Cecilie1200
Diamond Member
You vastly underestimate the human capacity for denial and tunnel vision. Also, blaming God because YOU are recalcitrant and He doesn't just overwhelm you and take all choice and freedom away from you is a little unreasonable.
No I'd rather believe in Christianity than believe I don't exist after death. I just don't see any evidence for the former.
That's where the whole "faith" thing comes into play. You're not "believing in" something if you have it proven to you. I don't "believe" that the sky is blue. It just is. I can see it. If I were unable to see any colors at all, though, I would have to believe that it was, based on having faith in the word of whoever told me that it was blue. You see the difference? Strict materialism is an extremely limiting life philosophy.
But this isn't only about me or anybody blaming that which they cannot reasonably presume to exist. I don't think free choice is even a fair assessment of the situation. It's quite a different choice for the preacher's son versus the imam's son. The imam's son may be conceptually aware of Christianity, but it is presented as the lies of his enemies. Being conceptually aware of something isn't useful. There are many religions besides Christianity and no compelling reason that Christianity is the correct choice, let alone that any religion has it right.
Um, you DO realize that many people who were raised in one belief system do convert to another, based upon their personal perception of the second as being more true than the first? Being conceptually aware of something is VERY useful, because you cannot give it consideration until you're aware of it. And whether or not there is a compelling reason that Christianity is the correct choice depends on the person in question. Given that it has billions of followers worldwide, most of whom were NOT raised in it from birth, it clearly has the ability to produce compelling reasons for faith.
Lots of people knowingly make that choice. I know any number of people who were raised as I was, had the same training from birth that I did, and knowingly chose to turn away from it.
They turned away from it as a conscious choice of choosing Satan and Hell. That still seems far-fetched.
There are some people who DO make a conscious choice of Satan (they're called Satanists. Perhaps you've heard of them), but the conscious choice of most people is to turn away from God and not believe in the teachings of Christianity, knowing that they're risking Satan and Hell if they're wrong.
Satan is redundant. This temptation you refer to requires no supernatural source.
This would be a relevant argument if I were making up a story and you were critiquing it. However, we're talking about a belief about what is and isn't real. If Christianity is true, as I believe, then Satan's redundancy in existing or lack thereof is irrelevant. You exist without having to justify the necessity of yourself to anyone, so why shouldn't he?
People are tempted to have sex? Why? Because sex feels good? Why? Because having sex is required to make the next generation and helps to forge social ties for an interdependent species. There are many examples.
Sex is not a sin per se, just so you know. Extramarital sex is a sin, because God doesn't want us to do it, so doing it anyway is disobedient.
If you're wanting to ask about the nature of temptation to sin, you're going to have to ask more clearly than simply picking one thing you think is a sin (particularly when you're mistaken), and then wandering off down a tangent.
Very few? Would even one ever be acceptable? Are there special rules for those who cannot understand the concept of Jesus, like a baby or a mentally disabled person?
Yes, there are special rules for those who cannot make competent decisions based on free will, such as young children or those with the mental capacity of young children. Christians believe in something called "the age of accountability", which is the point in your life where you are intelligent, mature, and self-aware enough to understand the concepts of sin and salvation, and to make a decision regarding them. This point differs with every person.
Yes I have heard that, I just haven't been able to reconcile that with reason. After all, "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo. Yet if we use that sense, reason, and intellect, we find problems with Christian doctrine and the Bible itself.
This would depend, as always, on your definitions of "sense", "reason", and "problems".
Trying to stick to what you said, though, why would a perfect god find it necessary to assert himself in such a way over his inferior creations? Such perfection would simply go without saying. It sounds very medieval to me. The jealousy and wrath of the God of the OT seems barbaric and juvenile.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by "assert Himself". I will say, however, that attempting to judge God by human standards sounds pretty funny.
Sure, these are the opinions of a mere mortal, but a mere mortal who has exactly no evidence for this superior being, that I'm aware of anyway.
Like I said, running around with a strictly materialistic view of life and refusing to take any stand or opinion on anything that you have not, personally, conclusively seen or experienced is going to leave you with a lot of big, empty spaces in your perspective.
Or to put it another way, you already take a lot of things on faith without demanding personalized, concrete evidence of them. Why balk so hard at this one?
There's just no common ground to be had. Every point you make requires a presupposition I don't find reasonable. Evidence suggests people evolved from lower lifeforms, and I don't believe people can be legitimately owned.
You misunderstand me. I'm not trying to convince you to believe anything. I'm simply telling you what Christians believe, so that you're not wandering around, making false statements and assumptions about them based on fallacies and misperceptions.
By the way, evidence does NOT suggest anything of the sort. You're just taking it on faith.
Spare me the empty moralizing and philosophical posturing about "people can't be legitimately owned". Talk about having faith in something without hard evidence.
In order for a choice to be anything but a lottery, you would have to have a rational basis for the choice. Where is Christianity's high ground over other religions? How can anything supernatural at all be verified?
First of all, who are YOU to define "rational basis" for someone else? Who are you to tell someone else what the "high ground" is over other religious options? And who are you to demand that anything be verified? Would that you had such high standards of proof for any of the number of beliefs I've heard you espouse on these boards.
Why would a substitute need to be made?
Because unlike God, Satan isn't willing to give his possessions the freedom to choose not to belong to him.
