I was reading through my Twitter stream and I came across a link to a video someone made in attempt to dismiss the Bible's teaching on the character and nature of God by attempting to show logical inconsistencies. The author uses the idea of a checklist which God uses to keep track of His purposes and goals. The author and I agree on what Christians believe about God. He does indeed have purposes and goals and He does interact with humanity throughout history. As unbeliever the author has the audacity to think he knows what the plan of God is and what God's purposes are. I think it's worth looking at his checklist and see if it is the same checklist we see in the Bible. I will make his checklist bullets blue and my comments will be in black. This will be in 2 parts. The second part will cover the video after 5 minutes and 6 seconds.
14. Declare that until further notice that the way only for these cognitive beings to rectify their sinful nature while on Earth is to perform ritual animal sacrifices and other acts of senseless violence. Additionally, when certain sins are committed by any one of your cognitive beings, demand that the surrounding community kill that being themselves. Check!
Why must there be blood sacrifice? The principle is substitution - life for life. Sin is a debt that can only be paid by blood because sin is truly that bad...that awful...that the only way sin can be atoned for is that someone has to die. Unfortunately the blood of animals is not enough for final and complete cleansing. To argue against the public execution of law breaker in ancient Israel is to come against capital punishment and the death penalty. Many folks today reject the death penalty, but just because you yourself don't see any crime worthy of death, doesn't mean that God sees the world that way.
15. In the mean time perform many epic miracles for all to see, and intervene often with your physical creations; stop the sun in the sky, part the Red Sea, turn rivers into blood and women into pillars of salt, give men superhuman strength, speak to the thousands with a booming voice from Heaven, etc. But, before these cognitive beings become advanced enough in the areas of science and communication that they could actually document, share, playback, and verify these epic miracles, make sure you stop performing them all together. Check!
God has not stopped performing miracles altogether. There have been several documented cases of miracles happening even today. I myself know of God healing power when He healed me of arthritis, not to mention other cases. What about holding reality together? As near as we can tell, there is no reason why reality retains the qualities it does have. If quantum mechanics is correct then there is some ultimate observer determining everything we measure and observe. It this isn't miraculous than I don't know the author's definition. Check that.
16. Decide at some point that the most pressing of your objective moral prescriptions are not as obvious to these cognitive beings as you once thought. Take this opportunity to chisel your top ten moral concerns into two tablets of stone and commission one of your cognitive beings to deliver these tablets to the masses. (Note to self: Roughly half of these moral concerns should center around pleasing you, praising you, and remaining loyal to you.) Check!
Check this. Obviously the Ten Commandments are not obvious because we break them all the time. Breaking one, breaks them all. Only 4 out of 10 of them center around our relationship with God. The other 6 deal with how we treat one another. Funny how the author tries to insinuate that God is cruel and selfish.
17. After several thousand years, impregnate one of these cognitive beings so that she gives birth to your son in physical form, who also happens to be you at the same time. Check!
"Impregnate" is pregnant with the meaning of sexual intercourse and God did not have sex with marry to conceive Jesus Christ. While the Bible does teach that Jesus is God, incarnated in human form, it's important to really understand what is being said because the author makes it sound like Christians are confused. The Trinity is not a confusion. God is one being...existing as three divine, co-equal, and co-eternal persons. It's confusing because today we treat "being" and "person" as the same thing but they are not. "Being" describes what an entity is, but "person(s)" describes who entities is/are. Also given our finiteness its hard to grasp how God could be one being but three persons since we think of ourselves as one being/one person. Why would an infinite being be bound to that? Simple. God isn't.
18. Allow this cognitive being who is your son but also you to grow up and make several revisions to you/your son’s original standards of morality. Then arrange for other cognitive beings to torture and kill you/your son. Authorize this sacrifice of yourself to yourself as a means of granting all other cognitive beings immunity to the consequences of their sinful nature, which you allowed them to be born with in the first place. Check!
Jesus made no revisions to the standards the Jews were already given. He only pointed out that thoughts are just as bad as the actions themselves and when asked what the greatest commandment is.
Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question:
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: " 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." - Matthew 22:34-40
Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.
In addition, because Jesus is the perfect sacrifice for our sins, we no longer need to offer sacrifices and again God allowed us to be born in sin for reasons we don't fully understand yet. But God is making something awesome and beyond wonderful and we can't see it all yet.
