Literally none of you really understand what you are mocking, and 95% of your ‘knowledge’ comes from memes and corporate news.
It is impossible to have a decent discussion with any of you, and I have been trying for YEARS.
Every circumstance is filled with ‘gotcha’ intellectual dishonesty parroted from whatever spike haired edgelad streamer you watched this week with ZERO of your own ideas in the mix.
HOW the FUCK can you hold a position that you can’t even defend without devolving into strawmanning and meme repetition? It staggers me how casually all of you just slip into this comforting ignorance that is immune to any discourse.
To be clear, I am NOT a conservative evangelical and I probably hate them more than you do, but none of you will care because ALL theists are the same to you as those ‘God hates fags’ protesters.
Oh I fucking hate every one of you but I still hate conservative evangelicals worse.
At least most of you edgelad ratheists aren’t trying to bring fascism to American.
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So, what you’re saying, is like most atheists, you don’t know what a strawman argument is. Banned.
This is what I like about lemmy. On Reddit you’d never see the crazy old man yelling at the clouds. Here he gets his own website, he gets to go on a power trip, he gets to rant, and we get to watch!
You shitheads still downvote bombed me, so much for the vaunted open mindedness of the fediverse.
Also, get the fuck off of my sub for several trillion years.
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First of all, thank you for checking out my new sub and responding with actual meat to chew on. It is rare to find that when talking about theology on the internet nowadays.
My bet is I know my Bible better than most people of faith.
And I will agree that this is likely the case and I can corroborate this with my own life experiences. The vast majority of Christians I speak to show shocking ignorance about core tenets.
So whatcha got that inspired the rant above?
A decade of trying to have decent conversations about theology with atheists online. Unfortunately I am stuck in a deep red hellhole so know exactly zero atheists IRL since a certain group I will not detail co-opted and shut down the atheism group at my college. So online discourse is my only choice.
Also, I can’t really talk openly about it with my brethren as it’s basically career suicide to admit to any even slight form of progressivism where I live.
Ok above was really all preamble, time to type.
Ok, so… I’m NOT arguing God exists or doesn’t exist, instead I want to open with the statement ‘It doesn’t matter whether God exists or not if living as if He does brings positive outcomes.’
What I mean by this is that there are a convincing number of studies where theists consistently report higher life satisfaction and outcomes. Again, this fact is objectively separate from the question of the supernatural existing,
So, if living in such a way as detailed in the Bible (and please let us not get into stupid rabbit trails about two material clothing or whether it is still considered a banishment worthy sin to not carry a shovel with you when you go shit at night. You know what I fucking mean) brings higher life satisfaction and outcomes, then people who actively try to prevent such living are needlessly increasing human misery for themselves and others.
That’s point one. Atheism increases human misery.
Point two: Humans are stupid. Like more than you realize. Sure, you’re probably smart, I mean you found Lemmy, right? And please don’t drag out the MiB reference. Just because it’s been turned into a meme doesn’t make it less true. I live in a state with crippled education, rampant religious misinformation, and hookworm. 20% of the people I meet everyday CANNOT FUNCTIONALLY READ. 50% of cashiers cannot make change if they don’t have a machine to tell them what to hand back. More people I have met in 2 years personally have been proud of the fact that they’ve never willingly read a book than the number of people I have met in the library over the last 3 decades.
These people are incapable of reason, cannot grasp nuance, and are incapable of forming their own critical thoughts. Granted a lot of this has to do with the whole crippled education thing, but I want you to understand that a staggering 35-40% of everyone you have ever met in public falls somewhere into that venn diagram of ignorance. And it’s not limited by ANY demographic.
There are per capita just as many stupid rich people as stupid poor people, just that the stupid rich are capable of being more dangerous.
So, how do you keep the stupid people from doing REALLY dangerous things?
You can’t reason with them, you can’t expect them to be swayed by facts or evidence. The only thing they respond to is strong emotional pull, and religion is DAMN GOOD at creating that emotional pull. It’s why cathedrals were designed that way, so everyone walking into them was humbled and awed and ready for their moral guidance.
