chink in my armour
Deprogramming yourself out of atheism requires that you take control of your own mind and train it how to think rationally. (Silence of Mind)
I think we wear our world views like armour and deflect information that doesn’t conform to our preconceptions. This is true of everyone. But every suit of armour has chinks in it. There are some words, some thoughts and some experiences that slip up through the gaps and have impact. We stop, think, question and perhaps subtly alter our viewpoint to fit the new revelation, but more often than not, continue along the same path.
However, there are obviously times when a chink can cause our world view to somersault and we speed through a tunnel to a completely new understanding of life.
The chinks in my Christian armour as a young adult weren’t the glaringly huge flaws I see so clearly now (like the god God drowning his creation because he didn’t like us) – they were individual passages in the Bible that hit me personally. Why should women be silent in churches? Why are people who share my characteristics so sidelined in all the stories? What could be wrong with gay people loving someone of their own sex? How could my friends be seen as evil?
I accepted these things but struggled to make sense of them, and felt pained that my benevolent god would allow such harmful words in his holy text. ‘Pray about it because God knows everything!’ got me through for a while. But it was the moment I was able to say to myself, to fully acknowledge he didn’t exist that I was set free. And with that, I realised that fear had stopped me thinking about things more clearly. Fear.
We’re told the invisible god is a creature of love, and yet all too often fear stops us thinking rationally. Whether it’s fear of eternal torture, fear of hurting God’s feelings by questioning things, or fear of disrupting our family and social ties by daring to question if the emperor has clothes on – it’s definitely fear that provides the strongest coat of armour for Christians. So I shouldn’t be surprised from the other side that conversations about faith tend to go nowhere, but deflect sharply off the Christian armour as if nothing has been said.
So, I’m at a point where I’m feeling tired of trying to discuss issues with people who bang on about their ‘world view’ but offer nothing beyond vague notions of ‘there is good and bad therefore my god exists’. But for any Christian who hasn’t yet felt the chink in their armour, I think Ark‘s list is a good place to start:
There is no more immoral work than the ‘Old Testament’. Its deity is an ancient Hebrew of the worst type, who condones permits or commands every sin in the Decalogue to a Jewish patriarch, qua patriarch. He orders Abraham to murder his son, and allows Jacob to swindle his brother; Moses to slaughter an Egyptian and the Jews to plunder and spoil a whole people, after inflicting upon them a series of plagues that would be the height of atrocity if the tale were true. The nations of Canaan are then extirpated. Ehud, for treacherously disemboweling King Eglog, is made judge over Israel. Jael is blessed above women (Joshua v.24) for vilely murdering , her sleeping guest; the horrid deeds of Judith and Esther are made examples to mankind; and David, after an adultery and a homicide which deserves ignominious death, is suffered to massacre a host of his enemies, cutting some in two with saws and axes and putting others into brick-kilns.
Violet,
“(like the god God drowning his creation because he didn’t like us)”
That’s you, not the Bible.
You people need to read the Bible with a clear, reasoning mind.
Please read what the Bible actually says about God’s reason for the Flood.
It is absolutely heartbreaking.
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‘The Lord saw that the human beings on the earth were very wicked. He also saw that their thoughts were only about evil all the time. 6 The Lord was sorry he had made human beings on the earth. His heart was filled with pain. 7 So the Lord said, “I will destroy all human beings that I made on the earth. And I will destroy every animal and everything that crawls on the earth. I will also destroy the birds of the air. This is because I am sorry that I have made them.”’
Anything I’m missing there SOM? I’m also confused how an omniscient being could regret his own actions.
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Violet,
What is missing is that legendary bleeding heart of yours and a rational mind to actually understand what it is that you are reading.
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So for gods’ sake, rather simply whine explain it .
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Ark,
The atheist is an indoctrinated fanatic.
You demand that I do for you what you need to be able to do for yourself.
That is, reason out the meaning of world class literature.
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Indoctrinated by what exactly?
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Ark,
I know that I was indoctrinated in atheism at school and by pop culture in general.
Maybe it is the same for you, too.
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Atheism is simply the lack of belief in gods. Yours and everyone else’s.
