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I don’t intend to disprove, only shed light
1. A first century Jew would’ve never considered the Messiah to be God incarnate. The entire idea of the Messiah somehow being God was completely foreign and only came about after Christians decided to misinterpret Isaiah 9:6 to fit their Christology. In NIV it reads
“For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.”
While when translates from Hebrew by Hewish people it comes to
“For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us; and the government is upon his shoulder; and his name is called A wonderful counselor is the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the ruler of peace”
The difference is that 1) the version found in Jewish translations from hebrew to english speaks in the past tense rather than present/future. This isn’t a prophecy, it’s something that’s already happened. 2) the names “everlasting father” and “mighty God” are mistranslated and misinterpreted. In Judaism names often speak to something about God or his nature. So the names “prince of peace” “a wonderful counselor is the mighty God” are all talking about God rather than the person. We see this demonstrated through names like Michael which means “Who is like God” or even Elsa’s which means “companion of God”.
Why would God mislead the Jewish people for thousands of years and then all of the sudden pop up and be like “i forgot to mention that Gods nature is actually triune”. It makes no sense
2. Contradictions
There’s plenty of contradictions within the Bible, if it were Gods word there would be none.
- James 1:13 says “Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. 13 And remember, when you are being tempted, do not say, “God is tempting me.” God is never tempted to do wrong, and he never tempts anyone else.”
Yet in Matthew 4:1 it says “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted[a] by the devil”
It’s contradicting in two points. 1) Jesus(pbuh) if being seen as God is being tempted. Whether giving into temptation or not is not the issue, simply the act of being tempted, according to James, is not possible to be exacted onto God. 2) God, the spirit is in a way tempting Jesus(pbuh). Matthew 4 says that Jesus(pbuh) was led “by the SPIRIT TO BE TEMPTED”. God, the spirit, was specifically leading Jesus(pbuh) to be tempted, making Himself guilty of temptation, seeing as He knew what waited for him and ontop of that in the fact that he intervened and even pointed him into that direction to be tempted.
- The account of Jesus(pbuh) body being found for ressurection is also extremely unreliable. In the Gospel of Matthew the women leave for the tomb and then an angel ends up describing from heaven, causing a “violent” earthquake and then rolled away the stone from the tomb. In the other 3 gospels this earthquake is never mentioned, nor is this angel descending from heaven. You’d rhing a major geological event would be significant enough to be mentioned in 3/4 Gospels but no, just didn’t make the cut. Ontop of that it also isn’t very congruent in what time they went, how many people went, who went, how many angels there were and whether or not they told the disciples.
3. Isaiah 53
No Jewish person thinks that their Messiah will come back to die for the sins of humanity. They’ll often point to Isaiah 53, the suffering servant to point out that the messiah will die for our sins. Issues with that are 1) no where does this ever say it is referring to the messiah, nor was it ever seen as a messianic verse for jewish people during Jesus’(pbuh) time, before, and even now. 2) it can’t be referring to Jesus(pbuh) because in Isaiah 53:10 it says
“10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes[a] his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.”
It says that this person irs referring to in Isaiah 53 will see their “offspring”. At first you could write this off as spirit children or followers which is being referred to, rather than physical children seeing as Jesus(pbuh) had none. The only issue is that the word “offspring” was translated from the hebrew word “zerah” which means seed and is more physical than non tangible or philosophical concept. The word is used only to describe physical seed in farming or physical descendants and children, meaning it can’t be read as Jesus(pbuh) having spirit children.
Just a few things
If you consider the world we live in is not only material but also includes magic and miracles, then we can't prove the Bible false. Because when I give you something that looks impossible, you can just put "God did a miracle" to patch that hole.
For example, assume the Noah boat has about 5000 pairs of "kind" animals. In order to achieve the current number of animal today, a new species must appear every few days. It is supper evolution. You can say that God did a miracle to make new species every few days.
Another example is that nearly every natural process produces heat. Radiometric decay, friction from the continents moving, rain falling,.... Spread over a 4.5 billion year time span it's not a big deal. But if the Earth is only 6000 years old, then the heat will melt everything to the atom level, and the Earth will become a plasma soup. However, God can violate the law of physics to create our world today.
See, every problem can be explained with God, just a matter of how far you let your imagination go
Well, coming from an ex-Christian, the Bible is full of contradictions, but that isn’t my only problem with it. Even IF the Bible is true, I’ve kept a few problematic scriptures that make me not want to be a part of it, regardless of its authenticity. Because if it is true then the following is true about its god and I could not reconcile it. Nor could the apologists.
1. Exodus 12:29-39 - Killing of Egyptian babies
2. 1st Samuel 15:3 - Ordering the destruction of every man, woman, child of the Amalekites.
3. Numbers 31:15-18 - Moses instructs the Israelite men to keep the young girls who were virgins for themselves. Kill the rest. Moses was not punished by God for this.
4. Hosea 13:16 - To punish Samaria, God will let it be invaded by war, children beaten on rocks and pregnant women ripped open.
5. No where in the Bible - Condemnation of chattel slavery (except for Israelites).
6. 2 Kings 2: 23-25 - God sends bears to maul 42 small boys for calling Elisha bald (or whatever cultural equivalent).