THE REAL PROBLEM with #2 is when that moral guidance is perverted for personal gain, and this is NOT exclusive to religion. Yes priests diddle kids a lot and they should go to jail for it and I am SO ANGRY that the church protects them. But per capita Hollywood producers diddle kids at a SIGNIFICANTLY higher rate than priests. Abusers take advantage of hierarchies and they don’t particularly care about the moral frameworks of the hierarchies they abuse.
Humans evolved religion as part of our social structure. It is part of what held together communities going back to paleolithic times. The standard atheist claim that it is detrimental to human well-being (usually accompanied by the dumb as fuck 'where we would be technologically if the ebil churchhhh didn’t cripple tecknicolgical developmenttttttt) are ignoring the MASSIVE psychological need for the sacred in our lives.
Now that we are almost entirely a secular culture now, what is considered inviolable is culturally relative. All manner of sin and crime is committed with no public outcry. Our politicians are more corrupt than they have ever been. We are closer to fascism than we have ever been. Celebrities literally get away with murder and child rape because they can afford to evade justice, and WHENEVER people gather to condemn such actions, there’s always a vocal crowd of people minimizing the social damage with tainted words, mocking those that ache for justice to return the world to sanity.
And that’s really the worst part. The solution is there, a new religion for our age needs to be born. One that people can feel passionate and excited about. No FSM and whatever the Satanists are calling themselves don’t count. Without genuine sincerity, religious practice is meaningless. So just to be clear, I don’t hate satainsts because they blaspheme, I hate satanists because they could have done so much good with their movement but instead chose to spend all their effort mocking people who don’t care about their opinions and making largely irrelevant news headlines when they do something shocking or funny.
Without a sense of the sacred in our culture, nothing is immune to careless excision without awareness of consequences for ideological reasons.
Actively removing the sense of the sacred has lessend our culture immesurably, and we are heading to a cultural divide that will only devolve into violence. All if this could have been prevented if there were still inviolable concepts in our culture.
And I wonder why people with autism (myself included) have such a bad reputation on the internet…
And you are a royal shitstain to police my behavior, my anger has nothing to do with my autism and is a separate thing altogether.
I want to ban you but that means I can’t yell at you anymore.
I don’t know you or your motivations; all I had to go by was your username.
I can’t yell at you anymore.
Keep at it, by all means. It doesn’t bother me
Good.
Listen IDGAF if you are on the spectrum, your conflation was a deliberately sadistic choice, intended to harm. Where the FUCK do you get off even considering that if you actually ARE on the spectrum.
Secondly, if you want to know the real fucking reason autists have a bad reputation, here’s a clinical study that will ABSOLUTELY depress the FUCK out of you if you ARE actually on the spectrum:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5286449/
TL:DR; neurotypicals can detect autism subconsciously and it causes them to downrate individuals on average 30%, EVEN IF ONLY EXPOSED TO FUCKING TRANSCRIPTS.
So, you doing whatever the FUCK you were doing is shifting blame from the bigots where it should rightfully sit onto the behaviors of people WHO NOTABLY HAVE PROBLEMS CONTROLLING THEIR BEHAVIORS!
So either you are a fucking neurotraitor or lying about your place on the spectrum and either outcome makes me angry enough to punch kittens, and I fucking LOVE kittens.
if you actually ARE on the spectrum
How dare you question my mental state… I guess
neurotypicals can detect autism subconsciously
Since “symptoms” vary GREATLY from one person with autism to the next (hence the use of the word “spectrum”) I’m gonna call at least partial bullshit on that.
I fucking LOVE kittens
Me too, actually.
How dare you question my mental state… I guess
Look, if you are on the spectrum, then you’re spreading dangerous misinformation. If you aren’t on the spectrum, then you are an abuser. So I don’t really care which one it is, you’re irredeemable.
