what is your opinion on christians.

Oh and let me add. The bible was written on papyrus and something else. I think it was lambskin. It depends also depends on whether your talking about the NT or OT. So be careful when you say something pre dates something. Because papyrus or the other material scribes wrote the bible on only lasts for so many amount of years before it deteriorates. I remember some guy tried to tell me the Egyptian religion is older than the Jewish religion and blah blah blah. But Egyptian stories were written on pyramid walls. Those walls last as long as no one knocks them down get my drift. So just because the oldest records we have are from so and so time does not necessarily mean they didn't exist before that. it just means the older ones either have not been found yet or they have deteriorated into dust. You won't find biblical scriptures carved on any pyramid wall naddadda mean.

 

And given that Christianity incorporates European pagan traditions in order to convert the locals there's not reason to expect they wouldn't do the same in the region it was founded. If you want to invent a new god/prophet and have people follow them borrow existing concepts. I mean even if that wasn't actively the goal you will interpret new information based on your previous experiences, which would be the current religious structures, myths, and concepts.

I mean you can even see Islam as kind of doing the same thing. Why invent a whole new god when you can just borrow an existing one.

In all three of the above cases you have an easier time trying to convince people to follow you because you're going, "Well you know that this god is real right? Well we just happen to have the newest/best/realest version of this god." Even in the modern era you don't really have a whole lot of invention of new gods. What you have is people splitting off into little sects based on their specific paradigms of existant gods, which in some cases can make a deity with the same name drastically different and is really no different to creating a whole new god except that you have easier recruitment.

I mean I'd have a far harder time convincing anyone that a new god exists than even some pretty drastic re-tooling of existing deities.

 

Comparative mythology is bit just Egypt - Virococha, Zoroaster, Dionysus...there are plenty of others...Christ is just one later arrival of the "risen god" archetype.....Wotan/Woden/Odin has that too

As for age, as the civilization that created Gilgamesh predates the Bible myth then yah, it's older....that is a really poor argument my friend and is clutching at straws

 

Oh so your actually talking about the Jesus story. Not the OT. First before I look this stuff up where did you get your info from. Just making sure it is a legit source and not a phony internet article or documentary. I can gurantee you that there are no mythology stories that predate the Jesus story that are practically parallel to it. I did this research a long time ago first after watching the Zeitgeist and religulous.

In fact state all the similarities between these mythological stories and the Jeusus story. I just want to make sure I don't waste my time doing research, if you got your info from one of these crappy documentaries or internet articles. And the internet articles are all over the internet. So please tell me you read this stuff from a legit source. If so what was it so I can take a look at it.

 

Now don't get me wrong there are some stories similar to the jesus story. But they come after the the NT scriptures were written.

 

Virococha is providenced in Incan mythology way back...start there

Interestingly the flood myth is there too

 

Ill have to continue tomorrow. I have a headache. By the way where did you read this mythology story. Some of these stories you won't be able to find the REAL ones on the internet. I had to got to my University to read bits and pieces of the Heru story from various sources basically because it was never written down but passed down by oral tradition for the most part. I also had to order a book off amazon.com. You can find the stories on the internet but they have been changed and are completely fraudulent. Which is why so many people think the story of Jesus was plagiarized from them. So I must ask, where did you read this story? Not saying you didn't read it from a decent source. But I just have to ask.

 

Maybe what I said doesn't apply to this particular story but it does for most of them.

 

Just think in terms of the fact that a worldwide flood would leave physical evidence in a host of different manners, both geologically and biologically. Look into the genetic signatures that would be left in literally every animal if their population was reduced to two (the minimum population size for sustainable genetic diversity is around 10,000 to 40,000 individuals). We know the rate at which mutations accumulate at neutral loci and we are able to construct molecular clocks based on these rates. If there were a genetic bottleneck of that size, it would be apparent.

He's a biochemist who made the claim that there are molecular machines of irreducible complexity within the cell that point to a designer. He's not an ignorant man and I'm sure that he knows full well that the idea of a worldwide flood is not borne out by evidence. As to his claims regarding intelligent design, these were a restatement of Paley's watchmaker argument, and he was rather humiliated by the 2005 Dover trials in which he walked back his claims and admitted under oath that they were not scientific beliefs. He has ceased doing research, has no grad students, his department treats him as a pariah, but he's made a LOT of money selling books. In the meantime, the molecular machines that he cited as irreducibly complex (such as the flagella) have been shown not to be so.

