Do Atheists have an emptiness which needs filling?

[Danno 1,228]

How typical, a Christian that doesn't know his own Bible:

That is clearly a lie. Adam and Eve did not die. Look how you don't even know it says they will die the day they eat it. Or is it lying for Jesus, where you know what it says yet need to cover it up? Either way this is why you are no challenge intellectually.

You have to defend the scribblings of ignorant Bronze Age goat herders, and you can't manipulate your way out of what the Bible actually says. The emptiness you have is between your ears. Skeptics don't have that problem.

Before Adam and Eve rebelled, they were without sin, uncorrupted and when they left the Garden the -Clock started ticking for them-

Another school of thought is concerning the Bibles reference to spiritual death and literal death, .......actual birth and spiritual birth.

Don't miss the principle of the scripture and focus only on the detail.

When a wife learns her husband has been cheating on her, something dies between them, even if it is only respect, nothing can undo that transgression of the commitment most couples make to each other.

When Adam and Eve were not satisfied with eating every other fruit in the garden and instead they took from the only tree which was off limits, a transgression took place.

And everything changed.

"There is a way which seems unto man right, and that path leads to death".

I appreciate your interest in the topic

[james&olya 1,121]

Dannologic. Dan no logic!

Edited February 15, 2013 by james&olya

[rlogan 2,036]

Before Adam and Eve rebelled, they were without sin, uncorrupted and when they left the Garden the -Clock started ticking for them-

Another school of thought is concerning the Bibles reference to spiritual death and literal death, .......actual birth and spiritual birth.

Don't miss the principle of the scripture and focus only on the detail.

When a wife learns her husband has been cheating on her, something dies between them, even if it is only respect, nothing can undo that transgression of the commitment most couples make to each other.

When Adam and Eve were not satisfied with eating every other fruit in the garden and instead they took from the only tree which was off limits, a transgression took place.

And everything changed.

"There is a way which seems unto man right, and that path leads to death".

I appreciate your interest in the topic

Look how the smug insult-laden posting suddenly stops when you have to defend what is actually written in the Bible. And there is nothing you can say to God lying, it is plain as day. This is one of many, many examples.

I'm sure you are also totally unaware that there are two different sets of ten commandments, with the Bible insisting they are the same. This is another lie anyone with eyes can see.

Archaeology and contemporary historical sources prove there was no captivity of Israelites in Egypt, no wandering in the desert, and hence no Moses. The author of the first Gospel produced (Mark) was totally ignorant of geography in Judea and made numerous extremely stupid errors no person from that area would make. He was writing in Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew and lived in some other region of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Pauline letters were clearly fielded by Marcion of Sinope, in what is now Turkey, and both of these sets of literature were unknown before at least the 130's CE.

But you don't know anything of the actual history of Christianity, as is so often the case. The first historical reference to Christians was between Pliny the Younger of Bithynia and Emperor Trajan in 112 CE. There was no earthy Jesus in that nascent Christianity. No gospels, no letters of Paul - all of that came decades later.

You are no match for anyone who actually studied your Bible and the history/archaeology of this period.

Edited February 15, 2013 by rlogan

[B & G 200]

Here is my two-cents... the bible was not written by God, but by man. So I don't agree with rlogan's reasoning that God lied. Though I do agree with him that the Bible is factually incorrect. After all it was written by man and boy, can men make mistakes!

To Danno...

Unfortunately all the articles that you favor and all your comments are propaganda ladled to whatever cause you associate yourself with. I have yet to read a newsworthy, informative and at times factually accurate post by you.

By the way..I am not an atheist. But I am an open-minded and logical person. There is not clear right or wrong in where a person's beliefs lay. And to bring up and early post, if atheists do arrive at the Pearly Gates I hardly see God slamming the doors shut and asking St Peter to post a no entry sign!!

But then..the God I have faith in..isnt a vengeful one.

[Danno 1,228]

There is not clear right or wrong in where a person's beliefs lay. , if atheists do arrive at the Pearly Gates I hardly see God slamming the doors shut and asking St Peter to post a no entry sign!!

But then..the God I have faith in..isnt a vengeful one.