That makes no more sense than a king executing an innocent man who volunteers to be executed in order to forgive the guilty people willing to thank the innocent man. How is that comparison invalid?
Actually, there are historical precedents for people taking punishment that rightfully belongs to someone else, but as it happens, God didn't "execute" anyone. Christ chose to give Himself in place of us. If we then insist on going ahead and going to Hell anyway, He won't stop us, but it's pretty redundant and silly. Think of it like a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his buddies, and then one of his buddies saying, "No, damn it. That explosion was meant for me!" and then shoving another grenade down his pants.
How do you arrive at those precepts, logically?
When did anyone ever say that any of this came from "logic" as you define it? When did anyone even say it NEEDED to be "logical" by your definitions? This isn't some story I'm inventing off the top of my head for a fiction novel. These are the beliefs of Christianity, being explained to you out of the goodness and generosity of my heart so that you will know what we truly believe instead of making incorrect assumptions, and neither I nor anyone else is obliged to justify them to you. Please do not make the mistake of thinking that I am trying to convince you that what I believe is how the universe truly is, or that you should believe it as well. I am simply explaining Christianity's real beliefs, as opposed to the fallacies you were previously attributing to us and basing your assumptions upon.
My standard is difficult to achieve? It sounded more like a do-the-crime-pay-the-time approach, which would be fair.
Only because you pigheadedly insist on believing that this is a penal system we're discussing, despite being told three times already that it isn't. Like I said, the main reason you don't understand Christian belief is because you are bound and determined to only see your own beliefs and to try to force everyone else's to fit inside that framework. If you're not going to even attempt to listen to what I'm saying, I'm not going to bother trying to be courteous and explain it to you.
No one is interested, by the way, in what you consider "fair", not just because that isn't the point (something else I keep saying and you keep ignoring), but also because no one elected YOU arbiter of universal mechanisms.
As far as the "achieveable by anybody who desires to" you have to realize that's not how it is. Not everybody can believe something only because they want to.
Who suggested that they should? I referred to the action required, not the motivation (You do seem to have enormous trouble differentiating between the two, and a huge obsession with motivations). Doesn't really matter why you decide to believe. Everyone comes to belief differently, for different reasons. The point is that once you do, you have only to ask for salvation to get to Heaven, an action that anyone can perform. You, on the other hand, would have people become saints on Earth to earn their way there, an action that most if not all of us would find impossible.
Does open to understanding mean surrendering reason and a sense of fairness? If a god were all powerful and benevolent he would be compelled to create a fair system.
No, it means being reasonable enough to look at someone else's viewpoint, instead of pigheadedly insisting that yours is the only possible one, and trying to impose it onto the beliefs of others. No one is asking you to agree with Christians. I'm asking you to get over yourself long enough to understand them. I am capable of looking at and understanding the viewpoint upon which Buddhists, for example, base their beliefs, even though I don't agree with them. Are you telling me that I'm more open-minded and tolerant than you are?
If God is all-powerful, who's going to compel Him to do anything?
You've been trying to force your own perspective of how the universe is onto it, and then declaring that "it doesn't make sense" because it doesn't match up to what you think it should be.
The universe does not appear to operate how I think it should.
I didn't say anything about how you think it SHOULD be. I said "how you think it is". You've decided that the universe is a certain way, and then flatly refused to even look at, let alone try to understand, anyone else's point of view. And then you wonder why you don't comprehend Christians and their beliefs. It's because you won't shut up long enough to hear anyone else.
Is there any basis to think people are awarded or punished according to how much they harm others after they die? No. There is no apparent fairness in the universe. And that might be because there is no God.
Or it might be because, as you've been told any number of times now, this isn't about rewards or punishment or "fairness". And God certainly is not obliged to conform to YOUR perceptions and standards of how things should be. It should go without saying that, "There's no God, because if there was, I think He should do things this way instead of the way they are" doesn't constitute proof of anything, except perhaps a bit of narcissism on your part.
The universe operates within natural laws that I have no say over but can be detected by quantitative analysis. The supernatural, let alone God, cannot be assumed to exist from scientific inquiry or reason as far as I can tell so far.
You should possibly look up the words "faith" and "belief", because I'm thinking you're a bit shaky on the concepts.
When you allow for the possibility that you've been mistaken about the order of things and open your mind to the change in perspective required to see Christianity on its own terms, you will begin to comprehend it. You might still disagree, but it won't be because you're demanding that we conform to you and we refuse.
Don't forget that while Christianity makes no sense to me, I absolutely would rather believe it than what I believe. Again, it's obviously true that the universe does not conform to what I want. And again, not everybody can believe something that doesn't make sense by sheer willpower. It comes down to the fact that everything I can perceive about the universe so far does not mesh with the Christian concept of God. There's no evidence for the supernatural.
I would be mightily obliged if you would stop saying, "Belief by sheer willpower", as though anyone except you has ever suggested it. You are, once again, making assumptions about how things are and then stating them as fact. I would also be mightily obliged if you would disabuse yourself of the notion that I am either trying to convince you to believe in Christianity or justify it to you. I am merely explaining what we believe in answer to your questions about it. We are not debating its rightness or wrongness, nor are we going to, so if you want to ask questions about what we believe, I'll be happy to try to answer. If you're going to continue with arguments about why it's wrong to believe it, our conversation is finished.