 

If there is a god that created viruses, bacteria, parasites, etc. then that is most certainly evil. We know that the existence of viruses predates humanity as we can see the insertion events of endogenous retroviruses that link us to our related primates as these occurred to our common ancestors. What I mean by this is that some species that later diverged into both humans and chimpanzees suffered an infection by a virus in one of their germ cells. The virus was rendered inactive and was passed down the line of descent such that its broken code remains in us, long dormant.

There is a worm in New Guinea that infects people, then grows to become a meter long before opening a hole in people's abdomen and sliding out of it to infect yet more people. If god created this then he cannot be called compassionate. If he simply let the world go after the fall, well, he still can't be called compassionate or loving. Seriously, guy couldn't just say "No more Guinea worms"?

If god is perfect why do the morals of his book line up so well with primitive cultures and do not display the compassion that is espoused in modern morality? For example: "But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the [censored] in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you."

Honestly man, I suggest you look at the list of things that can send someone to eternal torment. Those are not just.

A man named Jesus of Nazareth dying on a cross is not evidence for god anymore than the Jonestown suicides were.

Still waiting on that trail of evidence.

 

I've seen very compelling arguments for judao Christian beliefs being a rehash of sun worship.

My default position is that all religions are simply social constructs anyway.

I respect freedom to practice whatever belief you like. while respecting the person and the person's right to free choice I don't really have much respect for the choice itself.

 

Personally I think a lot of the flood myths come from folk memories of the various local floods. Large floods that would have seemed like global floods to primitive people with no notion of the scale of the planet (or the workings of the water cycle) and no ability to travel long distances to escape them.
The forming of the Mediterranean, the English Channel or the breaching of the Bosphorus to form the Black Sea for example.

 

Wasn't there a lot of big floods reported at the time in other sources? And yeah, if you've never left your village, it would appear to have covered "your world".

 

That to me is believable. There's a reason that the disasters of the bible are plagues, floods, and locusts rather than supernovae, spontaneous appearance of black holes, and Star Wars prequels.

 

My thoughts about Christianity.

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Note to mods: one curse word in the vid.

 

There is a lot of questions I have missed. I seem to be getting bombarded with questions and arguments from many different people. I will try to address them later tonight, if not tonight then tommmorrow.

-8limbs the scholar

 

It's a bit silly to have an opinion on "christians" IMHO.
That's like having an opinion on "black people" or "English people".
It's too broad a category.
It can cover the old dear that volunteers in charity shops and makes cups of tea for homeless people and goes to church on a Sunday right through to ranting idiots like the Westborough baptist church and Kent Hovind.

 

I did not mean to judge ALL Christians and paint them with a bad brush. Then I would be also talking about myself. I was referring to the majority of them, in America at least. Which is anything above 50 percent if you want to get technical about it. I hate to bash the church, but things I have witnessed from it have literally almost brought me to tears.

And it's really not the same as talking about a race of people. Skin color has no affect on someone's inner self so it would be wrong to form an opinion on people based on race, because that is no different than forming an opinion on people based on the color of their eyes. But religions, as well as organizations people belong to can affect people in both negative and positive ways. It affects who they are as a person in one way or another. Sometimes in a good way sometimes in a bad way. And it may not necessarily be just the religion that has affect on the person. It could be the influence of their fellow peers that affect them.

For example, if I said what is your opinions on the kkk members, that would not be the same as having an opinion on black people or English people.

 

No. Because the KKK are a much smaller sampling of people that come together because they share certain beliefs. They are a bit easy to judge because they voluntarily align themselves.
"Christians" is a MUCH larger cross section of people where beliefs are much more in a spectrum.

And also...you're from the states. You guys do Christianity in a way that is a bit baffling to people from the UK that are more used to tea and crumpets with the vicar CofE. We know the Irish take that sort of thing quite seriously but for many British Christians it's something they do on weekends if they feel like it.

I'm all for judging Christianity (and all religions). But that's not quite the same as judging "Christians". Although I'll happily do that too if said Christians start using their beliefs to impact others negatively (which happens far to often).

 

Well you're judging an individual based on their choice of their foundational beliefs. Now some of them can be perfectly pleasant people and hold a variety of different 'Christian' beliefs. But in effect, by judgement of Christianity you thereby come to an individual's choice of religion, choice of sect, adherence, hypocrisy, cognitive dissonance, etc. So I don't think you can entirely separate the two but you certainly have to take it on a case by case basis, as you do with any group of people.