Why your faith?

doubtingmerle said:

"That's interesting", I respond. "I personally don't have much faith in any deity. Seriously, why should I adopt your faith?"

You step back, pause, and reply...

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There is no reason to adopt the "Religion of the Heart" unless you have a pull to become a more human, Human Being.

doubtingmerle said:

12 times in one year? That is impressive.

I have read through the bible at least five times myself. The more I read, the more I realize something is very wrong with this book. Have you not felt that also?

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Ive always thought if you have no problem with it, your not thinking. Don't get me wrong I land on the believing side, but certain things leave me dumbfounded.

doubtingmerle said:

12 times in one year? That is impressive.

I have read through the bible at least five times myself. The more I read, the more I realize something is very wrong with this book. Have you not felt that also?

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Yes and No. And I say this as one who has also read the Bible as much as you have, Merle.

What is wrong isn't, I think, the Bible itself as much as it is the unfounded and hyper-spastic assertions about it's epistemological and topical nature that have been foisted by ultra-fundamentalists. The Bible was never intended to be some kind of perfect, comprehensive manual for the whole of human life, yet it gets touted as such. No, the revelatory collection of writings within the Bible have basically one function: to call us back to God through Christ, not to tell us how to figure out every little moral conundrum we may encounter or to assume that God has intended to lay out answer for us on every health and science problem we might be plagued with.

So, I'd assert that what you feel is "wrong" with the Bible is nothing less, really, than the fact that many Christians articulate and promulgate a misdirected set of assertions (and misinterpretations) about the very book they hold most dear.

doubtingmerle said:

I have a strong belief in the value of being human. How would faith help me be more human?

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The Religion of the Heart is the Religion of Love. If a person has faith in Love, they will become a more human, Human Being.

doubtingmerle said:

I never heard any Christian tell me the Bible was designed to answer every question about health, science, or moral conundrums, but should I ever hear somebody say that, I will remember that you too disagree with them.

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Thanks for remembering me in this ...

When I read the bible, I am more concerned about what it does say. How can the tribal rants of one tribe against another be gods word? How can the bible speak favorably about owning slaves or killing babies? I wander how a person can read the bible 12 times and never ask such questions.

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I've found that if a person has read the Bible 12 times and he or she has never asked such questions about the Bible, it's usually because they've had little or no exploration into other religions, other philosophies, other ethical systems, or even other paradigms. Of course, I've seen a similar locality of thought evident among some skeptics and atheists as well; they remain stuck into their present view on things because....they utterly refuse to move outside of their own humanist views or to challenge anything they've heretofore believed.

None of this is surprising, however, if we take seriously what Zimmerman says about how various any one person's hermeneutical practices and perceptions of the world are rooted in individual interests and personal motivations.

doubtingmerle said:

As a humanist, I also have confidence in love. Is that all we are saying: Trust the power of love?

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Exactly!

doubtingmerle said:

isn't Jesus god? If so, how can God give his life to please himself? Or is your Jesus not God?

why couldn't God reconcile us to himself without needing to put himself (or someone elae) into a dangerous position in which he knew he would get killed? One would think a God who wanted to forgive would just forgive.

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Yes, Jesus is God the Son. And there are three Persons of God who are relating and sharing personally with one another.

First, what comes to me is that the life Jesus gave was only that of this life, of having His body alive on this earth. But Jesus stayed alive, since God can not die. So, His dying means that He left this world's life and His body stopped living on this earth as a physical body.

And Jesus Himself is so pleasing to His Father. This is what made His death pleasing, that He was doing the dying. And we humans in sin could not die right for our sins; so we needed how Jesus only could die right and be pleasing about it, in order that our Father would have justice for our sins and be pleased with it.

And because Jesus is God, God was not having any lesser, inferior being do the dying.

"'For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.'" (John 3:16)

So, a point I see here is how God gave His own best to us, His own Son, since God loves by giving and sharing His very own best.

doubtingmerle said:

How do you know faith would make me more loving?

