Author Archive
Your almighty deity cannot …
- Save any of his followers from sickness, disaster, disease, or loss of goods or liberty. And this is despite the screaming, fervent, desperate prayers and pleas of his “beloved children”. (What a great father!)
- Heal autoimmune disorders, cancers, genetic defects, paralyzed limbs, lost limbs, dementia, insanity, or even acne. (What a great physician!)
- Show up and convince, scare, bewilder, or just talk to any person, skeptic or seeker, in order to provide them with something to believe in other than wishful thinking. (What a great communicator!)
- Write a treatise that provides clear guidance as to what he is like and what he expects of humanity. (What a great author!)
- Provide his followers with some sensible, logical, convincing, sound, intelligent, ‘non-internally-contradictory information that they can pass on to other humans. (What a great inspirer!)
- Manage to inspire his followers with enough sense, love, information, grace, diplomacy, brotherly love, or humility to keep his church from fragmenting into thousands of squabbling sects. (What a great administrator!)
- Give his church enough unity, sense, inspiration, drive, integrity, or guts to ‘accomplish such good works as to shame people of their slander’, or to ‘withstand the gates of hell’, or to ‘overcome the world’, or to ‘keep the unity of faith’, or to do anything else that he said the church should do. (What a great founder and guide!)
- Do anything. (What a great, all-powerful deity!)
- LeoPardus
WWJD Series: Jesus and Anger Management
Jesus is almost always held up as the great, human example of love. He’s supposed to embody all that the Christian should aspire to (WWJD). When a Christian does something mean, unloving, etc, they often say they messed up and need to be more Christ-like. But since I now can look at the Bible objectively -i.e., without filtering it through a set of presuppositions that demand that it must all be (mis)interpreted so that it “looks good”- I see that being angry, hateful, vengeful, even going on the out and out attack, is really being very Christ-like. It’s just the sort of thing Jesus would do.
In fact, according to the gospels, he seems to have had some problems with anger management.
Let’s look at a few situations to see WWJD.
Fig tree withering:
Matt 21:18-19 “Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.”
OR
Mark 11:12-14, 20-21 “The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” And his disciples heard him say it. ….. In the morning, as they went along, they saw the fig tree withered from the roots. Peter remembered and said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree you cursed has withered!”…
A caveman could figure it out (The Gog Monologues)
In talking with my wife once about my reasons for de-conversion, I set forth some very simple logic about why BibleGod could not be real. I basically said, “If the God of the Bible or Christianity is real, then there are certain, distinct traits about him that we can be sure of. Those traits have obvious and necessary outcomes. We simply need to look for those necessary outcomes. If we don’t find them, we are forced to conclude that the being we are discussing does not exist.”
Knowing the logic of this was unassailable, she derailed it all by saying, “That’s Enlightenment thinking. It’s all human reason as the ultimate. There are more things in the universe than what human reason can deduce.”
Of course the discussion was over then. Once someone takes logic and brains out of the discussion, there are no guidelines to go by. One can make up any specious claims and back it with tradition, “alternate thinking”, appeals to authority, or voodoo.
Of course I knew this was wrong “thinking”, but I needed a bit of time to think it through. Aside from the obvious problem of divorcing the only thinking organ we have in favor of …….. whatever, the big problem with the “That’s Enlightenment (or Humanist) thinking” approach is that it’s bogus. It’s not Enlightenment thinking. It’s just thinking.
Straightforward logic isn’t something humanity only came upon after the Middle Ages. It’s been around since we first starting hunting and using tools. It doesn’t take a post-Enlightenment, college-educated, westerner to think that way. A caveman could do it…
Continue Reading September 24, 2009 at 12:57 pm 111 comments
Comfort for budding atheists (Ray Comfort that is)
Ray Comfort has been aptly dubbed “The Grandmaster of Christian Ignorance”. Here are a few choice samples of his utter idocy.
If you would like to see the expanded version, go to his blog, Atheist Central, and look on the right side of the page a little ways down.
• If God didn’t exist, the atheist wouldn’t have something to not believe in.
• An atheist is someone who believes that nothing made everything.
• An atheist is someone who pretends that there is no God.
• The human propensity to gullibility is evidenced by evolution’s many believers.
• It is impossible for a Christian to convert to atheism because a Christian is someone who knows God.
• We have men who call themselves scientists, when they should have instead got a job with Disney as “imagineers.”
• School children should have evolution explained to them, so that they can see how unscientific and crazy it is.


Top Posts


Just in case you were wondering
Most Recent Discussions