Can anyone point out the weakest points in christianity? You need to know enough about it and you need to give it considerable thought.
(I am christian. As long as I can remember I have adopted a mindset of skeptical thinking and self doubt, but since I in real life don´t know many people who are smarter than me and knows enough to say anything about christianity, I ask you. My mom is agnostic and pretty clever, but she can come up with better arguments for a God than I can. A fair warning, I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something, but I would be positively surprised if someone did. I have some weak points of my own, but it would be very useful to see if I have missed something instead of just sticking with that.)
After reading a sizable amount of your responses, I have to ask if your interest is truly in finding weak points of your religion, or if you are merely trying to defend your beliefs to a (largely) atheist audience—possibly hoping to win a few converts, or at the very least trying to reassure yourself of your beliefs.
No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you. I don´t even want you to convert. I want you to walk your own ways in life and come up with your own conclusions. I am used to debate religion with christians myself. Many of the arguments used by people here, such as inconsistences in the Bible, are the same arguments I have used myself, when arguing with fundamentalists and conservative believers. The problem is, I am not one of those.
The male stereotypes of the Father and the Son and the lack of mother and daughter are to me, some of the strongest evidence for why christian churchs are the results of politics rather than divine intervention. Another is the fact that even amongst many protestant christians, Paulus is considered a higher authority than Jesus himself, or in other words, some christians assign the gospels lower priority than the interpretations of a mortal man who never met Jesus. (A teacher I once met actually said that the words of Paulus was such a good explanation of what Jesus most probably meant, that we therefore should disregard the words of Jesus himself to some extent.)
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
Where I was raised, people rather looked down on christians and not the other way around. I can honestly not imagine how it is to live in a place where people look up to you if you say that you are christian.
I value critical thinkning and I understand that this is impossbile if you are not free to think about whatever you want. I read all kinds of science and I love physics. That passion has been with me longer than my outspoken christinaity and I have come to respect ordinary scientists alot more than I respect someone who tells me that she/he is a rationalist. Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister and Alber Einstein was a hardcore theist and none of these guys are famous for that, because they did not waste all their time arguing religion with atheists.
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW. But I am used to that people harass you just because you tell them that you are christian. Still others value reason more than compassion.
I believe in a God that willingly exposed himself to the same evils that we face and who sacrifaced his life for us, because he loved us. I believe in love and compassion. I believe in forgiveness and an open mind. I share the same values as many atheists, the difference is that I believe in a God that share those values aswell. For monotheists it is not a question of which God to believe in, it is about that we try to learn about that God and who that is. The most important messages Jesus tried to teach us, whether he was mortal or not, is that we should love each other and that children are the saviours of this world. I believe in a God who knows us, our shortcomings and our doubts, who knows our fears and our pain better than we do ourselves, becuase “he” knows what we are missing. God is not a male, but rather genderless, the ultimate power, who will stay with us, alwyas, in love. I believe in love, that is my personal and universal God.
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
This is an example of the kind of thing that convinces me you’re not here for genuine questioning. A person who is truly trying to doubt, and who specifically asked for others to raise questions of their own, would not call those other people hypocrites. And note that you’re calling people hypocrites in response to, of all things, downvotes? All of this says to me that your primary attitude toward the people here is one of hostility. Ask yourself this: is hostility really the right way to respond to questioners whom you yourself asked to question your beliefs? Moreover, is it psychologically realistic that a person with genuine doubts would become so hostile toward his/her questioners at so slight a provocation? Maybe I’m misreading you here, but somehow, I doubt that’s the case.
We’re not the ones drawing the tribal lines here; you are. Maybe your original comment started out as a genuine request for discussion; I don’t know. But somewhere along the line, that sincerity of doubt got lost, and this became another one of those tired, rehashed debates about Christianity versus atheism. You’re on the “Christianity” side; we’re on the “atheism” side. That’s how you’ve labeled us in your mind: as enemies on a different side of a tribal war. Arguments become soldiers, any ground conceded whatsoever is viewed as some sort of “loss”, and that’s why you’re so eager to accuse everyone here who disagrees with you of hypocrisy.
(Note: I have downvoted none of your comments myself, but I can understand why some others have been doing so. As MarkusRamikin pointed out, you’ve been doing surprisingly little to make your position arguable, either for or against, and the insults and accusations of “hypocrisy” you’ve been hurling at people really haven’t been helping the matter. At any rate, a bit of advice: don’t take karma all that seriously. People aren’t downvoting due to some personal or tribal vendetta. Treat downvotes simply as slightly noisy signals of what LW users do not approve of, and would like to see less of in the future. As the age-old saying goes, “It’s nothing personal.”)
The point of looking at your belief’s real weak points is that it’s easy to find strong points to attack, and thus one can feel like they’ve engaged with their doubts when in fact they have avoided them.
Is asking us to find the weak spots of your particular flavor of Christianity attacking a weak point, or attacking a strong point? If you look back over your comments, you will note a number of times when you talk about not expecting people to understand, or pointing out that you don’t believe the various things that people are pointing out as weak spots in other forms of Christianity. It seems to me that this allows you to claim that you have exposed your beliefs to attack and them have survived—when, in fact, that is not so.
To elaborate, consider the following:
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW.
Is this what it looks like to attack a weak point, or a strong point? Was the goal here to reach mutual understanding, or to show that LWers aren’t capable of discussing religion?
Note that in the comment that started this all, you claimed that you had found some weak spots on your own. Why, then, are you not talking about those? Suppose you knew that at the end of this conversation you would be a convinced atheist, and you were trying to minimize the amount of time it would take to get to that conclusion. Would you have said the same things in the same way?
(I apologize for the Bulverism, but in this context it seems unavoidable. Just asking you to search your motivations doesn’t seem likely to succeed, because I want to raise this specific hypothesis.)
I’d never seen the term Bulverism, but I don’t think what you are doing would classify. You aren’t saying A is false because Okeymaker likes B, you’re saying the extraordinary claims with lack of extraordinary evidence doesn’t provide much prove A.
And that lack of good evidence does not seems not to matter… which makes me wonder how a discussion can continue. Questioning the motives of the discussion is goal clarification, without which there is no discussion.
I didn´t want to influence the eventual weak points that others knew of by telling about my own. That would be contra-productive.
Is asking us to find the weak spots of your particular flavor of Christianity attacking a weak point, or attacking a strong point? If you look back over your comments, you will note a number of times when you talk about not expecting people to understand, or pointing out that you don’t believe the various things that people are pointing out as weak spots in other forms of Christianity. It seems to me that this allows you to claim that you have exposed your beliefs to attack and them have survived—when, in fact, that is not so.
Aha! A valid question at last! My answer is that I did not estimate the rate of success by asking that question HERE to be more than about 40%, but if I would estimate the same question again, I would assign it about 5% probability. But aksing here would not diminish the chance for me to learn something new. Some contradicitons in the canon-gospels that polymathwannabe has indirectly introduced me to caught my interest, even if they were displayed at a website that was called. “The church of theists sucks.” Hehe. But rest assured, I do not intend to just ask YOU about weak points!. I have constantly been thinking about my doubts for years, and not until lately I have started to come to terms with them. Understand that I did not TRY to come to faith in Jesus, at least not deliberately. (When I was a kid my mom once said I could be a hindu for all she cared and the majority of my friends are atheists.)
If someone actually had asked about my own weak points earlier on I would have told them. To those who asked in a PM, I gladly have shared my doubts. But right now I don´t want to expose them as much, in this hostile environment, caused by a few. All the crap I get here has finally forced me to realize that it will probably not be worth the effort to discuss here. I mean, a religion is not such a big deal if it´s teachings are compatible with laws and morals that co-existing non-believers hold, and still people here treat religious beliefs like the plague? I don´t see why. THIS would be intersting to know. Because there is no threat to anyone else in what I believe. The reasons for my moral may be irrational to some extent, but not a potential danger.
Was the goal here to reach mutual understanding, or to show that LWers aren’t capable of discussing religion?
To me it was reaching mutual understandning, that is why I bothered answer so many comments. If I failed horribly, at least I honestly tried.
I do not blame you for your Bulverism in this comment. I find it well used and justified. Since I do believe, I can´t see how I would become an atheist, but I do not fear to become one. From my current perspective I believe that God will care for you who are atheists aswell, even though you do not believe in God, if you already value love above all else and honestly try to treat others well, just as well as you treat yourself. (I count in friendship and compassion in love.) Since I believe that God works this way, I won´t fear becoming an atheist before I have already became one, and then I will think to myself, that I had no reason to fear becoming one in the first place, since there is no God.
I mean, a religion is not such a big deal if it´s teachings are compatible with laws and morals that co-existing non-believers hold, and still people here treat religious beliefs like the plague?
If you’re not willing to discuss the weak points of your religion, you can’t claim that its teachings are compatible with the morals of other people. After all, how do you know this? Maybe they’re not compatible, and that’s one of the weak points you won’t discuss.
I can honestly not imagine how it is to live in a place where people look up to you if you say that you are christian.
That is a statement about your own lack of imagination and lack of thinking ability. Saying things like that invites downvotes much more than being Christian.
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
That’s passive aggressive and ignores that this community does have well respected Christians with karma > 2000 and 96% approval rate.
The idea that you get downvoted because you are Christian is an excuse.
The most important messages Jesus tried to teach us, whether he was mortal or not, is that we should love each other and that children are the saviours of this world. [...] I believe in love, that is my personal and universal God.
I don’t know much about the different sects of Christianity, but I do know when someone is being overly belligerent when they shouldn’t. The fact that you’re acting so belligerent about this is what originally made me wonder if you were really trying to question your beliefs. (As dxu said, a real person trying to question their beliefs wouldn’t attack people they asked to help in the first place.)
No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you. I don´t even want you to convert. I want you to walk your own ways in life and come up with your own conclusions.
If the atheists are wrong and you’re right and God does exist, I’m sure they’d like to know about it so they can update their beliefs! And if they’re right and you’re wrong, wouldn’t you like to know about it so you can update your beliefs? After all, there’s only one reality out there, either God exists or he doesn’t. If you really think you’re right about God existing, you should be trying to convert us.
I don’t know if this will feel relevant to you, but a big one for me in retrospect is that the concept of “faith” is really suspicious. When someone says “no, trust me unconditionally on this, I know you have doubts but just ignore them even though I will never address them in any concrete way,” that person is lying to you.
I always thought of God as truth-loving. If faith is a virtue, then God’s own commands undermine and obscure the truth, while making all sorts of lies equally defensible. The whole structure of the need for faith is just really weird if Christianity is true—but perfectly logical if Christianity is false.
A good point. I considered this when I was younger and still hadn´t fully turned my head towards christianity. (I still have a long way to go but I now consider myself christian.)
As I see it, we all have our basic premises. Just how much we depend on them differs. We all make fundamental choices. (In case you have read hpmor; Like Harry did when the sorting hat warned him about how unlogic it was for him to hope and risk that he would not turn into a dark wizard if he was sorted to any house but hufflepuff. He knew he was going to choose rawenclaw, but he couldn´t put words on WHY, and yes, that may be seen as suspicious.)
I think it is all about WHAT you put your faith in. Yes, you are allowed to doubt anything. And you should not blindly believe in something until you are ready to actually put your faith in it. It is a risk you take. Willingly. Kierkegaard once said something along the lines: “To have faith is to throw yourself out over a seventy thousand fathoms deep and hope that someone catches you.” I don´t respect stupidity, as in suiciding by jumping off a cliff. But I do respect Kierkegaard. When you have found something you are willing to put your faith in, you need that bravery.
