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Originally posted by jaywill
Too bad you can't ask Christopher Hitchens if the 10,000 some [b]journalists over the last 20 years are all wrong too.[/b]

Of course all religions are wrong, there is no godly communications, only creative writers who come up with pithy sayings that can help some people to be better persons, I am all for that, but don't expect anyone to believe a god was involved.

Humans are fully intelligent enough to make moral tales since there are so many bad moral attitudes to view even 5000 years ago. All it takes is an intelligent and observant person to see what bad people do that is obviously bad and make up allegories to tell that kind of person how to live more decently.

Making people better people, however, is not a sign of godliness, just intelligent creative people who can see how other people less endowed intellectually or morally, how those lesser people can make themselves better persons. Which is all well and good and much needed in our violence prone world but that alone is not a sign of godliness.

Humans would not even know what to do or make of real godliness.

We can't be gods anyway. Who would grow the food, build houses, educate the young, fix our computers and so forth? Not everyone can be an aesthetics and live from day to day expecting others to listen to their godly advice and get fed from the congregation or whatever. SOMEONE has to do the dirty work of civilization.

Originally posted by jaywill
Too many kinds of Athiesm out there. They must all be wrong.

Traditional atheism,
Mythological atheism,
Dialectical atheism,
Semantical atheism,
Christian atheism (oh yes, see Thomas Altizer)

they are all wrong.

Originally posted by VoidSpirit
they are all wrong.

If there is validity to multiple atheisms, does that mean that all religions are valid too?

Originally posted by sonhouse
Of course all religions are wrong, there is no godly communications, only creative writers who come up with pithy sayings that can help some people to be better persons, I am all for that, but don't expect anyone to believe a god was involved.

Humans are fully intelligent enough to make moral tales since there are so many bad moral attitudes to view even get fed from the congregation or whatever. SOMEONE has to do the dirty work of civilization.

Of course all religions are wrong, there is no godly communications, only creative writers who come up with pithy sayings that can help some people to be better persons, I am all for that, but don't expect anyone to believe a god was involved.

We don't care what you're all for.

Apparently God has reached out to communicate with man in the Bible. And the pithy and creative excuses of unbelievers cannot rob the Bible as a book like no other on earth.

Humans are fully intelligent enough to make moral tales since there are so many bad moral attitudes to view even 5000 years ago.

Human beings would not create a character like Jesus Christ even if they were able to do so.

Fulfillment of prophesy testfies to its supernatural nature.

All it takes is an intelligent and observant person to see what bad people do that is obviously bad and make up allegories to tell that kind of person how to live more decently.

I count your criticism as a naive generalization sought to extend a suspicion too far. It attempt to make the entire Bible Apochryphal. Many of us are not going to fall for the over generalization of anti-theists that the whole Bible is of the same nature as the Apochryphal and Pseudepigraphal books.

There is no reason why we should follow the anti-theist into this kind of abject spiritual darkness.

Making people better people, however, is not a sign of godliness, just intelligent creative people who can see how other people less endowed intellectually or morally, how those lesser people can make themselves better persons. Which is all well and good and much needed in our violence prone world but that alone is not a sign of godliness.

"Making people into better people" is your take. That is your humanistic view of reform.

The New Testament's teaching is reform or self improvement. It is that a believer is crucified with Christ and raised with Christ - terminated and resurrected as a process of God being dispensed into man.

As an outside anti-theist, you look at what is written there and you assume some sort of self improvement or human reform.

Besides, in the very opening pages of the Bible the dichotomy of the universe is not good verses evil. It is more profound than that. It is the knowledge of both good and evil verses divine life:

"And out of the ground Jehovah God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, as well as the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." (Gen 2:9)

This sentence alone persuades me that the writing is more than what any ethical human being could imagine out of any human system of morality.

The dichotomy placed before man is not Good on one side and Evil on the other. Rather Good and Evil are together on the same tree. And the knowledge of those two is set juxtiposed against "the tree of life".