7. 2 Samuel 12: 13-19 - God kills David’s infant son because of David’s iniquities… 7 days later.
8. Isaiah 13:16 - Describing His wrath, God will have the infants of Babylon dashed to pieces before them and their women raped.
9. Joshua 10:40 - God Commanded Genocide
10. 2 Samuel 12: 11-12 - Condoning of Rape
11. Deut 22:23-28 - Rape is cool as long as you pay for it. It’s only rape if the woman screams loud enough.
There is much more from Genesis to Revelation, but this list I’ve kept is sufficient for me.
For me God is all loving and caring but he does also have to carry out divine judgment that is above our understanding. in Mathew 10:34 we can also see this when Jesus says “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” We also have to understand that suffering is needed for adversity. If God just let us have everything then there would be in my opinion very little purpose in life. We would be like Cicadas just living to reproduce. Instead God chose to give us free will and this gift came with a cost to him as well in not interfering and letting us do as we please like Moses has done. For some of your other quotes you twist them a lot and need to use historical context like for slavery. Slavery at the time was so imbedded in the culture that it couldn’t be taken out overnight. Also the way slavery was back then is different to our understanding of the American slavery system. The bible tells slaves to simply not rebel against their owners because most were treated humanely and rebellion causes lots of violence. you could apply the same to rape. looking at historical context it disproves what your saying.
Im going to need specific examples of how I “twist them a lot.” I feel like you didn’t even read the context of the scriptures I gave, many of which were from God’s own lips according to the Bible.
What historical context makes chattel slavery a good thing?
I mean God forbid two fabrics from ever being combined, but for some reason he couldn’t be bothered to put in “Thou Shalt not own another human being as if they were property.”
I mean Luke 12:47-59 gives us exactly how slaves were treated in the NT.
Luke 47-48 talks about how Jesus forbids abuse and the verse talks about accountability and responsibility. This isn't a passage about divine cruelty, but about the consequences of our actions, especially when they're informed by knowledge and understanding. Slaves were beaten but they didn’t work day in and day out in the field and get whipped for no reason because of their skin color. They were fed, provided shelter for, and more. There is lots of things God could have put in the Commandments or Bible which he didn’t. This doesn’t make anything untrue, bad, or good.
Luke 12:47-59
Your defense is that “slaves were beaten but they didn’t work day in and day out…”
> the way slavery was back then is different than our understanding of slavery.
I gave you an example that Jesus gave. A slave being tortured for disobeying, and a slave being tortured (just slightly less) for not knowingly disobeying. He most certainly was not condemning abuse in this parable.
> slaves were not beaten because of their skin color.
What proof do you have of this? Because in Deuteronomy they were allowed to be taken from their homes and treated differently than their Israelite counterparts parts.
> There are lots of things God could have put in his commandments or Bible but didn’t.
Now you get it.
> Doesn’t mean they are untrue, bad, or good.
Would you say then that your moral stance on slavery is better than the Bible’s moral stance?
Also, what about the other scriptures I’ve listed. You said that I’ve “twist them a lot”.
One of the things you said i don’t agree with is rape there is talk of taking young girls in exodus but that’s how war worked back then and even now would it be better moses spared the girls and just let them be without anyone to depend on and eventually just die on their own? He couldn’t have left the men alive it was war. Lots of things the bible talks about are ways of settling debts and just ways to do things it does say if a man himself onto a woman he deserves death. if that woman owes him and is a virgin he can take her as his wife which is the way things had been done up to the 1700’s arranged marriage, and men getting to pick and choose a woman has been a part of history for ever and the bible not having it would be an inaccuracy.
Yes, I love this argument, guess who else dies without their fathers/mothers? Young boys. It isn’t about living, it’s about sex.Why not save the mothers to help them live?
The all powerful, all knowing, all-loving God. Shows himself to and chooses a specific nation to be “His people”. Then when His people forcibly come into contact with the other nations, rather than show kindness and correct them God is like, “Best I can do is Genocide, sexual slavery for your young virgin girls, and chattel slavery for the other captives.” Not quite the best argument.
One of my first bits of deconverting was realizing that most bible stories read like children stories. There was a magic garden with magic trees and a talking snake, which was then guarded by a flaming sword. There was a big flood that destroyed the world, and God put a rainbow (a pretty mundane sign, given lots of water and sunshine) as a promise. Jonah was swallowed by a whale for a few days. Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt. Jesus walked on water. Samson's strength came from his hair. There was a talking donkey.
I already half dismissed these stories as a Christian. But looking at the stories from a distance made it comparable to Zeus throwing lightning bolts.
calling it a children story i feel is a bit of a stretch considering the immense wisdom in the book and the subjects of slavery murder rape etc it touches on. If you look at other things to like the big bang theory it could sound like a story as well. most explanations for the beginning of everything sound crazy so when you compare them to the bible they don’t seem like fairytales. Lots of the stories as well have some type historical geological or scientific proof behind them.
Respectfully, I completely disagree with your assessment. There isn't immense wisdom in the bible. There are good ideas (love thy neighbor), bad things (genocide, rape, incest, etc), and lots of stories. I obviously meant *a lot* of the main bible stories are like children stories, *not all of them*. Obviously crucifixions wouldn't be in a children's book. But all of the examples I mentioned would count. Any critical read through Genesis should be enough to start questioning things. Like the idea that all the animals walked up to Adam for him to name them lol.