The need of faith (in christianity) may seem weird, if you do not know what you are supposed to have faith in. It is an important part of christianity to realize this. Many fail to draw any useful conslusion from the fact that Jesus says that we will be saved if we believe. And I do consider the conclusion that there is no god to be a useful conclusion if that is the best answer that mind can produce. Everyones way is their own making and should be respected. Those who “believe” in something just for the sake of it are not doing it right as far as I can see.
Depends on what sort of Christianity. For instance, much of blossom’s list is clearly addressed to those who believe that God designed earth’s living things (directly or less so) but some Christians don’t believe that.
Would you care to say a few words about the variety of Christianity you favour?
(In case the answer is no, here are a few suggested weak points for different varieties, all probably expressed too tersely to be more than the barest gesture towards an argument. Hardcore inerrantist fundamentalism: internal inconsistencies in the Bible. More mainstream but still fairly “traditional”: arguments from evil and silence. Varieties that stress God’s love over his power and suggest that for whatever reason he largely has “no hands on earth but ours”, but still see him as exerting moral influence: the fact that Christians are not spectacularly better morally than everyone else. Highly sophistimacated apophatic theology that refuses to say anything definite about God: impossibility of actually having any evidence to speak of for a being so vaguely defined; lack of continuity with the Christian tradition whose existence and longevity are pretty much the only reason for paying any attention to such ideas. All but the last: general shortage of evidence and tendencies for the more impressive sorts to evaporate on closer inspection; maybe complexity penalty for introducing into your model of the universe a god whose properties are so hard to pin down.)
I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something
I don’t know how LW compares with other places occupied by large numbers of intelligent atheists, but my experience generally is that a large fraction of atheists are former theists, many of them former serious and well informed theists. I don’t know whether we will come up with anything you find impressive (and of course you may be strongly motivated to find anything we do come up with unimpressive...) but if not it probably won’t be out of sheer ignorance of Christianity.
Would you care to say a few words about the variety of Christianity you favour?
I am an evangelic christian and within my belief the gospels override everything else that is or can be seen as contradictory. (I don´t read the Torah since I am not a Jew and I do not seek wisdome in the old testament even though I have had a surprinsingly wise teacher who taught me how to interpret that old rubbish in ways that actually made sense to me.) See, if I believe Jesus was divine, I have to value the words of Christ higher than the words of his followers and mortal predecessors.
I don’t know how LW compares with other places occupied by large numbers of intelligent atheists, but my experience generally is that a large fraction of atheists are former theists, many of them former serious and well informed theists.
Yes, my hope was and is that someone like that will answer my question. You are right, your answers do not impress me, you seem to fail to understand important things about christianity. I can come up with much better counter arguments myself, but I really appreciate the honest try. If you would like me to tell you about what I think might be wrong in your picture of what christianity is about, you can PM me or ask me to answer here.
I am an evangelic Christian and within my belief the gospels override everything else [...]
I take it “evangelic”, as you’re using it, is not identical to the fairly common term “evangelical” despite its obvious shared etymology? Evangelicalism as generally understood is hard to reconcile with calling the OT “old rubbish”. I guess you’re using it to mean something like “centred on the gospels”.
I’d have a pretty good idea of your likely position on lots of things if you were an evangelical in the usual sense (inerrancy of scripture or something close to it, salvation sola fide, strongly substitutionary theory of the atonement, relatively more stress on personal faith and relationship-with-God rather than more corporate things, inclined to skepticism about anything that could be labelled “tradition” or “ritual”, etc., etc., etc., etc.) but unfortunately what you’ve said here isn’t terribly indicative.
your answers do not impress me
They weren’t answers, they were (as I said in so many words) brief gestures in the direction of possible answers. If you think I would think half a dozen words would convince you of anything, then I think you must think I think you’re either much cleverer or much stupider than is at all plausible.
you seem to fail to understand important things about christianity
I honestly do not know how you could possibly be justified in leaping to such a conclusion from what I have written here. I wonder whether you have perhaps misunderstood the nature of my response.
Perhaps it is necessary to say some of the following things explicitly. 1. Christianity—like any religion—is not simply a body of propositions; it is also a community, a way of life, a set of attitudes, allegedly a personal and/or corporate communion with God, a rich stream of traditions of many kinds, etc., etc., etc. My comments are addressing some of the propositions because that is what you appeared to be interested in (e.g., talking about “arguments for God”) but that doesn’t mean I am unaware of the other things. 2. To any simple argument, whether good or bad, there is generally an almost-as-simple counterargument, to which in turn there is generally a counter-counter-argument one notch less simple again, etc. Of course when I say e.g. “argument from evil” I am not suggesting that on hearing the words “argument from evil” a Christian should deconvert on the spot. I am suggesting that there are lines of argument, briefly alluded to by that term, for which at any given level of sophistication the atheist has the better case. I have not actually made any such argument here, and of course I do not expect anyone to be convinced by the mere mention of a family of arguments. Similarly for all the other things I mentioned. 3. I am well aware that there are varieties of Christian thinking that attempt to sidestep some of the arguments I mention—e.g., denying that introducing God into your understanding of the world makes it more complex, because by definition God is supremely simple. For each such, though, (a) there are other varieties that don’t attempt the sidestep, and further (b) disagreeing with something is not the same as failing to understand it.
Or perhaps none of that helps. Who knows? Anyway, I would be interested to know a few examples of things you believe I fail to understand about Christianity. I think it would be more productive to tell me here out in the open, but if you prefer to PM me then feel free.
(I was a Christian for—depending on exactly how you count—at least twenty years. I have held (minor) leadership roles in Christian organizations. I have a few shelves of theology books, maybe 90% of which I have read. My wife is still an active Christian. It is of course possibly that I completely fail to understand fundamental things about the religion that was central to my life for decades (either because I never did, or because abandoning the faith exposed me to some kind of demonic possession, or whatever) but I would suggest that you consider the possibilities (1) that you have arrived at your conclusion prematurely and/or (2) that you would consider that, say, 80% or more of serious Christians fail to understand important things about Christianity. Which, of course, might be true.)
[EDITED to clarify a sentence in which I inadvertently used the word “common” with two quite different meanings.]
I take it “evangelic”, as you’re using it, is not identical to the fairly common term “evangelical” despite its obvious shared etymology? Evangelicalism as generally understood is hard to reconcile with calling the OT “old rubbish”. I guess you’re using it to mean something like “centred on the gospels”.
Wikipedia Yes, it may be confusing but I tend to use words in their original meaning. It is good to check anyway, since english is not my native language.
I honestly do not know how you could possibly be justified in leaping to such a conclusion from what I have written here. I wonder whether you have perhaps misunderstood the nature of my response.
Perhaps I arrived prematurely at the conclusion, but as I said, I think you might have misunderstood, I didn´t say you actually had. If I mean to say that you are wrong, I say that you are wrong. Okey, so you only hint at stuff. Well that don´t help me, is that a more political azccurate term?
Anyway, I would be interested to know a few examples of things you believe I fail to understand about Christianity. I think it would be more productive to tell me here out in the open, but if you prefer to PM me then feel free.
Okey, I will point out the hings I saw as weird. 1. “Hardcore inerrantist fundamentalism: internal inconsistencies in the Bible.”
Why would a christian need to be a hardcore fundamentalist and interpret the whole Bible literal? You don´t interpret science fiction literal. I guess you mean that this only apply to SOME christians. 2. “the fact that Christians are not spectacularly better morally than everyone else.” Well, this seems like an ambitious statement in my eyes. Compare all the countries with a cross in their flag with countries that don´t have it. Compare BNP and corruption, crime rate and wellfare etc etc. Now think about this: Why WOULD christians need to have higher moral? Where do you find that premise in the NT? It seems to me like that isn´t based in christian theology at all, but if you have 20 years experience as an active christian maybe you know something I don´t. 3. “Highly sophistimacated apophatic theology that refuses to say anything definite about God.” Hah! Like we have been very successful at definitely defining the universe for hundreds of years of scientific struggle. Anyhow, here are something to consider;
The holy trinity
Jesus saying: I am the way and the life
The statement that Jesus is the son of God and God and all his teachings showing what he valued and who he was and how he acted, which is kind of the whole point of christianity.
First Epistle to the Corinthians, verse (?) 13
Now if we compare this with other religious teachings, I think we will find that we can see differences between the deities.
Not a bad policy. The trouble is that saying “my version of Christianity is rooted in the gospels” doesn’t really do much to distinguish you from everyone else, because pretty much all Christians consider that their version of Christianity is rooted in the gospels. So describing your variety of Christianity as “evangelic” tells me rather little.
as I said, I think you might have misunderstood
Well, your actual words were “you seem to fail to understand important things about christianity”. But it’s OK; I’m not offended.
so you only hint at stuff
Well, you know, I did consider just asking you “so what kind of Christian are you?” and refusing to say anything about what might be the strongest arguments against any kind of Christianity until the kind is precisely specified. I thought it might help us move forward a bit quicker if I gave some indication of the kinds of arguments that might be appropriate, so that we could work in parallel on figuring out (1) what kind of Christianity to look for good arguments against and (2) what those arguments actually are.
Why would a christian need to be a hardcore fundamentalist and interpret the whole Bible literal?
They wouldn’t. My whole point was that there are different kinds of Christians with different kinds of Christianity. One kind—by no means the only kind—is the hardcore fundamentalist who claims to believe everything in the Bible (not necessarily literally, but I never claimed otherwise). If I were looking for good arguments against that kind of Christianity, one thing I’d look at is inconsistencies between different bits of the Bible (that appear to be intended as straightforward history or doctrinal teaching rather than any kind of metaphor).
I guess you mean that this only apply to SOME christians.
Yes. If I hadn’t already made that clear enough, I apologize. (I thought I had.)
Well, this seems like an ambitious statement in my eyes.
Really? You think a good default position is that Christians are spectacularly better than everyone else, morally? OK.
(I think the cross-country comparison you suggest is totally invalidated by lots of other things that historically happen to correlate a bit with Christian heritage.)
Why WOULD christians need to have higher moral? Where do you find that premise in the NT?
Christians are supposed (at least according to some varieties of Christianity, the ones I’d be taking aim at if I were making that kind of argument) to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, who is the source of all goodness and value in the world.
Christians typical pray frequently (both individually and if following standard liturgies of various churches that have them) for their hearts to be purified, to be cleansed from sin, to be enabled to live righteously. This seems like very much the kind of prayer that the Christian god might be expected to grant, if he were real (it is clearly in line with his stated goals; it doesn’t require “interference” with the world beyond people’s minds; the minds in question are of people who have already declared themselves willing for him to change them, and are specifically asking him to do it.)
Like we have been very successful at definitely defining the universe for hundreds of years of scientific struggle.
Well, actually, we have. Spectacularly so. Do you really disagree?
[EDITED to add a few other things since I had to write the above in a bit of a rush, which is one reason why it’s too long:]
Some suggestions in the NT that Christians should be much better morally than they generally are: 1 Peter 2 says that Jesus “bore our own sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin but live to righteousness”; one can read that as talking about some kind of “imputed righteousness” that doesn’t actually involve acting righteously, but I think it’s a stretch and more to the point a Christian of the particular kind I said this might be a good response to wouldn’t take that position. 1 John 1 and 2 similarly talk of being “cleansed from all unrighteousness” and again I don’t think it’s likely that the author means some purely formal transaction that doesn’t involve actually becoming morally better. He seems to admit only reluctantly that genuine Christians might continue to commit sins at all. In chapter 3 he goes further: “No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” Now of course 1 John paints with a very broad brush, but there it is in the New Testament and even if the author is overstating his case he must mean something by it. That famous chapter that you recommended I should consider, 1 Corinthians 13: read it in its context; it is saying that love (with that whole extravagant litany of virtues it brings along with it) is the most important gift of the Holy Spirit that is supposed to be present and active within every Christian’s heart. Galatians 5 has a lengthy list of “fruits of the Spirit” (which Christians are supposed to exhibit) and most of them are moral virtues (and the corresponding “works of the flesh” opposed thereto are mostly moral vices).
here are something to consider
I’m afraid it’s not obvious what sort of conclusion you’re hoping I’ll draw from your list. Rather than guessing, I’ll comment briefly on the individual items in it. I may very well be missing your point, though.