You can call bullshit all you want but study after study and every one of our personal experiences proves that neurotypicals nearly always discriminate against us.
I think you underestimate people’s pattern matching ability. Google that lady who could smell parkinsons, that’s the kind of pattern matching we are capable of. We are literally pattern matching meat machines. It is how we survived before we developed the whole scientific method and we’ve only had that for like 800 years…
All those gut feelings have origin in the fact that we are a fucktonne more aware of the world than our conscious mind lets us know (which you should know because NOT being able to do that is part of the reason we (well at least I, in this discussion) are on the spectrum.
They know we’re different, and it makes them hate us slightly more. Why are you giving them even more ammo with your careless memery?
every one of our personal experiences
Well, In my experience most people are pretty surprised when I tell them about being on the spectrum. Most people just see me as a normal person (as in, they don’t see anything weird in my behaviour).
You could say that they see me as a “neurotypical”, although I personally despise that word as it implies that there’s something inherently wrong with people who don’t fall into this arbitrary category, which in turn implies that conditions like autism or ADHD are bad and have to be “cured” (I’m not sure but I can imagine the pieces of shit at Autism Speaks loving that word).
Google that lady who could smell parkinsons
That’s entirely different from what I can see; for one, autism itself is an entirely psychological condition.
Why are you giving them even more ammo with your careless memery?
I’m not doing that, or at least I’m not trying to…
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Sorry no, you have zero clue about me.
I was an atheist and an anti-theist up till the age of 25. Literally every argument you can make I already have and better.
Don’t get mad at people for feeding you back the same crap
DON’T YOU FUCKING TELL ME WHO I CAN AND CAN’T GET MAD ABOUT. It’s medical you insensitive shit. Now you’re banned too.
So, basically your argument is that because you were once an athiest and have now found religion you’re uniquely qualified to dismiss other athiests without an actual rebuttal of their arguments.
I call troll.
Good day, Sir.
Nope, those are all assumptions you have made before you dipped out of the room like that girl who shat in the hot tub.
I dismiss other atheists because in 15 years I have yet to hear one decent argument out of you and your ilk that didn’t devolve into cute little jokes like what you just did.
So, you can gtfo and don’t let the door hit you where the dogs should have bit you.
What is being mocked and what is not understood exactly?
Everything is mocked, nothing is sacred in our society anymore. That’s 30% of the reason I am SO INCANDESCENTLY ANGRY about this.
Saying a religion is sacred presupposed that the religion is true. So your claim that its wrong to mock a religion because its sacred is circular logic.
No religion is true, therefore cannot be sacred, and therefore is not above mockery.
That’s not a true assumption at all and is further proof of your kind’s deliberate intellectual dishonesty.
If you had actually read the thread you’d see in at least 2 places that I am NOT arguing for the existence of a deity, in fact I point out the studies that show that theists report higher quality of life and outcomes than non-theists, and since I assume you believe no deity exists, and the results are peer-reviewed and in some cases multiply attested, you have to accept the results that regardless of the actual existence or not of the supernatural, living AS IF it existed brings better outcomes.
and therefore is not above mockery.
Oh you hold things dear that are above mockery and if I were able to sit with you and talk for ten minutes I GUARANTEE I could find at least 2 subjects you feel would be above mockery.
The thing is, by making everything mockable, you run into bullshit asymmetry and all the good gets lost in a rising sea of trollish discourse.
Great example is the ACA, in its original form it would have been the single best gift to American citizens, but the Republicunts mocked it for years and years until their constituents don’t realize that the ACA and ‘Obamacare’ are THE SAME THING, because it is a LOT easier to spew constant lies and mockery than it is to refute it.
The REASON certain things were held sacred and above reproach was usually because of how critical they were to society, for example the sanctity of human life, or of motherhood, or of charity.
So now that ‘nothing is sacred’, human life can end over a pair of shoes and no one cares, antinatal movements are in full swing, and the only time people talk about charity anymore is to say how celebrities use it to dodge taxes.