Life verses the knowledge of good and evil.
Divine life verses the knowledge of good and evil.

This contrast alone has persuaded me that only God could have come up with a writing like this. It speaks of a more profound will of God than just to have a "good" man. It speaks of God's will to have a "God man".

Humans would not even know what to do or make of real godliness.

The New Testament reveals to us what to do with godliness - build up the habitation of God on earth. Therefore godliness is not merely for individual spirituality or individual piety. God dispensing His life and nature into man is for the building up of the corporate house of God as God eventually dwelling on earth in a aggregate and collective "house of God"

"Being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophetss, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone; In whom all the building, being fitted together, is growing into a holy temple in the Lord; In whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in spirit." (Eph. 2:20-22)

The NT revelation is that godliness - God dispensed into His people, is for the building up of a living temple of God - a human / divine habitation of God in spirit.

No other book in the world speaks like this. This is a revelation of God to man. It is consistent. It is too profound to be the mere moral imagination of man. And while there are some good codes to live by both in the ancient and modern world - nothing comes close to vision set forth in the Bible of God seeking a living dwelling place on the earth by being dispensed into a corporate body of redeemed, regenerated, transformed, conformed, resurrected, glorified, and deified human beings.

Now that some of us have seen the revelation there is no way we will follow the anti-theist unbeliever back into the spiritual death and darkness of blindness. We are for the building up of the habitation of God in spirit on the earth.

We can't be gods anyway.

As the Apostle Peter wrote, the Christians have become "partakers of the divine nature" .

And in cooperation with His salvation we can become "conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the Firstborn among many brothers."

We can be builded up in oneness in many local churches around the globe just as God is doing. And just as Christ taught nothing will prevail against the builded church. She is universal and triumphant.

And through her overcomers Christ will establish a beachhead for His second coming. And the enemy of God will be cast into the lake of fire.

As the apostle Paul wrote the church - "Now the God of peace will crush Satan under your feet shortly. The grace of our Lord Jesus be with you." (Romans 16:20)

We know that His promise cannot fail to materialize eventually. And we see the durability of the church and that nothing has been able to destroy her in 20 centries.

And Revelation shows Jesus Christ as coming again, depicted as the very Word of God -

"And I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sits on it called Faithful and True, and in righteousness He judges and makes war. And His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many diadems, and He has a name wrotten which no one knows but Himself. And He is clothed with a garment dipped in blood; and His name is called THE WORD OF GOD." (Rev. 19:11-13)

You and your fellow anti-theists cannot fail to be anything but bitterly disappointed unless you turn in your hearts to believe. Christ is coming as "the Word of God". And He said heaven and earth will pass away before His word will pass away.

So that which came out from the lips of Jesus Christ is more secure to last than the physical universe itself.

"Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words shall by no means pass away." (Matt. 24:35)

And you are simply among the "slow of heart" to believe all that the Law and the Prophets have said concerning this One:

" And He said to them, O foolish and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken ! Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and enter into His glory? And beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, He explained to them clearly in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself." (Luke 24:25-27)

This is what Jesus spoke after His resurrection. And once more in His resurrection body he proved His overcoming all opposition and death -

"And He said to them, These are My words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all the things written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and Psalms concerning Me must be fulfilled.

Then He opened their mind to understand the SCriptures; And He said to them, Thus it is written, that the Christ would suffer and rise up from the dead on the third day, and repentance for firgiveness of sins would be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things." (Luke 24:43-48)


Christ has also opened our minds to understand. We're not going back to the blindness of unbelief.

Who would grow the food, build houses, educate the young, fix our computers and so forth? Not everyone can be an aesthetics and live from day to day expecting others to listen to their godly advice and get fed from the congregation or whatever. SOMEONE has to do the dirty work of civilization.

In the church life we are all priests - the priesthood of the believer. And like Peter, John, Paul etc. many have fishing jobs or tentmaking jobs. And we are pleased that some be free to devote their full time to the labor of caring for the gospel and the sheep of the flock.