The holy trinity … seems to me a doctrine of doubtful coherence and at best ambiguous support in the NT documents that are generally reckoned the foundation of Christian doctrine. Some Christians contemplating it have had neat ideas (e.g., the idea that the love Christianity makes a big deal of is found within, so to speak, the very structure of the Deity). I don’t see that Christianity is any more likely to be right, or beneficial, on account of having this idea in it.
Jesus saying: I am the way and the life … and the truth; don’t forget the truth. Anyway, again I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be being impressed by here. There’s a fair chance that Jesus’s grand-sounding “I am …” sayings, found only in John’s gospel, were in fact made up by the author of that gospel—don’t you think they’re the sort of things that the authors of the synoptic gospels might have been expected to record? So if you’re working towards a “lord, liar or lunatic” argument then I don’t think this is a great place to start. (Such arguments have other weaknesses, but I won’t belabour them unless it turns out you really are making one.)
The statement that Jesus is the son of God and [etc.] … well, it’s a statement. I don’t find that contemplating it fills me with awe or certainty that he must have been who the NT writers say he said he was. Many other religions don’t make similar claims about their founders; I guess that’s part of your point; but I’m not sure where you’re going from there. (Lord/liar/lunatic again?)
First Epistle to the Corinthians, [chapter] 13 … yeah, it’s a fine piece of writing. So are some other things in the Bible. I don’t see that they’re supernaturally good, though, if that’s where you’re heading; I’m not familiar enough with other religions’ scriptures to know how good their Best Bits are (though I know Muslims sometimes say that the sublimity of the Qur’an is evidence of its divine origin).
You have yet to tell us what you believe, apart from the tribal/political reassurance about evolution. What do you mean by “divine” (this is important for prior probability), and what evidence do you believe you have for this variety of Jesus?
I assume you know that scholars largely consider the Gospels unreliable. The earliest one dates from during or after the war that destroyed the ‘Second Temple’, and we know of no Christian leader in Jerusalem who survived it. Shortly before this Nero supposedly persecuted the Christians in Rome. We know nothing about the history of Christianity at the time when the Gospel of Mark likely appeared, which weakly supports the claim that all the leaders were dead. We can’t name anyone who definitely had the power to insist on points of doctrine or prevent innovation.
On the assumption most favorable to the reliability of the early Gospels—that someone in the know wrote them to preserve original Christianity in this difficult time—we should still conclude that they have a lot to do with theological/political disputes of the time which we know nothing about. We should expect to misinterpret something in the text through not knowing this context.
They have lower priority than what could be the words of God. I do not disregard the New testament, I just “like” the gospels more than the rest of it.
I take it you refer to christian churches. No. But I haven’t fully read any non-canon gospels yet. Do note this is off topic, PM me or continue our old chat instead, you have not answered there yet :)
Examples of misunderstanding. (Though I think Jiro may have misunderstood your statement that I fail to understand important things about Christianity as saying that the LW population at large fails to understand important things about Christianity.)
Because I don’t see any of them. Just saying “you misunderstand Christianity” isn’t really an example. Give some details about what in particular the person misunderstands.
You did not give even one. Another user gave some hypothetical arguments against different varieties of Christianity because hardly anyone agrees what the religion entails, and you hadn’t explained what you believed. You still haven’t explained it clearly. Instead you act like “The holy trinity” has a clear and accepted meaning, and “the Gospels” can only be read in one (trinitarian?) way.
If you write in this impossible-to-engage manner, you should expect people to engage with different positions instead. And gjm most definitely did not assume you believed anything on his list (I assume “his”).
Dude, Jiro asked for examples of people who misunderstand, he did not ask for examples of what I believe. As for The Holy Trinity, it is found in the Nicene creed, in the Apostle´s creed and finally precised in the Athanasian Creed. It has a clear and accepted meaning amongst theologists. Before you say anything more, know that I got an Laudatur in religion (Evangelisk-luthersk religion, which I can´t translate but it refers to lutheranism,) on my matriculation exam and I won´t tolerate nonsense.
Actually, this is getting to the point where it doesn’t seem worth anyone’s time. You seem to have said:
that you reject the Hebrew Bible, or at least consider it irrelevant
that the Gospels have a clear meaning which we should understand without explanation from you (and which you believe).
This may not contradict itself directly, but it certainly seems impossible to maintain once we admit that countless Christians read passages like that one differently. Why would the Gospel accounts of Jesus be clear to us, when your co-worshipers don’t agree on what they mean?
If you do continue the conversation on this topic, please try to explain yourself more coherently.
I note that you are talking about other comments (not related to Jiros weird question) here. Well, you are a bit ignorant. I never said the gospels should make clear sense to anyone, I said that the holy trinity should make sense. You are the one off topic. I don´t find it useful to discuss christianity with you either, so we can cut off the chat on this so called “topic”.
I didn’t downvote you, but you should be aware that this seems like trolling, because the Mystery of the Trinity is seen by most Christians as a famously hard problem.
Thank you Vaniver, these comments are one of the reasons that I don´t yet have given up on this community and only stick to reading Eliezer´s articles. Yeah, well the malicious/outright stupid people who downvoted me fail to understand/pretend to fail to understand that what I obviously referred to was my earlier comment, about that The Holy Trinity is a widely accepted concept, studied and defined by professional theologists with ACTUAl knowledge on the subject.The implications of the Holy Trinity is indeed a mystery, but the dispute about what it is, is settled since long ago, meaning that there is an actual, real, consensus there.
Yeah, well the malicious/outright stupid people who downvoted me fail to understand/pretend to fail to understand that what I obviously referred to was my earlier comment
The beauty of theological study (and the internet) is that you can look at the source material and translations in detail and directly yourself. You have access to the very small amount of source data on the subject. Most of what people ‘know’ about the Trinity was made up hundreds of years after the fact.… and quite obviously these theories about the holy trinity have been untested.
Far from that. The Orthodox Church fervently rejects filioque, which is official doctrine for Catholics, but not for Anglicans. And that’s without mentioning the rest of the entire spectrum of interpretations, ranging from the strong unitarianism of Jehovah’s Witnesses to the blatant tritheism of Mormonism.
Yes, yes you are right, That is an article I should reread. I´ll do it before I answer anything else. It is also wrong of me to assume that everyone here is very rational and also to think that just because you are very rational, that means that you are [well informed and intelligent].
Yeah go ahead and downvote me for not wanting to talk to you. How dare I refuse to answer all of your questions immediately, even though you don´t pay any attention to my answers?
Pretty sure you’re getting downvoted for some combination of the following: unclear, incoherent, unspecific, and impolite. Compared to your growing wordcount in this conversation so far, you have shown little evidence of having something to say.
That is because I waste time on replying to comments while trying to be polite. I think that I have tried very hard to be polite, and it is hard to be specific when people go off topic all the time. It is confusing aswell. I only tried to be critical on my own belifes, but apparently it is forbidden to ask “weak points of christianity” unless you explain all of christianity and everything you believe in at the same time. (When you say that you are a physicists, no one asks if you believe in string theory or inflation, they find out subsequently.)
It feels to me that almost the majority of those who have commented here, totally disregarded my request that they would only answer after seriously thinking about my question and actually be familiar with christianity.
I don´t have time to explain christianity to everyone and I don´t want to, and it don´t help me either.
Here is what I can say about my belief: I am an evangelic christian, I confess to the Apostles’ Creed and I believe in a personal God. I am enrolled as ev. luther, and I can live with that, but I don´t agree with everything the church does, just as a democrat doesn´t agree with everything Obama does. If there is anything more people need to know, they can ask me personally and treat me with respect, or they can have it and everyone can be happy.
To be blunt, I’m not really seeing answers from you. Most of your responses to most people’s claims have been “well I don’t believe that anyway”. Meanwhile, you haven’t even read most of Christianity.
Your specific responses seem to say very little:
No. But I haven’t fully read any non-canon gospels yet.
You haven’t done even your basic due diligence. You believe your eternal soul is controlled by God, but you can’t be bothered to read a few documents that claim to have worthwhile information? This is absurd. Instead you’ve randomly latched on one set of documents, which you fully acknowledge are contradicted elsewhere.
I am an evangelic christian and within my belief the gospels override everything else that is or can be seen as contradictory. I have to value the words of Christ higher than the words of his followers and mortal predecessors.
There are direct contradictions WITHIN the gospels. How can something with basic logical error be an ultimate truth? Moreover, most theologians acknowledge that the gospels were not written during Jesus’s claimed activities… let alone BY Jesus.
I just “like” the gospels more than the rest of it.
You like something, fine… that doesn’t make it true. That fact that you liking something doesn’t make it true is simply a fact. Having not even read the alternatives, why does what you ‘like’ even matter?
If the only ice cream you’ve ever had is broccoli flavored, a statement that ‘you it more than the rest’ doesn’t mean anything. You need something to compare it to.
Actually read and investigate the various documents across ‘flavors’ of Christianity that claim to talk about your God. Honestly ask yourself why you only choose the Gospels, and try to think about the various contradictions. You don’t need us for this.
but you can’t be bothered to read a few documents that claim to have worthwhile information?
Not true. I intend to read non-canon gospels, do you know how many there are? I don´t NEED to read non-canon gospels to believe in Jesus, just like I don´t need to read Feynman to believe in physics.
Most of your responses to most people’s claims have been “well I don’t believe that anyway”. Meanwhile, you haven’t even read most of Christianity.
Not true, I did not respond that way to “most people´s claims”. Prove it. I haven´t even read most of christianity? Yeah? how do YOU know that? The fact that I was amongst the top 5% of all Finnish people who took the matriculation exam in religion the year I did is proof enough that I am not ignorant, at least amongst academics.
You like something, fine… that doesn’t make it true.
Never said it would, Totally irrelevant comment, you purposely try to make me look stupid by taking that out of context. Why do you think I used the quotations mark?
There are direct contradictions WITHIN the gospels. How can something with basic logical error be an ultimate truth?
Feel free to refer to those contradicitons you talk about. Meanwhile, in the gospels JESUS do not contradict himself. If he does, prove it.
Honestly ask yourself why you only choose the Gospels
Haha, how silly. I never said I disregard everything that is not the gospels and you know it. I said I prioritize the gospels more, which is 100% logical if I believe that Jesus was a God. Why would I NOT give the gospels higher priority? Yeah, I can´t know that they aren´t falsified, but I can´t know that about any other NT scripture either!
errancy.org is a good reference. A simple reading of the first page should be sufficient to put doubt in the fact that the gospels are completely ‘true’.
While this is not enough to convince someone that the Biblical God is false, it at least is a good gate to further discussion. If someone can’t acknowledge that there are factual errors and contradiction… I’m not sure what there is left to talk about.
don´t NEED to read non-canon gospels to believe in Jesus, just like I don´t need to read Feynman to believe in physics.
