Re: Christianity Q&A Thread
I have few questions to you chrisitans, if you don't mind.
1. Christians, many many times, when praying, address their prayers to Jesus. Well, praying for your saviour sounds fine, aint it? But when you think about it, Jesus was a man. A normal man who was given his powers and quest (if you want to call it like that) from God. God is responsible for this miracle of yours, yet you pray for the "delivary-boy" and not for God himself. Although you do believe in God and in his powers (he didn't die after all), praying for a person or object or what not, except god is called Heretics. And moreover, believing that Jesus will answer your calls also means that there's some kind of another all-mercifull god, thus making Christianity un-monotheisty, or more accuratly, duetheisty. How can christians explain this paradoxes with their believes?
2. Jesus was a jew. His followers (the saints) were jews. The major difference between jews and christians is that the jews are (still) waiting for the messiah while the christians think he already came, with the form of Jesus of Nazereth. So if you don't mind, I will call christians in this answer another name, that will help you understand the quetions. Jews are waiting for the messiah, christians already got it => christians will be called "post-jews" (or PJ in short). So both jews and PJ are actually jews with different opinions about the messiah.
Now, I don't know if you know it, but there's a very known prophet (jewish prophet) which includes the messiah, which called "The after-life prophet" or something likewise. Well anyways, it states that when the messiah will come, the dead will ressurect (not one dead, but a whole bunch of deads
), the temple will fall down from the sky from the kindgom of the after-life, there will be no more wars, everything will be fine, etc. etc. And since Jesus is called the messiah for the post-jews, and plainly seeing that nothing happend from the above, that was supposed to happen when the jewish messiah will come. How is it possible that so many christians/post-jews still have faith although their messiah, which is the base of all of their belief, is probably not a messiah at all?
3. I know that some people say that the ressurection of the dead is just the ressurection of Jesus to answer the last question, but researchers have found a cave near Jerusalem, with buried bodies, which have Jesus's family (son and such..) and 90% also his very own body.
Again, the very bases of your faith are being shaken.
-What will the christian world would do when it'll be publicied?
-What will you personally do if you find that your religion is just one big scam/conspiracy?
-And just wanted to state. Generations of generations of christian popes hadn't known a woman body for nothing.
Sucks imo...
And final cool paradoxial question, which aint necessarily christian-only:
If god is almighty, can do everything, etc. Let's imagine for a sec he has an arm. If he IS almight, can he make an object even he can't lift?
P.S: Maybe I'll make a Jewish Q&A thread inspired but the already existing two other's Q&A.
Before I ruin this post, I'd like to make it clear that I'm such an atheist, I don't even believe that people who believe in God exist... Nonetheless, my knowledge of things makes it impossible for me to ignore the factual errors in this post. I shall try to address them as they were ordered.
1) Your first point contains no paradox whatsoever, or rather, it's only paradoxical aspect is that you would speak with such authority upon a topic which you clearly know so little about. Essentially, in order to understand Christian doctrine, of all stripes with the exception of Gothic Aryan Christianity (which, so far as I know, hasn't been practiced since the 4th century AD), Christians believe that God and Jesus are the same. I don't want to belabor the point here, because there are volumes of literature-in fact, an entire 2000 thousand year old religion-to attest to this fact. I want you to think about this, and if you're at all as logical as you claim to be, you will immediately see all your points about delivery boys and polytheism vanish from the perspective of a Christian mind. Moreover, as I stated above, not knowing this crucial piece of Christian doctrine truly does demonstrate your lack of knowledge in regard to Christian faith-it's like not understanding the role that Moses plays in Jewish faith...
2) Part A: canonization was not limited to Jews. Indeed, Saint Oswald is an example of this, as well as literally thousands of other Saints besides who the figures I believe you are thinking of, the apostles. For that matter, the process of canonization continues to this very day. As we speak there is a movement afoot to canonize Pope John Paul who recently died. Pope John Paul was a pole, not a Jew, so here is yet another counter example to that first outrageous claim.
