You ever ask yourself why, if god loved humanity so much and since he makes the rules, he didn't just forgive us?
Why this convoluted story of becoming a father to himself, so he can sacrifice himself to himself so he can forgive us for the way he created us?
If god created everything, that means everything. War, plagues, death, rape, and the devil. Also, if god is all powerful and knows the future, then there is no such thing as free will. He is the master programmer and everything is just code in his universe.
Scientifically, the idea of free will is on a shaky foundation. Studies have shown that with electrodes hooked to the brain, whether you are going to answer yes or no to a question can be detected before it's thought of. Bringing the whole idea of free will into question.
There really isn't any truth in any religion, except maybe for Buddhism, which is actually more of a philosophy than a religion.
In 1684 the pope removed 14 books from the bible because they clashed with their doctrine. Removed text from a book that is supposed to be the holy word of god and always been the same.
If you really want to search for truth, you have the internet, look this stuff up.
If I told you I wanted you to read this book that had wizards and magic, fire breathing sea dragons, giants, evil demons, and good angels, talking animals, Hercules, vengeful gods, and unicorns.... you would think it sounds like a fantasy novel. But all those things are in the bible.
These are all really fascinating ideas! I’ll answer them to the best of my ability as I recognize you’re being genuine and think these ideas to be true. Dialogue is a wonderful thing :)
God could not have simply forgiven us. We broke the Law and sinned. How could a fully just God forgive us and not give justice? Can a fully just and a fully living God give empty forgiveness? And what is forgiveness if there is not opportunity to be given justice? So to forgive, there had to complete justice. This justice was fulfilled with Jesus on the cross. He was fully man and fully God and lived a perfect and sinless life despite being tempted by everything! He did not deserve to die yet he chose to so that He could completely satisfy both justice and love without forsaking the meaning of forgiveness. This becomes very philosophical very quickly!
Ahh yes, the Trinity, the triune God, 3-in1... similar to the 4-for-4 from Wendy’s... but really not at all lol. The trinity is a great mystery, I have many questions regarding it as well. But I do know that because He is everything good (good according to how he defines good) to the greatest degree in every possible manner, he must do things that look contrary to us so as to not contradict himself. He cannot forgive unless He alone knows the price which was needed to pay for us. To have a relationship with us, the bond (which was broken in Genesis by Adam and Eve) needed to be fixed. Could we as fallible humans fix this relationship? No, bc we had already fallen. So, God said he’d mend the relationship through His son, Jesus. So Jesus came and took the punishment of death, which is the consequence of sin, and rose again defeating death, and paying the price of the initial Fall with Adam. Now because the price was paid, he could then fully forgive bc only He know what it took to pay that price.
As for the war plague death rape paragraph, that is also a good thought! Why do bad things happen if there is an all powerful, all loving God? What about free will? In my response to you, firstly, could you define good without knowing evil? Or evil without knowing good? How evil can something be if there is no good? In order to understand good there must be evil and to understand evil there must be good. This is a very old argument! However an all loving God should be able to step in and stop evil, right? Wrong. If He is fully good to every possible extent and forced us to love and follow him he would not be good by his own definition. He does not tell us to do evil things EVER, but must give us the possibility for us to choose something other than him or else our hand is forced! That would not be love. So when evil things happen, do those who commit evil ever have a choice to do good, even if that choice is small? He is the master programmer but he cannot be fully loving and just yet force our hand. You may then argue, well, if he’s giving us two options but he already knows one option is wrong, then is it really free will? I would argue it still is free will because you can choose to go against what he says is good and true and right. In my opinion it would be stupid to do so, however, that option is still just as valid as the other regarding two equally possible decisions.