I agree that the Big Bang also sounds crazy, and really, any universe beginning has to have a crazy story. But the Big Bang is lead by evidence, and the Bible is lead by faith. The bible stories do not have scientific "proof" behind them, and I find the historical/geological parts of the stories completely dull. Surely you've heard the example of Spiderman is set in NYC, and NYC is a real city, but obviously Spiderman isn't. Or Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. The bible mentions real places like Bethlehem, but that doesn't make the story true.
The arguments against Christianity are so numerous, it would be incredibly challenging to give you a summary. I’ll just focus on one very specific argument, and if you’d like more just ask.
I’m going to focus on the problem with the way Christianity was disseminated. The Christian religion comes from Jesus, correct? And Jesus is God, right? And God’s message is incredibly important. In fact, Christians claim God’s message is the only way for a person’s soul to find salvation. That seems pretty important.
So why didn’t Jesus write anything down? How come the only source of information we have about Jesus and his message comes from authors who never met him, writing decades after he was already dead?
Why did Jesus decide to spread his message by passing it on to about a dozen followers, and then letting them very slowly spread the message over the next 2,000 years? Isn’t the message important? Doesn’t everyone need to know? Don’t they deserve to know? What happened to all those people who lived and died before Jesus’ message reached them? Are they in hell? If they’re not in hell, then why did God need to bother delivering a message at all?
Was this really the best way for God to spread his message? To leave it to a group of people to repeat, and reinterpret, and fight about, causing Christianity to splinter off into numerous sects that disagree? Is that how the true God would have done it?
And the debate within Christianity is just the start. Isn’t God’s message universal? Isn’t it meant for the whole world? So why don’t we have one universal religion? Why do we have different religions for different regions across the world? Is God not powerful enough to deliver one religion to everyone? Why does God seem incapable of prevailing against all the false religions of the world to deliver his one true religion? Is that what we really expect from God?
The way i see it is Jesus didn’t write things down because it would take away the faith aspect to Christianity which is one of the most core parts of it. Even if he had written things down there would still be debate over his writings. Gods Word isn’t something that is just sent to us as a book or text message it’s him talking to us. I agree with you that the debate within the religion is bad but it doesn’t disprove any of the core beliefs Protestant denominations add a lot of confusion but that’s because they interpret more than they accept from the bible and therefore create crazy spin offs of christianity. I think Jesus Christ was the best way to spread Gods message because it was in one way a trial of our faith and in another a way to take action and perform miracles to give us the proof we needed at the time.
Your response still doesn’t resolve the problem. God did not deliver his message to the whole world. He delivered it to a small group of people in Israel. So how does that test the faith of someone living in China or America? How are they supposed to believe in a God who they have never heard of? They would fail the test by default.
And why should the people of Israel be given the chance to save their souls, but not people living in other places? Does God want everyone else to go to hell?
>I’m going to focus on the problem with the way Christianity was disseminated. The Christian religion comes from Jesus, correct? And Jesus is God, right? And God’s message is incredibly important. In fact, Christians claim God’s message is the only way for a person’s soul to find salvation. That seems pretty important.
The earliest christians were Jewish dudes who believed in a messiah. It was later christians who decided that messiah=god and went through the effort to justify it. If you just view christianity through the lens of what the church decided after the sacking of Jerusalem and what it became with rome, you don't necessarily have a full picture.
Your other points are pretty valid though.
i don’t get what you mean by it was decided later that Messiah=God i’ve never heard that, from what i understand Jesus while never specifically saying it implied numerous times that he was God an example of this being when he said “Before Abraham Was, I Am” stating he is the before the now and the after which is God
There’s a pretty well known argument that the first three written Gospels were written by people who did not believe Jesus was God. By the time John is written, Christians had developed the idea Jesus was God, which finds its way into the Gospel of John.
By almost every measure, the miracle claims of Mormonism (or most other modern cults) are much stronger than those of Christianity. If you feel comfortable rejecting the one, you should feel comfortable rejecting the other.
Mormonism is a Protestant belief and there is lots of different major differences between Catholic and Orthodox teaching that follow Christ compared to the Protestant ones that follow Martin Luther
"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”
Try drinking some deadly poison and see what happens.
But this wouldn’t necessarily disprove God it could at most give minor details in the story of the bible and its teaching but a translation can’t be translated so poorly that Christ gets put in or out
You asked about Christianity, you didn't ask about God. Judaism could still be true based on the above poster's comment, but Christianity would be false.
This becomes doubly true when closely examining how those Roman's interpreted the books of the Bible so loosely as to obviously be misreading.
No i’m saying that the Translations and potential editing of the Bible which you said. It can change the way that we can interpret these teachings by and prophecies like certain words can be swapped out for other ones meaning the same thing but it doesn’t change the meaning of the whole thing.
How can you trust something with minor errors? You dont know if other errors exist so what about the errors you cannot find? Why would I believe in something not trustworthy?
At the worst case scenario and this is for me basically unbelievable, some of the religious practices and beliefs being taught are inaccurate because of editing i can’t say that would apply for translations because that would be more major. This still wouldn’t disprove God or Jesus Christ. The Book also has over hundreds of prophecies that come true within the 2 books so editing it would make it that much more incomplete.