The simple fact is the world would be a lot better if we stopped mocking certain things, and we WOULDN’T be here where we are now if all of you and your ilk weren’t hellbent on uprooting three thousand years of human social development because you are angry your mommy wouldn’t let you bring your 3ds to church on Christmas.
I really, really don’t like it when you say things like “you and your ilk”. You are embodying everything you say you’re against.
And that last paragraph. Holy shit!
Ban me, hypocrite.
I know and it feels fucking great to be on this side of it for once in my life after so many hundreds of you harassing me for daring to be passionate about something that has so massively improved my life.
Oh my fucking GLOB you have no idea how magnificently, fucktastically tired I am of all of your half baked meme responses and smug superiority despite the fact that you are JUST as ignorant about theology as the people you mock and when confronted with that fact you and YOUR ILK actively use the same goalpost shifting and intellectually dishonest tactics you accuse cuntservatives of doing.
EVERY
TIME
There has never once been a post where I have engaged with an atheist, no matter how rigorous or referenced my posts, no matter how genial and respectful, that isn’t downvoted completely to oblivion, and I’ve been trying this for FUCKING DAMN NEAR TWENTY YEARS!
I have a bad opinion of you and your ilk because 99.9% of atheists I run into DO THE EXACT SAME INFURIATINGLY BULLETPROOF DANCE.
And you STILL claim the moral high ground afterward.
So yeah, every atheist can turn to dust and make the world a better place.
And I wouldn’t think that if even a handful of you hadn’t, but in my entire time doing this I’ve had exactly 3 atheists respond reasonably. In two decades… Those posts were still comment bombed or downvoted to oblivion though, and so were the reasonable atheist replies. Looks like you rabid sycophants can’t even stand dissent from your own kind. How pathetic.
Ban me, hypocrite.
Make me…
Blocked. Fuck off, you basement dwelling asshat. You are the worst person I’ve met on Lemmy, and I’ve met tankies. You are definitely going to hell. If there is a god, he hates you.
There are literal fashy shock troops on Lemmy right now and you call me the worst person you met?
You must not engage much.
Edit: Sorry, hell isn’t for the saved. I know you don’t care, just want to set the record straight when people start coming into the thread with dispensationalist bullshit.
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I don’t even know what kind of chatgpt bullshit this is but it isn’t going to be a part of the community.
So, of all we have it’s strawman arguments, why don’t you educate us and explain why we should believe in your god.
I don’t think you should believe in my God, I think you should find your own god and use your dedication to it to improve your life.
Hell I’m not even arguing whether any god exists or not, it’s largely a pointless argument to be honest. I live as if the God of the Hebrew Bible exists, and it has improved my life and made me a more compassionate and open minded person. I know you don’t believe that, because to you religion is the root of all evil, which is why I don’t really like talking to your ilk.
I think you SHOULD believe in SOMETHING sacred, because such things are powerful. For example, I would like for the world to start believing that human life is sacred again, and that has inspired me to donate to charities that preserve human life like Doctors without Borders. I feel that taking any human life outside of immediate safety should be considered one of the most horrific acts a human can perform. When I think about how unfair it is for those who’s lives are ruined or ended by the greed, ignorance, or anger of another, I strengthen the resolve within me to become more accepting of life imprisonment over execution of criminals. It causes me to want to support causes that prevent it, and to think of ways to convince others to agree and put aside their previously held beliefs about the acceptability of human death for those in the ‘out group’.
There’s no pathway to convince this world of fucking idiots through rational arguments or statistical evidence that such things should be true, and 40% of humanity absolutely needs the unassailable authority of a god lawgiver to keep them from doing ridiculously stupid things out of ignorance or maliciousness.
I’m sure you’ve mocked the whole ‘Without God stopping you, why don’t you rape?’ meme just like every other atheist online but if the last 8 years of mass murders, encroaching fascism, and rising social anxiety hasn’t convinced you that YES there ARE some people who need a god to tell them not to rape, then I don’t know what to say.
