Audie
Veteran Member
Justice as dispensed by “ god “?
Love as in love me or face eternal torture?
You do know that other cultures
teach justice and ethics?
( the “love” thing does translate not into Chinese)
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Do you believe the Bible is God's word?
- Thread starter Starlight
- Start date
Love as in love me or face eternal torture?
You do know that other cultures
teach justice and ethics?
( the “love” thing does translate not into Chinese)
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
2 questions.
1. How did you decide what parts are "loving"?
2. How did you decide those parts are from god?
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
So your answer to "why do you believe that" is "because I believe it".
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
Depends what the goal of the exercise is.
If what is actually true matters, then such cherry picking is a very good methodology to get it wrong.
TagliatelliMonster
Veteran Member
The problem is that the word "sin" is a religious concept which actually just means "behavior the religion disapproves of". Religious folks like to equate that religious concept with actual moral wrongs. But this is not the case.
Many things which the religion considers to be "sins" aren't actually morally wrong at all. No reasonable argument can be made to argue they are morally wrong.
This is exactly the reason for social conflict in secular societies. Many theists claim that morals come from religion and that therefor their concept of "sin" should be universally seen as the basis for morality. In humanism / secular morality, that simply is not the case at all.
I don't care one bit for the religious concept of "sin".
When somebody declares something is morally wrong, and if I disagree, I will ask them why it is wrong.
When they then reply with "god says it is wrong" or something like that, I will just reject it at face value. Bring me a real reason.
And many such "sins", don't actually have a real reason for why they are supposedly wrong.
That is just your religious belief. It's nonsense in my ears.
Audie
Veteran Member
Sending a hit- man angel to kill thousands of innocent children
has to be defined as just coz god done it.
Everything is god
Sgt. Pepper
All you need is love.
John 3:16–17 states, "16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." I'd like to reexamine these verses in light of the following:
According to the Bible, God can be hateful, angry, and jealous. In my opinion, Christians deceived themselves by focusing entirely on his purported love and mercy while disregarding the other scriptures depicting his hatred, anger, and jealousy. When I left Christianity, I reread the Bible without wearing rose-colored glasses, and I no longer believe that anyone should ever base their understanding of morality (such as love, mercy, and justice) on the Bible.
In my opinion, the following Bible stories aren't exemplary examples of upright moral behavior: forcing a rape victim to marry her rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29); dashing infants' heads against rocks (Psalm 137:9); ordering the death of witches (Exodus 22:18); God commanding his "chosen people" to kill an entire populace of foreign nations for their land in a conquest to possess a "promised land" (Exodus 17:8–13; 1 Samuel 15:2–3); or God, in an irrational fit of rage, commits global genocide by killing every living creature and eradicating the entire human race (apart from Noah and his family) in a global flood (Genesis 6:6-7). Does this sound like a loving and merciful God? How about a heavenly father who wants to save you? It doesn't sound like it to me.
According to Genesis 6:6-7, God regretted creating not only mankind but also every animal, every creature that creeps on the ground, and the birds of the air. The Bible contains several other verses that mention God's regrets in addition to creating humanity, all animals, and birds (1 Samuel 15:11; 2 Samuel 24:16; Jeremiah 42:10). The Bible also mentions God changing his mind about bringing disasters down on his alleged chosen people as punishment for their transgressions against him (Jeremiah 26:13, 1 Chronicles 21:15, Joel 2:13). For the record, Jeremiah 26:13, 1 Chronicles 21:15, and Joel 2:13 coincide with Isaiah 45:7 (NIV), which states, "I form the light and create darkness; I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things." Also, the New King James Version uses the word "calamity" instead of "disaster," and the King James Version uses the word "evil" instead of "disaster" or "calamity."
Isaiah 45:7
KJV: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things."
Evil:
1. Morally bad or wrong; wicked, 2. Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful, 3. Characterized by or indicating misfortune; ominous.
NIV: "I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things."
Disaster:
1. An occurrence causing widespread destruction and distress; a catastrophe; 2. A grave misfortune, and 3. A total failure.
ESV: "I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the LORD, who does all these things."
Calamity: 1. An event that brings terrible loss, lasting distress, or severe affliction; a disaster, 2. Dire distress resulting from loss or tragedy; 3. Any great misfortune or cause of misery; in general, any event or disaster which produces extensive evils, as loss of crops, earthquakes, etc., but also applied to any misfortune which brings great distress on a person; misfortune; distress; adversity.
FYI, "Violence in the Bible: Greatest Hits" has more examples of violence in the Bible.
Finally, I'm adding the following scriptures as additional evidence of the biblical God's unjust and sadistic nature.
Bible verses on God's hate.
100 Bible Verses about What God Hates
15 Bible Verses about God Hating People
Bible verses on God's jealousy.
Deuteronomy 4:24 "For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God."
Psalms 78:58 "For they provoked Him with their high places and aroused His jealousy with their graven images."
Exodus 20:5 "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me."
Exodus 34:13-14 "Break down their altars, smash their sacred stones and cut down their Asherah poles. Do not worship any other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God."
