Jesus Christ (real or not?)

Except due to lack of specificity that's not how prophecy works. If you actually know what will happen then you have a chance of altering it. Instead you get some vague nonsense which people then connect to events after the fact. For example take the way some people connect Nostradamus to 9/11. If that was an actual, specific prediction, so specific that you knew what would happen you'd be able to avoid it. But basically it's a way of going "see, look, I was right" without actually making specific claims in the first place.

I'm not picking on specific prophecies though. I'm picking on the entire idea of prophecy in general and showing you why it's nowhere near good evidence, in addition to the the ability to back-edit texts to prove yourself right.

Against specificity is necessary both to avoid the actual thing and to know for certain the events have transpired or not. You don't get to claim a prize when Number 6 comes in first at the Kentucky Derby just because you said "A horse will win a race." The real problem here is if prophecy was specific to the degree it needs to be to serve any actual purpose it allows for falsifiability, that is the ability to be either proven wrong, or proven right, and religion tries to stay as far away from that as possible.

 

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.

- Charles Darwin

 

Some prophecies are specific and clear some aren't. You are throwing all prophecies into a box labeled as unspecific and ambiguous or vague. It depends entirely on the prophecy. My argument still stands that sometimes if a prophecy is "too specific" it will be rendered useless, because people will read the prophecy then stop it from happening. For example, what if the messianic prophecy was that Jesus will be born on 0 BC, he will die on 0 AD for the sins of mankind, a man named Pontius Pilate will put him on the cross. blah blah blah.

Now Pontus Pilate would read the prophecy, and say. Wait a minute. That's me. IM NOT GONNA DO IT!!! There you have it. Jesus could not die for the sins of mankind, because the messianic prophecy was too dang specific.

This isn't advanced level calculus. I don't see why it can't be understood. I don't see how my argument is wrong.

 

That's because you believe the purpose of prophecies is to confirm themselves; a benevolent and compassionate god would be more than happy for his prophecy to not pass in order to save lives and alleviate suffering. This neglects the fact that she could certainly say "HEY YOU IDIOTS DON'T BUILD A CITY ON THAT ISLAND IT'S A VOLCANO!" The island would still detonate and people living fifty miles aways would say "Whoo, that was a close one. Yo, we better go dance naked in the moonlight to glorify her!"

 

Well...............imagine a world with no pain and suffering. A world where nothing bad happens to anyone. We would be spoiled little brats.

Adversity builds character. At least from my experience. Struggle builds character. God didn't want to spoil us. He designed things so we would grow up to be strong righteous individuals.

Ever met a child that got everything he ever wanted from his parents. They never said no to him. The child has absolutely no problems, his parents are billionaires, he gets whatever he wants, never knew the world struggle.

Well, that child grew up to be Donald Trump.

God knows what he is doing.

 

God sent prophets in the bible to warn the Israelites countless times in the scripture.

 

See, this is what I mean by the perversity of Christianity. There are children who develop brain tumors because one of their many cells goes rogue and they die painfully without medical treatment because they were born in the wrong country. Tell me that's building character. There is an arbitrariness and misery to the universe that simply kills people or tortures them to death.

And yet many natural disasters occur without warning or, at the very least, without the ability of people living in that situation to predict and deal with them. Do you believe that God only cares about the Israelites? That doesn't sound compassionate. That sounds tribal and primitive.

Edit: Also, why send a prophet? A lot of people don't believe random people who tell them "Don't go there it's EVILLLLLL!" There's plenty of people telling us that today that we all ignore everyday. The WBC comes to mind. If he or she really wanted to send a warning big flaming letters in the sky work well.

 

If I can save my child one ounce of suffering as his father I will do so, without a seconds hesitation

Adversity also breaks people, and how much character do you actually think being born a harlequin baby actually develops?