I read the bible and that pretty much did it for me as far as your gods was concerned. Oh, and ordinary common sense as well of course.
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Ark,
The quest for God is part of our human nature.
A lack of believe in God is simply a denial of our human nature.
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No. Assigning agency is part of human nature.
Continual belief in gods is largely due to cultural mores and indoctrination.
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Ark,
That all civilizations in human history grew up around religion proves otherwise.
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It simply ”proves” we assigned agency to things we did not understand.
Sadly, with regard gods it still happens.
However, it would happen a lot less if indoctrination fell away merely for a single generation.
As it is, religious adherence is falling year by year and the more socially and culturally advanced nations seem to have less and less need for religion, having realised it is merely just another primitive belief system.
You should look up the current stats for Iceland.
Fascintaing.
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Please read what the Bible actually says about God’s reason for the Flood.
Hey SOM, any reason why I can’t comment on your blog? Have you banned me?
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John,
Sorry about that.
God must have gotten mad at you.
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Ah
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Weird, what’s that all about? Maybe you were getting too close to the truth.
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I swim in an ocean of truth, my dearest Pict. 😉
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Violet, there is armor that can totally protect one from fear of any kind… It is the WHOLE armor of God that the apostle Paul pens in detail, in Ephesians 6:10-20…
With God’s whole set of spiritual armor firmly in place…and by totally submitting one’s life to be totally controlled by the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit (James 4:7-8)…satan and our own flesh will not be able to cause fear, anxiety, bitterness, hate, or any of the other sins that we as humans were born with…
I am reminded of scripture penned by the apostle John about fear, in… 1 John 4:18… There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. (NKJV)
This perfect love is the love of Christ which fills the heart of the Spirit filled believer…Ephesians 5:18-20… Supernatural power to fend off fear, or any other mortal feeling that causes one to doubt that God exists, and that He is in total control of everything !!
Here is the link for 12 days writing on God’s whole 6 piece set of spiritual armor…
Here is the link on what I call “God’s Duo” to combat satan and our own evil flesh…
https://godsmanforever.wordpress.com/2013/02/25/gods-group-thoughts-for-2252013-gods-duo/
Is anyone going to read any of this ?? Probably not… But until one walks in the Spirit with the Holy Spirit in total control of their lives…they will be unable to understand the life that I am blessed to live for Christ…
bruce
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Yes, but do you have anything t0 say abut sawing people in half and sticking them in brick kilns, Bruce? This is the burning issue of the post.
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Thanks Bruce. I was talking more about the fear of questioning the Christian god and confronting the obvious contradictions in the Bible, when I was a Christian. And it’s not a ‘fear’ I would have acknowledged while I was there – I simply couldn’t go there. I’m not living in fear these days, thank Zeus!
I’m glad you feel blessed. Christianity does bring a measure of relief to many people.
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Not his poor wife, apparently.
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“The chinks in my Christian armour as a young adult weren’t the glaringly huge flaws I see so clearly now (like the god God drowning his creation because he didn’t like us)….”
I am so sorry that you came to perceive God that way, Violet. In truth, there’s a back story to the flood that some speak of, a genetic experiment gone wrong, the co-mingling of angels with human women, and mutant giants now roaming the earth. God didn’t destroy us because He didn’t like us, He destroyed us because we had become contaminated. It’s an interesting concept, very evolutionary in flavor, because when a species can no longer adapt, when it exceeds it design capabilities, it dies out. I sometimes call the flood God exercising His intellectual property rights, some Divine intervention to keep us around a bit longer.
I see that same kind of thing going on in the world today, cloning, 3 way DNA splicing to make designer babies, the hope that we can soon create artificial intelligence that merges man with machine, and I often wonder what will happen to humanity if we are left to our own devices? Will we know what we have destroyed in our never ending quest to become better than we are?
I sometimes ponder whether or not I’d want to see the future, some kind of dystopian sci/fi nightmare, where all the things that once made us human are now gone, and we just sit there hooked to computers, puddles of biological goo, like some kind of genetic experiment gone all wrong. In that imaginary lab of horrors, I don’t dislike anyone,I just want to destroy them all and end their misery.
