Evidence for God from Science

Seraph wrote:Correction? I've been consistent in my position since the start of this thread. You're right, Deism is not monolithic, it is divided mainly into two major camps, Classic Deism and Modern Deism. The Classics believe in a personal God while the Modern don't. This is consistent with everything I've said, I've never had to revise my definitions or anything.

I was referring to your "correction" of me in calling my comment a caricature.

But regardless of what the Enlightenment era Deists believed (though I do agree with them on points often), I didn't become a Deist by researching these old Deists and their positions, I came to the conclusions on my own and decided that Deism was the best label for it.

That much is obvious.

Seraph wrote:That's Christian theology, but the idea of forgiveness always requiring sacrifice is not very intuitive. What if I said I needed to kill a rabbit and have a person accept the death of that rabbit each time I needed to forgive a person? Any logical person would say "Why the **** did you have to kill a rabbit in order to forgive someone?"

Or if it has to be self sacrifice, what if a person said they needed to slice off one of their own fingers whenever they forgave someone, and that the person needed to accept the sacrifice of the finger? You'd get the same response.

To show the logic of Jesus' sacrifice being the only way to God, the ideas of Original Sin and Redemption through Death/Ressurection need to be shown logically.

I don't know about 'logic' but anthropology has something to say about it.

How many cultures had animal or human sacrifice in them or a preceding culture? I really can't think of any that didn't. As far as I know it is universal that all people's, at some point in their history, had some form of regular sacrifice as a form of appeasement. A short list of examples:
Greeks/Romans
Egyptians (first dynasty did human sacrifice, later there was animal sacrifice)
Just South America in general
The Vikings, druids, other European groups.
These are the ones I know personally, but I've read articles by skeptics and believers alike agreeing with my statement.

Why? No freaking clue. I try to look at things scientifically first, and scientifically, its counterintuitive. Why kill your best athletes? Why kill off your best cattle, sheep, e.t.c? It's self-destructive (which most seem to realize at some point, or, well, 'self-destruct'). One or two cultures we could shrug off, but its kind of hard too on this scale.

Humanity has felt a weird need to appease something above it since the beginning afaik. Its weird. The question isn't if its logical, its if the Jesus story was fixing the root or just another facet of this need?

(We can't figure out the logic until we understand the need, and if you're on this forum, smart money says you know what most of us think it is. )

Seraph wrote:That's Christian theology, but the idea of forgiveness always requiring sacrifice is not very intuitive. What if I said I needed to kill a rabbit and have a person accept the death of that rabbit each time I needed to forgive a person? Any logical person would say "Why the **** did you have to kill a rabbit in order to forgive someone?"

Or if it has to be self sacrifice, what if a person said they needed to slice off one of their own fingers whenever they forgave someone, and that the person needed to accept the sacrifice of the finger? You'd get the same response.

To show the logic of Jesus' sacrifice being the only way to God, the ideas of Original Sin and Redemption through Death/Ressurection need to be shown logically.

Have you ever forgiven a wrong?
Was a price of some sort not paid?
Of course it was.
You are confusing the issue with examples that have no bearing on the issue.
Is it not hard to forgive a wrong? Yes, of course it is. Why?
Because we know that it involves some sort of 'sacrifice" on our part to do so.