Ever knew a child that was beaten, tortured, neglected and killed....that baby didn't grow into anything because it is dead, but it sure was full of character

You have failed to establish he actually exists, and even if you take it is read that such a being DOES exist whilst that God may know what it is doing, it clearly does not give a rats ass about it's creation

 

Man this could go on and on. God designed an after life for a life of no struggle and pain because he truly does care about us. He designed this world so we could grow and mature, and hopefully choose a righteous God fearing path. There has to be struggle, pain, and disaster in the world, otherwise we would be spoiled and we wouldn't grow and mature. And if there was no struggles in life, no disasters or pain. Then we would already be in heaven.

We spank our children when they are young and make them fear us, because if we don't they will grow up to be spoiled. In fact if we don't getem while they are young they may grow up so wicked they may hit us and attack us when they get older. We spank our children becaue we love them, and when they get older and mature enough, we stop spanking them because it is no longer needed.

Now, God doesn't really CAUSE pain and suffering. He just deisgned the world where pain and suffering could possibly happen, which is largely because of our free choice. Because of our free choice to do good or evil, the product of that is humans choosing to do evil.
Now God allows pain and suffering in the world yes, but he loved us enough that he designed a heaven where there is no disease, pain, or suffering in the world.

Now imagine if we had no pain and suffering in the world. We'd be spoiled little brats, and we probably wouldn't even make it to heaven because we would be too wicked and evil to get there.
God designed the world with an intelligence we puny humans are too ignorant and dumb compared to him to understand.

 

Sorry but this argument is intellectually weak - aside from anything else even under the logic of the bible (if that is not an oxymoron) the big G basically rebooted twice...once with Eden, once with the flood and thus the word we have now

it also fails to explain why for millions of years he killed off billions of organisms only to then say "ok, now conditions are right for the bald monkeys....have a male and a female one...oh crap, I made the female too independent...kick her out of eden and make another from a rib"

 

It also has ZERO evidence to support the assertions....the ineffable will of God is mentioned as "this is his plan" but it is guessing and backward engineering of the highest order...you believe that is God's intent? Fine - it has met your standard

it collapses instantly at my standard, so if that IS what he want sthen screw him I want no part of his petty and jealous tyranny

 

Well said good sir. It baffles me how this kind of logic is ignored or downplayed by some Christians. "Well, God works in mysterious ways, eh, eh" (nudge nudge). Or, "How can we humans possibly understand the will of our magnificent Jebus." Lowly sinners in the eyes of an angry God and all that. "God is punishing us because of the gays! We have to put an end to this blasphemy!"

 

Only for some people. For those who work on a Saturday it's eternal pain and torment.

How does giving some people a brain tumor and others a cushy life in the Hamptons strike you as just?

So you'd be cool with me exposing children to radium so that they develop tumors? I mean, we don't want to spoil them.

Some suffering is genuinely beyond people's control. If you are born in America you will likely have a higher standard of living than someone born in Africa. In part this is due to human choices, but not entirely; because we evolved in Africa our diseases evolved there with us. They learned our defenses and how to thwart them. Only the healthy left Africa, so our diseases stayed there. And now if you are born there you are likely to contract a host of illnesses, not due to human choice, but simply due to being the wrong place at the wrong time. An omnipotent and compassionate god would not allow that. So we've reached phase 2 of Christian perversity: it's your fault that you're suffering.

[quote[Now God allows pain and suffering in the world yes, but he loved us enough that he designed a heaven where there is no disease, pain, or suffering in the world.[/quote]

But you're not welcome if you're a woman who lied about being a virgin in a patriarchal society that will stone you.

So it's intelligent to infect children with cancer?

 

Evolution is really the most uncompassionate thing out there. Reproduce by any means necessary and if you're born with an A instead of a T in the right spot have a life of misery. I mean... seriously, a lot of critters just never have a chance.

This video may be disturbing. It depicts an impala giving birth before it leaves its newborn baby and a leopard eats it.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjuHYvieJlw"]Unbelievable: Leopard Hesitates Before Taking Out An Impala Lamb At Birth - YouTube[/ame]

So we need 3 billion years of this before god can start its project?