Absolutely true, but if your belief on some specific part of physics is based on a single untested book which has demonstrable errors, you should read some other sources. Especially when there really isn’t a huge volume.
[As a side note ‘belief in physics’ doesn’t really mean anything. If you believe that a dropped apple will fall, you ‘believe in physics’… you have direct evidence of it.]
I intend to read non-canon gospels, do you know how many there are?
It’s shorter than A Song of Fire and Ice. In your world view, your religious documents should be much more important than George R Martin’s musings are to millions.
Never said [liking something makes it true]
You’re missing my point. Tour reason for believing the Gospels appears to have no foundation other than your ‘like’, and as you seem to agree, you liking it doesn’t make it more true than all the other religious documents. If you have some other reason for believing it, share THAT and we can discuss. Currently you’re leaving everyone to guess why you believe what you believe. If you go ask 10 fellow believes ‘why’, I guarantee you won’t get the same answer each time.
I never said I disregard everything that is not the gospels and you know it.
I never said you did; I said you choose the Gospels over everything else… you have multiple sources, all of which are easily available to you; and you appear to randomly chose a subset. Even worse, you appear to have randomly picked a complete religion.
Your chance of having picked the right religion is near zero. Hopefully any real supreme being doesn’t send you to some analogue of hell for believing in the wrong god.
Meanwhile, in the gospels JESUS do not contradict himself.
To be clear, almost nobody claims Jesus wrote the gospels. Different gospels have Jesus saying different things in the same situation. For a straightforward indisputable example refer to Matthew 26:34 and Mark 14:30. A response that the above example may be misquoted could apply to everything Jesus is quoted as saying.
(You can Google other examples, but many could be argued as Jesus telling a story in which he describes different activities. This one is more straightforward.)
Feel free to refer to those contradictions you talk about.
Again, you can easily Google this. The Old Testament is demonstratively wrong on facts, but I suspect you’ll say you don’t follow that. Mark has a large number of demonstratively wrong facts as well. You’re trusting Mark to correctly quote Jesus, when his stories have numerous other mistakes,
Okay then, could you please answer my earlier question about scientific consensus in one particular instance? State your own opinion. It seems meta-relevant to the discussion.
(My impression so far is that you are not as accepting of d-separation as the general public here. As in, the set of mammals and the set of unicellular organisms are d-separated, and at least one set that ‘blocks’ mammals from unicellulars is ‘part of reptiles’. It means that learning some new feature about mammals, you can theorize about the corresponding feature/lack of it in reptiles, but you can’t infer much about unicellulars. Consider this model: God → Physics → Civilization. God and Civilization are d-separated, with Physics as the blocking set.)
I, too, hadn’t known about it before joining LW. Make a search on the site or on Wiki, and there is a book by Judea Pearl about causality that can be downloaded from web. It is a bit heavy, though, I am struggling to read it.
Then why do mammals need a different temperature in their testicles? Like mammals, birds also regulate their own temperature, and they do just fine with internal testicles.
I will admit, I don’t know much about bird testicles. But looking into it for 5 minutes suggests that there seem to be more significant streamlining concerns for aquatic and flying animals than normal ground animals, and the different convection for being suspended in water / moving quickly through air suggests to me that it might be easier to do temperature regulation if they’re internal (as might come to the mind of any man who’s gotten into a cold pool).
If you really believe God is responsible for everything, “blame evolution” isn’t really a good answer. Are you claiming that God is constrained in how he could set up evolution?
I think God created the world, then he let it have it´s run. I wouldn´t say that he “set up” earths evolution in any specific way… Except for the creationists (are they even considered christian?) I don´t know any christians who would deny evolution today.
Creationists describe themselves as Christians, and it’s hard to see how anyone else could be in a better position to tell them what they are, especially within Protestantism, where there’s no central authority on what the religion is and is not.
I have always believed that you need to worship Jesus as a god, as someone divine, in order to call yourself christian. The source I have used as support for this claim is The 1986 edition of this encyclopedia For the record, it was ultimately supervised by four professors and actually written and produced by many more, including docents in religions.
Jiro says that “blame evolution” is not a good answer. But I have the right to believe in evolution even though I believe in a God. There is no need for a contradiction there.
The reason that “blame evolution” isn’t a good answer isn’t that evolution specifically is incompatible with Christianity. The reason is that “blame anything” isn’t a good answer, whether it’s evolution or something else. God is supposed to be in complete control over the universe. The argument “God only let it happen because of X” is nonsense no matter what X is, because God can do anything he wants; he’s not subject to constraints.
I have always believed that you need to worship Jesus as a god, as someone divine, in order to call yourself christian.
Most US creationists would indeed say that they do worship Jesus as a God. Most of the Christian’s with whom you interact might not believe in creationism but it’s a mistake to assume that the people you know are representative for the whole world.
I did not downvote this, but I think whoever did meant it as ‘actually, you are NOT entitled to believe in evolution’. (People who view evolution through the lenses of genetics and biotechnology and not, say, botany and zoology, intuitively seem to me less baffled by it—not always a good thing. You have to be as baffled as you possibly can, to seek out any weak spots at all.)
From my point of view the most hazardous thing about Christianity (this may also be the weakest point logically, but that’s a different claim) is that Christianity posits a realm which is different from and superior to what can be perceived directly and thought about logically. This makes it rather easy to treat people very badly, both other people and oneself.
The lack of evidence for the existence of its deity. Even proving that a deity exists is not enough; you would still need to prove that the deity you found is the one described by the Bible. And proving that the Christian deity exists would still not be enough; you would also need to prove that the Bible describes it accurately. And even then you would need to prove monotheism, i.e. that other possible gods aren’t real too.
The internal inconsistencies and factual errors in the Bible. Specialized websites like IronChariotsWiki and RationalWiki can give better descriptions of this problem than I could.
I’m not quite sure what you want to see when you ask for the ‘weakest point in Christianity’. I thought the easily found arguments and frequently discussed arguments were compelling enough by themselves. I was a regular Sunday school attendee, continued to go to church (for social reasons) even after I started to think the whole thing was random, and genuinely enjoy having these sorts of discussions
The main things that I found had weight is that it’s taking the numerous world religions and saying ‘this one’ without any great reason. When the correct selection may damn you for eternity, it’s worthy of considering the alternatives.
From an outside view, I see no reason to privilege the supernatural portions of Christianity over other religions. Rhetorically, what do you find as the weak points of every other religion? Don’t many of these apply to Christianity?
Generic inconsistencies—having read all the Biblical texts (some multiple times), and referencing databases for discussions of the original pre-translated text, the number of straightforward contradictions is outstanding. If we just assume for a second that some of the text was effectively the word of god, you still don’t know which parts. And that’s disregarding every other religion’s text, seemingly without justification.
Inconsistencies in practice—some branches of Christianity heavily discount the Bible due to the above.… but this makes the problem WORSE. It just dilutes the ‘god content’ even further. Arguments of your specific practitioners being ‘inspired by god’ needs to address all the people who disagree with you but say the same thing.
The specific details about Christ, and your ‘flavor’ of Christianity, are besides the point in light of the above. Other than popularity, Christianity still has the same problems as Zeus and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
All that said, the best argument for Christianity seems to be as a placeholder belief and social system. For some people it’s better just to pick a set of beliefs and go with it (IE: it’s a complex/unknowable local minima problem that’s ‘good enough’).
P.S. - I’d be interested in hearing your arguments ‘for’ God. I’ve yet to see one that isn’t so broad to be effectively meaningless. You might want to just google your argument for God and see if there aren’t already identified issues.
The main things that I found had weight is that it’s taking the numerous world religions and saying ‘this one’ without any great reason.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. You’re not selecting from the set of all existing religions in the world today, but rather from the set of all possible religions, even those that haven’t been invented.
As long as it’s a god with a Big Divine Plan in which humans play a role, sure.
If the gods created the universe so they could watch the big shiny hydrogen balls, and don’t care about the emergent properties of complex proteins on that one planet in that one galaxy, we wouldn’t necessarily know about it.
I guess that when I thought “religion”, I thought “system of worship”, not “system of belief”. To me the a religion would be “true” if it accurately responded to a demand for worship or obedience or such. If the creators of the Universe have no preferences over our actions, then at most you could have a, well, description of them, but not much of a religion thus defined. Discovering such beings would not make me a religious person.
Of course now that I thought of it explicitely, I realize this is a rather narrow definition.
True and I didn’t consider that… but assuming a supreme being had any impact in humanity, it is reasonable to assume that the set of practiced religions are more likely to be true than the set of not discovered religions.
I was trying to minimize the possible tangential arguments. I think trying to expand from 1 religion to 19 major religions is enough to show the problem without going to ~200 religions, which allows room to argue about applicabiliy/similarity of subtypes. Going to all possible religions allows room to argue about applicability of set theory.
I don’t know the best approach for convincing flawed humans, and I would certainly start with the argument from other existing religions (rather than the world-creating cheese sandwich someone came up with). But objectively, given the vast set of possible alternatives that religions ignore, the only real significance to Hinduism or whatever vs Christianity is that it helps show belief is not much evidence for truth. It gives us some evidence (at least in many cases) but not necessarily a significant amount compared to the complexity penalties involved with detailed religious claims. And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as overlapping rather than a proper subset) is pretty detailed if we combine historical claims with some meaningful traits of divinity.
I know this has been discussed before, but I’m not convinced that complexity penalties should apply to anything involving human witnesses.
Suppose someone theorizes that the sun is made of a micro black hole covered in lightbulbs, and there is no obvious physics being broken.… this is an obvious place to use complexity penalties. Simpler models can explain the evidence.
With the Bible though, we have witnesses that presumably entangle the Bible with a divine being. Complexity penalty in this case shouldn’t penalize for extra details. (Considering complexity penalties may still point to “this story is made up for social reasons, and here are some prior sources” instead of “god did it”… but this isn’t due to the amount of detail provided.)
...What? As a technical matter, the laws of probability say that evidence (eyewitness or otherwise) tells us how to update a prior probability, and ultimately a complexity penalty seems like the only way to get sensible priors.
I take you to mean that in a real eyewitness account, we should expect details. That seems more or less right, but largely irrelevant to what I’m saying—even the idea of a human-like mind is more complicated than it appears. That’s before we get to the details of the story (which we might doubt to some degree, in more trustworthy cases, even while paradoxically taking those details as evidence for some core claim).
Even the bare claim that God was involved with certain historical figures is another logically distinct detail we need to penalize before we get to the specifics of any one Gospel or source for the Torah. So the evidence of witnesses would need to overcome this penalty. And of course, in order for them to justify the beliefs about God, we would need to understand what that word means and how someone could directly or indirectly observe its object.
I may have misread your initial comment. To paraphrase to check my reading: you are penalizing due to complexity of a ‘god’ prior but, on the balance, eyewitness details should increase your estimate of the claimed witnessed set being true. More details from eyewitnesses do not then penalize further. The complexity of the god models are just so complex in the first place, that eyewitness details don’t increase your estimate much.
What I’m not grasping is what this sentence meant:
And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as overlapping rather than a proper subset) is pretty detailed if we combine historical claims with some meaningful traits of divinity.
Functionally, we’re talking about the set of vaguely Bible shaped gods… not all the details would need to be true. Eyewitness claims that this bible shaped god interacted with a historical figure should STILL increase your estimate of it happening.… even though that increase may still be infinitesimal.
Excepting things like “the following sentence is false”, eyewitness details should always increase the chance of something like the referenced object existing. It may in parallel also provide evidence that the ‘custody chain’ is faulty or faked… but that’s a different issue.