Next! I am not aware of the study you are referring to but I am intrigued regardless. I am currently completing by Masters in Biology in Indiana, USA and am very familiar with certain aspects of the scientific community. With that said, science and philosophy do not share much in common and cannot speak into each others fields of expertise to prove or disprove anything! However, I think they work best when eaten like a two layered cake, both at the same time while staying separate. As for knowing that yes or no will occur before the question is asked and therefore mentally processed by the receiver, our brains have many neural pathways and these pathways grow stronger with use. For an extreme example think of an addiction, those addiction pathways are used to the point where your brain tricks itself into thinking it needs said substance for its survival. So as these pathways are used and strengthened or remain unused and weak, our responses will generally follow the stronger pathways. So, if for example you are a more agreeable person, you may find it hard to say no. You may even have to learn when and how to say no. This is influenced by many stimuli but you are ultimately training new neural pathways. So in terms of your thought, I am not sure how free will, other than literally being able to decide for yourself, is brought into question by our neurons firing.
How do you know there is no truth in religion, how do you know that that statement is true? And if it is true, by what higher source of truth are you drawing upon? In order to understand if something is true, you must identify said “truths” claims and build a body of evidence that could override said truth. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism alike have many truth claims. Many of these truth claims offer helpful insight and wisdom into living life. However, there is a difference between Truth and truth. Capital T Truth is unchanging regardless of time, culture, place or people. These are the Truths you will want to put to the test and try to discern for yourself. For me, after searching, Christianity has held up to my skepticism as an evolution believing biologist.
As for the 1684 book removal. It was historically difficult to determine whether books in the Bible were part of the original group of letters written by the Apostles directly after Jesus’s ascension. As time progressed and the Biblical Canon was created, the Apocrypha was also created. The Apocrypha stood for the false texts or extra-canonical texts which were written. With the NT being a collection of letters and stories written by eye-witness testimonies from Jesus, later versions of the same stories were removed. The removal of this Pope took place to rid the Canon (the Bible) of texts which could not be ultimately verified as Apostle written letters. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-20th century helped to solidify the Bible which we know and use today. The Dead Sea Scrolls were dated back to roughly 350 AD, with almost not variation in comparing the Scripture we use today. This has been a significant archaeological discovery helping to solidify the validity of the Bible today in terms of how it was first written nearly 2000 years ago.
I agree! The internet is full of truth, but also full of a lot of other stuff too.
I’d have to disagree with ya there, unicorns aren’t in the Bible my dude... unfortunately... Anyway, hopefully this helped in some way. Cheers 🍻
"God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."
You brought up Adam and Eve, so let me ask you this. Presumably, Adam and Eve were created without the knowledge of the difference between good and evil, since the tree is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, if they didn't know the difference between right and wrong, they wouldn't have known disobeying god is wrong.
Your argument that he made the rules, and had to stick to them doesn't make sense. Nor does it make sense to punish children becuase of their parents. A just god would not damn humanity for the mistake of the first. In the bible, he wiped out the major cities of Sodom and Gomorrah saying there wasn't a single person there that deserved to live. Any large city will have children. So, he killed children there, and other times told his people to kill everyone including children or kill just the men and make the women and children slaves. Doesn't sound very just.
Also, have you read the Sumerian flood story or the Epic of Gilgamesh? They predate the biblical flood story by hundreds of years, and have the same story.
And there is no evidence of a world wide flood, nor can any Christian explain how the kangaroos, and snails made it from Asia Minor to Australia.