No clear right or wrong?

Apparently your faith is placed in the hope that we create our own realities, whatever we think God is,,,, he is.

The Atheist makes more sense than that.

You said you base your faith on logic, how logical is it that?

Lets see how this works......

-Danno is going to (hopefully) greet the God of the Bible in the end.

- The Satanist will transition into eternal bliss.

-The primitive Indian whole cut the hearts out of live sacrifices will inherit his own reality of God.

It's kinda like the games at the carnival where "Every ones a winner".

I wish the ability to create our own realities worked in other aspects of life too: Stock market, relationships, children, weather.

Edited February 15, 2013 by Danno

[B & G 200]

No clear right or wrong?

Apparently your faith is placed in the hope that we create our own realities, whatever we think God is,,,, he is.

Actually you are very right.. we do create our own realities, and whatever we think God is, he is. Thats why there religions on this earth. As in plural. There is Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and thousands others. Each see God in a different way, for them..for all of us God is whatever we think he is.

Please, go right ahead and tell these billions of people that they are wrong, that their reality and who they think God is clearly a disillusion.

[rlogan 2,036]

So I don't agree with rlogan's reasoning that God lied.

I don't believe in God. So I don't reason that God lied.

If you take Danno's belief that the Bible is the word of God, then God has not only lied to Adam and Eve, but all throughout the Bible there are easily proven lies.

We know a great deal about how the Bible was constructed. All you have to do is remove yourself from Church Indoctrination and read history instead. Insofar as the New Testament there were a series of councils through the 300's started by Emperor Constantine, the most important of which was at Nicea in 325 CE, where the ludicrous concept of the Trinity was conceived. It is called the "Nicene Creed".

The wildly diffferent sects of Christianity could not agree on whether Christ was God himself, a spirit, or someone who actually walked upon the earth. (There was no Jesus in the earliest Christianity.) So they made a political settlement: they made him all three things. So many times I looked up in Church wondering ####### this Trinity business meant. It was so weird, so unclear why it was important. Once you understand the history involved and that it was a political compromise between groups struggling for power then the scales fall from your eyes. No church will ever tell you why the trinity happened - they will only force you to memorize it and obey.

A number of other councils were held that determined which of the cacaphony of texts in circulation would be allowed into canon. Omitted were the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas, and many other works which have since been discovered in archaological digs like Nag Hammadi. But Christianity was made the official state religion and conformity with the approved texts were enforced upon penalty of death. The other books were burned and adherents persecuted for over a thousand years thereafter.

The Christianity of the Bible today reflects the dictatorship of the Roman Empire imposed upon people in order to control them more effectively. Every person was required to register with a local parish, and this was the means the dictatorship used to keep track of every person in the empire: for military conscription, for taxes, for the census, for search and seizure, etc. You can clearly see the two major sects that were merged by observing the Pauline letters have no earthly Jesus whereas the Gospels do. The book of Acts was fabricated, like all the other books, to have Paul meet the disciples in Jerusalem and make him subservient to them. It is a bridging document to merge the two different faiths. You see this throughout the Bible, and it explains why there are two creation stories, two sets of ten commandments, etc. (called doublets) - when you merge two different faiths you just put both their books in the same Bible. Christians are so blind they don't even question these radical inconsistencies. That is what the Trinity is: a political merger of three different belief systems.

Observe how irrational Danno is, trying to explain away the unexplainable, vs. how clear and powerful the real history is. The real story of Christianity is also much more fascinating than the fables the dictatorship imposed upon us in the 300's.

[Danno 1,228]

Actually you are very right.. we do create our own realities, and whatever we think God is, he is. Thats why there religions on this earth. As in plural. There is Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism and thousands others. Each see God in a different way, for them..for all of us God is whatever we think he is.

Please, go right ahead and tell these billions of people that they are wrong, that their reality and who they think God is clearly a disillusion.

NO, I wouldn't tell anyone they were wrong.... except you in this instance

When we pass from this life onto the next, some people will have been correct and others will have been misguided.

And of course I am not exception, Danno does not get to create the reality of God... if in fact there is none.