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I see. So you’d happily compare your god to a ‘mad professor’ cooking up a mess and wiping it all out? What happened to omniscience?
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Violet,
The Bible isn’t modern art where the viewer or reader gets to hallucinate her own meaning from the art piece.
Biblical literature has at its core two persistent themes:
1. Morality
2. Covenant
Your hallucination about God’s omniscience, for example, is completely irrelevant to the Flood story.
What the reader needs to do to understand Biblical literature is to understand the point of view of the authors.
Superimposing your own postmodern mental/emotional constructs upon ancient literature means that you will never learn anything from it.
Being atheist means you never get outside your own head.
And if you want to get outside your own head with regard to the Flood story, you will have to understand Hebrew morality and the biblical concept of covenant.
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Silenceofmind, Christians have superimposed their own meaning over the Bible for the entire history of Christendom. Well, at least from the point on, after they had a Bible, wich according to you was in the late 3rc century, right?
The early Christians who came up with the idea of holy trinity were superimposing their idea on the Biblical stories, just as the ones who came before them who wrote the book were superimposing their hellenistic view on the events told about the Jesus character who was said to be “a son of god”,wich in the Jewish tradition merely means a man who keeps to the word of the Mosaic law.
Ever since, have the Christians superimposed their cultural views on the Bible believing their interpretation was correct even to the extremes of the inquisition during wich many a learned scholar and priest engaged in torture, to make the people who they thought were heretics repent before these victims were burned alive. Were they right? They surely thought so in good faith and with sincere hearts. No god ever appeared to stop them. Does this mean this god considered their actions good and right, or that this god was unable to prevent these events, or could it just be most likely in an Occams Razor type of way, that no god ever even existed?
An atheist, like our gracious host, is quite capable of understanding, that the “morals” of the flood story in the Bible is very primiteve equally so in the Hebrew tradition as in the Sumerian Gilgamesh Epic from wich it has been borrowed to the much younger Hebrew tradition. It is much more likely, that the Christian is blocked from understanding, that the Bible does not represent some universal moral standard, but a collection of stories of a very primitive and tribally moralistic group of people. Do you understand this?
If we do not evaluate the morals of past societies Hebrew or otherwise, according to modern secular logical morals, we are in no position to tell anyone, that for example the Nazies were wrong. And indeed, by far most of the nazies were Christians, who thought their own morals and that of their leaders was derived from the Bible. Howcome were they so easily deluded? Because they had no universal moral code to compare their deeds?
Why is it, that there is a public outcry about the gender neutral marriage laws among so many fundamentalist Christians, but tattoos are not a political issue or even religious issue? The Mosaic law forbids both male homosexuality and tattoos one right after the other. Yet it says nothing about child abuse. Why? There is absolutely nothing against child abuse in the entire Bible, is there? Do you think child abuse is just fine, or could it be, that the book only represents a rather poor morals of a past society, if any?
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Rautakyy,
The brazen atheist propaganda used to assault Christian teachings is Christians having disagreements about the Bible.
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What do you mean propaganda? Christians have not only had disagreements as they do today, but they have for centuries fought bloody wars over their disagreements, and even wiped out complete disagreeing Christian communities. Did you not know of this?
The only reason they do not continue on that path any more is the secularization of the western society around them and introduction of higher secular social morals standing more on logic than any scripture as a result.
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Yes the secular society stops them burning the witches now!
‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ (Exodus 22:18).
On this level Christians showed themselves to be in line with primitive pagan societies, rather than the enlightened secular civilisations.
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As an omnipotent deity would it not have been far simpler and a lot less cruel to simply ”switch us off”, as surely your god would have had all the right codes?
It seems your god was rather a vile, cruel and capricious egotistical arse, based on the bible tale for prolonging the torment of not only his ”failed experiment” (humans) but also all the flora and fauna.
Maybe Josef Mengele based his ”work” on your god in that case, IB?
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Yes, Ark, like the ancient Hebrews had studied Crick’s fundamental dogma of biology.
If you hallucinate something that stupid it’s best if you just leave everyone aghast and just answer your own stupid questions.
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Funny how only the indoctrinated fools are ever aghast at my ”stupid” questions.
