no problem at all with any of the pastors at my specific church, or with anything that the I church I grew up in basically taught. My church was quite liberal and actually rejected the "Fire and Brimstone" approach of many other Christian Churches. Our church preached love and acceptance, not condemnation and bigotry.

So it wasn't my church that turned me against the religion.

I appreciate you being willing to have a important yet respectful discussion regarding this issue.

I believe in being as respectful as possible with the people I debate with or discuss this religion with. However, I refuse to offer the same respect to the authors of the Bible. IMHO many of the authors are undeserving of respect. Their honesty is highly questionable. And they may indeed have had political and/or religious motives for their writings.

Keep in mind that not a single solitary word of the Bible was written by Jesus. Everything attributed to Jesus was written by other people, and IMHO, many of the things they have attributed to Jesus are highly questionable. I say this because if Jesus actually said everything attributed to him he would need to have either been an extreme liar, or a seriously forgetful person.

And there are things attributed to Jesus that are "provably false". So either Jesus had no clue what he was talking about, or the words attributed to him never came from him to begin with.

~~~~~~~~

Finally I have a question for you:

Why should you need to apologize for the Bible or make excuses for it in any way?

Consider the following:

I've read the Old Testament and found it to be totally unconvincing. Supposedly the Old Testament was "God's Inspired Word", albeit written by men.

Here's another question for you:

How could it possibly be that Yahweh was incapable of convincing me of anything through his inspired "Holy Book", yet you could somehow explain why Yahweh was such a failed communicator?

In other words, Yahweh couldn't convince me that he's real, but you think that you might be able to succeed at something Yahweh himself failed at?

Does a Bible that needs to be apologized for or explained truly make any sense at all? Especially when the Christian apologists can't even convince each other. They have already taken many disagreeing stances on what they think Yahweh and Jesus might have meant, yet they can't even get their act together to produce a single coherent religion. Instead we see the Catholics versus the Protestants. And a myriad of confused protesting Protestants who can't even agree with each other.

And you're going to try to convince non-Christians that the Bible has some sort of coherent message when the Christians themselves can't even find one?

Same thing goes for the New Testament:

And a third question for you:


How could it possibly be that Jesus was incapable of convincing me of anything through his inspired "Holy Gospels", yet you could somehow explain why Jesus was such a failed communicator?

Again, you would need to succeed at something that Jesus himself had failed at.

Why would you even think you could do such a thing?

Christian Apologetics makes no sense. If the religion needs to be explained because Yahweh and Jesus were so grossly inept at communicating their own message there's something grossly wrong, don't you think?

And this is especially true when the Christian Apologists can't even agree with each other. If Christianity had grown to become a single rock-solid theology where every single Christian apologist was in firm agreement concerning what the Bible had to say they might have a valid argument. But let's face it, that's simply not the situation. Not even close.

Back when I was a Christian my greatest antagonists were other Christians. Not from within my Church but certainly from Christendom at large. In fact, I used to try to argue for a loving forgiving Jesus, but for the most part many Christians would have absolutely nothing to do with a loving forgiving Jesus. They demanded a hateful condemning Jesus. If you aren't prepared to bow down and kiss Jesus' feet then you deserved to be damned. They make their own religion into a "hate cult". But as I pointed out in my previous post John does the same thing in print in the Gospels themselves.

I would certainly hope that you argue for and attempt to apologize for a "Loving forgiving Jesus".

But even so, that's not going to fix all the problems with the Biblical Canon in general.

In fact, before you even talk about Jesus you would need to convince me why I should first believe that some invisible God named Yahweh is out to damn me, and that I supposedly deserve eternal damnation in the first place.

Good luck with that.

I mean you can "love Christ" to your heart's content, that's not going to fix the problems with the Biblical Canon.

[Willum]

It is important to realize, there is no good reason to believe in the first place.

If nothing else, an earnest soul would see there were many religions, and begin working to find which, if any were true.

Now Christianity:
Let's begin:
The Roman Empire, began in 509 BCE. In about 300 BCE they began conquering using information warfare, particularly religion. They would conquer a country, draw analogy between their gods and the subjugated peoples' gods, and say the gods, who were both Rome's and the conquered peoples' gods, had ordained them to rule, that's why they won the war, god ordained it.