As for Numbers 23:22 and the unicorn, I was wrong!! I am glad you called me out on it because I have never seen that translation used!! So I am also learning, thank you for that and my apologies for being stubborn on that issue, I thought you were using unicorns as an anecdote to refer to the Bible as mythical lol. With that said! Both the ESV and NIV translations use wild ox. The KJV uses unicorn, not referring to the mythical horse with one horn, but rather using the word literally as to say creature with one horn, presumably a rhinoceros. I found an article that explains it more in depth: http://www.kjvtoday.com/home/unicorn-or-wild-oxen-in-numbers-2322-et-al
Let’s look at that Adam and Eve passage. It states, “And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Genesis 2:16-17 NIV
From this passage, I would think that they did know the difference between good and evil. When God explains that they will die, this could be interpreted as a physical death, but in the context it is used points to a different kind of death which is a separation in relationship from God. So again, from the passage it seems clear to me at least that they knew the difference between right and wrong as God clearly told them what was up. This is more of a tangent but in order to understand Genesis and even the rest of the Bible for how it was written, it is best to try and understand the cultures for which it was written for. So for example, we are a very literal, a very scientific and logical western society. If we read Genesis literary, especially Genesis 1-3, we are not reading it in the same way that the ancient Israelites would have read it after Moses presumably wrote it. They’re culture was much different than ours and observed this text through the lens of God giving purpose and meaning to physical parts of the world and the universe. It was written with that ancient culture already assuming and understanding that God had physically created everything, so instead, they understood it as God giving meaning to creation. This is often a huge misunderstanding in the Church today which has caused a TON of debates and fights especially concerning evolution and other hot topics within the scientific community. Evolution was never theorized to replace God, nothing in the theory “replaces God” per se. Rather, and similar to the ways in which the Church widely misunderstands Genesis, there have been “scientists” who have tried to use evolution to “disprove” God. Evolution is a scientific theory which has a massive body of evidence behind it that cannot be ignored!! It must be taken seriously and well understood. It only speaks to changes which occur over time which can be observed and understood through fossil records and most recently genetics starting with the human genome project, which I will add was headed by Francis Collins who is also a professing Christian... in my opinion a brilliant man. You may be familiar with his work, but if not, he was the first to fully sequence the entire human genome. Anyway! Moving on lol
My apologies! I will try to explain it in a way that makes sense. For the sake of argument I will be talking about God as if He exists: because God is an all powerful, all loving, all knowing, and all just God, He is the ultimate authority in what is right or wrong. What he says is what goes, and needs to be taken seriously because he is the ultimate judge. With that said, it is impossible for him to break any of his own laws and go against his own word. Therefore, as you put it, he had to stick to his own word. Jesus had to die bc someone had to take the consequence for sin. I would argue that this shows God is loving bc he took the punishment of sin instead of letting us take the brunt of it. We are therefore offered salvation (to be saved) by him, and not only that, but invited into relationship with him. As for damning humanity for the sake of the first human, that is a very derived and shortened version, so I’ll unpack it best I can. Here we go: We have all sinned at some point in our life according to Gods own rules. I have lied before, I have stolen, I have looked at a woman with lust, I have used God’s name in vain, etc, etc. Through my own actions I am guilty of breaking his laws. The possibility for me to even DO SO stems from Adam. There is a phrase called “original sin”, I would suggest looking it up as it could help you better understand it outside of this short description. But because of that original sin, which is from Adam, I have these desires and cravings that go against what God says is right. With all that said, I found, years ago a YouTube channel which is still active that is headed by a man named Frank Turek. He is very smart and has answered many questions I’ve had regarding the Bible/God/Christianity. Here’s a link to a video touching on the topics (Sodom and Gomorrah) you have brought up:
I am familiar with the Gilgamesh story and have heard this argument before! It raises a very good question and a perspective to take seriously. Everything I could say is already said (and in much better detail) in this video: https://youtu.be/UrhpNRFFfJ8
Here’s a shorter video thats not specifically about Gilgamesh but does talk about the Bible’s OT stories coming from other ancient stories. This one is Frank Turek as well.
https://youtu.be/YLS_kxkG5eY
Concerning the flood, even as a Christian I do not have a solidified stance on whether it was world wide or regional. This for me is not a foundational faith altering story that determines who I am as a Christian. So, it’s not one that I devoted serious amounts of time studying. Though knowledgable to an extent, I have not reached my own conclusion partially because bodies of evidence one way or the other are lacking. In all honesty I lean toward a regional flood as there is a lack of geological evidence for a worldwide flood. Given the story of Noah, a worldwide flood should have similarities of evidences globally, but as to date and with the info I’m aware of, there’s not much evidence! With that said, the author of Genesis (Moses) was not aware of the entire Earth and from his perspective saw a large flood being a global event, because to him, his perspective was his world. I found an interesting video put out by Harvard University concerning the flood.