Fools just like … well, not to put too fine a point on it, you in fact.
How’s prison life by the way? Moved you out of solitary, have they?
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‘In truth, there’s a back story to the flood that some speak of, a genetic experiment gone wrong, the co-mingling of angels with human women, and mutant giants now roaming the earth. God didn’t destroy us because He didn’t like us, He destroyed us because we had become contaminated. It’s an interesting concept, very evolutionary in flavor, because when a species can no longer adapt, when it exceeds it design capabilities, it dies out. I sometimes call the flood God exercising His intellectual property rights, some Divine intervention to keep us around a bit longer.’
IB that is one interpretation of Genesis 6:1-4. It is a very contentious and the argument that ‘sons of God’ refers angels is not agreed among Biblical Scholars.
As for the reason for the flood, that is provided in Genesis 6:5-8 and does not refer to interbreeding rather it refers to the ‘wickedness of man being great’. If it was some sort of half breeds the word ‘man’ the Hebrew word הָאָדָ֖ם would not have been used in verses 5 and 6. When the ‘half breeds’ are referred to in verse 4 the Hebrew word הַגִּבֹּרִ֛ים is used instead. So it seems the ‘cross breeding’ is not the issue.
In any case why did God have to kill all the animal also? By the time we get to Exodus God is able to be a bit more selective in killing.
Perhaps it is just a made up story?
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@pete
Truly hilarious.
Here we have an atheist who believes none of scripture, lecturing a fine believer who believes all of scripture………
It is a no brainer taking the side of someone who is actually serious about the word of God. As for you? Read the book of Jude.
So what if there are ‘many’ interpretations.It does not change the account of WHAT happened. Perhaps you have forgotten about that rather large oaf, Goliath of Gath, 9ft 6 inches, and todays 8 foot giants.
How many friends do you have who wear a size 22 shoe?
The scriptures win every argument. Every time.
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CS I have found that determining the ‘winner’ of an argument is very much in the eye of the beholder.
I am serious about the Bible. I have been sufficiently serious to study it in detail and to take note of what it says. This has led me to conclude it is a human, not a divine book.
Indeed the oldest available text we have of the Book of Samuel records the height of Goliath as four cubits and a span, or six feet nine inches tall. The greater number you refer to is from a Hebrew version, which in the words of Gleason Archer, appears to have became corrupted in transmission.
I quoted Gleason Archer as was a conservative Bible believing scholar. But even he had to admit that there were significant problems in the Hebrew text of Samuel.
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But contrary to your own point of view, you HAVE determined yourself to be WINNER, by writing off scripture as unreliable.
Your words not mine.
Not to belabor your point, but 6’9″ is hardly ‘giant,’ and the narrative of the Israelites being fearful of his sheer size………is kind of obvious, that he was massive, just as the scriptures present.
You know, 6 toes and all that. But my main gripe with you was to point out your weak depiction of the narrative of scripture, your unbelief, and your attempt to discredit a fine woman.
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So who killed Goliath? The ‘reliable’ Hebrew text reads:
‘And there was again war with the Philistines at Gob, and Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, struck down Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam’ (2 Samuel 21:19 ESV)
I used the ESV translation as that is the most reliable. Your version, the King James found this verse a bit problematic so the translators ‘fudged’ it by changing it to ‘the brother’ of Goliath. But these words were not in the text they were translating from, were they inspired by ‘God’ or dishonest?
I am just using this statement of fact to show that there are real problems with the Book of Samuel.
Ask yourself, why an all powerful God could not have prevented these problems? Did ‘God’ wish for the translators of the King James version to alter the text they were working on because to remove an inconsistency?
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@peter
I thought you were a serious student of scripture? If you were, you would not trade the rusty tools of carelessness with the simple narrative.
There is no mistake. There is no contradiction. And ib22’s initial observation about giants in the land stands true.
Read on:
‘These four were born to the giant in Gath, and fell by the hand of David, and by the hand of his servants.’
So I ask you again: how many friends do you have that are 6 ft who wear a size 22 shoe?
And no, NBA hoopsters are not giants. Let God’s word be true. And maybe try reading the scriptures without bias, and consider that your objections were not face squarely with honesty. And maybe you are asking the wrong questions, and ignoring ten thousand answers already given.
