Testing my faith
Hi, my name is paul and I am a "Born Again" Christian and as far as I know I am allowed to post on this sight so long as I'm respectful and polite. Basically what I want to do is test my faith by exposing it to Atheist rebuttal. So if you wouldn't mind please give me your number 1 damaging argument that, you feel, demolishes Christianity. I will try and respond with an answer. Yes I would love to convert you to Christ (is what we do) but still I do want to test the faith and see if it can stand. Thanks in advance. Paul
- Login to post comments
So let me get this straight. You answer a question about a discrepancy by pulling some boilerplate crap out of your ass. Then you completely ignore requests to substantiate said crap. You then continue to repeat the crap as if repeating it made it true. When pressed, you fail at some middle school level math. In other words, you are inept at history, math and apologetics. Then, you say that we need to give better arguments? Congratulations, you make an excellent born again christian, you have all the required traits, and you even surpass the requirements on arrogance.
shadowlandweller - You get an E for effort and a P for participation. But we do expect a higher level of support than this for your assertions.
Wow - you must have spent some real time googling to find this obscure reference to an 1898 "Camillus: a study of Indo-European religion as Roman history". It does not, however, mention time keeping in hours based on this midnight to midnight time scale - only that it was used for determining cultic and administrative observances. Roman determination of hours was based on hours after dawn, as can be found in numerous sites, including the ones I referenced earlier.
The http://www.beaglesoft.com/timehistoryroman.htm reference that you have provided as a proof has an unclear suggestion of roman days starting at midnight at some point in later Roman history (321 ad?). Though they say nothing about counting hours from this point. In fact, later in the same article, they list this table:
So I don't see this article (on a non-history site) as being supportive of your argument.
http://www.roman-colosseum.info/roman-life/julian-calendar.htm
This one, like the other references you provided, does not mention anything supporting two systems of hours in use.
Yes, I will agree that this does seem to be the official Christian rebuttal. The sad thing is that whoever made up this rebuttal must have realized how disingenuous it is. And they rely on the christians to not question or verify these rebuttals, but merely be grateful that someone has already provided them with the ammunition to throw at infidels. Unfortunately for you your ammunition is caca. While it might be odious, it is still laughable.
"There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right." Martin Luther King
IAWTC
Transitional fossils, between a spider and a monkey, lol. I don't believe we would ever find such a thing as this, why would you even infer it. Probably because you totally reject evolution and have done no study, nor have you really taken a look at nature.
God allows evil things to happen to innocents who have no hope, because he works in mysterious ways, is what I gather from your statement on this. Typical response when you really just don't know.
So the lost souls on a remote island can go to heaven even though they worship idols and drink animal blood? Very nice indeed. Theres an excuse for anything, the sun is yellow because I peed on it.
Women as second class citizens, yes, you better read your bible again, there are many passages about women, and how they should not speak in church and should "obey" their husbands. Society nowdays is breaking free from this.
Animal sacrifice, yes from what I understand satanists did this as well. There is a difference in slaughtering an animal to eat, and randomly killing a young animal on a big rock in the name of a god. What would this garner for a supreme being in the sky? One that is all knowing and wise. You don't know but it must be something huh.
Who told you slavery was self induced? Here is one passage "When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property"How is this good again? Oh it's not good OR bad, it's just the will of "god". Nice
When is the last time you stoned a child to death for disobeying their parents?
Religion is a blight and in the future we will look back and ponder why man had to believe in such things to get by.
It seems like you are not so much wanting to debate or look at the other side but to simply throw "faith" around.
I can say I have given the theist side a fair shake, I tried so fukin hard to believe and did as a child. There is just too much evidence that MAN wrote the bible, MAN invented god. This is almost infuriating to say, it is so obvious after all, it's like saying the sky is blue and someone wants to say it's not just because they read it in a book.
Now read Deuteronomy 13 and tell me you have complied.
As an afterthought, attempt to argue my signature. That would be fun.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
Oh, found a spider-monkey
if you read the bible, there are a lot of people, places, things, and even events that we have multiple historical records to support. and i don't doubt you know about the numerous other faiths and religions of the world that pre-date chrisitanity. that being said...almost all of them echo the same stories of creation, great flood, etc. this traces back all the way to what we understand to be the earliest records of human civilization; ancient Sumeria and Mesopotamia.
has it ever entered your thoughts that perhaps the stories, not just in the christian bible, but of all religions are merely allegory? meaning, because we hadn't stumbled into the understanding of certain sciences that we do now, ancient tales were handed down from generation to generation, eventually changing and mutating with each telling, to the point where we are today, with hundreds of religions that all say the same thing.