Pretty much. I’m saying that “vaguely Bible shaped,” rather than “touched down only in Jackson County, Missouri in 1978,” is itself a detail to be justified.
Can anyone point out the weakest points in christianity? You need to know enough about it and you need to give it considerable thought.
(I am christian. As long as I can remember I have adopted a mindset of skeptical thinking and self doubt, but since I in real life don´t know many people who are smarter than me and knows enough to say anything about christianity, I ask you. My mom is agnostic and pretty clever, but she can come up with better arguments for a God than I can. A fair warning, I doubt that many here knows enough about christianity to actually come up with something, but I would be positively surprised if someone did. I have some weak points of my own, but it would be very useful to see if I have missed something instead of just sticking with that.)
After reading a sizable amount of your responses, I have to ask if your interest is truly in finding weak points of your religion, or if you are merely trying to defend your beliefs to a (largely) atheist audience—possibly hoping to win a few converts, or at the very least trying to reassure yourself of your beliefs.
No, I don´t try to defend my beliefs to you. I don´t even want you to convert. I want you to walk your own ways in life and come up with your own conclusions. I am used to debate religion with christians myself. Many of the arguments used by people here, such as inconsistences in the Bible, are the same arguments I have used myself, when arguing with fundamentalists and conservative believers. The problem is, I am not one of those.
The male stereotypes of the Father and the Son and the lack of mother and daughter are to me, some of the strongest evidence for why christian churchs are the results of politics rather than divine intervention. Another is the fact that even amongst many protestant christians, Paulus is considered a higher authority than Jesus himself, or in other words, some christians assign the gospels lower priority than the interpretations of a mortal man who never met Jesus. (A teacher I once met actually said that the words of Paulus was such a good explanation of what Jesus most probably meant, that we therefore should disregard the words of Jesus himself to some extent.)
The hipocrits here downvoting all of my comments, even those not related to this, simply does it as a punishment for my insolence, something they think they are entitled to because of their Tribal status as atheists, and my inferior status as a theist. I must admit I was originally expecting more of this community.
Where I was raised, people rather looked down on christians and not the other way around. I can honestly not imagine how it is to live in a place where people look up to you if you say that you are christian.
I value critical thinkning and I understand that this is impossbile if you are not free to think about whatever you want. I read all kinds of science and I love physics. That passion has been with me longer than my outspoken christinaity and I have come to respect ordinary scientists alot more than I respect someone who tells me that she/he is a rationalist. Thomas Bayes was a Presbyterian minister and Alber Einstein was a hardcore theist and none of these guys are famous for that, because they did not waste all their time arguing religion with atheists.
The amount of upovotes you got here proves to anyone actually reading my comments and understanding them, just how little you actually pay attention to my what I actually say and just how pointless it is for a theist to try to discuss religion here on LW. But I am used to that people harass you just because you tell them that you are christian. Still others value reason more than compassion.
I believe in a God that willingly exposed himself to the same evils that we face and who sacrifaced his life for us, because he loved us. I believe in love and compassion. I believe in forgiveness and an open mind. I share the same values as many atheists, the difference is that I believe in a God that share those values aswell. For monotheists it is not a question of which God to believe in, it is about that we try to learn about that God and who that is. The most important messages Jesus tried to teach us, whether he was mortal or not, is that we should love each other and that children are the saviours of this world. I believe in a God who knows us, our shortcomings and our doubts, who knows our fears and our pain better than we do ourselves, becuase “he” knows what we are missing. God is not a male, but rather genderless, the ultimate power, who will stay with us, alwyas, in love. I believe in love, that is my personal and universal God.
This is an example of the kind of thing that convinces me you’re not here for genuine questioning. A person who is truly trying to doubt, and who specifically asked for others to raise questions of their own, would not call those other people hypocrites. And note that you’re calling people hypocrites in response to, of all things, downvotes? All of this says to me that your primary attitude toward the people here is one of hostility. Ask yourself this: is hostility really the right way to respond to questioners whom you yourself asked to question your beliefs? Moreover, is it psychologically realistic that a person with genuine doubts would become so hostile toward his/her questioners at so slight a provocation? Maybe I’m misreading you here, but somehow, I doubt that’s the case.
We’re not the ones drawing the tribal lines here; you are. Maybe your original comment started out as a genuine request for discussion; I don’t know. But somewhere along the line, that sincerity of doubt got lost, and this became another one of those tired, rehashed debates about Christianity versus atheism. You’re on the “Christianity” side; we’re on the “atheism” side. That’s how you’ve labeled us in your mind: as enemies on a different side of a tribal war. Arguments become soldiers, any ground conceded whatsoever is viewed as some sort of “loss”, and that’s why you’re so eager to accuse everyone here who disagrees with you of hypocrisy.
(Note: I have downvoted none of your comments myself, but I can understand why some others have been doing so. As MarkusRamikin pointed out, you’ve been doing surprisingly little to make your position arguable, either for or against, and the insults and accusations of “hypocrisy” you’ve been hurling at people really haven’t been helping the matter. At any rate, a bit of advice: don’t take karma all that seriously. People aren’t downvoting due to some personal or tribal vendetta. Treat downvotes simply as slightly noisy signals of what LW users do not approve of, and would like to see less of in the future. As the age-old saying goes, “It’s nothing personal.”)
I know this is a totally tangential issue, but: No, he really wasn’t. See, e.g., this Wikipedia article.
Then what exactly is going on here?
The point of looking at your belief’s real weak points is that it’s easy to find strong points to attack, and thus one can feel like they’ve engaged with their doubts when in fact they have avoided them.
Is asking us to find the weak spots of your particular flavor of Christianity attacking a weak point, or attacking a strong point? If you look back over your comments, you will note a number of times when you talk about not expecting people to understand, or pointing out that you don’t believe the various things that people are pointing out as weak spots in other forms of Christianity. It seems to me that this allows you to claim that you have exposed your beliefs to attack and them have survived—when, in fact, that is not so.
To elaborate, consider the following:
Is this what it looks like to attack a weak point, or a strong point? Was the goal here to reach mutual understanding, or to show that LWers aren’t capable of discussing religion?
Note that in the comment that started this all, you claimed that you had found some weak spots on your own. Why, then, are you not talking about those? Suppose you knew that at the end of this conversation you would be a convinced atheist, and you were trying to minimize the amount of time it would take to get to that conclusion. Would you have said the same things in the same way?
(I apologize for the Bulverism, but in this context it seems unavoidable. Just asking you to search your motivations doesn’t seem likely to succeed, because I want to raise this specific hypothesis.)
I’d never seen the term Bulverism, but I don’t think what you are doing would classify. You aren’t saying A is false because Okeymaker likes B, you’re saying the extraordinary claims with lack of extraordinary evidence doesn’t provide much prove A.
And that lack of good evidence does not seems not to matter… which makes me wonder how a discussion can continue. Questioning the motives of the discussion is goal clarification, without which there is no discussion.
I didn´t want to influence the eventual weak points that others knew of by telling about my own. That would be contra-productive.
Aha! A valid question at last! My answer is that I did not estimate the rate of success by asking that question HERE to be more than about 40%, but if I would estimate the same question again, I would assign it about 5% probability. But aksing here would not diminish the chance for me to learn something new. Some contradicitons in the canon-gospels that polymathwannabe has indirectly introduced me to caught my interest, even if they were displayed at a website that was called. “The church of theists sucks.” Hehe. But rest assured, I do not intend to just ask YOU about weak points!. I have constantly been thinking about my doubts for years, and not until lately I have started to come to terms with them. Understand that I did not TRY to come to faith in Jesus, at least not deliberately. (When I was a kid my mom once said I could be a hindu for all she cared and the majority of my friends are atheists.)
If someone actually had asked about my own weak points earlier on I would have told them. To those who asked in a PM, I gladly have shared my doubts. But right now I don´t want to expose them as much, in this hostile environment, caused by a few. All the crap I get here has finally forced me to realize that it will probably not be worth the effort to discuss here. I mean, a religion is not such a big deal if it´s teachings are compatible with laws and morals that co-existing non-believers hold, and still people here treat religious beliefs like the plague? I don´t see why. THIS would be intersting to know. Because there is no threat to anyone else in what I believe. The reasons for my moral may be irrational to some extent, but not a potential danger.
To me it was reaching mutual understandning, that is why I bothered answer so many comments. If I failed horribly, at least I honestly tried.
I do not blame you for your Bulverism in this comment. I find it well used and justified. Since I do believe, I can´t see how I would become an atheist, but I do not fear to become one. From my current perspective I believe that God will care for you who are atheists aswell, even though you do not believe in God, if you already value love above all else and honestly try to treat others well, just as well as you treat yourself. (I count in friendship and compassion in love.) Since I believe that God works this way, I won´t fear becoming an atheist before I have already became one, and then I will think to myself, that I had no reason to fear becoming one in the first place, since there is no God.
If you’re not willing to discuss the weak points of your religion, you can’t claim that its teachings are compatible with the morals of other people. After all, how do you know this? Maybe they’re not compatible, and that’s one of the weak points you won’t discuss.
That is a statement about your own lack of imagination and lack of thinking ability. Saying things like that invites downvotes much more than being Christian.
That’s passive aggressive and ignores that this community does have well respected Christians with karma > 2000 and 96% approval rate.
The idea that you get downvoted because you are Christian is an excuse.
I don’t think you do well in that front.
I don’t know much about the different sects of Christianity, but I do know when someone is being overly belligerent when they shouldn’t. The fact that you’re acting so belligerent about this is what originally made me wonder if you were really trying to question your beliefs. (As dxu said, a real person trying to question their beliefs wouldn’t attack people they asked to help in the first place.)
If the atheists are wrong and you’re right and God does exist, I’m sure they’d like to know about it so they can update their beliefs! And if they’re right and you’re wrong, wouldn’t you like to know about it so you can update your beliefs? After all, there’s only one reality out there, either God exists or he doesn’t. If you really think you’re right about God existing, you should be trying to convert us.
Can you please explain why you believe in your God, and not all the others?
Are you Weedlayer?
I don’t know if this will feel relevant to you, but a big one for me in retrospect is that the concept of “faith” is really suspicious. When someone says “no, trust me unconditionally on this, I know you have doubts but just ignore them even though I will never address them in any concrete way,” that person is lying to you.
I always thought of God as truth-loving. If faith is a virtue, then God’s own commands undermine and obscure the truth, while making all sorts of lies equally defensible. The whole structure of the need for faith is just really weird if Christianity is true—but perfectly logical if Christianity is false.
A good point. I considered this when I was younger and still hadn´t fully turned my head towards christianity. (I still have a long way to go but I now consider myself christian.)
As I see it, we all have our basic premises. Just how much we depend on them differs. We all make fundamental choices. (In case you have read hpmor; Like Harry did when the sorting hat warned him about how unlogic it was for him to hope and risk that he would not turn into a dark wizard if he was sorted to any house but hufflepuff. He knew he was going to choose rawenclaw, but he couldn´t put words on WHY, and yes, that may be seen as suspicious.)
I think it is all about WHAT you put your faith in. Yes, you are allowed to doubt anything. And you should not blindly believe in something until you are ready to actually put your faith in it. It is a risk you take. Willingly. Kierkegaard once said something along the lines: “To have faith is to throw yourself out over a seventy thousand fathoms deep and hope that someone catches you.” I don´t respect stupidity, as in suiciding by jumping off a cliff. But I do respect Kierkegaard. When you have found something you are willing to put your faith in, you need that bravery.