And your ‘problematic’ idea is only in your dreams.
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If the answer is so obvious as you claim then why did the translators of the King James Version feel compelled to change the text?
As to what are the correct questions to ask, well the big question everyone should ask is:
‘is the Bible a divine or a human book?’
My study and critique of the Bible is to the end of answering this question. My current conclusion is that it is a human book. Your responses are yet to cause me to change that view. Perhaps I am wrong, but in regard to the Bible I am asking the big question, you are proceeding on the basis that this question has been settled.
No doubt I am not as objective as I should be, I am sure that I suffer from unconscious bias. But that is what it is to be human.
My big question for you is this, <strong.'If God is all powerful, then why leave so many problem issues that could so easily have been removed?'
I suspect you won’t accept the premise of my question, but just try for once.
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I honestly do not know wether it is hilarious, or really scary, that you two are discussing imaginary floods and giants – I mean really – Giants! This when Insanitybytes22 raised an actual and possible fear for the future about the humanity in the future.
Personally I think, that though her fears may be justified, being weary of such dystopian future is the way we shall awoid it, but only if we do not let our fears lead us.
She pointed out that we may destroy nature and in the process ourselves, when looking for a better future. This is true. Yet, it is not like we can awoid the future. It is through better understanding of nature and reality around us, not by adhering to ancient and ignorant superstitions.
Fairy tales, like the story of Noah and the stories about giants (no matter from wich cultural tradition we are talking about), may teach us something, but the lesson may very well be, that the morality of ancient stories like a god drowning all of mankind and the rest of the land dwelling species after making a mistake with how he alledgedly created them, is not really moral at all. The lesson is much more likely, that we should abandon such arbitrary might makes right sort of concepts about morality as what they are: Moralistic garbage.
Or maybe the morals of the flood story is for us to learn how to discern fairy tales from reality. Like for example not believing it at face value, just because it is in an old book, when science has not found any evidence to back up the claim of a global flood, rather on the contrary, all evidence proves the opposite.
My question to this would be, how does a person come to be so faithfull to a god, that they are ready to accept their god worthy of worship, even if some of the core stories about this god reveal him to be a fascistic tribal moralist? By assuming that fascism and might makes right are infact somehow supernaturally moral?
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rautakyy you raise a good question, and I suspect there is no one answer. But in the majority of cases I would suggest it is the very natural human process of absorbing and adopting one’s local culture. Personally I am suspect belief is based more on emotion rather than reason.
The sociologist did a case study on a Moonies community. He found that it was social factors that mainly led to people’s conversion. People tended to adopt the beliefs of their social peer group. Interestingly he interviewed some people before and after conversion, and found that after conversion they convinced themselves that it was the beliefs of the group that led to their conversion, but Stark knew this was not the case having observed them through the process, he concluded this was an after the event rationalisation to make peace with the reasoning part of their brain.
So in summary rautakyy I suggest that if you see religion as a cultural and emotional construct rather than based on reason it will make a lot more sense. The reason is a small veneer layered on top afterwards.
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“I suggest that if you see religion as a cultural and emotional construct rather than based on reason it will make a lot more sense. The reason is a small veneer layered on top afterwards.”
I’m sure you’re right Peter. The ‘reason’ veneer is thin but,interestingly enough, it seems easy to change depending on other social and cultural influences that make it necessary for the survival of the religion. It’s astounding to think about how Christian ‘rules’ have changed over the centuries and Christians can convince themselves that law is eternal.
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Thank you for your kind words, but I don’t think my attitude should be labeled “Post-Christian”. Christianity, a tradition of every continent and from two thousand years ago with roots much further back, including neo-Platonists and other ancient philosophy, is too wide to suddenly stop, and not include Marcus J Borg or John S Spong, or Richard Holloway from my Scottish Episcopal tradition.
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Sorry my second paragraph could be clearer, it should refer to ‘the sociologist Rodney Stark’.
No doubt CS will say that Christianity is different to the Moonies. But to the non religious it is more the same than different.
