Belief and Reason
Before a person enters the discussion about religion, they have made a choice whether they prefer faith or reason.
If they chose faith over reason, then reason is used as a tool to selectively gain the arguments in their favor, and to disregard, underplay, maneuver around the arguments against their favored concept. They are using their reasoning like a lawyer trying to win their side of the argument. Their reasoning is not an open-ended search for the best explanation, free of constraints imposed by politics, tyrants or gods which can read their minds and know their feelings. This especially applies to god who will judge them adversely for questioning Him and weakening their faith in Him. This is not free thought at all, this is highly constrained thought, with extreme penalties for exploring ideas contrary to their favored doctrine. They are picking the chains of thinking which sustain the beliefs which they like, which make them happy, which gain them favor in their community of friends and family. They are locked in their thinking. It is a case of I’ve got my mind made up, don’t confuse me with the facts. Unfortunately, this traps Christians into the ideas of men who lived in a time where they thought the world was flat, at the center of the universe, where they did not know bacteria caused disease, and they had no idea of life got here through evolution. So those primitive men had to invent a god who created everything.
A loving god would not burn you in hell. This is contradictory. There is no way to resolve this contradiction. You love your kids and you will burn them in hell? What?! Reverse the characters – You love god, and you will burn him in hell. You love Christ and you will burn him in hell. This is not love. This is hatred, sadism.
An omniscient god knows before you were born every thought that will go through your mind for your whole life, that you will sin, that you will die. So before he made you he knows he will burn you in hell for eternity.
If god existed at the beginning, and he is omniscient, knows everything, then he knowingly made the devil, he knowingly made evil, suffering, AIDS, starvation, war. He is evil.
An all-knowing god who made the world and had to flood it three pages later is preposterous. That god is as stupid you and I.
The god of the Bible is the most unpleasant character in all fiction.
Here is the full quote: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal…pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Richard Dawkins
The New Testament? Oh, that’s when God got religion. – Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens. The god of the old testament changed into a nice guy in the last 40% of the Bible. For 60% of the Bible god was a vehement angry unforgiving irascible tyrant. Just read Leviticus, where he threatens to let your enemies conquer you and rape your daughters, send plagues, cover you with boils, send locusts to eat your crops, and on and on with horrible punishments for 30 pages. I have never in my whole live heard any preacher read passages out of Leviticus on Easter Sunday. If he did, everyone would run out of the church! And this god turns into a nice god in the New Testament? Wait a second. This is more than a change of personality, these are two totally different gods, different as night and day. The only reason they are in the same book is that the New Testament just conveniently got piggy backed on the Old Testament for continuity which gave it the credibility which was already established and accepted by the ancient peoples.
A god who made a world knowing the people would sin and he would have to come down and get tortured to death to forgive their sins is absolutely preposterous, absurd. A god allowing himself to be tortured by the people he made is inconceivable. If you can’t comprehend this, you are an idiot. This is the vehement angry god who turns people to stone, who burns up Sodom and Gomorrah with a blink of an eye, who floods the world. Flood it again! Anything is better than getting tortured to death. Would you volunteer to get tortured to death? Open your eyes! This story is screwed up beyond belief. Let’s get this straight – An all-powerful, all-knowing god makes a world knowing he is going to have to go down and get tortured to death to fix it? It doesn’t take too many brains to see there is something wrong with this story. This is complete and utter illogical nonsense. Something is seriously broken here. You have to be a religious zombie, brainwashed from early childhood to accept this insanity without balking. The fact that anybody would buy into this craziness shows how gullible they are, how desperate they are to live forever and be immortal, how badly they want a personal god watching over them willing to help them any time they need it, and the depths to which they will suspend their basic reasoning to accept these whacky ideas that contradict each other so blatantly.
Solomon had 400 wives and 600 concubines. And he was a good buddy with god. Slavery was completely acceptable. You could stone your kids for disobedience. These are Biblical values. What changed? The god of the Bible did not change. The morals and ethics of mankind changed. Morals and ethics are conceived by men, not by gods.