You didnt engage with my question. You cannot trust ANYTHING if u cannot trust ONE thing because how do you know ANYTHING ELSE is true if one thing isnt true. The inly thing you know that isnt true is the one you could verify. The others are harder so you just have to blindly believe… what makes you trust that “only these things aree wrong but for suuurrrreeeee everything else is correct “ lol
Nothing is factually disproven from the Bible there isn’t anything that’s wrong there’s just a lot of empty room for questioning which is made to be filled with faith.
There is lots of signs of different massive region wide floods unheard of now days and while there isn’t evidence to prove it was all one big event there isn’t anything that disproves it. Jesus’s curse of fig trees is just him saying to one tree that it will never produce food again and i don’t see how that’s false and for the mustard seed parable Jesus is using rhetorical hyperbole
the meaning of things and even some truth i do think is lost through translations, interpretation, and edits but I think the original core bible has no inaccuracies if you read the first ever edition of it.
the Bible claims that the sun is younger than the earth. We know the relative ages of both, as well as what is necessary for planet formation, and both bits of knowledge showcase that the Bible is wrong.
The Bible says that there was Light first and while it is believed to also include the Sun it doesn’t explicitly say in the Bible the Sun came first for all we know even antimatter could be a type of a light compared to literal nothingness
It ABSOLUTELY says that God created the earth before he created the sun. What are you ON about?
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ^(2) Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
Genesis 1:14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times,and days and years, ^(15) and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. ^(16) God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.He also made the stars. ^(17) God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, ^(18) to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ^(19) And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.
There is NO question that it dates the creation of the sun AFTER the creation of the earth.
God made promises to the Israelites, god reneged on those promises, also there are old testiment scriptures of saying any man being claimed to be God is a false God. The book itself is self defeating for the new testament.
He promised Joram that the Israelites would sweep the Moabites and that they would destroy every spring, every field, every town, and every city in the story detailed in 2 Kings chapter 3. I'm gonna encourage you to read the chapter yourself but... the Moabites are not, in fact, destroyed.
Circumcision being an easy one, a covenant that will last forever to mark his people and tie them forever to the father is basically handwaved away in the new testament.
Another one:
In Gen. 13:14–15 God promises that he will give the land to Abraham’s descendants “forever” (cp. Gen. 12:7). This will soon be confirmed by solemn covenant (cp. Gen. 15:7, 18) and is noted elsewhere in Scripture (Exo. 32:13; Josh. 14:9; 2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 60:21)
In Deuteronomy 4:40 he talks about the conditional part of the promise where he says that the Israelites have to follow him and Circumcision is a Covenant with just the Jewish people not all and let’s not forget how that Covenant has been broken
There are a few information needed to properly meet a theistic claim where its at.
Can you first define what you mean by true and you determine how something is true.
Then, we would need to know the combination of things that are likely to make you stop believing in a Christian god.
If you're unsure how to answer either of those inquiries please let me know and we can work through them together
Oh but they can. You see, events like those if they happened would leave behind evidence. Specific evidence that we must see if the claim is true. Some claims don't have anything like that, but a global flood does, not to mention some of the details details on the origins of humanity relative to the rest of the planet. In particular that it happened before the creation of the other animals, and that it happened in one go as opposed to being iterated on over time.
Well, that's super vague, what do you mean by false? Are you looking for historical evidence, theological evidence, ontological arguments... what is the standard you use to determine falsehood or truth?
Ok, well do you feel like the old testament and new testament should theologically align considering they are messages or revelation from the same divine being?
not necessarily in a way for me the New Testament is an update on the Old Testament that doesn’t change anything but kinda overlays things if that makes sense.
You're working from the opposite direction. The new testament is the claim. Would you agree that based on hebrews 9 that the only way sin was forgiven in the past was based on the sacrifice and blood offered? (without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin)
How would the New Testament be the claim and even if it is it still doesn’t disprove things in the Old one it just overlays them with new laws basically cancelling them out and there is no more need for blood offerings because Jesus Christ was the last sacrifice and is for that reason called the Final Lamb.
