cuchulain

i would read it even in fragments. it always interested me that the man with so many enemies accorrding to the bible...had no enemies write propaganda against him. such a basic tool thaat the romans used regularly, yet not here. i guess its a lack that adds to my disbelief.

i always wonder about the gospel of the only scribe in the bunch and why its missing...even the illiterates of the group had a book. why not judas?

such a powerful liar, the devil, would probably be able to pose as an angel or prophetic vision to those who wrote the bible. insert some truth, but alter a few things so they arent loving...like killing witches and keeping slaves and such. its a good thing none of that obviously hateful stuff is in the book, or at least that people were smart enough not to have crusades or burnings over some words some superstitious middle easterner wroote down centuries ago.

I would consider the context of that agreement as a threat...he won't send water, he'll send fire, instead.

your right. i thought of it as a choice when i said that, but i dont view belief as a choice, so my premise was flawed. thanks for further explaining that.

nah. everyone has the right to peacefully determine what is right, or better. its part and parcel. a christian might say doing gods will makes you better person. i would define it as contributing to the community in part. someone else might say reducing the footprint, or being great to the family. i think if a person can consider what they can do to be better and try, they'll get somewhere. edited to say, better isnt always or usually easier...or unproblematic.

a thought...ask if the change will make you a better person?

i was a druid and am now an atheist. the change built slowly for me. i have always argued and debated christianity, but rarely did i apply the same logic to my own beliefs and i often found myself arguing from the atheist perspective, so i reevaluated my druidry piece by piece using the same standard and realized it was just as hokey as others i had thought of as wackos. when that happened i tried to find variations that made sense and couldn't. but i did find stoicism, which seemed to be a philosophy of logic after i discarded the idea of logos. i had trouble switching only because of my own naiveté.

atheism is defined as lacking belief in theism, or deity. i do not actively disbelieve, i'm not sure what that would entail. i simply don't believe in any deity. agnosticism is a person who neither disbelieves nor has faith in a god. asking why i don't believe in god is almost bigotry to the thousands of deities left out of the question. at best, not specific enough i.e. which god? and if a person wants to waste the time asking about every deity, that's a long wait. why not zeus, marduk kurios, ishtar, innanna, etc...? i start at the position of not believing and leave it up to the proselytizer to prove their deity, not me disproving thousands of religions. and the classic logic...it up to the person making a claim to prove it.

its only fictional caring, though...i wonder if a thousand years from now if archaeology will discover a set of manuscripts detailing the life of a magical savior of the planet and a statue that proves we worshipped him in his home town in Metropolis.

That's been my question. First, shouldn't we prove ANY god is real? I mean, they really don't care...if they aren't real.

aren't ghosts supposed to be the spirits of the deceased? how do you catch a living dead thing?

I'm still stuck on the idea of proving ANY deity as real...let alone that there are multiples counterfeiting each other. As an aside, I think there are myriad religions which have similarities to the point of being able to claim plagiarism in some sense, although I do not know that the actual religions did indeed "steal" from each other. Some ideas are accepted socially to the point that they could be termed universal, I believe. So I don't think it's an enormous stretch to conclude that multiple religions might have used the same mythological set up to express the ideas in very similar manners. I have been considering myself something of an oddball lately for the reason that I can find truth in any religion while believing in none of them, or at least while believing in none of the deities. Of course, the converse is also true in that I can find falsehood in every religion.

I take breaks from this site of two to three days at a time often and don't even notice such things. I wonder if I have ever been banned, and just didn't know? Sorry to hear this happened to you in any case. I often find myself wondering how often administration checks this site, or if they bother with reading many of the topics. There are times where it seems like some people blatantly violate the rules and nothing is said about it. Maybe it's worked behind the scenes, so to speak, and they contact the members directly and privately. I think it might have greater effect on the membership to see that actions(words, at least) have consequences when they violate rules. But in your case, I cannot see that you violated anything and would work on the assumption it was a malfunction or mistake. Still, I can certainly understand wanting an apology. Administration has made the analogy in the past of this site being similar to someone's house, and us all as guests who follow certain decorum rules...and if we don't we are asked to leave. If you were asked to leave in error at someone's house, the proper decorum would be to apologize I think.

if this is the case, then how does the bible do so?

In school we studied various myths, mostly from Greek and Roman sources. For some reason they just don't want to teach other cultures mythologies, and I always wondered at that. Anyway, when I graduated high school and went to college, I studied other mythologies...Norse, Celtic, Japanese, I don't remember what all honestly. At the same time, I studied various religions. I looked into things like Christianity, even though I had grown up with it, but I began questioning it. I looked into various pagan religions, mysticism type religions, learned a little about Buddhism and Shintoism, all sorts. It took me years to realize that studying mythology or religion was the same.

god's nature changed from the old testament to the new...at least i haven't heard of any cities becoming salt or she bears entering towns to attack and kill kids making fun of his prophets...

is fact unattainable worthy of consideration?

why need a book if he can preprogram our brains to know what he wants us to in the first place, averting millions of deaths in the argument of the 'right' god? no, i don't believe, either.

scribal error, lol. it isn't really funny, but i laugh or cry. an error proof book(so claimed by christians) has specific errors called scribal errors(also claimed by usually the same christians who insist its error proof).

acceptable enough🙂

Your inability to accept a definition does not lay a responsibility on me to provide a better definition, friend. The bible is a book(an available body of facts and information indicating whether a belief is true). A tree, a kittens whiskers, whatever else you name...these are not bodies of facts and information, so they are indeed straw men. You change my argument to one that does not exist, that is...some absurd claim that trees are proof of god. This is a claim that I did not make. I merely pointed out a definition and stated that I think the bible meets that definition. I also stated that I believe it to be poor evidence, inadequate at best, but you do not differentiate. An assertion is also evidence. If you don't believe that, look up court cases. Specifically of sex offenders. Many have been convicted based solely on testimony as evidence. Testimony is......drum roll.....an assertion. Sure, it might be poor evidence, but it is evidence. Denial gets us nowhere.

evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true. fact: a piece of information used as evidence or as part of a report. unfortunately the bible does fit these criteria and so should be called evidence. note i certainly agree that its not objective, but that isn't required for evidence. i require something more substantial, but that also doesn't negate it as evidence. hence why i say inadequate evidence.

i do mmake it complicated sometimes. but, i did say inadequate for a reason. a written account exists and is evidence. it may be falsified or fraudulent evidence, but it is evidence the same as if joe down the street files a false statement with the police against his neighbor bill. i agree we hanothing objective. the authors were anonymous superstitious middle eastern men whose accounts don't match an might be falsified for an agenda and have been mistranslated and...well, more than i care to put, really the point, being more succinct if i can, is its not my job to disprove anything, but theirs to prove.

inadequate evidence seems the best response, but my initial post was basically about not needing to answer why i don't believe something. i see a lot of youtube videos that start with a christian asking the Atheist why they don't believe. i think that since i'm not trying to convince them but they are trying to convince me, it's not about why i don't believe but rather why they do. if i took the time to explain why i don't believe all the things i don't believe, it would take a long time for talking about nothing.