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3/9/2010 2:55:12 PM

bonerjamz 04 bringin the best thread of the week

3/9/2010 3:08:31 PM

btw, macdanger, you wrote bonkerjamz 04 on page 3

dunno if it was accidental or not, but i teehee'd

3/9/2010 3:10:24 PM

we need to have an award for users with the best thread of the week.

3/9/2010 3:34:23 PM

lol, the bible.

3/9/2010 4:03:33 PM

i don't get all the hate on the bible

zombies, talking animals, a god making a bet with satan over a man's soul, infanticide, worldwide flood story, man living in a whale...the book has it all

3/9/2010 4:05:51 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9taJVvD0ivM&feature=related

31 seconds in

3/11/2010 12:57:16 AM

Quote :

"The whole region was filled with enemies who could easily contradict the accounts, who were also eyewitnesses, and were in authority at the time. Yet we have no record of a Roman or Jewish writing, from the time, that says "Yeah, Luke is full of crap and here's how I know"

Maybe because Christians are the only one of the three groups known for burning what they saw as heresy, so nothing would remain to speak against them.

Quote :

"i'm not aware of any religion that actively discourages evangelism"

Judaism. The closest thing to evangelism is super Orthodox Jews telling modernized Jews that they aren't Jewish enough.

Quote :

"You realize that Al-Qaeda is an Islamist group that seeks to create a new Islamic caliphate, and this is heavily tied to a belief in a Christian-Jewish alliance that exists to destroy Islam?"

God, I really hope you were trolling here because I believe you to be smarter than to believe Al-Qaeda is made up of true Muslims. They break so many Islamic laws and try to supersede Quranic authority.

The existence of G-d is irrelevant. A person should be a good person regardless of any promise of afterlife paradise or eternal punishment by fire. The argument against the existence of G-d is pointless.

However, the argument about the Bible being dull or boring is something worth talking about. Yes, Leviticus drags on. But once you get past it, things get pretty good. Judges and Kings are my favorites.

3/11/2010 1:41:15 AM

Quote :

"Maybe because Christians are the only one of the three groups known for burning what they saw as heresy, so nothing would remain to speak against them."

Quote :

"I believe you to be smarter than to believe Al-Qaeda is made up of true Muslims. They break so many Islamic laws and try to supersede Quranic authority."

this is a bit of a double standard

if evil people who profess to follow Christian faith are to be considered Christians, then ditto for Muslims

3/11/2010 2:08:47 AM

it is apparent that tuliplovr reads lee strobel

[Edited on March 11, 2010 at 2:09 AM. Reason : .]

3/11/2010 2:09:04 AM

i never said anything about evil Christians, i just pointed out that they burned contradicting documents. its wrong, but not evil.

I would never say Hitler was a true Christian, because a true Christian wouldn't do that. A true Muslim would never have committed the acts of 9/11.

3/11/2010 2:13:23 AM

okay, so by this rationale, the Crusades were not undertaken by Christians, because no true Christian would go to war just to conquer "Holy Land", sack cities, etc.

3/11/2010 2:16:16 AM

that's different, because according to Catholic creed the Pope had the authority to send Christian soldiers to war. They were being true Catholics by following their pope.

Pope Urban II, however, was a corrupt bastard.

3/11/2010 2:18:35 AM

no, it's not...you mention that Al-Qaeda break Islamic laws and try to supersede Quranic authority...whereas the Crusaders broke Christian laws and tried to supersede Biblical authority.

3/11/2010 2:21:18 AM

Catholic dogma gave the Pope the ability to issue those orders. There was no member of Al-Queda with the authority to issue a fatwa.

The Crusaders believed they were acting on G-d's will through the voice of the Pope. I don't hold the average Crusader responsible, just like you can't hold the lowest German soldiers responsible for Hitler.

3/11/2010 2:25:16 AM

bdmazur, aren't you a Religious Studies graduate? When did we try using quantifiable labels like "true" to describe depth and variance of a religious group? You of all people should be discouraging the idea that there's a "True Christian" or a "True Muslim" when there is nothing quantifiable or exact in the way we practice faith, it seems rather insulting to the nature of religion itself.

3/11/2010 2:31:28 AM

Catholic dogma is irrelevant to true Christianity, just as Al-Qaeda dogma (by your argument) is irrelevant to true Islam...therefore the Crusaders were not Christians

come, come, your position strikes me as somewhat absurd. Of course al-Qaeda are Muslims. They believe that Mohammed is God's prophet, that one should make a pilgrimage to Mecca, etc...They are not good Muslims, they are not consistent Muslims, in fact they give Muslims everywhere a bad name, but Muslims they are.

You can be a member of a religion, and yet still fail to practice its tenets. That's one of the main reasons why Christianity has gotten such a bad rap among so many people.

3/11/2010 2:32:50 AM

Hey terrorists! Terrorize this!

3/11/2010 2:33:07 AM

"True" was a bad qualifier, you are right. I mostly agree with ^^.

But when a religious group professes the scripture (Quran) as truth, and then an individual goes against it, then logically that person is not true to it. That's what I meant by it.

3/11/2010 2:38:15 AM

^You just added to my statement. Christians aren't a singular group, and they certainly don't agree to everything in the Bible, or read it the same way, or even agree on what constitutes the Bible. There is no "general" confessor among Christians except maybe fundamentalists, and even then they often prove to be the persons who violate ideologies of the Bible at their most critical.