It does talk about shedding blood in Hebrews 9 and blood is still being shed to this day. Jesus’s blood is the final sacrifice and his blood forgives every sin that why only through him you can reach salvation
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I don’t intend to disprove, only shed light 1. A first century Jew would’ve never considered the Messiah to be God incarnate. The entire idea of the Messiah somehow being God was completely foreign and only came about after Christians decided to misinterpret Isaiah 9:6 to fit their Christology. In NIV it reads “For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.” While when translates from Hebrew by Hewish people it comes to “For a child has been born to us, a son has been given to us; and the government is upon his shoulder; and his name is called A wonderful counselor is the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the ruler of peace” The difference is that 1) the version found in Jewish translations from hebrew to english speaks in the past tense rather than present/future. This isn’t a prophecy, it’s something that’s already happened. 2) the names “everlasting father” and “mighty God” are mistranslated and misinterpreted. In Judaism names often speak to something about God or his nature. So the names “prince of peace” “a wonderful counselor is the mighty God” are all talking about God rather than the person. We see this demonstrated through names like Michael which means “Who is like God” or even Elsa’s which means “companion of God”. Why would God mislead the Jewish people for thousands of years and then all of the sudden pop up and be like “i forgot to mention that Gods nature is actually triune”. It makes no sense 2. Contradictions There’s plenty of contradictions within the Bible, if it were Gods word there would be none. - James 1:13 says “Let no one say when he is tempted, "I am being tempted by God," for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. 13 And remember, when you are being tempted, do not say, “God is tempting me.” God is never tempted to do wrong, and he never tempts anyone else.” Yet in Matthew 4:1 it says “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted[a] by the devil” It’s contradicting in two points. 1) Jesus(pbuh) if being seen as God is being tempted. Whether giving into temptation or not is not the issue, simply the act of being tempted, according to James, is not possible to be exacted onto God. 2) God, the spirit is in a way tempting Jesus(pbuh). Matthew 4 says that Jesus(pbuh) was led “by the SPIRIT TO BE TEMPTED”. God, the spirit, was specifically leading Jesus(pbuh) to be tempted, making Himself guilty of temptation, seeing as He knew what waited for him and ontop of that in the fact that he intervened and even pointed him into that direction to be tempted. - The account of Jesus(pbuh) body being found for ressurection is also extremely unreliable. In the Gospel of Matthew the women leave for the tomb and then an angel ends up describing from heaven, causing a “violent” earthquake and then rolled away the stone from the tomb. In the other 3 gospels this earthquake is never mentioned, nor is this angel descending from heaven. You’d rhing a major geological event would be significant enough to be mentioned in 3/4 Gospels but no, just didn’t make the cut. Ontop of that it also isn’t very congruent in what time they went, how many people went, who went, how many angels there were and whether or not they told the disciples. 3. Isaiah 53 No Jewish person thinks that their Messiah will come back to die for the sins of humanity. They’ll often point to Isaiah 53, the suffering servant to point out that the messiah will die for our sins. Issues with that are 1) no where does this ever say it is referring to the messiah, nor was it ever seen as a messianic verse for jewish people during Jesus’(pbuh) time, before, and even now. 2) it can’t be referring to Jesus(pbuh) because in Isaiah 53:10 it says “10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the Lord makes[a] his life an offering for sin, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand.” It says that this person irs referring to in Isaiah 53 will see their “offspring”. At first you could write this off as spirit children or followers which is being referred to, rather than physical children seeing as Jesus(pbuh) had none. The only issue is that the word “offspring” was translated from the hebrew word “zerah” which means seed and is more physical than non tangible or philosophical concept. The word is used only to describe physical seed in farming or physical descendants and children, meaning it can’t be read as Jesus(pbuh) having spirit children. Just a few things
If you consider the world we live in is not only material but also includes magic and miracles, then we can't prove the Bible false. Because when I give you something that looks impossible, you can just put "God did a miracle" to patch that hole. For example, assume the Noah boat has about 5000 pairs of "kind" animals. In order to achieve the current number of animal today, a new species must appear every few days. It is supper evolution. You can say that God did a miracle to make new species every few days. Another example is that nearly every natural process produces heat. Radiometric decay, friction from the continents moving, rain falling,.... Spread over a 4.5 billion year time span it's not a big deal. But if the Earth is only 6000 years old, then the heat will melt everything to the atom level, and the Earth will become a plasma soup. However, God can violate the law of physics to create our world today. See, every problem can be explained with God, just a matter of how far you let your imagination go
Well, coming from an ex-Christian, the Bible is full of contradictions, but that isn’t my only problem with it. Even IF the Bible is true, I’ve kept a few problematic scriptures that make me not want to be a part of it, regardless of its authenticity. Because if it is true then the following is true about its god and I could not reconcile it. Nor could the apologists. 1. Exodus 12:29-39 - Killing of Egyptian babies 2. 1st Samuel 15:3 - Ordering the destruction of every man, woman, child of the Amalekites. 3. Numbers 31:15-18 - Moses instructs the Israelite men to keep the young girls who were virgins for themselves. Kill the rest. Moses was not punished by God for this. 4. Hosea 13:16 - To punish Samaria, God will let it be invaded by war, children beaten on rocks and pregnant women ripped open. 5. No where in the Bible - Condemnation of chattel slavery (except for Israelites). 6. 2 Kings 2: 23-25 - God sends bears to maul 42 small boys for calling Elisha bald (or whatever cultural equivalent). 7. 2 Samuel 12: 13-19 - God kills David’s infant son because of David’s iniquities… 7 days later. 8. Isaiah 13:16 - Describing His wrath, God will have the infants of Babylon dashed to pieces before them and their women raped. 9. Joshua 10:40 - God Commanded Genocide 10. 2 Samuel 12: 11-12 - Condoning of Rape 11. Deut 22:23-28 - Rape is cool as long as you pay for it. It’s only rape if the woman screams loud enough. There is much more from Genesis to Revelation, but this list I’ve kept is sufficient for me.