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It's the quality of the love which we can have in Jesus. Jesus is God, so more and better in love, than we humans can be on our own. In His love we have His almighty power, also, to protect us from lusts, raging anger, fear and anxiety, unforgiveness, boredom and loneliness, hate, lingering suffering of hurts from the past, and other cruel and dominating dictatorial things of Satan's spirit.

With Jesus we can share in how He is able to love and able to please our Father.

doubtingmerle said:

Sounds good. How do you know you are really having such a relationship and are not just fooling yourself into thinking it is so? For a person that believes that thoughts in his head come from an allknowing righteous God thinks he has thoughts inside him that are infallible. If he is mistaken when he thinks he is he hearing from god, that is a problem. How do you know you are not mistaken?

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To be honest, I do have trouble sometimes discerning what is from God and what is not. But there have been too many times where I received information I could not have known naturally. Then there is the feeling that accompanied the information sometimes, and all of this was what Jesus said would happen if I believed in Him. Given the promise, I just don't see how I could take what has happened to me as anything other than fulfillment of Jesus' promise.

Ok, but many also think they hear from god and are hearing him ask for something quite different from you. Are many of them not really hearing god?

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I can't speak to anyone else's experience. I can only speak to my own. Given what I know about God, I do have to admit that I think many others are not truly hearing from God because their message and resulting actions do not match up to the character of the God I know from my experience and from the New Testament (NT from here on out).

doubtingmerle said:

12 times in one year? That is impressive.

I have read through the bible at least five times myself. The more I read, the more I realize something is very wrong with this book. Have you not felt that also?

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I admit there are some things, particularly in the Old Testament (OT), that give me trouble. But I have no problems believing the vast majority of it is from a good and holy God. I honestly don't know what to say about the parts I do have trouble with... I trust in faith that God is good, and believe that either these passages are not original, or that I am just not understanding them properly.

Sorry it took so long to reply, I started a new job last week.

Nihilist Virus said:

Try re-reading what you just wrote and tell me you didn't get it from Mein Kampf.

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I've never read Mein Kampf. All I can say is that these tribes were no longer fully human.

Let's use this hypothetical analogy: suppose an alien race decided they wanted to conquer and settle earth, but due to the differences in the earth's ecology they could not survive as they were. So they created human/alien hybrids to allow them to survive on earth and began populating part of America, say Kansas, and were preparing to invade the neighboring states once they were numerous enough. Once their motives were discerned, don't you think genocide would be a reasonable response? They are part human after all...

Morality aside, genocide could easily be performed without violence. Given omnipotence, I could snap my fingers and make all of the people sterile.

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The LORD had multiple motives that I can discern in wiping out those tribes. Aside from what I have already mentioned regarding the demonic activity, there was also the need for retributive justice for all the wickedness that was going on in the land. Moreover, the LORD was trying to teach the Israelites to trust Him implicitly. One way He did that was thru using them, a people not trained in war and without true weapons (like swords and shields), to overthrow the people of the land. Finally, God wanted to teach Israel to obey Him implicitly. These are the motives I can discern, and I am sure there were many more that I cannot discern.

Let me put it this way. Suppose I made the standing offer to anyone on this site:

Make a video of yourself bowing down and touching your head to the ground before a statue of a non-Christian god; in return, I will wire $100 to your bank account.

Do you think I'd have any takers? I don't think I would.

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Sadly, if you upped the prize enough, you would probably find a bunch of takers on that offer.

In fact, many Christians, without prompt, will say, "I wouldn't worship another god if you had a gun at my head."

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Talk is cheap.

And most of these Christians would openly say that they've had no supernatural experiences. Yet the Jews who were shepherded out of Egypt worshiped false deities by the thousands despite having personally witnessed miracles of great significance being performed by their god. It makes no sense really.