Deuteronomy 6:15 "for the Lord your God in the midst of you is a jealous God; otherwise the anger of the Lord your God will be kindled against you, and He will wipe you off the face of the earth."
Nahum 1:2 The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.
Bible verses on God's wrath.
Nahum 1:6 "Who can withstand his indignation? Who can endure his fierce anger. His wrath is poured out like fire; the rocks are shattered before him."
Ezekiel 25:17 "I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful rebukes. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance upon them.”
John 3:36 "Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”
Romans 1:18 "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth."
Romans 12:19 "Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”
Ephesians 5:6 "Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.”
The fact that nobody achieves the level of conformity to commanded behavior tells you that it's not humanly possible. You might as well say that God gave everybody free will to defy gravity and just float upward but nobody wanted to try it.
The Christians generally agree with that and proclaim that every human being is a sinner in need of redemption. One believer on this thread just wrote, "I don’t believe the scriptures indicate that complete victory over sin occurs until one leaves this physical world and enters eternity," an idea that creates another area in incoherence in Christian dogma - man is given free will and a propensity to sin. Now, suddenly, he has no will to sin after dying if he is saved? What happened? Was the desire to sin excised in the transition? Was free will lost?
This kind of thinking is the basis of so much destructive negative judgment as well as self-loathing. It's the idea that sexual behavior is the business of anybody but the law, and even there, unacceptable sexual behavior is limited to statutory and violent rape, incest, and maybe something else I'm forgetting, because of the psychological and physical harm those things do to people - not because of some imagined god who is offended by harmless behaviors such as premarital sex and homosexuality.
I'm familiar with the arguments from believers that those activities are also harmful in and of themselves even if there were no god to be offended by them, but that's an unrelated argument to declaring such behavior off-limits because it offends a god. If your argument is religious, the skeptic rejects it on that basis. If it's scientific, then you need to make the case that behaviors like extramarital sex should be avoided on those grounds, and the attempts I just mentioned don't rise to that. They just point out that careless people get STDs, unwanted pregnancies, have their marriages fall apart, or get shot by jealous husbands, which are reasons to be careful, not to avoid those practices altogether.
That's not good enough. It would need to be divinely authored by an actual deity without human input to have value.
Why? Because inspired by means not faithful to the original, without which one cannot distinguish which are the god's ideas and which have been added. Let me illustrate:
The Flintstones were inspired by The Honeymooners. There are many things true bout The Flintstones that parallel the Honeymooners, but also many changes have been added. If all you had was The Flintstones, you couldn't tell which features of the Flintstones represented the mind of The Honeymooners' authors.
In case you're unfamiliar with both shows, they each feature a couple of married blue-collar men who are friends and neighbors and attend the same lodge where they wear funny hats, and who are married to women one of which is very cynical and sarcastic toward her husband and the other giggly.
But there are differences, too. One is set in the stone age. Fred and Wilma have a pet whereas Ralph and Alice did not. The Flintstones had a car and eventually, a baby, whereas there were no cars or children The Honeymooners' lives.
If we stipulate to the idea that scripture was only inspired by a deity and not authored by one, which parts did the original writer write and which parts did the human authors add? You don't have a rational way to decide.
Your reasoning is faulty. The Bible might not be set in mythical places, and might reference assorted public officials, but that just means that its authors were familiar with those names and faces as we are of the names and places in our lives - not that there stories are accurate.
The serpent was there. The god was not. That's not love or caring considering the foreseeable outcome of that arrangement and the punishment that would be exacted on all of mankind.
Here's an analogous situation. You have a cookie jar in reach of a couple of children. The consequences for the kids if they eat one is that the parents will throw them out of the house and force them to fend for themselves if they do. The parents leave the kids alonewith thecookies and a person who encourages them to eat one.
Do you have difficulty deciding how that is likely to end? I don't. And who is to blame? In Christianity, it would be the kids. In humanism, it would be the parent.
We have similar stories in the news of parents who keep guns in the house that the kids have access to, and even if told to stay away from the guns, if they're accessible rather than locked up, and the child uses the gun, the parent is being held criminally liable as is the child if they're old enough
The story is about them becoming knowledgeable about good and bad after eating the apple.
It shows me the weakness, pettiness, and moral insecurity of the depicted deity. It's allegedly all-powerful but can't do what most human beings are capable of. I can snap my fingers and forgive another's "sin" against me, but that is apparently not possible for this god. That's not a virtue. That's a moral defect.
You've ben viewing all of this through the lens of a believer who assumes that his god is good and right, and that therefore anything bad that occurs is man's or the devil's fault. But the skeptic doesn't do that. He doesn't make that assumption before evaluating the alleged deeds of the deity. He makes his moral judgments by evaluating those deeds.
I'm well aware that the believer considers that kind of thinking off limits and invalid, but the humanist doesn't. He considers it essential to making a fair and accurate assessment and judgment.