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Well, Peter, of course Christianity is different from the Moonies, just like Islam is different from Christianity, Islam is different from Buddhism, and Buddhism is different from Hinduism and so on. As much as Mormonism is different from Roman Catholicism and Shiaism is different from Sunnism. Different does not make any of them any more true nor less like Moonism in the sense of them being cultural constructs exactly the way you describe.
ColorStorm has a tendency to go on a tangent when he can not address the topic issue, like with the Giants here. I know, I have followed him/her on a number of occasions down that rabit hole.
I still wonder though, where do these attitudes to cow down to obvious Fascistic set of values, the Christian god presents in his alledged “word” come from? There is a limit how much an individual is able to rationalize after they have found out about such evil. For example, our gracious host Violetwisp, describes in the topic post, how she could not make the leap from being indoctrinated to believe in a loving god, to the authoritarian, murdering and torturing monstrosity on the pages of the Bible. How is it then, that some people feel they need to come up with excuses for this terrible god, or worse yet, may demand we should accept the authority of such a god on might makes right justification? Have these people ever had other than Fascistic values, or do they come to such by a strong emotional tie to their identity as a Christian? It propably varies, but I wonder…
I can see how some Christians compartmentalize parts of the Bible to be divine and some to be cultural products of contemporary humans. For exampel Insanitybytes22 once made the claim, that the part in the Bible where the god character demands, that a person smashing the heads of babies on rocks should feel happy, was not a divine revelation, nor “word of god” but a revenge fantasy of a single human writer of scripture. I still do not see how she makes the difference between divine word and fan fiction within the book, but at least she on that occasion was not willing to claim her god actually justified feelings of joy when a demand to smash in little innocent babies heads was presented in the Bible. That has got to count for something, at very least a sort of humane and moral feature within her irrespective of what the Bible claims.
Is the Christian culture, as for one particular example religion, inherently fascistic when it relies on fundamentalist literal interpretation of the Bible? This book is full of justification for fascistic, racist, misogynist, divisive, and generally dehumanizing values, as we can see how it has been sincerely interpreted by generations of people who had read the book, thought it was demanded by their god in their holy book, to persecute, enslave, torture and burn alive people. It is still going on, though in a lesser measure as a result of secularization of the western societies. Yet, most Christians have never read the book through, or engaged, nor – I suspect – even condoned such vile activities. Certainly a lot of Christians have found equal amount of love and demands to show compassion from the pages of the same book. It is very hard to find any coherent moral code from it as a book. A human beign is forced to find their own morality for better – secular – reasons even if they adhere to this book. So, why even claim, the book provides their morality? No gods have ever appeared to stop the fundies from their inhumane deeds either, wich makes all the gods (including the ones of the varying Christian sects) suggested in human culture either evil, incompetent, or most likely simply imaginary.
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rautakyy I don’t think I can answer your very pertinent question in any authoritative way, But I will at the risk of going off on a tangent offer an observation.
From years of involvement in Christian churches of differing persuasions I found that the more literally a person took the Bible, the fundamentalist their belief the more likely their politics was to be right wing. By contrast the more a person sought to emphasise the ‘spirit’ of the teaching the more likely the person was to be left wing in interpretation.
Thus in the discussion between SOM and Claire elsewhere on this thread we see this in action. Both claiming to be Christian have different interpretations of the Christian attitude to homosexuality. The approach of SOM is to take the Bible at its word, which is to condemn homosexuality, the old argument of love the sinner and hate the sin etc (or one might say tough love). By contrast Claire seeks a more enlightened interpretation that seeks to read ‘between’ the lines.
So what does one make of this? Well as a person with formal Theological training and post graduate studies of the Bible I have no doubt that SOM’s interpretation is the one that is correct based on the Bible being the authoritative source. Claire’s approach is by contrast more enlightened and humane, but it is a post Christian interpretation. I suppose it is issues like this that caused me to question my Christian faith and eventually abandon it. As I came to see that the science was showing that sexuality was not a choice (in some cases at least), it ran counter to the whole argument of the Bible on the matter of homosexuality (which the Bible treats as being akin to adultery in seriousness). In the end it just helped me out the door of faith as it showed me that the Bible was indeed not a divine book.