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The people didn't worship false gods in the wilderness, they failed to fully trust in God and tried to worship God in ways that God was not pleased with... also, those who refused to enter the promised land later repented and tried to go into the land (Numbers 14:39-45). The worship of false Gods came upon the later generations during the time of the Judges and after. It is part of human nature to doubt what seems to be too good to be true, right? Imagine being a people not trained in battle, with no swords or shields, being asked to trust that God would deliver a militarily strong people into their hands in battle... it takes faith to trust that God would not change His mind. They did not know God from the later prophets as we do. They knew the God who had destroyed the Egyptians, flooded the world, and chose them to be His people based upon the faith of Abraham. What if God was displeased with them in some way? They had grumbled enough already on the way to the promised land. He had reason to reject them already, yet they did not know that God was true to His promises yet.

The only thing that makes sense is that all gods were made of wood and stone, including Jehovah, and that the Jews worshiped, say, a warlord deity during times of war (Jehovah) and a fertility goddess during times of peace (Ashtoreth). Like it or not this is the best explanation available, and like it or not the Christian version makes next to no sense at all.

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That is probably at least partially true of later generations, but not of the generation of the exodus or the conquest.

You used other references in the Bible in making your case about the nephilim. Could you do the same here? I need to see evidence that God mitigates suffering when he smites people.

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God deals harshly with the wicked, but the child had done nothing wrong... my belief is an inference from the passages that speak of God goodness and mercy.

When you get so sick that you die from it, the natural expectations are that you suffer in the process. The burden of proof is on you to sway us from that neutral position. The neutral position is not that one does not suffer from a terminal illness.

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The text says nothing about what the child experienced. You can choose to believe that God caused the child to suffer intensely, or you can choose to believe that the child was in a coma or something, and experienced no pain. Either belief is possible, based just upon the text.

This is a thread. Threads fray into sub-threads. If you'd rather just abandon the conversation, then, as you say, that's your prerogative. I just don't understand what kinds of expectations you had.

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I was just stating what I felt, I had an idea that there would be opposition to God being viewed as I view Him. I do think this conversation is going nowhere, as we are both set in our beliefs about God, but I don't want to abandon it yet.

Originally you said,

I didn't think this deserved a reply. The people almost certainly took the worship seriously and would not have risked offending their "god" by offering already dead or seriously ill sacrifices.

But it wasn't common sense. It was pure speculation.

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OK. Call it speculation. Well, at least call it informed speculation because of our knowledge of how people normally take their faith very seriously, regardless of it's veracity. There are other examples in history of people undoubtedly taking their human sacrifice rituals very seriously, and wanting everything to be just right. It is speculation, but based upon the information we have from historical sources, it is highly likely that the sacrifices were not dead and ill and maimed. Think about it, from your perspective, YHWH worship arose out of pagan worship practices of the time, and YHWH was extremely specific in how He wanted the sacrifices to be offered... so even if you are right about that, then the worship of Molech would probably be similar in that aspect.

That's a good first step, I suppose. It's supposed to be a complete non-struggle because it should be obvious that most of the Leviticus laws are inhumane and detestable.

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I find no problem with the vast majority of the Bible, there are only a relative few passages that give me problems. I do not find the majority of the laws to be detestable... they are not always "humane" to our modern sensibilities, but not detestable in my mind.

doubtingmerle said:

Only the vast majority is from God? Interesting.

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I am not sure that the passages I struggle with are from God.

I find errors throughout the book.

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That depends on what you mean by errors. There are textual variances throughout the Old and New Testaments, but these are reconciled with extreme care by textual critics. I trust they are successful because of the shear number of manuscripts and God's providence.

Can you point to a single chapter in the Bible for which there is not an error in that chapter, or on the same page as that chapter?

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If you are talking about textual variances, I am not a Greek scholar, so I would not be able to identify such a section of Scripture. Are these the type of errors you are speaking of?

food4thought said:

Sorry it took so long to reply, I started a new job last week.



I've never read Mein Kampf. All I can say is that these tribes were no longer fully human.

Let's use this hypothetical analogy: suppose an alien race decided they wanted to conquer and settle earth, but due to the differences in the earth's ecology they could not survive as they were. So they created human/alien hybrids to allow them to survive on earth and began populating part of America, say Kansas, and were preparing to invade the neighboring states once they were numerous enough. Once their motives were discerned, don't you think genocide would be a reasonable response? They are part human after all...