19. Do not however, make this sacrifice free. Establish that none of these cognitive beings shall be eligible for the benefits of this sacrifice unless they actively believe that it happened. In other words, despite the quality of their intentions, any cognitive being henceforth who finds themselves unconvinced that these events actually took place is unwittingly designating themselves for the endless suffering of Hell. Check!
The author presupposes that in and of ourselves a human being is capable of living up to the standards of holiness and purity that God has set. The author thinks that it's unfair that good people could suffer for eternity in Hell and the only thing they failed to do was not to believe that Jesus is the only way to God. The author is wrong. No one is that good or that moral that they meet the standard. Because all have sinned and fallen short of the ideal, the only way to be reconciled back to God is by riding Jesus' coat-tails. On our own, apart from Jesus, everyone of us deserve to go to Hell. Check that.
20. That established, be sure to refrain from making it clear and knowable to the rest of the world that these events actually took place. Ensure that no cognitive being born after the first century has the luxury of witnessing your son (Who is also you) say or do anything to indicate that he was a living god. Again, make sure that all of this occurs before the advancements in science and technology are available to verify it for those who aren’t present. Check!
This is one of the reasons why the Resurrection is so important. Jesus died really and for true, however He did not stay dead. He is alive and anyone who desires to have a personal relationship with Him can have it. You can experience the same Jesus that they did in the first century because Jesus can live through you in a union even closer than the apostles and His followers enjoyed when they were with Jesus as ministered on earth. It's hard to explain to one who has never experienced. We can categorically say that if you make the attempt to reach out to Him, you will find Him and experience what I'm talking about. The author is wrong, you can witness the power of God today and know Jesus for yourself!
21. Arrange so that the only surviving record of these events will be authored anonymously, by non-eyewitnesses, translated to a language different from the one you/your son will speak, and written no earlier than thirty years after you/your son performs these miracles and makes these claims. However, do make sure that these records feature the precept that believing in something without evidence is morally superior to investigation and verification. Check!
Check this: I don't have time to go over textual criticism or explaining how we got the Bible, but I totally disagree with the author. In terms of ancient documents, any document recorded 30 years after the events it describes is like an eye blink of time and could have easily been an eyewitness as tradition holds. I think its arguing from silence saying that Jesus only spoke Aramaic. Recall that on a few occasions Jesus spoke to Gentiles and to Pilate. How do we know that He spoke only Aramaic to them and a good case could be made that Jesus could read Greek (the Septuagint, from which Jesus quoted, is the Greek translation of the Old Testament). In addition, just like today educated and intelligent people spoke multiple languages. I'm sure that He at least spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. Who would be more intelligent than Jesus - The Logos incarnate? I disagree that faith mean believing something without evidence. That's not the definition of Biblical Faith and if you read Luke and Acts, then you know the author says the he carefully researched and investigated the facts and wrote them down. Even if you disagree that the one who wrote them was Luke, you cannot deny the following passages:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. - Luke 1:1-4
In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. - Acts 1:1-3
22. Be sure that after only a few decades the only accounts of these events in existence are copies of copies of copies of copies, which will be verifiably altered and added to in historically and theologically significant ways from generation to generation, sect to sect. Do not preserve the original copies of these accounts, do not protect them from revision, and do not set in place any mechanism for protecting them against being interpreted in hundreds upon hundreds of ways, most of which being heretical, and therefore punishable. Check!
Again, I don't have the time to go into textual criticism and how the Bible was transmitted, but I will recommend the King James Only Controversy by James White and his Debate with Bart Ehrman if you want to fully understand why the author is completely off base. God did preserve his Word - Both testaments whether you like the way he did it or not.
23. Do not bother to employ your omniscience in such a way as to discern which of these cognitive beings are truly rebelling, and which simply don’t know how to distinguish you from other versions of God which do not in fact exist, but which are attributed the same claims of exclusivity. Check!
God does know who is rebelling and who can't distinguish the truth. The thing is that we are accountable. No one will ever to be able to say to God, "I rejected Christ because I could not tell who was telling the truth." We all make choices and will have live with the consequences.