You have a very strange idea of what an atheist is. An atheist is simply someone who doesn’t believe in gods. That’s the long and short of it.
…but if the last 8 years of mass murders, encroaching fascism, and rising social anxiety hasn’t convinced you that YES there ARE some people who need a god to tell them not to rape, then I don’t know what to say.
If you look at the kind of behaviour that is being justified with religion, then your good isn’t very good at that, is he?
I’m not even touching that stupid as shit strawman, and I really should ban you for that deliberately crafted bullshit but your naivety amuses me so you may remain for now.
Time for you to be less stupid tho:
Sociopaths use any hierarchy to insulate themselves from judgment, the church isn’t even close to being unique.
Per capita hollywood producers molest children at a SIGNIFICANTLY higher rate than the clergy but I don’t see edgelads like you boycotting their movies.
then your good isn’t very good at that, is he?
What if I told you that I don’t know if He exists and it doesn’t really matter to me at all if He does or doesn’t?
Also, I have been waiting to rip some youtube trained ratheist a ninth opening over the modern ridiculous formation of the Problem of Evil and I have LITERAL HANDWRITTEN notes over the last twenty years I have been formulating this argument, so please tell me you are actually trying to defend that kindergarten-level intellectual dishonesty so I can break out this long pent up lesson.
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according to the bible, your faith has to be based on faith alone, rather than evidence. which means, there is no evidence. if there were evidence, your faith would be based on evidence instead of faith.
so what causes you to believe in god?
I know it’s hard for you to contemplate but what if I told you that it really doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme if He does or does not exist?
Statement: God does or does not exist independent of my belief or desire.
Conclusion: my belief is irrelevant to His actual existence or lack thereof.
Statement the Second: Since I have begun living as if He does exist, my life is more fulfilling and purposeful.
Conclusion the Second: Regardless of the existence or lack thereof of God, it is prudent to live as if He exists if your goal is greater life satisfaction.
You have a fucktonne of these arguments you’ve been rehearsing in your head for when you actually get the chance to dunk on a theist and I want to warn you right now that none of them will work on me because they have zero nuance and are formulated by talking heads for views and clicks instead of being rigorous arguments.
Your insistence on this cute little ‘catch 22’ shows that you may have an understanding of specific passages that you and your community have combed through to pick out for these ‘gotchas’, but you certainly have zero grasp of the actually meaningful parts about living a good life and supporting your community.
We call that ‘legalism’ in my church, and it’s looked down upon.
Do you really think that IF God exists, He’s going to be fooled by word play?
And IF He DOESN’T exist, why waste the time? I think it is because you like the attention.
oh, you just go around making up stories about the people you’re talking about in your head? I didn’t realize that’s what we were doing here. have fun with that, I’m not interested
I’m not even going to validate your low effort post, gtfo.
Excuse me, I mostly watch spike haired edgelady streamers.
Do you take your opinions on theism from their poorly organized for-views rants without even considering them objectively first?
Oh, I don’t really care about theism tbh, I just don’t believe in it. I know some people find a lot of meaning, hope, and community in their beliefs and I have no interest in arguing that’s wrong.
It’s the conservative part I take umbrage with.
It’s the conservative part I take umbrage with.
Agreed.
One thing you have to admit: a sense of community is missing in our world, a lot of people feel adrift and alone. Churches are places where people who share ideals can be together and those kinds of communities provide so many small, unnoticed services.
Just that the easiest way to form a community is around a religion, and with the majority of the world being secular, the only things we can form a similar group around is media, and I don’t see anime circles and record collecting groups having quite the outreach.
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The religious impulse is a fundamental part of human identity, it was the glue that allowed civilization to begin, uniting people in shared values and goals.
To deny this impulse is to cut ourselves away from one of the more successful survival behaviors that we have developed.
You people get SO CLOSE when you make the little ‘Well I see how it can bring people some comfort believing in a nonexistent afterlife, so good for them even if it is childish’, the fear of death and the loss of loved ones ARE NOT ADDRESSED by our modern secular society other than ‘There is no afterlife, suck it up, they’re worm food’ which is so ridiculously detrimental to our well being as a species but you can no more see it than a fish can see water for being fully immersed in it for your entire life.