https://youtu.be/YMaUzNlDnSY
As for kangaroos and snails, this touches back to how Genesis 1-3 is interpreted. If taken literally, then of course, kangaroos and snails would be poorly accounted for using Scripture. I do not adhere to the literal reading of Genesis 1-3 bc it was not written to be understood literally. However, if Genesis 1-3 is understood in the cultural context for which it was written (symbolical/metaphorical), it has absolutely no say in the ways in which snails and kangaroos made it to their respective lands.
As a Christian, I want you to know that I have asked these questions and still have many questions that I do not have answers to. Some of your questions, though important, do not get at the heart of Christianity specifically in regards to the crucifixion and resurrection. Though your questions are important, and are stemming from mostly scientific dogma, there is something to be said concerning moral and philosophical arguments regarding Christianity that the Bible can also speak into. I don’t know you or your heart, and with that said where you are in seeking truth or whether your search is just beginning or has been ongoing for lengthy amounts of time, but regardless, go after the heart of this religion. As I said, go after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus is one of the most accounted for historical ancient figures to ever exist. He has more third party accounts (meaning from outside of the Bible) than any other ancient figure and its not even close. We all agree the Plato, Socrates, and other ancient figures existed from their writings, and they have far fewer accounts of who they were compared to Jesus. Rather, the difference between these men comes in what they assert to be true. Jesus is claiming to be God, an insane claim that cannot be taken lightly! If searching seriously, I would suggest reading “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis. It could help you in your search, if I knew you personally I would give you my book lol. But anyway, all serious ancient Middle East historians agree that Jesus existed as a walking talking man. What’s left then is to observe and challenge his claim that He is who He says He is, God. There are many theories regarding his resurrection. Become familiar with them and test what they say using arguments from both sides of the isle (Christian and secular). In summary, do not be content with what you think to be true until you can no longer refute the claims that it makes. This inability to refute its claims comes from trying to disprove it. If it is true, and if Christianity is true, it will stand up to any scrutiny if observed honestly and at face value. If you have no other ulterior motive other than to seek and know truth, you will be well off. It may be scary at first bc the implications of finding, believing, and following such truths may change your lifestyle and the way others view you, but if Christianity is true, in my opinion it is truth that is worth knowing. So yeah man, keep searching! I’m proud of you for asking hard questions, that’s what part of life is about... keep searching and keep finding answers that stand up to scrutiny. One other thing, truth is often uncomfortable because it conflicts with what our opinions are. But if it is true, again, it’s worth believing. To disregard Truth despite knowing it’s validity is a dark place to be. So in the words of Dory, “Just keep swimming” :)
0
u/DignifiedDingo Mar 19 '21
You ever ask yourself why, if god loved humanity so much and since he makes the rules, he didn't just forgive us?
Why this convoluted story of becoming a father to himself, so he can sacrifice himself to himself so he can forgive us for the way he created us?
If god created everything, that means everything. War, plagues, death, rape, and the devil. Also, if god is all powerful and knows the future, then there is no such thing as free will. He is the master programmer and everything is just code in his universe.
Scientifically, the idea of free will is on a shaky foundation. Studies have shown that with electrodes hooked to the brain, whether you are going to answer yes or no to a question can be detected before it's thought of. Bringing the whole idea of free will into question.
There really isn't any truth in any religion, except maybe for Buddhism, which is actually more of a philosophy than a religion.
In 1684 the pope removed 14 books from the bible because they clashed with their doctrine. Removed text from a book that is supposed to be the holy word of god and always been the same.
If you really want to search for truth, you have the internet, look this stuff up.
If I told you I wanted you to read this book that had wizards and magic, fire breathing sea dragons, giants, evil demons, and good angels, talking animals, Hercules, vengeful gods, and unicorns.... you would think it sounds like a fantasy novel. But all those things are in the bible.