And by the same token the Atheist will not make God go away if he was wrong.

[B & G 200]

Enlighten me.. In my last post.. Where was I wrong??

[Danno 1,228]

Enlighten me.. In my last post.. Where was I wrong??

Supposing that at the moment of truth... everyones faith or beliefs based in truth.

Or did I misunderstand you?

Of course I know you were mostly referring to the "here and now" but my post that you had replied to was not based on what we believe but rather what "Is".

It's kinda like if 5 people see a car accident and each in their heart and mind recall the fleeing car to be wildly different colors.... the fact is, the car was only one color.

[rlogan 2,036]

Explain this one away, Danno:

In Exodus, Moses comes down the mountain with the two tablets containing the ten commandments. Everyone is partying, Moses gets angry, and smashes the two tablets. So God tells Moses to make two new tablets in Exodus 34:1:

And the LORD said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.

and here is the list of the new, but different ten commandments. My favorite is not to cook a yearling in its mother's milk:

14: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God:

15: Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods , and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice;

16: And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.

17: Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.

18: The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.

19: All that openeth the matrix is mine; and every firstling among thy cattle, whether ox or sheep, that is male.

20: But the firstling of an #### thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break his neck. All the firstborn of thy sons thou shalt redeem. And none shall appear before me empty.

21: Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.

22: And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.

23: Thrice in the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord GOD, the God of Israel.

24: For I will cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders: neither shall any man desire thy land, when thou shalt go up to appear before the LORD thy God thrice in the year.

25: Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.

26: The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

About half of these are similar to the Ten Commandments you know about in your Christian ignorance, which discourages study of the Bible with open eyes.

Since these are the second set, one would presume they would supercede the first set. But you don't even know they exist. That's how appalling the blindness and ignorance is in Christianity. What can be more basic than the Ten Commandments? How can you not know this?

Clearly, this is a lie that the two sets of ten commandments are the same. I can continue to list innumerable outright lies and contradictions. You don't have to read far to find them. The first one is on the first page of the Bible with a second creation story coming immediately after the first creation story and contradicting it. They cannot both be true. So it is literally true that most Christians do not know the first thing about their Bible, because the first thing on page 1 is two contradictory stories on creation.

Atheists do not have an emptiness that needs filling. Christians do. They need to fill the space between their ears with knowledge and science, to remove themselves from this ancient superstitious blathering that is built on fantasy from the first page of Genesis to the last page of Revelations. I should be angry at the pastors I had in my youth because in Theological College they have to contend with all of these contradictions and lies and decide what to do about them. What they do is conceal them. In the days when less than three percent of the populace was literate, and the Bibles were only produced in Latin or Greek this is understandable. But with universal literacy and the Bible being the most widely circulated book on earth, now you do not have that excuse.

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

I admit that the Bible can be difficult at times. But there are cultural and historical contexts that have to be considered. The Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament) was written specifically to the Jewish nation. Years of Jewish scholarship and interpretation should be considered and respected. You should not simply point to apparent inconsistencies as proof that you know better than the original hearers what REALLY happened. That is outright cultural arrogance. Look again at the context. First, Chapter 34 has to be taken in context of the whole of Exodus, particularly chapters 20 through 39. In that context, chapter 34 is a reiteration of expected rituals under God's covenant with Israel. See 23:10-19. As you mentioned, most scholars (Jewish and Christian, and not all "fundamentalists") see the list in Chapter 34 as the covenant "Ritual Decalogue" as opposed to the universal "Ethical Decalogue" in Exodus 20. Again, this ritual covenant was PART (Exodus 23) of the WHOLE (Exodus 20-23). This is supported by the fact that this immediately follows the idolatrous golden calf episode of the Israelites (chapter 32). This idolatry itself FOLLOWED the agreement of the Israelites to the covenant with God (24:3). Despite their agreement, they broke the covenant by making and worshipping the idol. Second, notice in 34:1 that God says that HE will write the words on the tablets that were on the original tablets that Moses broke. And verse 28 says that God indeed (not Moses, as some wrongly assume) wrote the original Ten Commandments on these tablets (also see 31:18). Deuteronomy chapters 4 through 11 explicitly state this. Moses DID write the ritual expectations down. That's why we have Exodus 34! But God Himself wrote the Ten Commandments (from chapter 20) on stone tablets. Third, Jesus Himself referred to the Ten Commandments and specifically listed the commandments coming from chapter 20, not chapter 34 (Luke 18:20). However, Jesus is also said to have followed the rituals of the covenant listed in chapter 34. Throughout Jewish history, the Ten Commandments as listed in chapter 20 have been honored as the foundation of the Law and Covenant with God. The rituals in chapter 34 and elsewhere were outward signs of their covenant with God.