I argue that even if no god or afterlife exists, that believing in such and using that as a framework to ease the pain of lost loved ones LITERALLY COSTS NOTHING, HARMS NOTHING, AND CAN BE SUPREMELY THERAPEUTIC.
When irrationally exuberant atheists, fresh off the feeling of freedom that ‘throwing off the shackles’ brings, flood the forums with dumbass shit like “Tax the churches” (churces aren’t tax exempt because they are churches, they are tax exempt because they are charities like any other with the only difference being churches are not required to submit a balance sheet (though many do nowadays in the interest of transparency), “Sepuhration of da churches and stateseses” (Congress shall make no law respecting a religion doesn’t and never has meant what you internet raised atheist thinks it means) or PedoPriest Bad so all Bad! (Hollywood producers rape children at a significantly higher rate than clergy but I don’t see ANY of you calling them out)
I have heard every single argument for atheism and in my day have crafted a few of my own with significantly more nuance than I have ever found online and I am so fucking willing to go into every one of them with ANY of you that can maintain at least some form of intellectual honestly.
Problem of Evil? SURE! I can go on about that for hours and none of my arguments will be found online until I type them.
Biblical ‘contradictions’? FUCK YEAH! I love doing this one because unless you and your ilk actively misunderstand, like go out of your way to do so, you’ll be forced to learn just how historically accurate, multiply attested, and applicable the Bible actually is. Protip: There isn’t a single core tenant of Christianity that is contradicted anywhere. Most ‘contradictions’ come from cultural animal names, or misunderstood cultural context as the cultures written of in the Bible are a lot more diverse than you imagine. And no, the Bible isn’t a ‘copy of a copy of a copy’. Unless it is a transliteration, all Bibles start with as close to the oldest texts as we have access to, and thanks to the Vatican that’s within 100 years of Jesus’s death and there is NO ancient document SO WELL attested by literally an order of magnitude.
Evil in the name of the Church? ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY because this is not an inherently church issue, it is an issue with ALL hierarchies of power where abusers can shield themselves from scrutiny with power and authority. But since you edgelads focus on pretty much exclusively the church, you ignore that the most brutal dictators on the planet were atheists, with atheist regimes. And don’t you FUCKING START about the nazis being Christian, they openly mocked Christianity and had their own pagan symbolism that wore the trappings of Christianity for protection just like conservative evangelicals do today.
I can literally go on for hours, pick the topic
You had me up to here: “LITERALLY COSTS NOTHING, HARMS NOTHING, AND CAN BE SUPREMELY THERAPEUTIC.”
Religion has historically been extremely damaging to many groups of people including religious people themselves. Religion has caused wars, the persecution of: gay people, trans people, polygamous people, people of other religions, atheists and agnostics, scientists, and so on. It’s also been used as a justification for monarchy, slavery, caste societies, and fascism. It leads to all kinds of crackpot conspiracies including modern flat earthers. It’s caused more harm than pretty much any other idea in human history, other than perhaps money.
From my perspective religion is a kind of mass delusion. Delusions aren’t always harmful, and provided they are benign it might be better to just let them be. This stops the moment those delusions become harmful to either the person having the delusion or the people around them. If your religion harms no one including yourself then that’s a-okay by me. Otherwise we need to disabuse you of it as quickly as possible, or at least try and replace it with a harmless delusion if reality is too painful to bare.
Comparing religion to celebrity worship isn’t a good argument to make. Celebrity worship isn’t a positive thing either, and imo needs to happen a lot less. It’s a bit like saying thing b is bad so why care about bad thing a? I dislike harmful religions and harmful celebrities.
Also I don’t care about Christianity in particular. I don’t consider islam or Judaism to be good either. Nazis were not atheists, and any religion that causes harm is a problem.
