Alnobia

Philosopher of the day has not been updated? If someone (Yankeedomland) doesn't update it, should we keep it?

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Northern Astra wrote:

I have read most of the Bible.

I don't think that "the crackpots" are the only ones deserving criticism, when people worship both a god and a book in which the god encourages genocide (Deuteronomy 7:2), it says that women should be ruled by men (old testament: Genesis 3:16; new testament: 1 Timothy 2:11-14), allows slavery (old testament: Leviticus 25:44-46; new testament: Ephesians 6:5*), etc.

*This is either translated as "servant" or "slave," as you can see at https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Ephesians%206:5

Alright, I don’t want to revive the debate, but I do have a new response to this argument:

The problem with looking at the Bible this way is that it completely ignores Christian theology and the living progression of the Bible. The entire purpose is that all of the genocide, bloodshed, and murder that the Israelites committed in the name of God wasn’t actually committed by God himself. But God, in his ever loving grace, was willing to go so low as to bear the crimes the Israelites committed in his name, because he loved them so much. And when the time was right, Jesus came to earth, and he showed the ancient Jews that God was not about the hate and murder, but about love and acceptance. Jesus came as a new covenant, and his death at the cross signaled the end of the old covenant with all its murder and hate, and the beginning of the new covenant, with love and peace.

The cross, just like the Bible, is where humans and God meet. At the cross, God stooped down low to take on the appearance of our sin and appear as a bloody criminal. At the cross, we took the nails and murdered an innocent man, putting our sin onto God. In the Bible, God stooped down low to take on the appearance of our sin and appear as a bloody criminal. In the Bible, we took the pen and described God that way, putting our sin onto God. God acted towards us and we acted towards God. This is true of the cross and it is true of the Bible.

We can either continue seeing the horribly evil portraits of God in the Old Testament in the same way that the Romans and the Jews saw Jesus on the cross, or we can see what is really going on behind the scenes. If we can fully trust in the revelation of God revealed in Jesus on the cross then the ignorant ways that the ancient Israelites sometimes described God will become obvious. But if we refuse to fully trust that Jesus is the full and complete representation of God then we will continue to read the Old Testament like the ancient Romans and Jewish priests, who put the creator of the universe to death. Don’t settle for fragments and glimpses of the truth, instead, put all your trust in Jesus, who perfectly shows us what God actually looks like—nonviolent, self-sacrificial, enemy-love. A God who loves his children and who wants peace. Dare to believe that God really is as beautiful as the cross reveals him to be.

https://www.rivalnations.org/god-looks-like/

Northern Astra wrote:

That is, in fact, quite a nice argument, and I don't plan to attack it. I read the article at the bottom, but I still have a clarifying question: are the authors of the Gospel then inherently reliable, because they have seen the divine? Or is the Gospel just more reliable, but still not perfect? The reason I'm asking is because the argument rests of the idea of Jesus, and Jesus is only known through the Gospel.
It's almost a shame that I am incapable of believing in gods. (I understand intellectually that people have religious experiences, but believing in something omnipotent just seems viscerally wrong.)

1) The writers of the Gospel are not themselves perfect. They are not even known. The reason we can rely on the Gospels for their accounts of Jesus is because we can cross check it with Jewish, Roman, and Syrian historical documents (like the works of Jewish historian Josephus) and determine their accuracy. In fact, the Gospels and the New Testament have a 97% cross-checked accuracy rate, meaning the people, settings, and beliefs correspond with that of regional historical and archeological documents.

2) You should understand that Christians view it in the opposite way, we are incapable of not believing in God, because we see a teleological universe. To us, the existence of prevalent structures (such as the Quantum Field or general relativity) as well as the facts of contingent beings reveal the existence of God. For me personally, math does this very well. How could abstract values have such total absolutality across the entire universe without being warped? How could abstract values govern every relationship between every physical body, or even between neural centers without themselves being materially existent? How can we have built-in knowledge of mathematical relationships that do not have to be revealed via empirical methods? And most importantly, how could such a vast system governed by abstract values arise from pure chaos and the void of nothingness? I’ll just say, God is a mathematician.

I also think the cosmological models of the universe point to a universal beginning of the universe, and that combined with the Leibniz Contingency Argument for God’s existence give me a pretty good idea of whether God exists or not.

Ya know, the common atheist argument is that God is just superstition, but the atheist conception of God is wrong, especially in this context. God is not a magical being who make things happen with the flick of a wrist or some fairy godfather who helps you with everything. God is more like a mechanic, working on a very detailed and structured machine, and who is revealed to us through the harmonies and intricate structure of that machine.