Which is why I don't like these arguments. It demeans the value and role of religion to pretend that we can be addressed as a whole, and that any one person can be representative of another's beliefs.

3/11/2010 2:47:18 AM

Everyone pretty much makes their own religion. You'd find that among the many Christian denominations, there are many different doctrines, but it's all based off the same general idea. People have gotten really good at disregarding certain parts of the bible in order to make it match up with their own sense of morality. Obviously, you're not going to get away with something like "ehh, I don't think Jesus existed at all" while calling yourself a Christian, but you'll most definitely get away with "ehh, Jesus didn't really mean that part about giving away everything you have."

3/11/2010 3:04:53 AM

bump request

7/31/2010 7:24:02 PM

I don't typically get involved in discussions of religion. However, I think that everyone should at least make an attempt to read the Bible. It has just influenced so much of western society that I feel like it would be a huge gap in one's education not to read it.

7/31/2010 7:43:40 PM

Quote :

"you subscribe to the IDEA that if something is not inherently provable is it undeniably untrue"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorems

i'm ok with believing PA is consistent

7/31/2010 8:28:41 PM

Quote :

"Maybe because Christians are the only one of the three groups known for burning what they saw as heresy, so nothing would remain to speak against them."

Staying quiet is better than arguing in ignorance.

I said that the lack of Roman/Jewish response to the Biblical accounts of Jesus (from his existence, to his miracles, to his death and resurrection) is something that should be taken meaningfully.

Then you post some crap about Christians burning documents they don't like.

Well, guess what. This whole Jesus thing happened in the first century.

Where were the Christians a majority in the first century? Nowhere. What area was dominated by Christian political rulers, or had any at all? Nowhere. In what area were Christians anything but the lower, servant class? Nowhere.

So please tell me how they would get rid of a Roman or Jewish document that said "Hey, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are full of crap. Jesus' body is still in the tomb. And these miracles never happened. And here is how we know he and his disciples are lying sacks of shit."

Given the hatred that both Roman and Jewish authorities had for Christians, and the tremendous volume of documents we have from the first century, you would think we'd find some evidence of formal Roman/Jewish response. Yet, they never questioned the historicity of the Christian accounts of Jesus' life. We have thousands of pages detailing their response to the growing Christian movement, but no rejection of the truth of their claims, or any attempt to 'set the record straight' on who Jesus was.

And no, the lower-class, uneducated, poor Christian church, in its infancy, did not burn the documents

[Edited on July 31, 2010 at 9:48 PM. Reason : a]

7/31/2010 9:46:45 PM

this was an instant classic of you-know-who

Quote :

"GOD HAS SPOKEN"

8/1/2010 12:54:01 AM

^^your definition of tremendous and mine are quite different.

To my knowledge, there are 4 first-century sources outside of the Bible that at least reference Jesus. 3 of them are highly suspect or admitted by Biblical scholars as irrelevant, and the other refers to someone named Chrestus, which a) probably wasn't Jesus, and b) was an extremely common name.

I'm interested in learning of the "tremendous" amount of collaborative evidence outside of the Bible of the historicity of Jesus.

Quote :

"I said that the lack of Roman/Jewish response to the Biblical accounts of Jesus (from his existence, to his miracles, to his death and resurrection) is something that should be taken meaningfully. "

The lack of Roman/Jewish response to the many other cults that popped up during that time or any of the thousands of other religions that have been worshiped on this Earth up to that point should be taken meaningfully.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
But since we're playing the "what you would expect to see game...."
If there was an omnipotent God that had an interested in having his creation worship him and follow his rules, you would expect to see better evidence of his existence than a book written by man. You would expect to see a world where innocent did not suffer or be needlessly terminated by natural disasters/wars/disease/act of terrorism beyond their control. Yet that is not what we see. Incoming apologetics about how "free will" somehow causes hurricanes and earthquakes.

8/1/2010 1:11:35 AM

Chit Chat, because Soap Box just had too much argument to make room for more!
















Seriously though, some real rhetors up in here.

8/1/2010 2:28:59 AM

I made a thread for this...

message_topic.aspx?topic=599648

8/1/2010 2:31:38 AM

Quote :

"If there was an omnipotent God that had an interested in having his creation worship him and follow his rules, you would expect to see better evidence of his existence than a book written by man. You would expect to see a world where innocent did not suffer or be needlessly terminated by natural disasters/wars/disease/act of terrorism beyond their control. Yet that is not what we see. Incoming apologetics about how "free will" somehow causes hurricanes and earthquakes."

just to chime in...here's a very simple answer to your point

I don't believe God is omnipotent

just because He created the world, that doesn't mean He can do anything He wants. He is, perhaps, subject to certain laws. So when you ask "Why didn't God create a world where everyone could be happy?" the answer is, perhaps, that He couldn't. I mean, the underlying theme of the universe seems to be "conservation," and a world with no suffering would totally violate that theme. So perhaps it's metaphysically impossible, even for God.

The very notion of omnipotence is self-contradictory, anyway...Can God create a rock He can't lift, etc.

8/1/2010 1:36:07 PM

this entire thread is stupid

8/1/2010 2:02:51 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac

8/1/2010 2:46:06 PM

Read this instead. It oughta be more entertaining.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/

8/1/2010 4:33:37 PM