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I don’t think Esther is too bad. She is mostly passive. As for Judith, I love Artemisia Gentileschi’s feminist paintings of her. A woman gets one over on male violence- yes, I know, with sexual seduction then violence, but still!
I don’t think you get very far with your Christianity debates. Well done for getting atheists and Christians debating, but I see little evidence of minds changing. I got bored with it eventually. I posted a lot about Christian stuff, about how the Bible properly read is pro-LGBT folk, how a truly Biblical Christian is liberal, not conservative; but having fully accepted that myself I am on to other stuff. Check out the video of me dancing in the street, to be posted at midnight.
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I go through phases of finding it interesting, or seeing value in understanding how other people view the world. Then sometimes I feel too tired to pursue conversations that go nowhere, especially with people who seem to be a sandwich or two short of the picnic. Maybe I’ll start posting videos of me dancing in the street too. 😎
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It is quite professionally done. We danced to a portable cd player, then the film-maker mixed our sounds with the original recordings of the music, and synced it to the video.
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Clare,
Projecting your own values onto the Bible to justify yourself is self-deception not scholarship.
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Scholarship? I do not come here for scholarship, any more than you do.
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Clare,
Scholarship is about teaching and learning.
It’s about the pursuit of truth.
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@SOM
Then you seem to be doing something very wrong indeed, don’t you?
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I pursue Truth, and I conceive the possibility that you pursue truth the best way you know how. However, we are finite, human creatures, and our understandings are so different that dialogue between us has no value. I could pray that Jesus opens your eyes, but then you could pray the same for me. There is far more value in one academic article than a hundred times the number of words on comment threads.
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Clare,
Invoking Jesus so that he will make me just like you is what is wrong with your atheist brand of religion.
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On the contrary, your failure to give yourself up to Jesus is what is wrong with your conservative brand of religion. You have received your reward in full. But we could echo each other in condemnation till the cows come home. What good do you imagine that will do?
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Clare,
Don’t you betray yourself as horribly self-righteous and judgmental in your determination that I have failed to give myself up to Jesus?
Who appointed you Royal Queen of the Jesus Police?
You appointed yourself no doubt.
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Don’t you betray yourself as horribly self-righteous and judgmental in saying that commenters here are incapable of rational thought? Judge not! I was seeking to save your soul from death, as the Bible exhorts me.
But, what do you get out of commenting here? What do you gain? Why do you do it?
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@clare
I’ll answer for SoM, lest you accuse him of boasting…………
You ask WHY does he do it. Why comment?
Daylight.
Daylight dispels every trace of darkness.
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And yet you remain in the deepest night, unable even to see that you are in night. Turn to Christ!
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Hmmmm. Quite a statement.
But who is it who reads the scriptures like its a salad a bar, picking and choosing what is edible and digestable?
Hmmmm? It appears your ‘jesus’ is the common buddha of religianity, a far cry from the Lord Jesus Christ of heaven and earth who put His finger on sin, righteousness, and judgment.
Quite telling clare, that you align yourself with atheists who despise God, the word of God, believers, while you wear the mask of Christian and malign good people of faith? Really?
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You. Certainly you. You have no self-knowledge, so you are not aware of it. You malign God’s good creation. Your vile abuse drives people away. Do you not know that a gentle answer turns away wrath?
Only you are capable of seeing how far you are betraying Christ. No-one else will convince you. I mock you, because I enjoy pointing out how far from Christ you are. I have no ulterior motive.
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Just a quick thank you then would be in order.
For you join the likes of Zande, the littlestonegod, and many others, who have gone on record saying they despise the God of creation, the scriptures, the teachings of the New Testament, all Christians, and the reviling of the entire warp and woof of scripture as it is clearly written.
So thanks again for recognizing that your own lips have admitted your allegiance and your confederacy with godlessness.
And btw, you are clueless as to the ‘gentle answer’ which in its context, refers to person to person dialog.
Then again, perhaps you have never read: ‘have I become your enemy by telling you the truth?????????????’
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Not at all. I despise your false God, created in your own image. Do keep up. Perhaps you are tired. Did you not sleep well last night?