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I don’t think you understand how many atheists I have spoken with and how fuckdamn similar every one of you are in your retreat to intellectual dishonesty when the conversation gets even slightly tough.
I’m not sure what your little tribal daydream has to do with the world as it is now but I think you are making fantasies that don’t exactly match up with the anthropological record and basing assumptions on that fantasy for your worldview.
At least I have a fucking book to tell me my made up history. You just decided to go and make one up on your own.
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Oh I understand, I was an atheist myself for more than a decade, it’s just that I was wrong and so are you but not for the reasons you think, and those reasons are impossible for you to understand until you have experienced more of the world.
It’s like when people say ‘Oh you autists can’t understand hierarchies’.
No bitch, we understand them fine, we just know they are stupid and detrimental.
Same with your infantile edgeladism.
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Don’t think it makes you special, I attack basically everyone. Have you not read literally anything I’ve posted?
- Mainly by the texture and pattern of your text and how ill formed your replies are, mid 20s I would guess, middle class or close to it, smarter than most of your friends but you don’t have that big of a group to compare to. You might be older but then that would make your friend cadre uncomfortably young in comparison but who am I to judge of you as a 30 year old like hanging out with younger people, but I’m pretty sure you’re 27 at the absolute oldest. You will of course deny all of this so you can win your internet argument, but I’m done paying attention to anything you have to say today.
C} No you don’t want a real discussion, your ridiculous ‘it just hit me in the head’ story is proof of this. I’m sure that’s how you’ve convinced yourself it’s happened but life doesn’t have a narrative outside of the one we craft for ourselves. When people make up those narratives, they are noticeably different from people recounting events.
And lastly, while you were being a smug little fucknugget in my sub, I actually found 2 people with the intellectual honesty to have a discussion and I’ve been having a blast over there.
At least most of you edgelad ratheists aren’t trying to bring fascism to American.
You can’t “bring” fascism to the US - this call has been coming from inside the house before the ink on the constitution had dried.
Yeah I agree but I couldn’t think of a way to fit it in good prose while also being filled with the red mist atm.
You know Errol Flynn? The actor? I used to work with his nephew. Errol was a big time nazi simp, like embarrassingly so to even other nazi simps.
So yeah, it’s been here, just with the seditionist in chief emboldening them, they are coming out of the woodwork like roaches but less welcome.
I used to work with his nephew. Errol was a big time nazi simp
And his nephew?
Hardcore progressive, pro-trans back before most people even knew the word. Apparently he was part of the Conch Rebellion in the Florida Keys. Also tall AF. He gave me my first Subgenius barrage tape and is probably about 20% of the reason I became anti-authoritarian.
Most of the family hated Errol according to him. Not all though…
Cool.
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- why someone who had never heard of Jesus would go to hell,
They don’t, well not automatically.
Romans 2:12-14
12 All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.
TL:DR; If you haven’t heard of Jesus you will be judged by your actions and convictions.
why unbaptised babies would go to hel
Baptism isn’t required for salvation,it is an outward expression of an inward transformation. Children who pass on before being able to make offerings for their own sins in the Temple days were covered by the offering of their father, the same is now with the everlasting Blood of the Lamb. A family in Christ who has a child die is covered. A child from a family that does not know Jesus will be judged on the character of their father.
if he exists, and he’s strong enough to do something about all this, a
Ah, the Epicurean Problem of Evil. The answer is Free Well. God could have made us automaton that did everything we were programmed to do, but then worship is meaningless and God wanted companionship. Without the ability to disobey obedience is meaningless. The value in our worship is EXACTLY because we CHOOSE to do it when other options are available. You and every other atheist on the planet refuses to accept it to the point you forward research that suggests that human will doesn’t exist and that gives me a laugh every time it makes news.
, translated imperfectly
Another misnomer, and one so often passed about. ALL translations of the Bible currently in print go back directly to copies taken of the oldest extant versions of the documents housed in the Vatican, circa 30-70 years after the death of Jesus. There is no core tenant contradicted in any of the accepted valid Biblical texts from the most ancient to modern of archive.