24. Do not make it clear to these beings that you’re even here. Allow for your very existence to remain an easily debatable, easily questionable, and easily doubtable proposition. Allow for billions and billions of souls to be unthinkably tortured for all of eternity regardless of their character, integrity, bravery, responsibility, or conduct, because they had not correctly assumed that the right set of propositions were true by the time their lives on Earth were over. Check!
It is clear to every honest person that God exists. People rationalize and contort and squirm but deep down we all know that there is a creator - one whom we are all ultimately accountable to. No one has a high enough character, brave enough, honest enough, responsible enough, or even remotely good enough to deserve heaven. We all deserve to go to hell.
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. - Romans 1:18-20
So, wanna re-think that item on the check list? You should. No way would it be on it.
25. And finally, when all is said and done, demand that you be praised for this plan. Check!
I do think that this one is on the checklist. God demands our worship because He deserves it. If you don't believe that creating all of reality by speaking it out of nothing into existence and holding it together by His will is enough to worship and serve Him, then let's make it personal: every single breath you take - every thought you are allowed to think - everything good and decent about you - you owe Him. Still not enough to praise Him? Fine. One last point: God is not obligated to save anyone. He could have chosen to save everyone, no one, or some of us. He'd be perfectly in his rights to do either. He chose to save some of us when we did not now we needed to be saved, did not want to be saved and did not love Him. He takes our rebellious and sinful hearts and free us from sin and its consequences. He make it available to all who believe! If that is not worth praising Him for, then you have no idea how horrible of a condition you are really in.
Here is the video on which this post is based:
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So wrong.
ReplyDelete20. Your claims about the resurrection are too bold. Which is more likely, that a person came back from the dead or that a bunch of people believed something that didn't happen and made up stories about it? I've seen the latter happen many times, but never the former.
24. "It is clear to every honest person that God exists." That's just silly.
@almightygod
ReplyDeleteConcerning point 20 - it is not an overstatement at all. Just because you don't have a personal relationship with God doesn't mean that you can't and other people don't. Here is the irrefutable evidence:
1. Jesus died by Roman Crucifixion
2. The Tomb was empty that Sunday morning.
3. His followers and some of his enemies radically changed - claiming that Jesus was alive.
Your hypothesis is a partial wrong answer to the 3rd fact. How do you explain that non e of the disciples expected to see Jesus again and why Paul and James who was an outright opponents and skeptics changed their minds? I've experienced the radical change Jesus brings and it makes perfects since even though you don't get it.
As as for point 24...me thinks thou doth protest too much. The Bible says why people deny the plain truth of God's existence but we are without any excuse for doing so.
I wouldn't call those points irrefutable. The crucifixion may well have happened, but the empty tomb and his followers' immediate reaction are not verifiable. We just don't have any reliable record that those things happened, especially #2. I think it's possible that no one even claimed the resurrection until several years after Jesus died. Again, we can't say for sure because the few records we have are after the fact and biased.
ReplyDeleteFalse religions win over skeptics every day. Why else would the ranks of scientology and mormonism continue to grow? I've had religious experiences, too. They're not proof. The mind is a powerful thing.
"The Bible says . . ." is not a reason I respect. It's just a book written by humans.
The Bible says things that people would not write on their own...ie. "All have sinned and fallen short" - with the one writing including himself. Had a person made it up it would have read something like "all of you, but me, have sinned and fallen short and are damned unless you do what I tell you because I am more enlightened than you and God likes me better anyway."
ReplyDeleteYou have no proof that the resurrection story was done years later. However we have the fact that the tomb was empty because if it wasn't the Jewish leaders would have just produced Jesus' body to show that Jesus was still dead but they could not. Jewish tradition also affirms that the tomb was empty.
Paul and James were not just won over. These were men who were not just skeptics...they completely rejected Christ. Like you. But unlike Paul was hunting down Christians, and arresting them knowing that he was consigning them to death. James, Jesus' brother, believed his brother was nuts! I don't blame him. If one of my brothers were saying what Jesus said, I'd be the first to call the patty wagon and the dudes in white coats. Just saying that they just changed their minds is really ignoring the point. You have not refuted any of those points and the resurrection is the best explanation for all three.
Muhammad included himself in his teaching about sin. Does that mean the Koran is true?
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_views_of_sin There's nothing supernatural about saying that everyone makes mistakes. Most humanists would agree with that idea (and include themselves).