The need of faith (in christianity) may seem weird, if you do not know what you are supposed to have faith in. It is an important part of christianity to realize this. Many fail to draw any useful conslusion from the fact that Jesus says that we will be saved if we believe. And I do consider the conclusion that there is no god to be a useful conclusion if that is the best answer that mind can produce. Everyones way is their own making and should be respected. Those who “believe” in something just for the sake of it are not doing it right as far as I can see.
Depends on what sort of Christianity. For instance, much of blossom’s list is clearly addressed to those who believe that God designed earth’s living things (directly or less so) but some Christians don’t believe that.
Would you care to say a few words about the variety of Christianity you favour?
(In case the answer is no, here are a few suggested weak points for different varieties, all probably expressed too tersely to be more than the barest gesture towards an argument. Hardcore inerrantist fundamentalism: internal inconsistencies in the Bible. More mainstream but still fairly “traditional”: arguments from evil and silence. Varieties that stress God’s love over his power and suggest that for whatever reason he largely has “no hands on earth but ours”, but still see him as exerting moral influence: the fact that Christians are not spectacularly better morally than everyone else. Highly sophistimacated apophatic theology that refuses to say anything definite about God: impossibility of actually having any evidence to speak of for a being so vaguely defined; lack of continuity with the Christian tradition whose existence and longevity are pretty much the only reason for paying any attention to such ideas. All but the last: general shortage of evidence and tendencies for the more impressive sorts to evaporate on closer inspection; maybe complexity penalty for introducing into your model of the universe a god whose properties are so hard to pin down.)
I don’t know how LW compares with other places occupied by large numbers of intelligent atheists, but my experience generally is that a large fraction of atheists are former theists, many of them former serious and well informed theists. I don’t know whether we will come up with anything you find impressive (and of course you may be strongly motivated to find anything we do come up with unimpressive...) but if not it probably won’t be out of sheer ignorance of Christianity.
Thank you for your answer.
I am an evangelic christian and within my belief the gospels override everything else that is or can be seen as contradictory. (I don´t read the Torah since I am not a Jew and I do not seek wisdome in the old testament even though I have had a surprinsingly wise teacher who taught me how to interpret that old rubbish in ways that actually made sense to me.) See, if I believe Jesus was divine, I have to value the words of Christ higher than the words of his followers and mortal predecessors.
Yes, my hope was and is that someone like that will answer my question. You are right, your answers do not impress me, you seem to fail to understand important things about christianity. I can come up with much better counter arguments myself, but I really appreciate the honest try. If you would like me to tell you about what I think might be wrong in your picture of what christianity is about, you can PM me or ask me to answer here.
I take it “evangelic”, as you’re using it, is not identical to the fairly common term “evangelical” despite its obvious shared etymology? Evangelicalism as generally understood is hard to reconcile with calling the OT “old rubbish”. I guess you’re using it to mean something like “centred on the gospels”.
I’d have a pretty good idea of your likely position on lots of things if you were an evangelical in the usual sense (inerrancy of scripture or something close to it, salvation sola fide, strongly substitutionary theory of the atonement, relatively more stress on personal faith and relationship-with-God rather than more corporate things, inclined to skepticism about anything that could be labelled “tradition” or “ritual”, etc., etc., etc., etc.) but unfortunately what you’ve said here isn’t terribly indicative.
They weren’t answers, they were (as I said in so many words) brief gestures in the direction of possible answers. If you think I would think half a dozen words would convince you of anything, then I think you must think I think you’re either much cleverer or much stupider than is at all plausible.
I honestly do not know how you could possibly be justified in leaping to such a conclusion from what I have written here. I wonder whether you have perhaps misunderstood the nature of my response.
Perhaps it is necessary to say some of the following things explicitly. 1. Christianity—like any religion—is not simply a body of propositions; it is also a community, a way of life, a set of attitudes, allegedly a personal and/or corporate communion with God, a rich stream of traditions of many kinds, etc., etc., etc. My comments are addressing some of the propositions because that is what you appeared to be interested in (e.g., talking about “arguments for God”) but that doesn’t mean I am unaware of the other things. 2. To any simple argument, whether good or bad, there is generally an almost-as-simple counterargument, to which in turn there is generally a counter-counter-argument one notch less simple again, etc. Of course when I say e.g. “argument from evil” I am not suggesting that on hearing the words “argument from evil” a Christian should deconvert on the spot. I am suggesting that there are lines of argument, briefly alluded to by that term, for which at any given level of sophistication the atheist has the better case. I have not actually made any such argument here, and of course I do not expect anyone to be convinced by the mere mention of a family of arguments. Similarly for all the other things I mentioned. 3. I am well aware that there are varieties of Christian thinking that attempt to sidestep some of the arguments I mention—e.g., denying that introducing God into your understanding of the world makes it more complex, because by definition God is supremely simple. For each such, though, (a) there are other varieties that don’t attempt the sidestep, and further (b) disagreeing with something is not the same as failing to understand it.
Or perhaps none of that helps. Who knows? Anyway, I would be interested to know a few examples of things you believe I fail to understand about Christianity. I think it would be more productive to tell me here out in the open, but if you prefer to PM me then feel free.
(I was a Christian for—depending on exactly how you count—at least twenty years. I have held (minor) leadership roles in Christian organizations. I have a few shelves of theology books, maybe 90% of which I have read. My wife is still an active Christian. It is of course possibly that I completely fail to understand fundamental things about the religion that was central to my life for decades (either because I never did, or because abandoning the faith exposed me to some kind of demonic possession, or whatever) but I would suggest that you consider the possibilities (1) that you have arrived at your conclusion prematurely and/or (2) that you would consider that, say, 80% or more of serious Christians fail to understand important things about Christianity. Which, of course, might be true.)
[EDITED to clarify a sentence in which I inadvertently used the word “common” with two quite different meanings.]
Wikipedia Yes, it may be confusing but I tend to use words in their original meaning. It is good to check anyway, since english is not my native language.
Perhaps I arrived prematurely at the conclusion, but as I said, I think you might have misunderstood, I didn´t say you actually had. If I mean to say that you are wrong, I say that you are wrong. Okey, so you only hint at stuff. Well that don´t help me, is that a more political azccurate term?
Okey, I will point out the hings I saw as weird. 1. “Hardcore inerrantist fundamentalism: internal inconsistencies in the Bible.” Why would a christian need to be a hardcore fundamentalist and interpret the whole Bible literal? You don´t interpret science fiction literal. I guess you mean that this only apply to SOME christians. 2. “the fact that Christians are not spectacularly better morally than everyone else.” Well, this seems like an ambitious statement in my eyes. Compare all the countries with a cross in their flag with countries that don´t have it. Compare BNP and corruption, crime rate and wellfare etc etc. Now think about this: Why WOULD christians need to have higher moral? Where do you find that premise in the NT? It seems to me like that isn´t based in christian theology at all, but if you have 20 years experience as an active christian maybe you know something I don´t. 3. “Highly sophistimacated apophatic theology that refuses to say anything definite about God.” Hah! Like we have been very successful at definitely defining the universe for hundreds of years of scientific struggle. Anyhow, here are something to consider;
The holy trinity
Jesus saying: I am the way and the life
The statement that Jesus is the son of God and God and all his teachings showing what he valued and who he was and how he acted, which is kind of the whole point of christianity.
First Epistle to the Corinthians, verse (?) 13
Now if we compare this with other religious teachings, I think we will find that we can see differences between the deities.
Not a bad policy. The trouble is that saying “my version of Christianity is rooted in the gospels” doesn’t really do much to distinguish you from everyone else, because pretty much all Christians consider that their version of Christianity is rooted in the gospels. So describing your variety of Christianity as “evangelic” tells me rather little.
Well, your actual words were “you seem to fail to understand important things about christianity”. But it’s OK; I’m not offended.
Well, you know, I did consider just asking you “so what kind of Christian are you?” and refusing to say anything about what might be the strongest arguments against any kind of Christianity until the kind is precisely specified. I thought it might help us move forward a bit quicker if I gave some indication of the kinds of arguments that might be appropriate, so that we could work in parallel on figuring out (1) what kind of Christianity to look for good arguments against and (2) what those arguments actually are.
They wouldn’t. My whole point was that there are different kinds of Christians with different kinds of Christianity. One kind—by no means the only kind—is the hardcore fundamentalist who claims to believe everything in the Bible (not necessarily literally, but I never claimed otherwise). If I were looking for good arguments against that kind of Christianity, one thing I’d look at is inconsistencies between different bits of the Bible (that appear to be intended as straightforward history or doctrinal teaching rather than any kind of metaphor).
Yes. If I hadn’t already made that clear enough, I apologize. (I thought I had.)
Really? You think a good default position is that Christians are spectacularly better than everyone else, morally? OK.
(I think the cross-country comparison you suggest is totally invalidated by lots of other things that historically happen to correlate a bit with Christian heritage.)
Christians are supposed (at least according to some varieties of Christianity, the ones I’d be taking aim at if I were making that kind of argument) to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God, who is the source of all goodness and value in the world.
Christians typical pray frequently (both individually and if following standard liturgies of various churches that have them) for their hearts to be purified, to be cleansed from sin, to be enabled to live righteously. This seems like very much the kind of prayer that the Christian god might be expected to grant, if he were real (it is clearly in line with his stated goals; it doesn’t require “interference” with the world beyond people’s minds; the minds in question are of people who have already declared themselves willing for him to change them, and are specifically asking him to do it.)
Well, actually, we have. Spectacularly so. Do you really disagree?
[EDITED to add a few other things since I had to write the above in a bit of a rush, which is one reason why it’s too long:]
Some suggestions in the NT that Christians should be much better morally than they generally are: 1 Peter 2 says that Jesus “bore our own sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin but live to righteousness”; one can read that as talking about some kind of “imputed righteousness” that doesn’t actually involve acting righteously, but I think it’s a stretch and more to the point a Christian of the particular kind I said this might be a good response to wouldn’t take that position. 1 John 1 and 2 similarly talk of being “cleansed from all unrighteousness” and again I don’t think it’s likely that the author means some purely formal transaction that doesn’t involve actually becoming morally better. He seems to admit only reluctantly that genuine Christians might continue to commit sins at all. In chapter 3 he goes further: “No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him.” Now of course 1 John paints with a very broad brush, but there it is in the New Testament and even if the author is overstating his case he must mean something by it. That famous chapter that you recommended I should consider, 1 Corinthians 13: read it in its context; it is saying that love (with that whole extravagant litany of virtues it brings along with it) is the most important gift of the Holy Spirit that is supposed to be present and active within every Christian’s heart. Galatians 5 has a lengthy list of “fruits of the Spirit” (which Christians are supposed to exhibit) and most of them are moral virtues (and the corresponding “works of the flesh” opposed thereto are mostly moral vices).
I’m afraid it’s not obvious what sort of conclusion you’re hoping I’ll draw from your list. Rather than guessing, I’ll comment briefly on the individual items in it. I may very well be missing your point, though.
The holy trinity … seems to me a doctrine of doubtful coherence and at best ambiguous support in the NT documents that are generally reckoned the foundation of Christian doctrine. Some Christians contemplating it have had neat ideas (e.g., the idea that the love Christianity makes a big deal of is found within, so to speak, the very structure of the Deity). I don’t see that Christianity is any more likely to be right, or beneficial, on account of having this idea in it.