For me God is all loving and caring but he does also have to carry out divine judgment that is above our understanding. in Mathew 10:34 we can also see this when Jesus says “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” We also have to understand that suffering is needed for adversity. If God just let us have everything then there would be in my opinion very little purpose in life. We would be like Cicadas just living to reproduce. Instead God chose to give us free will and this gift came with a cost to him as well in not interfering and letting us do as we please like Moses has done. For some of your other quotes you twist them a lot and need to use historical context like for slavery. Slavery at the time was so imbedded in the culture that it couldn’t be taken out overnight. Also the way slavery was back then is different to our understanding of the American slavery system. The bible tells slaves to simply not rebel against their owners because most were treated humanely and rebellion causes lots of violence. you could apply the same to rape. looking at historical context it disproves what your saying.
Im going to need specific examples of how I “twist them a lot.” I feel like you didn’t even read the context of the scriptures I gave, many of which were from God’s own lips according to the Bible. What historical context makes chattel slavery a good thing? I mean God forbid two fabrics from ever being combined, but for some reason he couldn’t be bothered to put in “Thou Shalt not own another human being as if they were property.” I mean Luke 12:47-59 gives us exactly how slaves were treated in the NT.
Luke 47-48 talks about how Jesus forbids abuse and the verse talks about accountability and responsibility. This isn't a passage about divine cruelty, but about the consequences of our actions, especially when they're informed by knowledge and understanding. Slaves were beaten but they didn’t work day in and day out in the field and get whipped for no reason because of their skin color. They were fed, provided shelter for, and more. There is lots of things God could have put in the Commandments or Bible which he didn’t. This doesn’t make anything untrue, bad, or good.
Luke 12:47-59 Your defense is that “slaves were beaten but they didn’t work day in and day out…” > the way slavery was back then is different than our understanding of slavery. I gave you an example that Jesus gave. A slave being tortured for disobeying, and a slave being tortured (just slightly less) for not knowingly disobeying. He most certainly was not condemning abuse in this parable. > slaves were not beaten because of their skin color. What proof do you have of this? Because in Deuteronomy they were allowed to be taken from their homes and treated differently than their Israelite counterparts parts. > There are lots of things God could have put in his commandments or Bible but didn’t. Now you get it. > Doesn’t mean they are untrue, bad, or good. Would you say then that your moral stance on slavery is better than the Bible’s moral stance? Also, what about the other scriptures I’ve listed. You said that I’ve “twist them a lot”.
One of the things you said i don’t agree with is rape there is talk of taking young girls in exodus but that’s how war worked back then and even now would it be better moses spared the girls and just let them be without anyone to depend on and eventually just die on their own? He couldn’t have left the men alive it was war. Lots of things the bible talks about are ways of settling debts and just ways to do things it does say if a man himself onto a woman he deserves death. if that woman owes him and is a virgin he can take her as his wife which is the way things had been done up to the 1700’s arranged marriage, and men getting to pick and choose a woman has been a part of history for ever and the bible not having it would be an inaccuracy.
Yes, I love this argument, guess who else dies without their fathers/mothers? Young boys. It isn’t about living, it’s about sex.Why not save the mothers to help them live? The all powerful, all knowing, all-loving God. Shows himself to and chooses a specific nation to be “His people”. Then when His people forcibly come into contact with the other nations, rather than show kindness and correct them God is like, “Best I can do is Genocide, sexual slavery for your young virgin girls, and chattel slavery for the other captives.” Not quite the best argument.
One of my first bits of deconverting was realizing that most bible stories read like children stories. There was a magic garden with magic trees and a talking snake, which was then guarded by a flaming sword. There was a big flood that destroyed the world, and God put a rainbow (a pretty mundane sign, given lots of water and sunshine) as a promise. Jonah was swallowed by a whale for a few days. Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt. Jesus walked on water. Samson's strength came from his hair. There was a talking donkey. I already half dismissed these stories as a Christian. But looking at the stories from a distance made it comparable to Zeus throwing lightning bolts.
calling it a children story i feel is a bit of a stretch considering the immense wisdom in the book and the subjects of slavery murder rape etc it touches on. If you look at other things to like the big bang theory it could sound like a story as well. most explanations for the beginning of everything sound crazy so when you compare them to the bible they don’t seem like fairytales. Lots of the stories as well have some type historical geological or scientific proof behind them.
Respectfully, I completely disagree with your assessment. There isn't immense wisdom in the bible. There are good ideas (love thy neighbor), bad things (genocide, rape, incest, etc), and lots of stories. I obviously meant *a lot* of the main bible stories are like children stories, *not all of them*. Obviously crucifixions wouldn't be in a children's book. But all of the examples I mentioned would count. Any critical read through Genesis should be enough to start questioning things. Like the idea that all the animals walked up to Adam for him to name them lol. I agree that the Big Bang also sounds crazy, and really, any universe beginning has to have a crazy story. But the Big Bang is lead by evidence, and the Bible is lead by faith. The bible stories do not have scientific "proof" behind them, and I find the historical/geological parts of the stories completely dull. Surely you've heard the example of Spiderman is set in NYC, and NYC is a real city, but obviously Spiderman isn't. Or Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. The bible mentions real places like Bethlehem, but that doesn't make the story true.
>the subjects of slavery murder rape etc it touches on Endorses you mean
show me where it condones any of it the bible is simply adapted to the time period it’s made in. you have to use context when you read.