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Clare,
That atheists can’t think rationally is a product of atheism not my personal judgement.
You prove your own irrationality with your own comments.
You are so poorly equipped that you can’t tell the difference between rational thought and your holier-than-thou moral judgements.
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And yet you can’t answer the question. What possible good does abusing others here do for you?
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Clare,
I have abused anyone.
To the atheist any challenge is considered abuse.
That is because knowledge, understanding and the pursuit of truth are all mortal threats to the atheist.
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It is a simple technique you have, to write the opposite of the truth, or wild abuse. Some variation in your technique would be less boring.
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Clare,
You are hallucinating bizarrely.
And there is nothing like hallucinating bizarrely to end civil discourse.
You are like the big bad wolf.
You huff and you puff and you blow.
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Civil discourse? What on Earth do you imagine that to be? Your mindless rantings, or your abusive drivel?
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Thank you for jumping in, Storm.
Whenever someone like Clare calls me a bad Christian it is too much to bear and I go to pieces.
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Would that that were so. You would then have less energy for driving people from Christ.
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Too funny. But that brand of pseudo-religion that creates its own God……..needs pointed out
Takes no effort and causes no sweat. 😉
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Oh! ColorStorm! One might almost imagine you have insight into your predicament- but you are projecting, aren’t you? You think you are talking of someone else?
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Clare,
Wouldn’t it be much more interesting and beneficial to discuss the actual meaning of the Flood story instead of changing the subject?
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What do you think is the actual meaning of the Flood story?
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Clare,
I just published a post dedicated to the ones I love (you and Violet) about Noah’s Ark.
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Mmm. So God killed the “weaker men, women and children” who were enslaved by the bad guys. Why? For smiting, strokes and heart attacks would be much better than a Flood- lightning strikes, if you really want to be public about it.
I see Monochrome Drizzle likes what you write, though. That must be something for you.
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Pingback: Asking Questions? | See, there's this thing called biology...
Isn’t it amazing that God tells us these kinds of stories! I think he is saying there is not way you can out-sin my ability to forgive. But in all honesty he did not forgive all. Some faced the consequences of their choices.
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And some faced the consequences of God’s poor foresight.
The great flood demonstrates that the Christian God is neither all-powerful nor all-knowing. According to God’s actions, He seems to be fallible just as us humans are said to be.
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Jason,
According to the Bible, God created man, male and female (not gay, lesbian or tranny) in his own image.
That means mankind is totally free to create his own life.
That means man is not a slave to God but contains within himself the same fires of creations that God possesses.
Please stop for just 30 seconds or so and think about that.
You will find your poorly conceived ideas about God’s omniscience and omnipotence completely dissolve in the light of truth.
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“God’s omniscience and omnipotence completely dissolve in the light of truth.”
I fully agree with this part. In the light of reality, God certainly cannot be omniscient and omnipotent. The Christian God is a God with flaws.
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Jason,
You are assuming that you know God more than God knows God.
And that you think you could do a better job.
That is essential atheist “thinking” and it is spooky.
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That is exactly how new mental paradigms come about: it is contradictions on the periphery, things that don’t seem essential, that bring about a Copernican revolution.
The problem of course is that plenty of people have the exact inverse progression from unbelief to belief, so much of mid-20th century apologetics (CS Lewis etc) is about that psychology of conversion. So it is a process that, as far as I can see at least, is subjective: the whole re-arrangement of mental furniture and reinterpretation of previously known realities never really gets out of your own head.
And I doubt fear of hell ever motivated anyone to do anything lasting. If there are hidden motives at work it is more our herd-instincts: with what sort of people do you want to hang out, what crowd do you want to accept you.
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So, do you think Yahweh chose you, DP because you are cool to hang out with, or did he have ulterior motives?
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Both!
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I’ve deleted your ‘tongue-in-cheek’ racist conversation with Pink. If you both think that kind of thing is funny, feel free to do it on your own spaces. By the way, neither of you were funny or clever.
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Your blog your rules.
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Sadly, if the Chinese decided to do something unlawfull, they could simply do it, as they have the strongest army on the planet. Like some other nations with fairly strong armies have been doing for generations and are doing at the moment.
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