Maybe it’s in plain sight, just under your eyes, and you can’t see it? 
And that’s your full right. Be happy. 
If you can define exactly that which I can’t see then maybe I’d be more likely to see it?
As an olive branch, it should be as clear as day, to use a Biblical phrase, that ALL have sinned. Believers. Unbelievers. The lot.
The irreligious persuasion I’m seeing in this thread wants to take it as read that it has mostly been the believers who have sinned. That’s nonsense. Hence my tangent earlier in the thread, which I didn’t do a good job of getting across:
- Take the sum total of crime, misdeed, misery, disrespect, the lot… say, in the UK today. Whether crime is up, down, it doesn’t matter. Just take it, en bloc, as a given.
- Now consider the fact that for 100 years religion has increasingly been set aside in the UK, such that there are very few people who adhere to and practice religion today.
- So if there are barely any religious people left, who is responsible for the sum total of current crime, misdeed, misery, disrespect? Sorry, but I’m not seeing the emergence of a secular utopia.
My second point is about the Bible, as I’ve seen it referenced in the thread. It has been misunderstood, misused and misapplied. People are happy to take an obscure thing from a covenant given in a different time and place, for a different group of people, in a different set of circumstances, and try to apply it to our lives today. When corrected, by someone trained in Biblical hermeneutics, albeit at undergrad level, the retort is to say, well that’s the problem, the Bible is so confusing and inaccessible, etc.
It isn’t, if there’s a good faith effort, and indeed some humility to be guided if genuinely interested or curious. I don’t see any of that. Instead, we would rather cling to the bullet points we have picked up from our own holy books, written by Hitchens et al, to try to score points in a discussion like this one.
The third point is about why I believe, which is obviously more personal.
As a person who has faith in God I see a beautiful world, an incredible universe, intricate detail, pattern, order, mathematics. I think God is behind all that. And not just in the physical world either. Let’s go metaphysical and consider consciousness, for example. I read, I’m intellectually curious, but neither phylogeny or ontogeny has anything useful to say to me here. From chemistry to consciousness? The best are grasping at straws.
My belief is that something external to ourselves put consciousness there. I actually think he did it to lead us to him. Imagine what would be lost if I reduced a magnificent symphony to ‘just’ a series of harmonic vibrations, or a painting masterpiece to ‘just’ pigments, oil and brushstrokes, or even my favorite film to ‘just’ pixels on a screen. There is something more, much more than this.
And flowing from consciousness I think about other metaphysical, everyday things, like kindness, love, stories of redemption, hope, overcoming loss…
None of these things, physical or metaphysical, prove God’s existence. If the demand is for proof, we don’t understand religion on even a basic level, because faith has a role to play too.
The word faith is a little vulnerable to use, because people assume I mean blind faith, or stupid faith. I am talking about reasonable faith. That’s where I’m coming from. I look at all of this stuff, physical, metaphysical, and I see it as evidence that points me towards God.
Instead of playing the ultimate game of hide and seek, his fingerprints are everywhere.
If you stopped me in the street or knocked on my door and called me a sinner, I’d be rather terse in my response. You might consider that you are a sinner, I don’t and I don’t appreciate the accusation. You might throw it about happily as it’s a part of your belief but note, not all of us have this eternal hang up and obsession with sin.
With regard the rest, you’ve put into multiple paragraphs “I have no proof of god but believe in him anyway” I note you didn’t answer my question, what would it take for you to cease to believe in Jesus?
There is nothing to be misunderstood about the bible, it is explicit in condoning slavery, selling children as prostitutes and calling for murdering gay people. That cannot be misunderstood. You can try to excuse it, you can go deeply into theology, you can claim that that’s not the word of Jesus etc. But if you’ve read what a few of us have posted of late, you can see (if you choose to see) that JC did nothing to renounce nor change the Old Testament. That alone means he either wasn’t the son of the almighty, the whole thing is a fabrication or possibly more worrying for you, the old testament does accurately reflect god’s stance.
The FIRST thing you’d do if you were god’s son incarnate on earth is correct the teachings of a book written in his name. If indeed you considered those teachings to be incorrect. Please, I’d be interested in your thoughts on this particular point.
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I gave a response to this above. Both you and Lowton (you were first) quoted Jesus in Matthew 5:17-19. I shared what it meant, going to the key word in the original Greek, and also giving context as to how Jesus’ teaching was received by those in authority in that day, and why.
Bottom line is that Jesus didn’t change the old covenant. He ended it. That’s what Matthew 5:17-19 is about. Finished. Done. Complete. I added several other NT quotes from Paul to show the same thing. Jesus didn’t change the OT. He ended it.