Jesus saying: I am the way and the life … and the truth; don’t forget the truth. Anyway, again I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be being impressed by here. There’s a fair chance that Jesus’s grand-sounding “I am …” sayings, found only in John’s gospel, were in fact made up by the author of that gospel—don’t you think they’re the sort of things that the authors of the synoptic gospels might have been expected to record? So if you’re working towards a “lord, liar or lunatic” argument then I don’t think this is a great place to start. (Such arguments have other weaknesses, but I won’t belabour them unless it turns out you really are making one.)
The statement that Jesus is the son of God and [etc.] … well, it’s a statement. I don’t find that contemplating it fills me with awe or certainty that he must have been who the NT writers say he said he was. Many other religions don’t make similar claims about their founders; I guess that’s part of your point; but I’m not sure where you’re going from there. (Lord/liar/lunatic again?)
First Epistle to the Corinthians, [chapter] 13 … yeah, it’s a fine piece of writing. So are some other things in the Bible. I don’t see that they’re supernaturally good, though, if that’s where you’re heading; I’m not familiar enough with other religions’ scriptures to know how good their Best Bits are (though I know Muslims sometimes say that the sublimity of the Qur’an is evidence of its divine origin).
Just a note: I see your comments in this thread are getting downvoted, but it’s not by me.
I know.
Just out of curiosity: How? Has someone else been boasting of doing it?
You have yet to tell us what you believe, apart from the tribal/political reassurance about evolution. What do you mean by “divine” (this is important for prior probability), and what evidence do you believe you have for this variety of Jesus?
I assume you know that scholars largely consider the Gospels unreliable. The earliest one dates from during or after the war that destroyed the ‘Second Temple’, and we know of no Christian leader in Jerusalem who survived it. Shortly before this Nero supposedly persecuted the Christians in Rome. We know nothing about the history of Christianity at the time when the Gospel of Mark likely appeared, which weakly supports the claim that all the leaders were dead. We can’t name anyone who definitely had the power to insist on points of doctrine or prevent innovation.
On the assumption most favorable to the reliability of the early Gospels—that someone in the know wrote them to preserve original Christianity in this difficult time—we should still conclude that they have a lot to do with theological/political disputes of the time which we know nothing about. We should expect to misinterpret something in the text through not knowing this context.
Besides the entire Old Testament, do you also disregard the books of Acts, Epistles and Apocalypse?
They have lower priority than what could be the words of God. I do not disregard the New testament, I just “like” the gospels more than the rest of it.
Do you agree completely with the Church’s opinion on which books should be part of the Bible and which books shouldn’t?
I take it you refer to christian churches. No. But I haven’t fully read any non-canon gospels yet. Do note this is off topic, PM me or continue our old chat instead, you have not answered there yet :)
Really? Name the two best examples of people here misunderstanding.
I don´t understand what you mean. Examples of people?
Examples of misunderstanding. (Though I think Jiro may have misunderstood your statement that I fail to understand important things about Christianity as saying that the LW population at large fails to understand important things about Christianity.)
Examples of misunderstandings by people.
Aha. Well I couldn´t give you 2 examples, I think I already gave you one. Why would you otherwise comment?
Because I don’t see any of them. Just saying “you misunderstand Christianity” isn’t really an example. Give some details about what in particular the person misunderstands.
You did not give even one. Another user gave some hypothetical arguments against different varieties of Christianity because hardly anyone agrees what the religion entails, and you hadn’t explained what you believed. You still haven’t explained it clearly. Instead you act like “The holy trinity” has a clear and accepted meaning, and “the Gospels” can only be read in one (trinitarian?) way.
If you write in this impossible-to-engage manner, you should expect people to engage with different positions instead. And gjm most definitely did not assume you believed anything on his list (I assume “his”).
Dude, Jiro asked for examples of people who misunderstand, he did not ask for examples of what I believe. As for The Holy Trinity, it is found in the Nicene creed, in the Apostle´s creed and finally precised in the Athanasian Creed. It has a clear and accepted meaning amongst theologists. Before you say anything more, know that I got an Laudatur in religion (Evangelisk-luthersk religion, which I can´t translate but it refers to lutheranism,) on my matriculation exam and I won´t tolerate nonsense.
Actually, this is getting to the point where it doesn’t seem worth anyone’s time. You seem to have said:
that you reject the Hebrew Bible, or at least consider it irrelevant
that the Gospels have a clear meaning which we should understand without explanation from you (and which you believe).
This may not contradict itself directly, but it certainly seems impossible to maintain once we admit that countless Christians read passages like that one differently. Why would the Gospel accounts of Jesus be clear to us, when your co-worshipers don’t agree on what they mean?
If you do continue the conversation on this topic, please try to explain yourself more coherently.
I note that you are talking about other comments (not related to Jiros weird question) here. Well, you are a bit ignorant. I never said the gospels should make clear sense to anyone, I said that the holy trinity should make sense. You are the one off topic. I don´t find it useful to discuss christianity with you either, so we can cut off the chat on this so called “topic”.
I didn’t downvote you, but you should be aware that this seems like trolling, because the Mystery of the Trinity is seen by most Christians as a famously hard problem.
Thank you Vaniver, these comments are one of the reasons that I don´t yet have given up on this community and only stick to reading Eliezer´s articles. Yeah, well the malicious/outright stupid people who downvoted me fail to understand/pretend to fail to understand that what I obviously referred to was my earlier comment, about that The Holy Trinity is a widely accepted concept, studied and defined by professional theologists with ACTUAl knowledge on the subject.The implications of the Holy Trinity is indeed a mystery, but the dispute about what it is, is settled since long ago, meaning that there is an actual, real, consensus there.
Insulting people is seldom helpful.
The beauty of theological study (and the internet) is that you can look at the source material and translations in detail and directly yourself. You have access to the very small amount of source data on the subject. Most of what people ‘know’ about the Trinity was made up hundreds of years after the fact.… and quite obviously these theories about the holy trinity have been untested.
Far from that. The Orthodox Church fervently rejects filioque, which is official doctrine for Catholics, but not for Anglicans. And that’s without mentioning the rest of the entire spectrum of interpretations, ranging from the strong unitarianism of Jehovah’s Witnesses to the blatant tritheism of Mormonism.
Assuming you’re going through in chronological order, you are likely to find the upcoming Illusion of Transparency helpful.
Yes, yes you are right, That is an article I should reread. I´ll do it before I answer anything else. It is also wrong of me to assume that everyone here is very rational and also to think that just because you are very rational, that means that you are [well informed and intelligent].
Yeah go ahead and downvote me for not wanting to talk to you. How dare I refuse to answer all of your questions immediately, even though you don´t pay any attention to my answers?
Pretty sure you’re getting downvoted for some combination of the following: unclear, incoherent, unspecific, and impolite. Compared to your growing wordcount in this conversation so far, you have shown little evidence of having something to say.
That is because I waste time on replying to comments while trying to be polite. I think that I have tried very hard to be polite, and it is hard to be specific when people go off topic all the time. It is confusing aswell. I only tried to be critical on my own belifes, but apparently it is forbidden to ask “weak points of christianity” unless you explain all of christianity and everything you believe in at the same time. (When you say that you are a physicists, no one asks if you believe in string theory or inflation, they find out subsequently.)
It feels to me that almost the majority of those who have commented here, totally disregarded my request that they would only answer after seriously thinking about my question and actually be familiar with christianity.
I don´t have time to explain christianity to everyone and I don´t want to, and it don´t help me either. Here is what I can say about my belief: I am an evangelic christian, I confess to the Apostles’ Creed and I believe in a personal God. I am enrolled as ev. luther, and I can live with that, but I don´t agree with everything the church does, just as a democrat doesn´t agree with everything Obama does. If there is anything more people need to know, they can ask me personally and treat me with respect, or they can have it and everyone can be happy.
To be blunt, I’m not really seeing answers from you. Most of your responses to most people’s claims have been “well I don’t believe that anyway”. Meanwhile, you haven’t even read most of Christianity.
Your specific responses seem to say very little:
You haven’t done even your basic due diligence. You believe your eternal soul is controlled by God, but you can’t be bothered to read a few documents that claim to have worthwhile information? This is absurd. Instead you’ve randomly latched on one set of documents, which you fully acknowledge are contradicted elsewhere.
There are direct contradictions WITHIN the gospels. How can something with basic logical error be an ultimate truth? Moreover, most theologians acknowledge that the gospels were not written during Jesus’s claimed activities… let alone BY Jesus.
You like something, fine… that doesn’t make it true. That fact that you liking something doesn’t make it true is simply a fact. Having not even read the alternatives, why does what you ‘like’ even matter?
If the only ice cream you’ve ever had is broccoli flavored, a statement that ‘you it more than the rest’ doesn’t mean anything. You need something to compare it to.
Actually read and investigate the various documents across ‘flavors’ of Christianity that claim to talk about your God. Honestly ask yourself why you only choose the Gospels, and try to think about the various contradictions. You don’t need us for this.
You say alot of things about me which isn´t true.
Not true. I intend to read non-canon gospels, do you know how many there are? I don´t NEED to read non-canon gospels to believe in Jesus, just like I don´t need to read Feynman to believe in physics.
Not true, I did not respond that way to “most people´s claims”. Prove it. I haven´t even read most of christianity? Yeah? how do YOU know that? The fact that I was amongst the top 5% of all Finnish people who took the matriculation exam in religion the year I did is proof enough that I am not ignorant, at least amongst academics.
Never said it would, Totally irrelevant comment, you purposely try to make me look stupid by taking that out of context. Why do you think I used the quotations mark?
Feel free to refer to those contradicitons you talk about. Meanwhile, in the gospels JESUS do not contradict himself. If he does, prove it.
Haha, how silly. I never said I disregard everything that is not the gospels and you know it. I said I prioritize the gospels more, which is 100% logical if I believe that Jesus was a God. Why would I NOT give the gospels higher priority? Yeah, I can´t know that they aren´t falsified, but I can´t know that about any other NT scripture either!
Lots of examples:
http://www.evilbible.com/contradictions.htm
http://www.skeptically.org/bible/id2.html
http://errancy.org/
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/06/contradictory-and-chaotic-gospel-lies.html
http://www.christianitydisproved.com/bible.html
errancy.org is a good reference. A simple reading of the first page should be sufficient to put doubt in the fact that the gospels are completely ‘true’.
While this is not enough to convince someone that the Biblical God is false, it at least is a good gate to further discussion. If someone can’t acknowledge that there are factual errors and contradiction… I’m not sure what there is left to talk about.
Absolutely true, but if your belief on some specific part of physics is based on a single untested book which has demonstrable errors, you should read some other sources. Especially when there really isn’t a huge volume.
[As a side note ‘belief in physics’ doesn’t really mean anything. If you believe that a dropped apple will fall, you ‘believe in physics’… you have direct evidence of it.]
It’s shorter than A Song of Fire and Ice. In your world view, your religious documents should be much more important than George R Martin’s musings are to millions.
You’re missing my point. Tour reason for believing the Gospels appears to have no foundation other than your ‘like’, and as you seem to agree, you liking it doesn’t make it more true than all the other religious documents. If you have some other reason for believing it, share THAT and we can discuss. Currently you’re leaving everyone to guess why you believe what you believe. If you go ask 10 fellow believes ‘why’, I guarantee you won’t get the same answer each time.
I never said you did; I said you choose the Gospels over everything else… you have multiple sources, all of which are easily available to you; and you appear to randomly chose a subset. Even worse, you appear to have randomly picked a complete religion.
Your chance of having picked the right religion is near zero. Hopefully any real supreme being doesn’t send you to some analogue of hell for believing in the wrong god.
To be clear, almost nobody claims Jesus wrote the gospels. Different gospels have Jesus saying different things in the same situation. For a straightforward indisputable example refer to Matthew 26:34 and Mark 14:30. A response that the above example may be misquoted could apply to everything Jesus is quoted as saying.