This is a historical fact and can be confirmed by any legit Bible scholar, INCLUDING atheist Bart Ehrman, because the practice of MAKING a translation REQUIRES the document chain.
Transliterations are different but I bet you don’t even know what a transliteration Bible is or its purpose.
I think Jesus was a pretty cool dude with good ideas,
But you can’t think that. That’s not a rational option.
He claimed to be the living son of God, he claimed to perform miracles.
So either he is who he says he is or he is a madman. You cannot cherry pick just because it doesn’t challenge your comfortable sense of reality.
Ok lets say for your argument, he just is ‘a cool guy’, well that cool guy asked for the sick to come up before him to be healed.
If he was ‘just a cool guy’, and not a supernatural being, then he is actively deluding people just as bad as a tent preacher.
I know WHY you want to think this, yes everything he said is valuable and useful for living a good life.
But you cannot deny the fact that he claimed to be the son of God, and to perform miracles.
And any ‘just a cool guy’ claimed all that did that, don’t you think he would be a certified manipulative cult leader?
Why do you care what people think of your religion?
Because nearly everyone including you and my churchmates get it wrong when it is all already spelled out for everyone and we have 2k years of record as to the quality of life in nations that are largely Christian.
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blame the Anglican priests whose own studies of the Bible led them to answer my questions inadequately at the time.†
No argument from me here, a lot of bad dogma has been made by bored priests.
Obedient companionship? Like a child… or a dog?
What other relationship can a finite being have with literally the creator of all existence? There can be no illusion of equality if He is who He claims He is. You frame it in derisive tones which tells me your atheism is reactionary. There is no shame in a child having a loving but unequal relationship with their parent. In fact it is exactly the intimacy of this relationship that should characterize our worship (well, my worship).
What I’m asking here is how do you know they got it right
Ok, let’s do a thought experiment.
Lets say for class you were assigned the homework of copying down a newspaper article form the 1930s. That’s more than a hundred years ago, so it is even longer than the 30-70 year time gap in the Vatican archives from the time of Jesus’s death to the first ancient attested sources. You go online and find a scanned archive of newspaper clippings from the 1930s, you find that some of the words are used a little differently in modern times but you really have zero problem reading and understanding the article. So you copy it down letter for letter, even the words you don’t necessarly understand or see the context of.
You, making that copy can in the moment verify with your own eyes that you copied it correctly, even if you didn’t understand all the context and meanings of how some old words were used.
That is the first part. This is how we know that the oldest dated fragments existing in the Vatican archives all align to a RIDICULOUSLY accurate degree with all that came after.
Next, as far as the meaning of the words changing over time. Yes, we understand this. There are entire branches of scholarship dedicated to how words change over time. And not exclusively Biblical scholarship so you can’t play the ‘filthy xtians faking the sciences’ because all secular academia agrees with the lexical interpretations that are used as the basis of the modern Bible translations.
Thirdly, we know quite a lot about how the world worked in the time of Jesus from archaeological and anthropological studies, again largely from secular sources, and they all align with the descriptions, fashions, word choices, and world events of the time.
Because if that’s what you’re contending
It is amazingly apparent you have very little understanding of this subject. Literally none of those points you presented are actually points of contention made by anyone in modern academia. Sure I bet they were hot talking points during the Renaissance before we had the archaeological artifacts and anthropological studies, but that was six hundred years ago my guy.
I’m not the one who’s cherry picking my reality
You are doing exactly that. I mention a time period spanning two millennia and you focus on two specific periods covering MAYBE a handful of decades to be generous.
You know what, I was prepared to point by point you but you have zero arguments that aren’t already worn out atheismtuber thumbnail eyecatches, you really don’t understand where our knowledge comes from or the path it took to get us here.
All you know is that magical sky wizard friends make you angie. Bye.
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Could you even be more low effort? Well I guess at least it isn’t just an emoji
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