Their god, was the first all-powerful god, Zeus, also called Dyues, Dyupiter (Dyues-father) - Jupiter or Jové, notice the accent, we pronounce it wrong in English.
Then we can look at the Bible vs religious history.
I presume you are familiar with Biblical history. But history's history has the Canaan be a people called the Seleucid's, and they weren't murdered by the Hebrew, they were usurped by the, you guessed it, Romans. Pompey the Great himself displaced them and put the Sadducee in charge. Later the Pharisee would lead the Romans in an insurrection against them.

Then there is likelihood:
Were he to exist, would it be more likely Moses was a paranoid-schizophrenic, or miraculous saviour?
Is it more likely two or more people were raised from the dead, and left no record.

Then there is evidence: Of all the miracles in the Bible, why are their no artifacts? Carpentry by Jesus, the Ark of the Covenant.
Why did Lazarus, who survived death, leave us no biography or description?

Then to rap it up:
Jesus is a homophonein (sounds like) Latin and Greek of "Io Zeus," of hail Zeus.
Zeus, or Deus ( see above) is worshiped in the Latinized world as Deus, Dios, Dieux, Dio and so on even today.
Why is the God of the Jews named after the God of the Romans.

He's not you may say, but just pronounce Jové, I'll help:

J --> Ie
o --> o
v --> u, v or w
é --> eh or ae

So Jove is properly pronounced as the Roman deity.
Yahu is how you pronounce YHVH...

Kindest regards,

[Mithrae]

I presume you are familiar with Biblical history. But history's history has the Canaan be a people called the Seleucid's, and they weren't murdered by the Hebrew

Pop quiz:
- When is the earliest recorded reference to 'Seleucids'?
- And (a slightly different question) the earliest recorded reference to 'Seleucus'?

- When is the earliest recorded reference to Israel?
- ...to the 'house of David'?
- ...to biblical kings of Israel like Omri and Jehu?

###

Hello! I am relatively new to this website, and I was hoping to find one partner to engage with on this website frequently regarding Christian apologetics.

Just make sure you find one with a basic grasp of actual history There's a lot of Christian misinformation out there, and finding others to discuss with is an excellent way to help balance your perspective, but (while still a lot less common than Christian misinformation) there's also some pretty wild counter-narratives floating around the 'net too!

[Divine Insight]

[Replying to post 1 by Christlover2000]

By the way, I would like to add the following:

I don't want to get into a big long history, but I think it might be informative to understand that from very early childhood I felt a connection with "God". Not the God of the Bible as I was too young at that time to have any understanding of religion. Instead I just felt an innate connection with a higher presence, for lack of a better description.

Therefore when I realized that Christianity could not be true and that Jesus could not have been the "Son of God", I did not feel as though I had "lost" God. All I had done was come to the realization that Christianity cannot be true.

So after I "left" Christianity I never felt "Godless" or that I had rejected any God anymore than a Christian would feel that they had rejected God when they learned that the Greek Gods were myths.

So I never had an "adversarial" relationship with "God".

In fact, all I was doing was confessing to the truth with total honesty. And surely no decent God who cares about truth and honesty would have a problem with that?

And perhaps this is another reason why I see Christianity as a "hateful" religion. Not only does the Bible condemn me for refusing to believe its claims, but the Christians who believe the claims of the Bible accuse me of "Rejecting God".

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, to tell me that I have rejected "God" is a hateful insult to be certain. In fact, I would be hard-pressed to think of a more hateful accusation to make toward anyone.

If a God exists, only the "Jealous God Religions" like Christianity, and Islam (and possibly some versions of Judaism) would claim that their God would condemn me and that I deserve to be condemned.

Other religions don't even make those kinds of hateful accusations. For example, if you don't believe in Buddhism it doesn't matter. There is nothing in Buddhism that says that anyone needs to worship Buddhism, their Buddha, or their God. You can be a complete atheist and the God of Buddhism couldn't care less. Buddhism has absolutely nothing to do with what you believe about any Gods. All Buddhism speaks to is your moral actions. Period. As long as you are a decent person you're in great shape in Buddhism.

But not so in Christianity, or Islam. Those religions demand that if you reject their Gods you deserve to burn in hell for eternity.

So tell me that those aren't hateful religions.

God's going to hate me for being truthful and honest?

That wouldn't be a God, that would be an extremely evil demon to be certain.

My question to you:

How can you support, defend and apologize for a religion that condemns truthfulness and honesty?