"We have the fact that the tomb was empty because if it wasn't the Jewish leaders would have just produced Jesus' body to show that Jesus was still dead but they could not."
If no one was claiming an empty tomb until years later, then Jewish leaders would have no reason to exhume the body immediately. Perhaps by the time resurrection claims were being made, the tomb was forgotten. Or perhaps Jesus was never buried in a tomb. That whole burial storyline could have been invented years later, too. The corpse of Jesus might have been tossed into a mass grave. There are any number of possibilities that are more likely than a resurrection. Why do you assume that the least likely explanation is the true one? That's not how history is done.
"Jewish tradition also affirms that the tomb was empty."
Can you back this claim up with some evidence?
We don't know much of anything about Paul and James except for what Christian tradition tells us. As I said above, you're using the Bible as evidence, but I don't see it as a reliable book.
"Sin" is not making mistakes. The Bible says that every person who has ever lived, but Jesus, deserves to go to hell, not just that "we all mistakes". The Bible affirms that no one can be reconciled with God apart from Jesus. This why your argument comparing what I said with the Koran does not hold up because the Koran directly contradicts the Bible on this point. They both can't be true.
ReplyDeleteYou have no proof at all that anyone was claiming an empty tomb years later. The Book of Acts was completed before AD 70 and starts on the day Jesus returned to Heaven. Paul's letters are all before AD70 and he says he is quoting from earlier sources. All the people contemporary to Jesus' time and that of the early church all agree that the Tomb was empty. Your assertion that it's like likely that Jesus was never buried or the tomb's location was forgotten is silly because we know that it was in the lifetime of witnesses that Jesus' resurrection was proclaimed (40 days after the crufixion) and in the very city where He was crucified. You can't possibly believe that they didn't know where he was buried especially since they put an armed guard over the tomb trto keep the body from being stolen. Could you? If you do, I have swampland in Florida to sell you.
The Resurrection is the only explanation that fits the three minimal facts that you all scholars agree with. And none of your other possibilities for the empty tomb hold any water or have any proof.
As for proof that Jewish tradition exists for the empty tomb I offer the Toledoth Yeshu (a compilation of early Jewish writings), and also in Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Trypho the Jew. check out the following site: http://www.allaboutjesuschrist.org/resurrection-of-jesus-christ.htm.
I disagree with you because we know a lot about Paul from his letters. Even skeptical, unbelieving scholars grans that 8 of the 11 epistles credited to him are really genuine historical documents written by him. You may not see the Bible as reliable or historical, but even scholars like Bart Ehrman would grant much of the information I have presented while disagreeing with the conclusions. Disagree? Look at his debeates especially the ones against William Lane Craig and Mike Licona on the Resurrection. I have the m posted here
"The Bible says..." You keep quoting the Bible as if you think I consider it to be an authority. I don't. "They both can't be true." Correct, but they can both be false.
ReplyDelete"You have no proof at all that anyone was claiming an empty tomb years later." True, but you have no proof that my hypothesis is wrong. Everything in your second paragraph is based on the Bible. I've already told you that I don't see it as a reliable record, so I don't know why you keep quoting it. It was not written as history, but as religious propaganda. There is no consensus among modern scholars that there was an empty tomb. All we can say for sure is that decades after the fact there were some people who believed in an empty tomb. Decades, Marcus. A lot of legend and exaggeration can grow up in that amount of time.
The other documents you mentioned are even later, so I don't see what help they offer you. I've seen the debate about the resurrection between Bart Ehrman and William Lane Craig. Ehrman explains that any number of scenarios are more likely than the resurrection.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But all you can offer are stories.
Under 3 decades is not enough time for legend and embellishments can crop up. Many scholars believe that Mark was written 40 AD. There is consensus, including Bart Ehrman that the tomb was empty. And you can date that to the time after the time where eye-witnesses were still living.
ReplyDeleteThe documents I have mentioned show that there is Judaic tradition that Jesus' tomb was empty. So it proves my point.
In that debate, William Lane Craig rebutted Ehrman's likely scenarios to explain the empty tomb and why the change in the lives of the early Christians. Ehrman offered no rebuttal to Craig's responses. Can you? Ehrman basically said that there are more likely explanation than the Resurrection but none of his ideas answer all the questions.
I've offered more than stories but historical evidence. All you have offered is scenarios you can't prove.