Posted on 05/01/2011 7:24:18 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
What makes it the word of God? Your choice? Prove that it's the word of God. A Muslim will tell you that his little green book is the word of God and that yours is false.
You will say that his is false. A Jew will tell you that your NT is and the Muslim book are false. A Mormon will tell you that both your and the Jewish books are incomplete, you will say that the Mormon book of Mormon is false, etc., etc. It's one man's word against another; one man's chosen belief against another.
Why, even the collection of books the people who call themselves Christians call the Word of God is not the same for all Christians! The Protestants will tell Catholics and Orthodox that their "Apocrypha" are false, the Ethiopian Orthodox will tell you that the Book Enoch is inspired, the Catholics and Orthodox will tell you that not everything the Church knows is in the Bible, etc.
There are hundreds of other man-made religions in this world, with just as many deities. They all claim to be true and dismiss others as false. Why? because they say so? The authority you ascribe to (your chosen) God is something you chose to believe. Just because you chose to believe something doesn't make it true.
Do you really believe that your beliefs determine what is true and what isn't? I am beginning to suspect that some do. I hope you don't, because that's bordering on dementia, as far as I am concerned.
Example?
Can you differentiate between your beliefs and reality? I odubt it.
As I was browsing through ‘recent articles’, or whatever it’s called, I read the title of this thread as, “When athletes attack each other” and I thought, cool, maybe it’s a new twist on mixed martial arts.
Major disappointment, Clive.
I’ve given you a source, probably several times, from a former atheist, and you demand that I reproduce his work on an internet forum.
You may reply to me after you have read Lee Stroebel’s works. Until then, pound sand.
Let me give you a hint - he set out to “disprove” the Bible as well.
He encountered the numerous proofs that you demand people give you, but refuse to acknowledge them when they are given.
It’s the same fallacies, repeatedly recycled by them.
If they cannot objectively substantiate their claims, they’ll run an insult tirade why those who reject their dogma are bad, are crazy, are nuts, and so on.
So now they lie helpless, unable to decide whether the tribals are saved or not, by ignorance of THEIR CHOSEN DOGMA. Their conundrum is easy to understand. If they choose to say that they are saved in spite of the lack of faith in their chosen dogma, then faith doesn’t require their dogma, thus contradicting their dogma. If they say they are not saved, then their deity fails the test of justice, for it now punishes the innocent. They know this well, so they choose to avoid, and the endless prattle of insults rain on.
Then it’s the usual scoundrel’s trick of appealing to authority (defective induction). Ever notice, popularity contest religions greatly value converting “atheists” to their chosen superstition. For some reason, such conversions are of far higher propaganda value than others. Go figure, LOL!
The final 'take' is...
"He (Judas) did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it."
Matthew 13:13 - "This is why I speak to them in parables: “Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand."
The tribals neither saw, nor heard.
True enough.
You could have it appear etched in stone by lightning strikes and you would still be wasting your time.
Pro 23:9 Speak not in the ears of a fool: for he will despise the wisdom of thy words.
I think the atheists fear more being right than being wrong.
Keep flatteirng yourself.
They "substantiate" their claims by this silly circular reasoning: they believe because the Bible says so, and they believe the Bible is true, so therefore it must be true. Solipsism. Unadulterated infantile egotism. They believe it, ergo it MUST be true.
Lee Strobel’s Case Against Christ: Apologetics Backfiring
By Austin Cline, About.com Guide September 27, 2007
Apologists usually write for the sake of convincing people to convert to their particular religion, though in practical terms their work seems to be more about helping current believers think their religion is more reasonable and justified than it really is. Sometimes, though, the arguments from apologists are so bad that they actually end up making the case against their religion. If you look closely enough and find that their “best” arguments are riddled with fallacies and obviously just fishing for rationalizations, what other conclusion can you come to?
Jeffrey W. Haws writes about his experience when a friend gave him a copy of Lee Strobel’s book A Case for Christ:
The more I read the book, went over Stroebel’s interviews and the explanations provided for everything from “Why does God allow suffering?” to “Why doesn’t God give people a second chance?,” the more disillusioned I became. The more I read the products of Stroebel’s so-called “extensive” research on Christianity, the less palatable I found religion to be. I found nearly every answer given to be unsatisfying at best and amoral at worst. The explanations given through his many interviews were confounding, contradictory and hypocritical. The more I read it, the more I became convinced Stroebel was either simply fishing for reasons to convince himself to believe (”I want to believe in God; now, let’s see if I can talk to enough people who will give me reasons to do so”) or was utterly dense.
The answers indiscriminately combined New-Earth to Old-Earth philosophies, absolved God of all responsibility while saying he sends people to eternal damnation, gave Christianity credit for every bit of good any Christian has done while saying Christians who committed evil acts weren’t “True Christians,” said atheism devalues life on Earth while saying the only objective of God is to get as many people as possible to heaven.
No one did more to solidify my lack of faith in God than did Stroebel. He showed me that, even with extensive research, interviews, etc., it isn’t remotely possible to reconcile all the seeming contradictions within the Christian faith. Those contradictions are real. For a long time, I thought I was missing something. All these people around me had faith, and I just couldn’t seem to get to that point. I saw all these problems, and I thought, “What is it that I’m not getting?” A Case for Christ showed me I got it all along.
There are better and worse apologists for Christianity, but in different ways they all arguably make a better case for atheism than they do for Christianity. When it comes to the inferior apologists, one can argue as above that when a person does loads of research only to come up with fallacious and false arguments, it's hard not to conclude that they are defending a lost cause.
When it comes to superior apologists, we consistently end up with erudite arguments that the average believer would have trouble understanding, much less using as part of their daily, lived religious life — and even then, the arguments frequently point at best to a distant, transcendent deity which has little in common with the Christian god which most Christians actively believe in and want to think is reasonable to believe in. If we take those arguments seriously, we end up with an irrelevant god of Deism than the active, involved god of orthodox and traditional Christianity.
I consider the source of that advice(but not much), especially in light of fact, that I did not refer to myself once in post 2173.
"I am not calling you a fool, Allah is!"
Those who indulge in it, do so for the dubious satisfaction that their immaturity craves.
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