He said a new commandment I give to you, “Love one another.” (John 13:34)
I think he is right on, and it is the better way to live.
That’s all down to interpretation. You could equally argue that he did nothing to change the OT. Did he not mention keeping the commandments? If the OT was wiped away and finished then the commandments no longer exist. It really takes a leap of faith (and significant confirmation bias) to claim that JC didn’t fully support the OT. Do you have a red letter bible? Fascinating thing. Pretty sure that JC never mentioned inaccuracies in the OT.
I refuse to do that, because as I said, it’s a very personal thing. Everyone should find his own spiritual way.
But let’s propose the following in a few words: God is in every single atom of the universe.
In that case, everything you have under your eyes is God.
As an olive branch you might acknowledge where you have got things factually wrong instead of just ignoring it?
Really? Sin is a particular construct of your faith, which I rejected many years ago. I don’t find the suggestion that I’m a sinner particular welcome. I don’t believe in that stuff.
No, I don’t think it is, and I’m not sure you’ve understood the point if you express it like that.
If you look back through history, at the genocides, the wars, the persecutions etc you wil frequently find a religious underpinning. That’s the point, and I’ve already addressed the points about Hitler and Stalin.
The fact is that religion has been a source of misery to untold millions throughout history. I don’t think that’s arguable.
This is where you are suffering from recency bias. You are complaining about secularism while benefiting from its influence.
If you live in the western world right now, you are living in a relative Utopia. You mostly have the freedom to do what you please, love who you want, and say what you feel. You probably have access to some form of healthcare, some kind of education, some degree of leisure time, and freedom from exploitation. You life expectancy is far beyond that of your ancestors who lived under the yoke of religion, and even your ability to read would be something that the church in previous era would have done their utmost to suppress.
Do you not understand quite how lucky you are to be born in a developed world nation at this point in time? You live a life beyond the wildest dreams of your ancestors.
Shall we compare this to a period of history where religion was in the ascendency? Or compare it to a part of the world right now that is controlled by religion?
If your complaint is that there is still crime, then yeah. What can I say? Secularism has failed to deliver a crime free society. But at least we don’t really have to fear being the victim of a genocide, or a persecution, or a pogrom.
We have some way to go, clearly. We still have inequality and intolerance. But if you live in a western democracy life is so much better now, across every well-being measure you can think of than it was just 100 years ago, including the likelihood of being a victim of crime.
Well, first of all, let me admit a degree in theology does not impress me at all. I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to be cruel. But appealing to authority on something I think is basically nonsense just isn’t impressive to me.
Saying that…
People are happy to take an obscure thing from a covenant given in a different time and place, for a different group of people, in a different set of circumstances, and try to apply it to our lives today.
… highlights exactly the problem here. The bible is a collection of stories and myths, some borrowed from older religions, cobbled together, and edited to suit whatever political agenda was at play. Written, collated and rewritten by people who knew next to nothing about their world. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Council of Nicea?
And yet people do try to apply it to our lives today. That’s the whole problem!
I can find a lot of beauty and wisdom in the bible (Corinthians 13 is one of the most profoundly beautiful pieces of writing). But you can also find unspeakable horror, terrible advice and stuff that is just absurd. And when you accept that the people who were writing this stuff didn’t know that if they looked after their teeth they’d have a better chance of living past 30, or that it would really be a good idea to keep their food away from their shit, then that stuff is all understandable.
It’s when people tell me this frankly unimpressive nonsense has some kind of validity today that I have a problem. And why does the bible pusher so frequently have to resort to “ah but when god said that, what he actually meant was…”
This process of cherry picking and rethinking is what gives the bible it’s meaning. You take your modern values, shaped by progress and secularism, and you make your holy book fit them. Of course the bible can’t be wrong so you make it mean what you want it to mean.
Obviously when Jesus says blessed are the cheese makers, it isn’t meant to be taken literally. It just refers to any manufacturer of dairy produce…
And as a person who doesn’t believe in God I see a beautiful world, an incredible universe, intricate detail, pattern, order, mathematics.
Your faith does not make the world anymore beautiful. I don’t look at a sunset and feel it’s beauty is diminished because I know the setting sun is an illusion created by the rotation of the earth, that the sun is only one of billions of stars in the galaxy, and the galaxy only one of trillions we’re aware of. I’m not disappointed because I know the sun was formed about 5 billion years ago from a collapsing cloud of hydrogen and dust, itself a remnant of a long exploded dead star.
I think that makes it more beautiful.
Again you make these incredible, and pretty insulting, sweeping statements about people who don’t believe in god.