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On the one hand you say that my analogy of Hitler is not applicable because Hitler attempted genocide on humans whereas Joshua committed genocide on demon-human hybrids, but on the other hand you suggest that your analogy here does apply. But your analogy involves humans with limited power and resources fighting against a threat that could potentially eliminate the human race. This is a false analogy to the Joshua genocides because God, being omnipotent, could have resolved everything without violence. He could have created another planet like Earth and placed the nephilim there.

Furthermore, your "evidence" that these people were demon-human hybrids is based on what the Bible itself calls a "bad report."

On top of this, you have already stated that demon-human intercourse was punished severely several hundred years prior and that is the reason that nephilim no longer exist today. You have no explanation as to how these nephilim should have existed during the Joshua genocides.

So I would say that your argument here is in a dire state.

The LORD had multiple motives that I can discern in wiping out those tribes. Aside from what I have already mentioned regarding the demonic activity, there was also the need for retributive justice for all the wickedness that was going on in the land.

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Again, we've covered this. There is no evidence that they were doing anything that the Jews would have even considered truly wicked. If the Jews were inclined to kill children who cursed their parents by throwing rocks at them until they die, and if these other people were inclined to sacrifice such children to their deity, how is one any worse than the other? While I freely admit we don't know this was the case, we surely don't know it wasn't the case. You can't definitively say that they actually were doing anything worse than what the Jews were doing, so to say that they deserved to be slaughtered is reckless and irresponsible.

Moreover, the LORD was trying to teach the Israelites to trust Him implicitly. One way He did that was thru using them, a people not trained in war and without true weapons (like swords and shields), to overthrow the people of the land. Finally, God wanted to teach Israel to obey Him implicitly. These are the motives I can discern, and I am sure there were many more that I cannot discern.

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First, these are your inferences. Second, God took them out of slavery and into a land of flowing milk and honey. If that won't teach them to trust him, how will it help if he compels them to slaughter women and children?

Sadly, if you upped the prize enough, you would probably find a bunch of takers on that offer.


Talk is cheap.

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If you say so.

The people didn't worship false gods in the wilderness,

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I don't understand what you're talking about. Aaron built a golden calf and they worshiped it.

they failed to fully trust in God and tried to worship God in ways that God was not pleased with... also, those who refused to enter the promised land later repented and tried to go into the land (Numbers 14:39-45). The worship of false Gods came upon the later generations during the time of the Judges and after. It is part of human nature to doubt what seems to be too good to be true, right? Imagine being a people not trained in battle, with no swords or shields, being asked to trust that God would deliver a militarily strong people into their hands in battle... it takes faith to trust that God would not change His mind. They did not know God from the later prophets as we do. They knew the God who had destroyed the Egyptians, flooded the world, and chose them to be His people based upon the faith of Abraham. What if God was displeased with them in some way? They had grumbled enough already on the way to the promised land. He had reason to reject them already, yet they did not know that God was true to His promises yet.

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None of this actually explains why they would bow down before a piece of wood or stone despite having witnessed miracles personally performed by God. You seem to be explaining why they were hesitant to believe in God with your "too good to be true" remark and the reasoning that followed, but I am talking about the actual worship of other gods. I'm saying that it makes no sense, and I am giving another view where it does make sense (where Jehovah is also a piece of wood or stone). All you've really done is write a paragraph where you tap dance around the issue.

That is probably at least partially true of later generations, but not of the generation of the exodus or the conquest.

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Again, a lot of people worshiped the golden calf during the exodus. So my statement is true of the generation of the exodus. My statement is also true of the conquest because I said that they would worship warlord deities during times of war, and Jehovah was a warlord deity.

God deals harshly with the wicked, but the child had done nothing wrong... my belief is an inference from the passages that speak of God goodness and mercy.