Not in the religious sense. There is no such thing as sin if the god you believe in doesn't exist, since sin is defined as a violation of its rules. What we have instead is laudatory, acceptable, and unacceptable behavior, the latter being subject to human shunning (they call it cancel culture in its strongest form now, but it can be as little as grounding a child) and the law.
And yes, bad behavior can be harmful to self and others but look at how much comes from the church and its adherents. And society is gradually letting it know how it feels about its bigotries (homophobia, atheophobia, misogyny), hypocrisies (pedophilia coverup), and now in the States, its anti-American, theocratic tendencies. As you say, these are "real things impacting our lives and world in such harmful and negative ways."
Humanists and humanism have no such scandals. They're the ones pushing back on the church and its incursion into lives where it is both unwelcome and often harmful. Humanism is about human empowerment such that the maximal number of people can pursue happiness as they understand it as long as they remain within the law, and that requires maximal freedom, human development, and social and economic opportunity - not finger wagging and irrational proscriptions against behaviors that some group of religious people believe a god commands.
Your religion teaches that God sent his son to be tortured, and that disobedient people will be tortured for eternity. And the god that does those things is called perfectly loving - a grotesque perversion of the concept of love.
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe that is true but I also believe if you don't believe in the right things in the Bible you can end up in Hell anyway.
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe that is your loss.
Muffled
Jesus in me
I believe that is a misinterpretation of the Qu'ran.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
According to the Baha'i Writings God can be none of those things. Guess which one I am going to believe?
I thank God every day that I was never a bible-believing Christian.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
In the Baha'i Faith, sin is defined as disobedience to God and the separation from God that results from sinning. Some examples of sins in the Baha'i Faith include: Anger, Jealousy, Hypocrisy, Prejudice, and Failure to follow Baha'i laws.
Perfect obedience to God is impossible for any human to achieve. God knows that so that is why God is the Ever-Forgiving.
Nobody can be sinless, according to my definition above, but in my opinion, God gave everyone free will so everyone can refrain from committing certain kinds of sins if they want to.
In Christianity, redemption is the act of being saved from sin and its consequences, and is a necessary part of salvation. It is a key belief in the Christian faith, and is often associated with the death of Jesus Christ.
That is not a Baha'i belief. Baha'is do not believe in redemption.
What we do believe is that everyone has a lower material nature and a higher spiritual nature, and because we have a lower nature we all have the propensity to sin. The way that Jesus saved is from our sins is by offering His teachings to follow and dying on the cross.
"The Christ sacrificed Himself so that men might be freed from the imperfections of the physical nature and might become possessed of the virtues of the spiritual nature. This spiritual nature, which came into existence through the bounty of the Divine Reality, is the union of all perfections and appears through the breath of the Holy Spirit. It is the divine perfections; it is light, spirituality, guidance, exaltation, high aspiration, justice, love, grace, kindness to all, philanthropy, the essence of life. It is the reflection of the splendor of the Sun of Reality."
That we will have 'complete victory over sin' when we leave this physical world is not a Baha'i belief.
That we will have no will to sin after dying if we were 'saved' in this life is not a Baha'i belief.
From a Baha'i standpoint, the reason we will be free of sins when we leave this physical world and enter the spiritual world is because there will be nothing physical in the spiritual world whereby we might commit sins. Also, in the spiritual world we will not have free will to choose to sin, since free will is only in this world.
Sexual behavior is not the business of anybody but the law, limited to statutory and violent rape and incest, and nobody in the Baha'i Faith makes it their business.
God is not offended by anyone's sexual behavior. Nothing could be more ridiculous than God being offended. Only humans get offended.
The only reason that are Baha'i Laws governing sexual behavior is for the good of the individual and the good of society.
Again, God is not offended by anyone's sexual behavior. Nothing could be more ridiculous than God being offended. Only humans get offended. The only reason that are Baha'i Laws governing sexual behavior is for the good of the individual and the good of society.
I could easily make a case as to why extramarital sex should be avoided, without involving religion at all, but this is a subject I don't want to discuss right now, given there are so many reasons and it would take too much time to explain all of them, time I don't have right now!
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Sgt. Pepper
All you need is love.
I wish I had never been one.
Trailblazer
Veteran Member
So do I, but you have done a very good job of digging your way out.
Unfortunately the pile of rubble is massive, so it seems as if you are still digging your way out.
Such as who _________________________________________________________
What is incorrect at www.jw.org
or, the so-called MANY modern-day Christians fitting as Jesus mentioned at Matthew 7:21-23
Thank you for pointing out the ^above^ because that was also true in the 1st Century - see 1st Corinthians 5:7-11
As far as the soon coming time of separation (sheep & goats) Jesus as judge decides - Matthew 25:31-34,37,40
Sgt. Pepper
All you need is love.
As a former Christian evangelist, I know that there are many Christians who believe Jehovah's Witnesses aren't true Christians and are a misguided cult who hold false beliefs, distort and misinterpret the Bible, and teach unbiblical doctrines (e.g., "Who are the Jehovah’s Witnesses and what are their beliefs?").