Attack Against Christendom

Well then, some of them must have reformed.

 

That is a saying about dealing with Feuerbach who says all theology is anthropology. The second quote is mine. You have to do the research on Marx writing he turned Hegel on his head..it may be in German Idealism..see Marx.
And all of you other questions are classic apologetic positions against Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit." You should read it. So it think you know, but you just want me to waste my time going fetching whatever you want. I don't play that game.

 

I have no expectation you should ‘fetch whatever I want’.Nor do I wish to sit at your feet. Conversation over.

 

No, you are a potential child of God.....just not convinced.

 

and you are uninformed.

 

Conviction and faith would appear to be antagonistic.

 

Uninformed?

 

I understand. I have read Foxes Book of Martyrs. I have a direct descendent that was burned at the stake for translating the scriptures into common language. Are you going to try and convince me that those individuals that performed those atrocities were "true believers" that sincerely believed the tenets of John 3:16?? That they had obtained the Grace and Mercy that Christ had died for so they were willing to extend it to others? Show me the evidence. Show me how they were justified by the fruits of their labor.
I will contend they were members of a facade they call Christianity.....a man made religion of sorts. Many belong to that today but that does not show they "believe".

 

From my experience, there aren't. Most people who call themselves Christians either fall short of living up to Jesus' teachings, or actively oppose them.

1; He taught not to judge others. Christians are some of the most judging people on earth.

2; He COMMANDED his followers to give to the poor, and taught that being rich was not a virtue. Chritians, at least on the right, revere the rich, and promote the idea that if you are poor, it's because you are lazy and do not deserve help.

3; He taught that those who saught to profit from god were scum (He threw them out of the temple). Christians leaders, especially evangelicals, actively exploit their followers into giving them money, and use that money for their personal benefit. Pat Robertson, one of the most UnChristians scumbags on earth. literally said he needed a private jet because of all the "demons" on public planes, and wanted his followers to send him money to buy one for his church (Basically, he wanted a private jet and wanted to pretend it was for church use so he could get it tax free,

 

You've got it all wrong. You address "good works" as defining a "Christian". Works do not make you a Christian if you don't understand several things.
1) all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God
2) Jesus died on a Cross to make restitution for us
3) we are saved by Grace.....not by anything we have done, so we have no right to bragg
4) When we accept what jesus did for us and invite Him in, good works will be generated through us and it is to God's credit.

 

The Bible has countless examples that show that people don't have free will. Life is like a play in which everyone plays a certain character and cant deviate from the script.

BTW, the biblical God Yahweh (and Yeshua) don't love everyone. In fact they hate or ignore the vast majority of people.

 

You inadvertently (?) make a good point by drawing attention to the fact the God of the Old Testament appears as a very different deity than illustrated in the New.

 

Yeshua (Jesus) was not a Christian and he did not follow Christian teachings. Biblical Christian teachings instruct Christians to judge their fellow believers and to expel the evil ones.

Yeshua was a stingy freeloader who never gave anyone anything of material value. He sponged off of his rich buddies. When he had the opportunity to actually help the poor by selling his property he refused and said that he needed it more than the poor did.

The 4th Commandment tells people to bring cash when they go to church (Exodus 34:20). So if people are involved in the evangelical or televangical cults they are doing what that part of the 4th Commandment requires them to do, which is tofork over their money to the guy who is babbling about an imaginary deity.

Christians are told not to help people who will not work or to help widows who are younger than 60 years old. So if they are charitable toward those groups they are ignoring biblical Christian doctrine.

 

The God character Yahweh does not appear in the New Testament except for a single line of dialogue. He was a figment of imagination from earlier times and bit the dust with the collapse of the Babylonian Empire around 530 BC.

 

Well, as a sweeping generalisation I might agree but it’s not that simple. In fact the origins of the Bible (as we now have it) are so complex and so attended by controversy any attempt to go into detailed analysis is way, way beyond this thread. Besides, most of the arguments (if that what you call them) from Christian and Jewish fundamentalists on the subject give me a headache. I’m more interested in the puzzle of whether any of Christianities many doctrines are worthy of preservation without bringing along the ancient sad-masochist baggage. The only hint such and outcome is possible that makes any sense to me comes from Bishop John Shelby Spong in his “The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love" and even that has holes in it .
Still, the man has at least made a very brave effort to de-toxify scripture.