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But ultimately it's based on no evidence, seeing as how you present none here. Like I said, the default position is to believe that if one is stricken with illness that eventually causes death, then one will suffer. Evidence is required to sway us from this neutral position.

Why did God make it so that a fetus has the capacity to feel pain, knowing that there would one day be abortions performed on a mass scale? Pain is only useful to those who can avoid danger.

The fact is that if your God is real, then he's made a world wherein most living things with a nervous system end up dying in terror and agony. And yet I'm supposed to believe, on absolutely no evidence at all, that when God was slowly killing an infant in order to punish the father, that this was an exception to the rule. This couldn't be further from the truth. God was making an example, not an exception.

The text says nothing about what the child experienced. You can choose to believe that God caused the child to suffer intensely, or you can choose to believe that the child was in a coma or something, and experienced no pain. Either belief is possible, based just upon the text.

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I have no choice in what I believe. If I did, my "world" would be amazing.

Yes, the child could have been in a coma. But does it mention anything about the infant sleeping?

I was just stating what I felt, I had an idea that there would be opposition to God being viewed as I view Him. I do think this conversation is going nowhere, as we are both set in our beliefs about God, but I don't want to abandon it yet.

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Hmm, interesting remarks.

Consider Acts 5:38-39,

38 Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. 39 But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.

Apply that to this conversation. If you see me say something you can't answer, take the question to an elder in your church and see what they say. If Christianity is the one true religion, there should be a reasonable answer. If not, there might not be a reasonable answer. If you repeatedly see your genuine questions met with tap dances, you should know there is a problem. If you genuinely don't care that there is a problem with your religion, I simply can't help you.

OK. Call it speculation. Well, at least call it informed speculation because of our knowledge of how people normally take their faith very seriously, regardless of it's veracity.

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This contradicts what you said above:

NV: Let me put it this way. Suppose I made the standing offer to anyone on this site:

Make a video of yourself bowing down and touching your head to the ground before a statue of a non-Christian god; in return, I will wire $100 to your bank account.

Do you think I'd have any takers? I don't think I would.


f4t: Sadly, if you upped the prize enough, you would probably find a bunch of takers on that offer.

NV: In fact, many Christians, without prompt, will say, "I wouldn't worship another god if you had a gun at my head."

f4t: Talk is cheap.

There are other examples in history of people undoubtedly taking their human sacrifice rituals very seriously, and wanting everything to be just right.

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Yes, such as all of Christianity.

It is speculation, but based upon the information we have from historical sources, it is highly likely that the sacrifices were not dead and ill and maimed. Think about it, from your perspective, YHWH worship arose out of pagan worship practices of the time, and YHWH was extremely specific in how He wanted the sacrifices to be offered... so even if you are right about that, then the worship of Molech would probably be similar in that aspect.

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My understanding is that deities are ultimately based on the behavior of rivers.

Most civilizations settled near rivers for obvious reasons, and most rivers will flood for various reasons. Some rivers flooded with predictability, and the people of those regions worshiped dying and rising gods. Other rivers flooded sporadically and unpredictably, and the people of those regions worshiped wrathful gods. Jehovah was the latter, and Jesus was eventually the Jewish version inspired by religions of the former.

Anyway, your argument seems to be the following:

The Jews were extremely specific in that they offered only the best of their flock to their deity. Therefore, it is likely that this other group which is supposedly of the same origin offered only their best children to their deity.

I hope I'm faithfully representing you here. The problem is that you're not faithfully representing the situation on your end. The Jews detested the idea of sacrificing their own children to their deity. You completely left out that detail. Let's look at it again:

The Jews detested the idea of sacrificing their children to their deity. They also detested the idea of substandard offerings. Therefore, another group of similar origin likely shared the latter preference but did not share the former preference.

The reality here is that your argument is just a clear case of cherry picking.

I find no problem with the vast majority of the Bible, there are only a relative few passages that give me problems. I do not find the majority of the laws to be detestable... they are not always "humane" to our modern sensibilities, but not detestable in my mind.

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From this I'd conclude you simply have not read the Bible.