Where I meet we have no clergy and we have no laity. We have members of the Body of Christ consecrated to God's eternal purpose. And this is the kingdom that will last when all earthly kingdoms fail and fall.

" And the world is passing away, and its lust, but he who does the will of God abides forever." (1 John 2:17)

We have received an unshakable kingdom.

Originally posted by 667joe
If there is validity to multiple atheisms, does that mean that all religions are valid too?

what do you mean by validity?

Originally posted by 667joe
There are at least 313 religions in the US. If you believe in one of them, then you think the other 312 are wrong. An atheist thinks all 313 are wrong. "Who is more likely to be correct? If you still think only yours is correct don't you think you are rather presumptuous?

I'd like to see the original source for this. I suspect many of these are versions of Christianity, some will also be versions of Islam, Judaism etc.

Certainly some versions of Christianity preach that all the other versions are wrong and the same goes for many variants of all the religions. Probably the reason most sects spring up is because their adherents believe the parent denomination to be wrong in some, often fundamental, way. Whether each sect counts as a separate religion is debatable.

Relevant joke by Emo Philips:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2005/sep/29/comedy.religion

I have started (or possibly just contributed to) a thread or two raising this issue is the past but I believe my limited research identified [edit]a little more than 20 distinct major[/edit] religions in the world today, when treating denominations and sects as part of the parent religion.

The point still stands though: there are a large number of mutually exclusive religions in the world today, all (including Christianity) with similar levels of evidence to back them up. At most one of them can be right and it is far more likely that none of them are.

--- Penguin.

Originally posted by googlefudge
One slight quibble/correction.

While an atheist might well think that all 313 are wrong, the requirement for being an atheist is simply to think that all
313 are unproven.

Religions do not have to be proven. Scientific facts have to be proven. That
is why evolution is called a theory because it has not been proven in science.

P.S. Atheism has not been proven either. HalleluYah !!! 😏

Originally posted by RJHinds
Religions do not have to be proven. Scientific facts have to be proven. That
is why evolution is called a theory because it has not been proven in science.

P.S. Atheism has not been proven either. HalleluYah !!! 😏

And neither has gravity or electro-magnetism. Your point is?

-- Penguin.

Originally posted by RJHinds
Religions do not have to be proven. Scientific facts have to be proven. That
is why evolution is called a theory because it has not been proven in science.

P.S. Atheism has not been proven either. HalleluYah !!! 😏

You have had the meaning of the word theory explained to you many times and the fact
that you continue to get it wrong is now simply proof of your dishonesty and lies.


Evolution happens, it is a fact, it has been observed and proven.


And religions do need positive proof for their positive claims which none of them have.
Which is why atheism is the only rational position.

Originally posted by googlefudge
You have had the meaning of the word theory explained to you many times and the fact
that you continue to get it wrong is now simply proof of your dishonesty and lies.


Evolution happens, it is a fact, it has been observed and proven.


And religions do need positive proof for their positive claims which none of them have.
Which is why atheism is the only rational position.

In your dreams, maybe.

Originally posted by RJHinds
In your dreams, maybe.

No reality.

The thing I believe in and you ignore.

Originally posted by Penguin
And neither has gravity or electro-magnetism. Your point is?

-- Penguin.

You are wrong on both counts. There are scientific laws dealing with both
gravity and electromagnetism. Laws have been proven.

http://www.jimloy.com/physics/gravity.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_induction

Originally posted by RJHinds
In your dreams, maybe.

how do you decide which scientific theories you are going to believe and which ones you wont?

for example, do you believe in the theory of gravity? the strong and weak force? the electromagnetic force?

what about chemistry do you believe taking an asprin will help take away pain?

is the theory of photosynthesis correct?

edit: i see you accept the fundamental forces. why do you accept them as proven and not accept the universe could be created by a large explosion?

how do you decide rj?

Originally posted by googlefudge
No reality.

The thing I believe in and you ignore.

You can believe in your religion of Atheism if you like, however, I think Christianity
is more believable to me. HalleluYah !!! 😏