ever read original KJV bibles? kinda interesting how in genisis, God says "Let US make man in OUR own image." now why would it say "we" and "our". who was god talking to? angels? other gods? or is it possible that because of our ignorance, we perceived beings more intelligent than us to be gods? i'm very sure that i will be raked over the coals by every other member of this board, and at the risk of sounding like a complete moron...is it out of the realm of possibility that things didn't go down exactly, word for word, the way the bible says? instead of God saying "let us make man in our own image", could it be that it was actually beings from other worlds? being an athiest, i don't neccessairly subscribe to any 1 particular idea, but my rationale says to me that with so many different theories on life, and it's origins, that it would be very foolish for me to say, "yes, this one is right. beyone a shadow of a doubt, this one is it. it has all the answers, and all the others are wrong."
That much of the Hebrew Bible has origins in other cultures such as Sumer and Egypt is something that I also consider as likely.
KJV is not an original Bible but a very poorly put together English translation, see Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman.
As to the god saying "Let us make man in out own image" is really support for the god coming out of a polytheistic system such as Sumer, Egypt or even Canaanite where multiple gods were involved in creation.
As to did high tech aliens develop life on Earth as a science project or for a colony or even as a source of lab rats is certainly a possibility but there is so little to support the idea. Bring in the relic of the crashed spaceship that first brought life to Earth for a start. Same standard for all conjecture, hard evidence.
____________________________________________________________
"I guess it's time to ask if you live under high voltage power transmission lines which have been shown to cause stimulation of the fantasy centers of the brain due to electromagnetic waves?" - Me
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert A Heinlein.
The whole we are made in his image thing has always been flaky to me as well. We have 10 toes, 10 fingers, a mouth to breathe and talk ears to hear with a nose to smell and breathe through etc etc, yet we have no extra, wouldn't a supreme being have "extra" stuff? Does an all powerful being even need hands? Does he even need a body for that matter? Could he be just a pop of energy, perhaps even just the energy required to flow from an axon, and therefore simply a thought? If he is a thought who's brain is he in anyway.
Faith is the word but next to that snugged up closely "lie's" the want.
"By simple common sense I don't believe in god, in none."-Charlie Chaplin
thanks for commenting pauljohn....
when i meant the original KJV, i did not actually mean the original. i absolutely understand that it is not the original version. if i'm not mistaken the KJV was written by Shakespeare. so yeah...really bad english translation. being raised southern baptist though, whenever our ministers would refer to the different editions of the bible, i would always hear the KJV referred to as th "original KJV". my bad bro. old habits die hard.
i totally agree though. what evidence is there that we were made by ancient astronauts? the only credible scientist that swears up and down he's right about it, is Zachariah Sitchin...and thanks to a lovely little lexicon, anyone can now translate those Sumerian cylindar scrolls and find out that there were a lot of mistranslations on Sitchin's part. which is a perfect example of science. a new theory is posed...research is done...too many holes poked in the new theory from the reseach to support it...theory is set aside until new evidence that relates to it can be examined.
my argument with this to christians is that there is no evidence to support the ancient astronaut theory (or at least not enough). the same is said for the christian bible. there's just not enough evidence to support all of its outrageous claims. so if it's silly to think that aliens engineered us, then in the same right, wouldn't it be silly to believe the bible as well? that was my point...or counter argument for the original poster.
There is as much evidence the Sumerian gods orginated life on Earth as the volcano/thunder god Yahweh did and the stories are more fun. Enki loved beer and sex, Yahweh is never mentioned having erotic adventures like he was. A really good site for Sumerian Lit is ETCSL from Oxford if you are into it.
I would more likely accept alien origins than the fantasy claims of the poorly misinterpreted myths of the ancient archaic Hebrew nomads. Just show me the spaceship. It will probably turn out Vger time travelled back to early Earth. (Star Trek)
The KJV was an authorized English translation by a group of 47 bible scholars of the Church of England by King James I began in 1604 and completed in 1611. There are many problems with this version. The NT used Greek texts that were patched together earlier, see Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus for specifics. The OT was supposedly translated from the Hebrew Masoretic text while the Apocrypha used mostly the Greek Septugint. I don't think Willy Shakespeare wrote any of the KJV, though he was alive at the time and the English is just as hard to grasp at times as what he wrote.
____________________________________________________________
"I guess it's time to ask if you live under high voltage power transmission lines which have been shown to cause stimulation of the fantasy centers of the brain due to electromagnetic waves?" - Me
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert A Heinlein.