 

It says my message is too short. But I injected answers to your questions above.

 

Oh good lord, are you really espousing intelligent design?

 

And you seem to keep ignoring the fact that this deity is supposed to be omnipotent. If it wanted something it's very easy to set the starting conditions to do so. Also it doesn't explain the benefit to the deity for us choosing the correct religious path out of all those which have existed.... you know by happening to be born in the correct time period and region.

If I create a computer simulation with simulated humans on a planet, who suffer horribly and who only a small percentage of which over the course of the whole simulation even have a chance to do a specific action confused by the fact that there are about a thousand others which have the exact same level of plausibility. That action meaning that after they die they get to go to a vaguely described paradise for all eternity and the rest get to endure terribly suffering for all eternity. Now imagine they're not computer generated at all but real and on top of that I keep messing with them (and yes the biblical god does that). Imagine I did all that. I would be a terrible individual and I would still have to have some sort of motivation for all of this. I and most other people would call it sadism.

All of this is of course excused by the instant nullifier that "god works in mysterious ways." Nonsense. God works in eminently predictable ways. The bible anthropomorphises God because rather than a deity who created us in his image, we have created thousands upon thousands of deities in our own. We anthropomorphise everything. "My computer hates me, my dog loves me, etc. etc." That's how you get religions like shinto which have a kami for literally everything. And behaviour is determined by biology and the changes it has had to undergo over the long term. The idea that a non-physical entity who apparently both created and comprises the universe and is omnipotent should have human motivations is as laughable as expecting an octopus to do the same.

Even if you excuse that as a failure of humans to interpret such an entity outside of their frame of reference that means the Bible definitely has some things very wrong and likely has many others as well.

And on top of that omnipotence is contrary to the idea of free will. Either everything is predestined as designed by some master architect or god has no idea what I'm going to do next in which case he's not omnipotent. He either consigned all those people to hell/heaven at the inception of the universe or we're entirely beyond his control.

 

But you're not welcome if you're a woman who lied about being a virgin in a patriarchal society that will stone you.



So it's intelligent to infect children with cancer?[/QUOTE]

God allows pain and suffering to good people. Doesn't go out and malevolently strike people with brain cancer.
You seem to want God to void the world of all pain and suffering. Your argument does not stand, because if he made the world void of all pain and suffering, all darkness and evil, then we simply would not mature. My argument was that he designed the world the way he did, for a reason. Life is not necessarily fair because if it was we would live in a perfect world. In order to live in a perfect world God would have to take away all pain and suffering. If there was no pain and suffering, then we simply would not grow and mature. He made heaven because he loves us. Heaven is forever, this world we are living in is for a short time compared to forever. Your arguments, simply don't stand up. God made a way for us to live in a perfect world called heaven. If we lived in a world that was fair, and only bad people caught cancer, and we caught on to this, we would only be good people because we realized that only wicked people catch cancer, then we wouldn't really be good people. We would be "behaving so we don't catch cancer." God wants us to be sincerely good people. because he is a good god. And he loves us. Only a wicked father lets his son grow up to be a scoundrel.

 

Imagine a world of nothing, but a bunch of evil hitlerish people walking around. Complete chaos.

 

It's pretty much completely random. He does nothing to stop it.

That's the point, some people do not mature because of pain and suffering. Look up child soldiers - they would not have become soldiers if they were born into other circumstances like the United States, but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time they suffer. Children who were born with the wrong genetics die young. No maturation.

So you're saying that children having cancer is part of the plan?

A god who can create an imperfect world is not perfect. He dun goofed.

Or distribute it uniformly.

Some difficulty may cause us to mature, other degrees of suffering simply destroy us. You strike me as someone who has not observed true poverty.

Not all of us. If you blaspheme then you will suffer for eternity because god is sensitive like that.

So he rewards sincerely good people, but he can't reward good people because that would provide incentive? You're trying to have it both ways. Only a wicked father would paralyze his child by making them get into a car wreck.