 

The Bible, the Koran, and the Book of Mormon do not teach morality. They teach complete obedience and total loyalty to the Boss. You will be hard pressed to find a handful of good moral teachings in the entire Bible and even fewer in the Koran and any in the Book of Mormon. That is not their purpose.

Believing in ancient ethnocentric Middle Eastern Jewish and Arabian religious fairy tales is siller than believing in religions cooked up by American con men, sci-fy writers, and a retired British civil servant in 1954. It is all lunacy.

 

True but that leaves us with the vexing question, why do ‘true believers’ imagine they work from a moral code? As to loyalty to the boss the best trick has been performed by those religious authorities who’ve managed to convince believers that they, the so called authorities, are the one and only means to approach God.
Nice little money earner that one.

There’s more to this game though than convincing others your so called holy book is ‘the Word of God’. There are all the complex, clever and psychologically manipulative methods used to place the congregation etc into a mental state where they are convinced they are closer to the divine. Take one example from one stream of European Christianity, the process of exposing Sunday worshipers of the High Anglican kind to ‘service high and anthems clear’.

 

True, but half truths....I see conflation of points and unstated assumptions that ignore...
1. Christianity is a Jewish heresy.
2. There are theological divisions in doctrines of g-d.
3. There are frauds in the business of religion.
4. People are hypocritical.
5. There are contradictions in church doctrine--in fact, different sects of "Christian" churches number in the hundreds of thousands.
6. g-d's phone number cannot be found in the phone book; therefore, he doesn't exist (a strawman argument to illustrate the absurdity of arguing for the existence of g-d as a thing).
7. Religion resulted in many dead and tortured people and should be abandoned as a belief system by rational persons.
8. Is "Christianity" and "Christendom" substantially the same thing?

On the seven point, modern materialistic-causal science has killed massive number of people also, should we....well you know the argument here for all genetic ad hominem fallacies. If all of the above assumptions and conflations were true--the spiritual life could still be real.

 

According to the biblical fairy tale Yeshua demands that a magic number of believers MUST be killed for their faith before he returns. It has been 2,000 years and that number has not been reached. Maybe it is because not one single person in all of human history has ever had faith in Yeshua (Jesus). So maybe the number is 1?

 

...maybe your only form of defense is to leave a trail of red herrings. Maybe you don't have a favorite fictional story that you think is nevertheless true.

As the Indian mental patient "Chief" Bromden said in the introduction of the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,”

In our scientific-positivistic-control dominated industrial epistemology of commodity production, we lost the ability to think “mythologically.” Modern epistemology equates “myth” with “fiction” when fiction can sometimes tell the stories that are the truest of all.

 

No, Jesus said FIRST take the beam out of your own eye before you judge, IOW, don't judge hypocritically.

Paul said if you don't work you shouldn't eat. People of faith give more to charity than secular people, see the book "Who Really Cares". People of faith even donate blood more often.

That happened because their dealings were dishonest, and it was done in the wrong place, the Court of the Gentiles, preventing people from worshipping there.

Rarely, most pastors don't make that much. My rector left his successful advertising business in Vancouver to become a priest in the cold plains of Alberta, at a much smaller salary.

Why don't you PM me and we'll compare what we both give to charity?

 

You all are just silly.

 

Such a powerful argument. On the other hand maybe you should have adhered to 1st Corinthians Ch14: V 38?

 

John 3:16.....the words of Jesus which he augmented on several occasions ARE the powerful argument that you choose to ignore. Instead you chase around man made "RELIGIONS" and use them as your reason for disbelief.

 

Having studied the pipe organ for 11 years at catholic cathedral in my youth I can assure you I was the one being chased around. As to John 3: 16 it has absolutely no power over me. In fact it shines a spotlight on a central feature of the Christian myth I find both sadistic and disturbed, that a deity would torture his own son ( who is actually himself if you swallow trinitarian theology) to redeem sins he knowingly made possible in the first place ( or do you want to deny God’s omniscience?). Taking 3:16 as our reading but from Joel, not John, we see another side of that deity. A side that may terrify you but simply impresses me as yet more religious psychological blackmail.