(You can Google other examples, but many could be argued as Jesus telling a story in which he describes different activities. This one is more straightforward.)
Again, you can easily Google this. The Old Testament is demonstratively wrong on facts, but I suspect you’ll say you don’t follow that. Mark has a large number of demonstratively wrong facts as well. You’re trusting Mark to correctly quote Jesus, when his stories have numerous other mistakes,
Okay then, could you please answer my earlier question about scientific consensus in one particular instance? State your own opinion. It seems meta-relevant to the discussion. (My impression so far is that you are not as accepting of d-separation as the general public here. As in, the set of mammals and the set of unicellular organisms are d-separated, and at least one set that ‘blocks’ mammals from unicellulars is ‘part of reptiles’. It means that learning some new feature about mammals, you can theorize about the corresponding feature/lack of it in reptiles, but you can’t infer much about unicellulars. Consider this model: God → Physics → Civilization. God and Civilization are d-separated, with Physics as the blocking set.)
Sorry, I am too stupid to understand what you ask of me. I don´t even know what d-separation is.
I, too, hadn’t known about it before joining LW. Make a search on the site or on Wiki, and there is a book by Judea Pearl about causality that can be downloaded from web. It is a bit heavy, though, I am struggling to read it.
A list that pops up for me, but I don’t think they are exactly unusual (and most if not all of them can be found somewhere on this blog):
Pain, suffering, death, injustice, etc.
Why did rabbits evolve to evade foxes and foxes to catch rabbits?
Why would elephants starve to death after they have lost their last teeth, going through all that suffering? Why not a painless death?
Why all those design inefficiencies (eyes backwards, testicles on the outside, …)?
Is there anything that is actually evidence for the existence of god?
I thought this made obvious sense for temperature regulation reasons. (The eye is a much stronger example.)
I agree, if you are limited to the stupid designs that natural selection can produce. But if you are god, you should be able to do better!
Then why do mammals need a different temperature in their testicles? Like mammals, birds also regulate their own temperature, and they do just fine with internal testicles.
I will admit, I don’t know much about bird testicles. But looking into it for 5 minutes suggests that there seem to be more significant streamlining concerns for aquatic and flying animals than normal ground animals, and the different convection for being suspended in water / moving quickly through air suggests to me that it might be easier to do temperature regulation if they’re internal (as might come to the mind of any man who’s gotten into a cold pool).
They evolved from dinosaurs. It could have something to do with that. Mammals are fundamentally different from reptiles and birds. Blame evolution.
If you really believe God is responsible for everything, “blame evolution” isn’t really a good answer. Are you claiming that God is constrained in how he could set up evolution?
I think God created the world, then he let it have it´s run. I wouldn´t say that he “set up” earths evolution in any specific way… Except for the creationists (are they even considered christian?) I don´t know any christians who would deny evolution today.
Creationists describe themselves as Christians, and it’s hard to see how anyone else could be in a better position to tell them what they are, especially within Protestantism, where there’s no central authority on what the religion is and is not.
I have always believed that you need to worship Jesus as a god, as someone divine, in order to call yourself christian. The source I have used as support for this claim is The 1986 edition of this encyclopedia For the record, it was ultimately supervised by four professors and actually written and produced by many more, including docents in religions.
Jiro says that “blame evolution” is not a good answer. But I have the right to believe in evolution even though I believe in a God. There is no need for a contradiction there.
The reason that “blame evolution” isn’t a good answer isn’t that evolution specifically is incompatible with Christianity. The reason is that “blame anything” isn’t a good answer, whether it’s evolution or something else. God is supposed to be in complete control over the universe. The argument “God only let it happen because of X” is nonsense no matter what X is, because God can do anything he wants; he’s not subject to constraints.
Most US creationists would indeed say that they do worship Jesus as a God. Most of the Christian’s with whom you interact might not believe in creationism but it’s a mistake to assume that the people you know are representative for the whole world.
See the gallup poll for the US.
Argument by authority doesn’t bring you far on LW. Especially when you make trivial errors such as questioning whether creationists are Christian.
At least I wont be alone in the trivial error club.
I did not downvote this, but I think whoever did meant it as ‘actually, you are NOT entitled to believe in evolution’. (People who view evolution through the lenses of genetics and biotechnology and not, say, botany and zoology, intuitively seem to me less baffled by it—not always a good thing. You have to be as baffled as you possibly can, to seek out any weak spots at all.)
What makes you think so?
Because ‘entitled to believe’ doesn’t go well with critical thinking?
Didn’t mammals evolve from reptiles, too? I think your argument would be stronger if you only left ‘mammals are fundamentally different from birds’.
Yes they did, but birds are much more related to dinosaurs than mammals are. All life forms evolved from Unicellular organisms.
And why, do you think, did it take biologists until XIX century to agree upon the unicellular part?
From my point of view the most hazardous thing about Christianity (this may also be the weakest point logically, but that’s a different claim) is that Christianity posits a realm which is different from and superior to what can be perceived directly and thought about logically. This makes it rather easy to treat people very badly, both other people and oneself.
To me the weakest points of Christianism are two:
The lack of evidence for the existence of its deity. Even proving that a deity exists is not enough; you would still need to prove that the deity you found is the one described by the Bible. And proving that the Christian deity exists would still not be enough; you would also need to prove that the Bible describes it accurately. And even then you would need to prove monotheism, i.e. that other possible gods aren’t real too.
The internal inconsistencies and factual errors in the Bible. Specialized websites like IronChariotsWiki and RationalWiki can give better descriptions of this problem than I could.
I’m not quite sure what you want to see when you ask for the ‘weakest point in Christianity’. I thought the easily found arguments and frequently discussed arguments were compelling enough by themselves. I was a regular Sunday school attendee, continued to go to church (for social reasons) even after I started to think the whole thing was random, and genuinely enjoy having these sorts of discussions
The main things that I found had weight is that it’s taking the numerous world religions and saying ‘this one’ without any great reason. When the correct selection may damn you for eternity, it’s worthy of considering the alternatives.
From an outside view, I see no reason to privilege the supernatural portions of Christianity over other religions. Rhetorically, what do you find as the weak points of every other religion? Don’t many of these apply to Christianity?
Generic inconsistencies—having read all the Biblical texts (some multiple times), and referencing databases for discussions of the original pre-translated text, the number of straightforward contradictions is outstanding. If we just assume for a second that some of the text was effectively the word of god, you still don’t know which parts. And that’s disregarding every other religion’s text, seemingly without justification.
Inconsistencies in practice—some branches of Christianity heavily discount the Bible due to the above.… but this makes the problem WORSE. It just dilutes the ‘god content’ even further. Arguments of your specific practitioners being ‘inspired by god’ needs to address all the people who disagree with you but say the same thing.
The specific details about Christ, and your ‘flavor’ of Christianity, are besides the point in light of the above. Other than popularity, Christianity still has the same problems as Zeus and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
All that said, the best argument for Christianity seems to be as a placeholder belief and social system. For some people it’s better just to pick a set of beliefs and go with it (IE: it’s a complex/unknowable local minima problem that’s ‘good enough’).
P.S. - I’d be interested in hearing your arguments ‘for’ God. I’ve yet to see one that isn’t so broad to be effectively meaningless. You might want to just google your argument for God and see if there aren’t already identified issues.
In fact, it’s even worse than that. You’re not selecting from the set of all existing religions in the world today, but rather from the set of all possible religions, even those that haven’t been invented.
Wait, why? If God existed, I’d expect the true religion to be among actually existing ones.
As long as it’s a god with a Big Divine Plan in which humans play a role, sure.
If the gods created the universe so they could watch the big shiny hydrogen balls, and don’t care about the emergent properties of complex proteins on that one planet in that one galaxy, we wouldn’t necessarily know about it.
Well crap.
I guess that when I thought “religion”, I thought “system of worship”, not “system of belief”. To me the a religion would be “true” if it accurately responded to a demand for worship or obedience or such. If the creators of the Universe have no preferences over our actions, then at most you could have a, well, description of them, but not much of a religion thus defined. Discovering such beings would not make me a religious person.
Of course now that I thought of it explicitely, I realize this is a rather narrow definition.
True and I didn’t consider that… but assuming a supreme being had any impact in humanity, it is reasonable to assume that the set of practiced religions are more likely to be true than the set of not discovered religions.
I was trying to minimize the possible tangential arguments. I think trying to expand from 1 religion to 19 major religions is enough to show the problem without going to ~200 religions, which allows room to argue about applicabiliy/similarity of subtypes. Going to all possible religions allows room to argue about applicability of set theory.
I don’t know the best approach for convincing flawed humans, and I would certainly start with the argument from other existing religions (rather than the world-creating cheese sandwich someone came up with). But objectively, given the vast set of possible alternatives that religions ignore, the only real significance to Hinduism or whatever vs Christianity is that it helps show belief is not much evidence for truth. It gives us some evidence (at least in many cases) but not necessarily a significant amount compared to the complexity penalties involved with detailed religious claims. And even an Abrahamic God (or a divine Gospel Jesus, if we treat that as overlapping rather than a proper subset) is pretty detailed if we combine historical claims with some meaningful traits of divinity.
I know this has been discussed before, but I’m not convinced that complexity penalties should apply to anything involving human witnesses.
Suppose someone theorizes that the sun is made of a micro black hole covered in lightbulbs, and there is no obvious physics being broken.… this is an obvious place to use complexity penalties. Simpler models can explain the evidence.
With the Bible though, we have witnesses that presumably entangle the Bible with a divine being. Complexity penalty in this case shouldn’t penalize for extra details. (Considering complexity penalties may still point to “this story is made up for social reasons, and here are some prior sources” instead of “god did it”… but this isn’t due to the amount of detail provided.)
...What? As a technical matter, the laws of probability say that evidence (eyewitness or otherwise) tells us how to update a prior probability, and ultimately a complexity penalty seems like the only way to get sensible priors.
I take you to mean that in a real eyewitness account, we should expect details. That seems more or less right, but largely irrelevant to what I’m saying—even the idea of a human-like mind is more complicated than it appears. That’s before we get to the details of the story (which we might doubt to some degree, in more trustworthy cases, even while paradoxically taking those details as evidence for some core claim).
Even the bare claim that God was involved with certain historical figures is another logically distinct detail we need to penalize before we get to the specifics of any one Gospel or source for the Torah. So the evidence of witnesses would need to overcome this penalty. And of course, in order for them to justify the beliefs about God, we would need to understand what that word means and how someone could directly or indirectly observe its object.
I may have misread your initial comment. To paraphrase to check my reading: you are penalizing due to complexity of a ‘god’ prior but, on the balance, eyewitness details should increase your estimate of the claimed witnessed set being true. More details from eyewitnesses do not then penalize further. The complexity of the god models are just so complex in the first place, that eyewitness details don’t increase your estimate much.
What I’m not grasping is what this sentence meant:
Functionally, we’re talking about the set of vaguely Bible shaped gods… not all the details would need to be true. Eyewitness claims that this bible shaped god interacted with a historical figure should STILL increase your estimate of it happening.… even though that increase may still be infinitesimal.
Excepting things like “the following sentence is false”, eyewitness details should always increase the chance of something like the referenced object existing. It may in parallel also provide evidence that the ‘custody chain’ is faulty or faked… but that’s a different issue.
Pretty much. I’m saying that “vaguely Bible shaped,” rather than “touched down only in Jackson County, Missouri in 1978,” is itself a detail to be justified.