Don’t you think I’m capable of trancendence? When I listen to a beautiful piece of music knowing that it is essentially vibrations in air doesn’t diminish it in the slightest - it enhances it. That you have evolved hearing and a brain that can comprehend and attribute meaning to these vibrations in the air, is far more awe inspiring than believing it’s all down to a deity, IMO.
Religious people always make the mistake of thinking that science is about stripping the awe and beauty of things. I think understanding is beautiful and far more worthy of awe than ‘God did it’.
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Perhaps had you spent a little more time studying Greek, and a little less on hermeneutics, you might have come to understand that the verb πληόω (plēoō) has a range of possible meanings. It is not confined to a single meaning, and certainly not the meaning you would wish it to have.
The standard reference, Bauer, Danker, Arndt and Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG), provides the following meanings for plēoō:
- To make full, fill (full)
- To complete a period of time, fill (up)
- To bring to completion that which was already begun
- To bring to a designated end, fulfil a prophesy, an obligation, a promise a law, a request, a purpose, a desire, a hope, a duty, a fate, a destiny etc.
- To bring to completion an activity in which one has been involved from its beginning
- Complete a number
Specifically, regarding Matthew 5:17, BDAG states:
depending on how one prefers to interpret the context, plēoō is understood here as either
• fulfil = do, carry out,
• or, to bring to full expression = show it forth in its true meaning,
• or, as in fill up = complete
It should be evident that “to end” as in “to do away with” is not included as possible acceptable meaning.
And in context it is obvious that the author does not intend us to form the view that the Law is ended.
Why would he have Jesus say in one breath that he had not come to abolish the law, only to contradict himself with his very next breath and say that he’d come to put an end to it?
That would be palpable nonsense. Matthew’s Jesus did not put an end to the law.
This view is confirmed in the New Oxford Annotated Bible which states:
The phrase truly (“amen”) I tell you in Jesus’ mouth frequently involves pronouncements pertaining to the end time. Until . . . all: both temporal clauses refer to the end of the present age and the onset of the eschatological age. The verse suggests that the Torah remained in force among Jewish Christians in Matthew’s church.
Paul, the greatest gnostic and snake oil salesman of them all, the “abortion of an apostle”, might have claimed that Jesus put an end to the law, but the original Christians, the Jewish Christians, those that might actually have had a chance of hearing Jesus, did not agree.
And the evidence suggests that they were right.
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I’ll put this all to bed with a simple Syllogism, I stole from one of my favorite comedians: Richard Jeni (RIP)
God is love,
Love is blind…
therefore:
Ray Charles is God.
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Liked Lowton’s post for academic rigor. Cheers!
Been trying to leave this thread for a couple days, as we are talking past each other, and respect is on the wane. Feels a bit like an echo chamber to me.
I’m happy to accept I’m wrong about god if he’s proven to exist. I note you’ve still not answered my question.
As per my post, I lose respect for people when I’m called a sinner.
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Indeed. The default is we are all sinners and not worthy and that is an indisputable and absolute statement applicable likewise to a new born baby or a 90 year old. Born of sin etc etc etc. So if there is a plan we cannot see it will have started with Adam and Eve and the Almighty will have known then what would happen ergo, he wanted man to sin because if he didn’t then he wouldn’t have this ‘plan’, right?
The default answer to this is, of course, that there is no way I could possibly understand…
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Fuck me. This is a huge article. Didnt leave anything out didya
He did show himself a few years back 
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Sorry mate, not sure what the question is. Come again?
On the sinner stuff, if the biblical language feels antwacky, see it as shorthand for [insert word of choice to cover crime, misery, misdeeds, atrocities, stealing, lying, abuse, etc.]
I am saying everyone is in the same boat with that, religious and irreligious alike. We all fall short.
Then on a personal note I have said that I have never seen a more generous and engaged bunch than the Jesus followers I know, who give of themselves and their resources to better our world here and now.
You’re there again you see. You’re making the assumption and the accusation that I’m guilty of committing some / all of your examples.
I suspect you spend a lot of time in the company of people who share your beliefs. Confirmation bias is easy to miss.
Regards my question, it’s this. If the god of the bible turned up tomorrow, I’d admit I was wrong and accept his existence. I wouldn’t worship him due to the many details laid out above. If Lord Vishnu turned up tomorrow, told us Hinduism was the only religion, would you still believe in Jesus?
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This goes back to the old problem. Believing in a god is one thing, but to follow one religion you have to believe not only in god, but that your god is the right one, out of the 100,000 or so that humans have worshipped.
Or, @RedOverTheWater you are as much an atheist as me when it comes to 99,999 gods. I just go one god further 