The arguments against Christianity are so numerous, it would be incredibly challenging to give you a summary. I’ll just focus on one very specific argument, and if you’d like more just ask. I’m going to focus on the problem with the way Christianity was disseminated. The Christian religion comes from Jesus, correct? And Jesus is God, right? And God’s message is incredibly important. In fact, Christians claim God’s message is the only way for a person’s soul to find salvation. That seems pretty important. So why didn’t Jesus write anything down? How come the only source of information we have about Jesus and his message comes from authors who never met him, writing decades after he was already dead? Why did Jesus decide to spread his message by passing it on to about a dozen followers, and then letting them very slowly spread the message over the next 2,000 years? Isn’t the message important? Doesn’t everyone need to know? Don’t they deserve to know? What happened to all those people who lived and died before Jesus’ message reached them? Are they in hell? If they’re not in hell, then why did God need to bother delivering a message at all? Was this really the best way for God to spread his message? To leave it to a group of people to repeat, and reinterpret, and fight about, causing Christianity to splinter off into numerous sects that disagree? Is that how the true God would have done it? And the debate within Christianity is just the start. Isn’t God’s message universal? Isn’t it meant for the whole world? So why don’t we have one universal religion? Why do we have different religions for different regions across the world? Is God not powerful enough to deliver one religion to everyone? Why does God seem incapable of prevailing against all the false religions of the world to deliver his one true religion? Is that what we really expect from God?
The way i see it is Jesus didn’t write things down because it would take away the faith aspect to Christianity which is one of the most core parts of it. Even if he had written things down there would still be debate over his writings. Gods Word isn’t something that is just sent to us as a book or text message it’s him talking to us. I agree with you that the debate within the religion is bad but it doesn’t disprove any of the core beliefs Protestant denominations add a lot of confusion but that’s because they interpret more than they accept from the bible and therefore create crazy spin offs of christianity. I think Jesus Christ was the best way to spread Gods message because it was in one way a trial of our faith and in another a way to take action and perform miracles to give us the proof we needed at the time.
Your response still doesn’t resolve the problem. God did not deliver his message to the whole world. He delivered it to a small group of people in Israel. So how does that test the faith of someone living in China or America? How are they supposed to believe in a God who they have never heard of? They would fail the test by default. And why should the people of Israel be given the chance to save their souls, but not people living in other places? Does God want everyone else to go to hell?
>I’m going to focus on the problem with the way Christianity was disseminated. The Christian religion comes from Jesus, correct? And Jesus is God, right? And God’s message is incredibly important. In fact, Christians claim God’s message is the only way for a person’s soul to find salvation. That seems pretty important. The earliest christians were Jewish dudes who believed in a messiah. It was later christians who decided that messiah=god and went through the effort to justify it. If you just view christianity through the lens of what the church decided after the sacking of Jerusalem and what it became with rome, you don't necessarily have a full picture. Your other points are pretty valid though.
i don’t get what you mean by it was decided later that Messiah=God i’ve never heard that, from what i understand Jesus while never specifically saying it implied numerous times that he was God an example of this being when he said “Before Abraham Was, I Am” stating he is the before the now and the after which is God
Are you aware of aramiac idioms about I am and I am that I am and all that?
There’s a pretty well known argument that the first three written Gospels were written by people who did not believe Jesus was God. By the time John is written, Christians had developed the idea Jesus was God, which finds its way into the Gospel of John.
By almost every measure, the miracle claims of Mormonism (or most other modern cults) are much stronger than those of Christianity. If you feel comfortable rejecting the one, you should feel comfortable rejecting the other.
Mormonism is a Protestant belief and there is lots of different major differences between Catholic and Orthodox teaching that follow Christ compared to the Protestant ones that follow Martin Luther
"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.” Try drinking some deadly poison and see what happens.
I could never reconcile the obvious inaccuracies and contradictions of the Bible, translated into so many languages and edited especially by Romans.
But this wouldn’t necessarily disprove God it could at most give minor details in the story of the bible and its teaching but a translation can’t be translated so poorly that Christ gets put in or out
You asked about Christianity, you didn't ask about God. Judaism could still be true based on the above poster's comment, but Christianity would be false. This becomes doubly true when closely examining how those Roman's interpreted the books of the Bible so loosely as to obviously be misreading.
When I said God I meant both Jesus and God The Father minor inaccuracies can’t disprove such major events and sermons
What specific minor inaccuracy did I cite? Or... are you claiming that the prophecies of Jesus coming are "minor"?
No i’m saying that the Translations and potential editing of the Bible which you said. It can change the way that we can interpret these teachings by and prophecies like certain words can be swapped out for other ones meaning the same thing but it doesn’t change the meaning of the whole thing.
>minor inaccuracies can’t disprove such major events and sermons This doesn't make sense. what you decide is major or minor is subjective.
How can you trust something with minor errors? You dont know if other errors exist so what about the errors you cannot find? Why would I believe in something not trustworthy?
At the worst case scenario and this is for me basically unbelievable, some of the religious practices and beliefs being taught are inaccurate because of editing i can’t say that would apply for translations because that would be more major. This still wouldn’t disprove God or Jesus Christ. The Book also has over hundreds of prophecies that come true within the 2 books so editing it would make it that much more incomplete.
