The
Christian ThinkTank...[www.christian-thinktank.com]
(Reference Abbreviations)
Over-dex of Objections
[Mod Aug 22/2012...I hope to keep filling this out over time]
The God of the Bible is not worthy of my respect:
The God who 'created' nature is cruel
God practices genocide, and even endorses anti-Semitic writings in the New Testament (John, 1 Thess 2)
God is hypocritical in His orders, and in His ethics.
God must have created evil (1) and (2). He must be evil itself.
God is apparently insensitive to suffering, and natural evil.
God is either malevolent or impotent--He expects us to intervene in crime situations but He doesn't!
God must be cruel or insane to set us up for failure from the beginning.
God forces people to disobey Him, so He can punish them--both His friends (1),(2) and His enemies.
God unfairly condemns people who don't even know about Him.
And He even unfairly places people in specific cultures which will determine that they have a low chance of becoming a Christian.
God condones slavery and dishonors and devalues women.
God must not be all that loving, executing justice when He could just as easily forgive sins.
Plus, He punishes people eternally for non-eternal sins!
And then His 'solution' to it (substitutionary death of Jesus) is immoral and illegal!
God is even called "jealous", "vengeful", and "wrathful" by the bible itself!
His servants are cruel, too, even to butchering innocent women and children, more than once, and on a large scale, too.
God is a self-centered and insecure glory-hog, because He created an entire universe just to sit around and praise Him.
God knew that all this suffering and hell would befall us, but He was heartless/sadistic enough to go ahead with creation and history ANYWAY.
And He then offers me the "free choice" of "love me, or be tortured in hell for ever..."
Or so I THOUGHT it was a choice--but instead He predestined me to choose hell ANYWAYaccording to St. Paul in Romans 9! (1),(2)
And, this predestination was totally arbitrary, as if decided by a random set of dice
Besides, God just created us just to meet His own, personal EGO needs--He obviously is not 'healthy' enough without us!
Actually, it might even be that He needs us to feed him, since He gets hungry!
Actually, the very concepts of "god" and "souls" are useless:
Humanity probably invented the concept.
Science has shown us that humans don't have "souls" anyway.
The concept of God is riddled with incoherence anyway.
Even if He/she/it/they DID exist, our finite language is inadequate to talk about God.
And God (if he/she/it/they did exist) is so far beyond our knowledge, we could never know God personally.
The OT/Tanaach that tells us about the God is not trustworthy
It makes false claims: it claims to be written by Moses, but it wasn't, and Daniel 'pretends' that its telling the future!
It is filled with historical errors (1), (2), (3), (4), (5).
Archaeology has disproved it.
It is filled with contradictions (1), (2), (3), (4), (5).
There is no extra-biblical data to support it.
And the extra-biblical data that does exist shows that it is merely a rip-off of earlier ANE literature!
It was corrupted in transmission to us.
I have no affirmative reason to believe such a God exists
God should give us concrete proof., and the Christian interpretation of the "evidence" has no compelling support for it.
We don't have any evidence of God's existence.
We dont have any reasons to believe in spirits or a 'supernatural dimension' anyway.
Christianity cannot be true, since it needs so much defending? And God doesn't make it very clear or obvious?
The complexity in the universe doesn't need a 'God' to explain it--complexity arises from simplicity all the time
The supernatural elements in the gospels are not 'evidence', since the ancient world was teeming with fraudulent claims, aimed for the credulous masses.
Jesus didn't actually exist himself:
There are no extra-biblical records of Jesus.
He was probably just an amalgam of other savior myths.
He (and the bible itself) was probably concocted for power reasons, to control the populace.
The Jesus of the New Testament is not worthy of my respect (much less, worship or trust):
He was a hate-monger, and even anti-family.
He was dishonest and sacrilegious.
He was mean and insulting.
He prayed to a pagan god.
He was mistaken
about His return., and the Church
had to re-spin Him into something else!
Even His death contradicted the Law of God.
And He even tried to do away with (annul) the eternal, unchangeable Mosaic law!
The New Testament that tells us about this Jesus is not trustworthy:
The whole story about "Jesus the Messiah" cannot be true, because the Jews were not expecting a Messiah at all.
Instead, the early Christians twisted the OT into saying something it didn't, (even the Psalm 22 thing!) and they 'read Jesus back into' the OT.
But even then, Jesus didn't fulfill those messianic prophecies, he was a failure as a messiah to His people, and he didn't even fulfill the prophecies he was supposed to (so we would KNOW he was the messiah).
The NT itself was probably a hoax, written by people biased to the point of untruthfulness, perhaps victims of a group hallucination. And we know that some of the letters of the NT were frauds--written by someone 'borrowing' the name of a famous person to win their case...especially the so-called letters of Peter
These NT authors somehow felt it was okay to invent places and events,, inflate numbers, make up speeches/settings for Jesus (1), (2), plagiarize the OT, and borrow freely from pagan religions.
With all the problems associated with memory and memory recall, it is no wonder that, after the long, slow, hodge-podge collection, by warring factions within the early church, of oral traditions about Jesus, we find the NT accounts filled with contradictions about major events like the Resurrection , Infancy events, and Ascension (1) (2), and countless other small details (1), (2), (3), (4), (5),
Even the best historian in the NT (Luke) makes major, glaring historical errors (1), (2).--why should I trust the others, like the peasant John who was anti-Semitic, or Paul who completely mutates Jesus' religion into something totally different!
The evangelists/disciples even invented the miracles stories of Jesus, to "sell Him" to others, didn't they?
This whole myth construction was done so rapidly, and gained power so quickly, that those that knew the truth did not have time to speak up in time (1)(2), and the Christians somehow simply outlived those that knew the truth.
Thanks to the Jesus Seminar and the earliest gospel (the Gospel of Thomas), we know that the message of Jesus was 'embellished' by the early Christian communities, and the 'official version' of the NT we have today (and the doctrines of the Church) were not the original ones of the true original Christians--the Nazarenes and Ebionites.
The early church was so fragmented that they could not tell between 'authentic' books and 'inauthentic' books, and the process they used for deciding on what were 'official books' was corrupt and politically motivated (1), (2), (3).
And, by the time we get to Rome making Christianity the "state religion", it totally distorted the NT documents for political purposes, increasing the number of textual errors (further undermining our confidence in the NT).
And we even have reason to believe that the earliest church suppressed the truth and deceived people for reasons of power.
And even if it were all true:
How could I decide between all the competing world religions, all claiming to be true?
How would I know whether I had the right kind of faith or not?
How would I know how to deal with "faith vs. knowledge" issues?
The
Christian ThinkTank...[www.christian-thinktank.com]
(Reference Abbreviations)