[elmcitymaven 9,711]

Maybe it's because I was born to atheist parents and raised without belief, but I just don't really give enough of a toss about what other people believe religiously to be so angry about it. The only time I get angry about religion is when it impinges on my freedom, and when it is clearly acting to the detriment of others. Otherwise, pfffft. Believe, don't believe. Whatever.

[Danno 1,228]

Maybe it's because I was born to atheist parents and raised without belief, but I just don't really give enough of a toss about what other people believe religiously to be so angry about it. The only time I get angry about religion is when it impinges on my freedom, and when it is clearly acting to the detriment of others. Otherwise, pfffft. Believe, don't believe. Whatever.

I hear ya.

[rlogan 2,036]

Hey The Patriot -

The Bible says the two sets of ten commandments are the same. All the apologetic gibberish you quoted can't change that:

I admit that the Bible can be difficult at times. But there are cultural and historical contexts that have to be considered. The Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament) was written specifically to the Jewish nation. Years of Jewish scholarship and interpretation should be considered and respected. You should not simply point to apparent inconsistencies as proof that you know better than the original hearers what REALLY happened. That is outright cultural arrogance. Look again at the context. First, Chapter 34 has to be taken in context of the whole of Exodus, particularly chapters 20 through 39. In that context, chapter 34 is a reiteration of expected rituals under God's covenant with Israel. See 23:10-19. As you mentioned, most scholars (Jewish and Christian, and not all "fundamentalists") see the list in Chapter 34 as the covenant "Ritual Decalogue" as opposed to the universal "Ethical Decalogue" in Exodus 20. Again, this ritual covenant was PART (Exodus 23) of the WHOLE (Exodus 20-23). This is supported by the fact that this immediately follows the idolatrous golden calf episode of the Israelites (chapter 32). This idolatry itself FOLLOWED the agreement of the Israelites to the covenant with God (24:3). Despite their agreement, they broke the covenant by making and worshipping the idol. Second, notice in 34:1 that God says that HE will write the words on the tablets that were on the original tablets that Moses broke. And verse 28 says that God indeed (not Moses, as some wrongly assume) wrote the original Ten Commandments on these tablets (also see 31:18). Deuteronomy chapters 4 through 11 explicitly state this. Moses DID write the ritual expectations down. That's why we have Exodus 34! But God Himself wrote the Ten Commandments (from chapter 20) on stone tablets. Third, Jesus Himself referred to the Ten Commandments and specifically listed the commandments coming from chapter 20, not chapter 34 (Luke 18:20). However, Jesus is also said to have followed the rituals of the covenant listed in chapter 34. Throughout Jewish history, the Ten Commandments as listed in chapter 20 have been honored as the foundation of the Law and Covenant with God. The rituals in chapter 34 and elsewhere were outward signs of their covenant with God.

Who is angry The Maven? You have implied someone in this thread is, and I see nobody expressing anger. I've stated I should be angry at specific individuals - not even relgion in general, but I'm not. I am fascinated by the real history involved here and as I said find it far more interesting than the phony apologetics. Despite all the insults levied by Danno too, that didn't make me angry.

I had years of people I trusted lying to me, knowing they were lying while they were doing it. I can remember very specific sentences now that were clearly manipulative means of pretending not to lie while doing just that. That did affect me. For many years it kept me in ignorance and believing superstitious nonsense. I finally decided to undertake an academic study of Christian history and wow did that open my eyes.

Edited February 16, 2013 by rlogan