Part B: While I don't know enough about the Jewish conception of the messiah to address your second point entirely (notice the humility here) I can tell you this: Christians believe Jesus ressurected from the dead and performed miracles. It is primarily for this reason that Christians believe Christ is the messiah, as rising from the dead is a pretty miraculous thing. Of course there is a lot of history to consider here, such as the influence of the ancient Roman empire, the politics behind conquering the scraps of Rome after its fall, the parallels between Christ and other messianic cults of the day, but overall, from a spiritual point of view, the ressurection is really it. Why? Because God gave his only begotten son to suffer for the sins of the world and thereby rid us of original sin(provided of course you are baptized.) If you don't want to accept that, that's fine, but trying to examine why one group of fools thinks a falling church implies the presence of a messiah whilst another is willing to settle merely on the resurrection of a single individual is sort of like trying to argue why Square-circles are more plentiful than Angles on the head of a pin. One might also just say the more obvious thing, which is one needs a lot of faith to believe in obviously impossible things-Christian, Jewish, and otherwise-and therefore find it suspect to question another's impossible beliefs if they themselves believe in similar impossible things.
3) I imagine Christians will do the same thing upon discovering that Jesus is buried under a coffee shop in Israel as the Jews will do once they figure out Moses sat on a mountain creating all that Jewish law by himself. You want to talk about absurd, before there was even a Jesus there was an entire religion based upon what appears to be a very, very poorly performed sleight of hand. That an entire tribe of caananites wouldn't say to themselves, "hang on, Moses was sitting up there for a while, maybe he just carved those tablets himself" is as ridiculous as anything a Christian believe. And prior to that in history, you can really only resort to the time of Abraham when humans were supposed to live for 900 or so years, so using wildly unverifable evidence isn't going to help you much either if your overall goal is to demonstrate the scientific impossibility of a religion. You refer to Christians as post-Jews, which is itself fairly offensive considering their beliefs, but if that is so, then PJ's as you say are simply the fruit of a poison tree. In any case, if you haven't noticed, none of the Abrahamic religions (judaism, christianity, and islam) are very logically sound; do you really think the putative evidence of a single researcher and the director of Terminator 2 is going perturb such people, that is, people who already accept as fact impossible things? There are people alive right now who think dinosaur bones are a conspiracy, or the remnants of devils! I'll die laughing if anything James Cameron finds truly puts to rest the whole of Christian faith.
4) Your cool "paradoxical" question isn't really very paradoxical if you properly define God. Lord knows I've tried breaking down Christian's arguments this way myself, and their counter is somewhat satisfying, unfortunately for me. God is, by definition, capable of any task, therefore to conceive of a task which he cannot complete simply is to say that task does not exist. Sof, if you recall the definition of a paradox, you'll discover that your question isn't paradoxical at all, because one of its premises is false. A statement is only paradoxical if, at the very least, all of its premises are true. So in other words, your question presupposes the definition that God is not capable of all things, as in your scenario, you have conceived of a God whom is incapable of performing a particular task. But that is not a God at all, for I can imagine a God still greater! Furthermore, just on a personal note, has it occured to you that since Christians believe in essentially the same God as the Jews and the Muslims, that any fact which undermines the Christian God's existence also undermines the other two? Kind of renders your entire post about the beliefs of the Jews being anymore credible than those of the Christians a bit moot if you think about it.
5) I hope if you do start a Jewish thread, you're as honest in dealing with Judaism as you think are being with Christianity, since all religions are ridiculous from a scientific perspective. I mean, if you're going to quote the director of T2 and his research team to "expose" Christianity as a fraud, maybe you would like to say something about how insanely impossible it would be, from a mathematical point of view alone, for something like Noah's arc to exist. I mean, maybe it was a miracle of God's, but if you're willing to accept that, then how is it any less possible that Jesus was also a miracle of God? I mean, there is no reliable logical source with which to counter that claim, just other beliefs, as you have already done in your original post. But then one could just say that pink unicorns cloaked in silver really run the universe and your God is just THEIR messiah, they are that powerful! You see, you really must respect other people's beliefs, because in the end, if you're a believer yourself, you should understand how vulnerable all believers can be to ridicule. We know the sun isn't pulled around the sky in a chariot anymore, so it's becoming increasing more difficult to condescend to one religion from another just because you think your religion is the right one.
EDIT: apologies to the above posters, as I see you made a lot of the points I did before me. I just read the original post and was stunned by its inaccuracy, so I fired away. But it was so long I'm loathe to erase it, so you'll have to forgive me.