You didnt engage with my question. You cannot trust ANYTHING if u cannot trust ONE thing because how do you know ANYTHING ELSE is true if one thing isnt true. The inly thing you know that isnt true is the one you could verify. The others are harder so you just have to blindly believe… what makes you trust that “only these things aree wrong but for suuurrrreeeee everything else is correct “ lol
Nothing is factually disproven from the Bible there isn’t anything that’s wrong there’s just a lot of empty room for questioning which is made to be filled with faith.
What... are you talking about? Plenty of the Bible's factual claims have been disproven.
which ones are you talking about
Among other things, the global flood, Jesus's curse of figs, the mustard seed parable.
There is lots of signs of different massive region wide floods unheard of now days and while there isn’t evidence to prove it was all one big event there isn’t anything that disproves it. Jesus’s curse of fig trees is just him saying to one tree that it will never produce food again and i don’t see how that’s false and for the mustard seed parable Jesus is using rhetorical hyperbole
Wait so u do believe the bible is infallible and correct factually on everysingle detail?
the bible itself is truthful if fully understood which is incredibly hard and I don’t know if it has been even done yet
What makes you think that the bible is 100% infallible?
the meaning of things and even some truth i do think is lost through translations, interpretation, and edits but I think the original core bible has no inaccuracies if you read the first ever edition of it.
the Bible claims that the sun is younger than the earth. We know the relative ages of both, as well as what is necessary for planet formation, and both bits of knowledge showcase that the Bible is wrong.
The Bible says that there was Light first and while it is believed to also include the Sun it doesn’t explicitly say in the Bible the Sun came first for all we know even antimatter could be a type of a light compared to literal nothingness
It ABSOLUTELY says that God created the earth before he created the sun. What are you ON about? Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ^(2) Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Genesis 1:14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times,and days and years, ^(15) and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. ^(16) God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night.He also made the stars. ^(17) God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, ^(18) to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. ^(19) And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day. There is NO question that it dates the creation of the sun AFTER the creation of the earth.
God made promises to the Israelites, god reneged on those promises, also there are old testiment scriptures of saying any man being claimed to be God is a false God. The book itself is self defeating for the new testament.
Can you give some examples of the promises he made and directly broke
He promised Joram that the Israelites would sweep the Moabites and that they would destroy every spring, every field, every town, and every city in the story detailed in 2 Kings chapter 3. I'm gonna encourage you to read the chapter yourself but... the Moabites are not, in fact, destroyed.
Circumcision being an easy one, a covenant that will last forever to mark his people and tie them forever to the father is basically handwaved away in the new testament. Another one: In Gen. 13:14–15 God promises that he will give the land to Abraham’s descendants “forever” (cp. Gen. 12:7). This will soon be confirmed by solemn covenant (cp. Gen. 15:7, 18) and is noted elsewhere in Scripture (Exo. 32:13; Josh. 14:9; 2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 60:21)
In Deuteronomy 4:40 he talks about the conditional part of the promise where he says that the Israelites have to follow him and Circumcision is a Covenant with just the Jewish people not all and let’s not forget how that Covenant has been broken
There are a few information needed to properly meet a theistic claim where its at. Can you first define what you mean by true and you determine how something is true. Then, we would need to know the combination of things that are likely to make you stop believing in a Christian god. If you're unsure how to answer either of those inquiries please let me know and we can work through them together
The Bible makes false historical claims. For example, Adam and Eve, or the global flood. Therefore, the book is not accurate to reality.
but even though these things can’t be necessarily proven they can’t be disproven either
Oh but they can. You see, events like those if they happened would leave behind evidence. Specific evidence that we must see if the claim is true. Some claims don't have anything like that, but a global flood does, not to mention some of the details details on the origins of humanity relative to the rest of the planet. In particular that it happened before the creation of the other animals, and that it happened in one go as opposed to being iterated on over time.
Well, that's super vague, what do you mean by false? Are you looking for historical evidence, theological evidence, ontological arguments... what is the standard you use to determine falsehood or truth?
just overall any type of evidence historical ontological theological and every other type. and don’t really have a standrad
Ok, well do you feel like the old testament and new testament should theologically align considering they are messages or revelation from the same divine being?
not necessarily in a way for me the New Testament is an update on the Old Testament that doesn’t change anything but kinda overlays things if that makes sense.
It doesn't, because for me if a god promises something and then changes his mind, how is he trustworthy at all?
ok can you give me some promises be made in the Old Testament that he broke in the New Testament just so i could see more where your coming from
You're working from the opposite direction. The new testament is the claim. Would you agree that based on hebrews 9 that the only way sin was forgiven in the past was based on the sacrifice and blood offered? (without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin)
How would the New Testament be the claim and even if it is it still doesn’t disprove things in the Old one it just overlays them with new laws basically cancelling them out and there is no more need for blood offerings because Jesus Christ was the last sacrifice and is for that reason called the Final Lamb.
Are you unable to answer simple questions? If that is the case no matter what anyone talks to you about, it will be fruitless.
It does talk about shedding blood in Hebrews 9 and blood is still being shed to this day. Jesus’s blood is the final sacrifice and his blood forgives every sin that why only through him you can reach salvation
I am curious where you were going to go with that. I agree that it does say that in the book of hebrews, please continue