God commands the Jews to slaughter tribe after tribe in the Bible, in an endless killing of anyone who was not Jewish, totaling millions of deaths. God even stopped the sun in the sky so the Jews could have more daylight to kill their enemies, Joshua 10:13. [Good work by the Biblical writers who thought the sun rotated around the earth.] Then God sits idly by during the Holocaust where Hitler and the Nazis slaughter millions and millions of Jews, his chosen people. Compare that to God who protected the Jews from slavery by changing the River Nile into blood, then going so far as to kill the first borne of every Egyptian family in the Passover. This change in God’s behavior, character and temperament that it is beyond anyone’s credibility. Why didn’t God send the archangels down to kill the firstborns of all the Nazis until the Jews were released? Over these 2000 years, God changed to an entirely different entity. It sounds like the Jewish God went to sleep, or had a heart attack and died. Or maybe he never existed. The Biblical story of God looks more like pure human fiction.
The original 10 commandments, given twice to Moses as he came down from Mt. Si “I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.”- Exodus 20:5. Is this the kind of god you want to worship? The Christians sweep this under the carpet, disregard it totally, hide it from their doctrine, thinking and sermons. They have completely deleted it from their list of the Ten Commandments. Wait a second, this is the first Commandment! Not just given once, but given twice by god to Moses, “written with the finger of God” (Exodus 31:18). This is censorship at the utmost degree, erasing the very first commandment given by god in order to make their god more palatable for the masses. But it needs to be done to eliminate an obvious glaring contradiction, turning a jealous vindictive god into a forgiving god. Can you imagine first graders citing the first Commandment – I am a jealous god, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me? That would be hilarious! Anyone can see this is not going to fly. So the religious community has buried this one and hopes the contradiction does not get noticed by anyone with enough intellectual integrity to take it to heart and add up its grievous implications into the overall picture of a very unkind deity.
Virgin Birth. Do I even need to go into this to describe how screwed up this is? A healthy young man and woman sleep together night after night and don’t have the urge to engage in sex? Not even once? And who was watching them to insure they didn’t? Did they have a chaperon who verified they slept in separate beds every night? So Mary gets pregnant and then the storyline becomes Joseph didn’t do it, it was some ghost that got her pregnant. That’s laughable. Billions of couples around the globe mate and get pregnant, and you expect me to believe that some incubus fertilized Mary while Joseph was sleeping right next to her? This is ludicrous! The problem is anybody throughout much of history who had the common sense and honesty to point this out would be accused of being a heretic defying sacred religious doctrine and could get their tongue cut out. This is a striking example of choosing the arguments that fit the preconceived ideas that you want to sustain, and rationality gets thrown out the window. This is the process where human wishes, fantasies, faith-based dogma and superstitions triumph over common sense.
Talking snakes, burning bushes not consumed by flames, mass resurrections with graves opening and bodies of saints walking into Jerusalem, turning rivers to blood, killing of all firstborns, parting of seas, living inside a whale for three days, mana coming from heaven, why does all this not happen now where it can be documented and videotaped? Because modern technology would easily prove it does not happen. The only place something like that cannot be challenged is when it happened in the distant past. Therefor you have to belief it without proof. Any ideas which cannot be proven or disproven are not worth discussing. If it can’t be proven or disproven, anybody can believe anything. That doesn’t get us anywhere in our search for knowledge. The scientific method demands repeatability, and results which can be measured by observers of any persuasion at any time. This rapidly sorts out facts from fiction. The scientific method is the overall principle which gives us reliable and useful things such as radio, tv, computers, satellites, GPS, cell phones, the internet, cars which start every time you turn the ignition. By this rigorous scientific criterion, where any premise must be testable by any observer at any time to be considered true, religion falls into the category of fiction and mythology.
Contradictions prove the premise is flawed. The contradictions presented above show the concept of the Christian god is deeply flawed, it cannot be reconciled or resolved. The contradictions are inherent in the concepts, inseparable. When a set of premises prove to be flawed, a rational mind throws them away and looks for something better, which is a better explanation of our world.
If a person cannot see the points above refute the concept of the Christian god, then he is not accepting his powers of reasoning and the conclusions which they bring.
He is choosing belief over reasoning.
Unfortunately, this traps him in an ancient obscure world view before the dawn of the scientific age. Beliefs in ancient Christian mythology are a boat anchor to the past, and a mental block to understanding the wonders of our lives, how we got here, where we are going, how we work, world and our universe which science has shown and continues to enrich. Worst of all, people who chose belief over reasoning are sacrificing much of their brain power and analytical abilities in order to sustain a set of beliefs that prohibits them from understanding the world at a higher level.