First of all, thanks for the article you posted previously. I'd say overall all it's just stating common sense. I won't nit-pick it though because it seems to be an honest effort on your part to seek common ground. And there's some common ground.
I feel I should say some things positives about religion. I like the fellowship that occurs in religion when it's about being festive and social. The Catholic Church near me is Croatian. They have awesome parties! It was kind of neat helping a Priest (yes, all black, white collar thingy) carry kegs onto the church grounds. I love it when the Priest rewards me by doing a couple shots of slivovitz with me. They have a live band playing traditional crow music. (I hope crow isn't an epithet for Croatian). I like it when people come together and have a good time. I wish Atheists could gather for fellowship and fun. I wish we could get together and do more positive things for the community as a group. But if we did, we wouldn't get tax exempt status so a lot of our fund raising would go to taxes. I guess we could set up a 501-C3 or something...
The problem is, whenever atheists get together, all they seem to want to do, and this thread is evidence of it, is complain about how much they don't like Christians or mock them for believing "fairy tales" or pretend to be edgy by making all kinds of blasphemous jokes--some of which are funny, but that doesn't really do any good in the world.
One issue is compartmentalization. You have acquired, knowingly or unknowingly, a psychological trick. The trick is that you can drop all the reason that you apply in everything else when it comes to religion. You see Criss Angel and you know he's not performing miracles. You see a plane in the sky and you know it's not flying because of pixie dust. But you read there's a magic entity that created everything including people which he uses in a proxy war against another one of his creations (satan), and somehow all your understanding of logic and reason gets tossed to the wayside. Then, I see a lot of religious folks trying to reverse engineer the logical side of their nature in order for it to better coexist with their faith.
I like to think that my faith is pretty well reasoned TBH. There's nothing wrong necessarily with just believing in Jesus and trusting him for salvation though:
"
All sensible people know that if you are tired and hungry a meal will do you good. But the modern theory of nourishment—all about the vitamins and proteins—is a different thing. People ate their dinners and felt better long before the theory of vitamins was ever heard of: and if the theory of vitamins is some day abandoned they will go on eating their dinners just the same..."
"We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world. And if we cannot picture even the atoms of which our own world is built, of course we are not going to be able to picture this. Indeed, if we found that we could fully understand it, that very fact would show it was not what it professes to be—the inconceivable, the uncreated, the thing from beyond nature, striking down into nature like lightning. You may ask what good will it be to us if we do not understand it. But that is easily answered. A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it."
It's not a requirement to know how it works, just that it does. Some people like to dig deeper though I guess.
"Believe or suffer for an eternity". Hey, Ghandi wasn't Christian either so I guess I'll have good company.
As I've said many many times, not all Christians believe that. See my previous post.
"God (as Jesus) died for you sins". No one asked him to for one. Two, he made us as sinners. Not only because of free will, but he created a Universe where free will has damnable consequences. Why was that necessary?
Good question. This is a misconception I've heard a lot of. Look at it this way: God
is goodness. I don't mean that he's a good being, or that he does good things all the time, (though that's true too), but he is the embodiment of the notion which we call goodness. The people who will be condemned are those who willfully choose to separate themselves from goodness. There is no other source of goodness anywhere. He is it. Imagine this analogy. Suppose there were a single star in the entire universe with a planet revolving around it. Some people say, "We don't like this star. It's too yellow/hot/whatever," get on a spaceship and leave to live on some barren husk in the outer darkness. Would they then have any right to complain that they couldn't see because it was dark?
You seem to think God is some kind of policeman, sitting there with his radar gun looking for someone to chase down and give a ticket to. In reality he's our father, calling us to come over and live in the home he's made for us. Some people refuse and would rather sit in the outer darkness than enjoy his companionship. They have no right then to complain that they don't find anything good apart from the source of all goodness.
"Religion is truth". If it's so true why does it have to reinterpret itself when it ceases to align culturally with the society it's trying to prosper from? Basically, Religion is steadfast in it's views until those views start to cost the church warm bodies.
I personally am very much against some of the new realignings, but I don't want to get into that.
Anyone here ever read "The Apocrypha"? Kind of interesting that a book "inspired" by God had so many hidden/rejected texts.
I've read some of it. And I wouldn't expect you to catch this yourself, any more than I could be counted on to detect the subtle differences between types of wine, as I don't drink wine really, but there's something about those books that's "off." They don't seem to fit like the rest of the Bible, and I'm not one bit surprised that they were excluded as being
not inspired by God.
