bippy123 wrote:And what truthhood's may those be Seraph? maybe u would like to share them with us?
Well I did briefly go over them in the opening post, but I'll go more into detail.
To me it seems apparent that the Bible is just one of the hundreds of religious texts throughout history and its simply the one that happened to catch on. Read the creation story of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve, and it reads exactly like a simple creation myth that hundreds of civilizations have come up with, because they had no knowledge of how the Universe and Earth actually formed, which humanity now knows. Old Earth Creationism and Christian Theistic Evolutionism seem to be desperate attempts to justify the creation story and reconcile it with modern science, despite this websites very valliant attempts to do so. The Sun was not created after the Earth. There was never any waters for the spirit of God to hover over. Look at palentology and its apparent that there never was a time where death was not present in the world like the Bible claims of the garden of eden. Also, why would God have life exist and spread across the planet for billions of years without intervention, only to plant a garden with a magic tree containing sin in it? A simple reading of genesis without all the footnotes and going "but what it REALLY means by this text is..." makes it appear as just another primitive creation story. The serpent appears to be a simple "trickster" character that appears in a ton of creation myths, but was late amended in the new testament to be the Devil. For the past couple years I've been almost afraid to read Genesis because it would be painfully obvious how desperate non-YEC interpretations are to explain Genesis' incompatibility with facts that have been uncovered about the formation of the world since Genesis was written. On top of that, Christianity teaches that we live in a fallen world of Sin and that God never intended for it to be this way. A few minutes of Philosophy 101 makes the problems with this paradigm very apparent, and a few minutes of Biology and Palentology 101 show that this was never the case. All of this is just the beginning of Genesis.
Noah's Ark and the Great Flood whether local or global, I'm just gonna say, is a rediculous unbelievable story. DNA analysis of ancient humans migration across the planet does not show any point where humanity's population "bottlenecked" where all of humanity except for a very small amount of people went extinct (at least not homo sapiens, humanities ancestors did bottleneck with the eruption of the supervolcano that is now Lake Toba). A global flood interpretation is just ludicrous, as Noah could not possibly put two of each ancestor of present day species on a giant boat. A local flood interpretation does not make much sense either, as why is it so important to save two of each local species, when the flood only covers a relatively small area, and the rest of the planet is still filled with life? Why did God regret creating humanity at this point? The idea of the nephilim seems like another myth similar to the greek titans, or other mythological "giants", which are mysteriously absent from fossil records. On top of that, how could Noah or any of the other humans at the time have possibly been 900+ years old? People back then lived only half as long as they do today, not ten times as long. The Noah's Ark story reads a lot like that of any other mythological story that make an interesting story but did not actually happen.
Fast foward to the rest of the Old Testament. I have a hard time believing that the God who created the stars and galaxies, the outer reaches of the universe and the galactic clusters and filaments as well as the God who is involved in humanity, chose only to reveal himself to the Hebrews, a single small nation in the middle east thousands of years ago. There have been tons of civilizations on the planet, yet Christianity says that God chose to directly interact with this small ancient nation. This whole time, China and the Native Americans have just been out of the loop, with God having nothing to do with them for thousands of years, yet with Israel God directs their armies and performs miracles to lead them to victory? I have a hard time believing that. On top of that, and this gets pointed out quite a lot, God in the old testament is extremely cruel and the complete opposite of omnibenevolent. Why punish King Saul for failing to slaughter every last amalekite, children included? Why kill Uzzah for trying to protect the sacred ark of God? Why harden Pharoahs heart just to prove a point when all it does is make it necessary to kill the firstborn of every family in Egypt? Why give the israelites an encyclopedia of crazy laws only to have them "fulfilled" by Jesus later? What does "fulfilling" a law even mean? What if someone came to the US dressed as Uncle Sam and claimed to "fulfill" the laws of America and they no longer need to be followed? The God of the Old Testament seems to be a god of war that the israelites invented to lead their people to victory, just like how the old greek cities would claim to be supported by one of the greek gods, which was later "amended" to be God preparing for the coming of a messiah.
Fast foward to the New Testament. The plan of having a messiah come to save humanity from sin is a terrible plan and only limits who can be saved. What purpose does a messiah serve to an omnibenevolent God? Why does sin need to have something slaughtered to be forgiven? How insane would it be if my friend stole a dollar from me and I told him that if I am going to forgive him, he will have to slaughter a cute bunny because some living thing will have to pay for what he did? Why have sacrifices at all to forgive someone? And if you have a messiah come and die for everyones sins, why does it require belief in it to "work"? The amount of people on the planet throughout history who have been exposed to Jesus and believe in him is probably less than a tenth of everyone who has ever existed. Pretend for a moment that you arent Christian and someone is telling you this whole paradigm and trying to make you believe in it. Most thinking people who werent raised Christian will probably reject it because it seems ludicrous. God's plan for salvation for someone involves getting them to believe a story that to many will appear ludicrious? Surely God, before the universe was made, could have come up with a way for people to come to him that wasn't so roundabout and exclusive to a select few? In order to believe in Jesus, one has to have been born at the right place, at the right time, and have the right mindset and knowledge. It is not simply "you can choose to believe in him, or not believe in him". It is based on so many factors that have to lead to a person believing in a story. It's silly, and doesn't seem like a plan devised by an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, beautifully simple God. And it's not fair to a lot of people. Consider the (non-radical) Muslims, who genuinely seek a relationship with God but don't believe in the penal substitution of Jesus. God's just going to send them to hell despite genuinely perusing him because the lived in the wrong place at the wrong time and made the wrong choices about which story to believe? It makes no sense.
A lot of Christian Philosophy, as demonstrated by many on this site, is horrifically medieval and outdated in nature. The reconciliation of divine simplicity and the Trinity, or the reconciliation of God being three persons yet one being, all seem like something that can only exist on paper and not in reality. Most philosophers now disagree with a lot of the old Christian thinkers entire way of thinking. It's just not something I'm able to subscribe to.
In the end, Christianity feels like trying to desperately make a bunch of peaces fit together that clearly don't and trying to make a massive unstable structure hold up. I know that people probably have an answer for each object I brought up but each answer I've seen to these feels like jumping through mental hoops to try and believe genuinely. Believing in all of them is becoming somewhat impossible and extremely stressful. All of this has been floating around in my head for years. All of this extra mental baggage has been a roadblock in my relationship with God, the idea of believing in a simple God that is accessible to anyone without the need of a human sacrifice and belief in a single one of hundreds of different similar stories sounds so liberating and freeing to me. It makes more sense to believe that God does not require penal substitution, and that when we die we are each in the hands of a just loving God who judges on an individual basis of if he wants to continue a relationship with the person after death. Maybe I'll end up rejecting Deism and sticking with Christianity somehow in the future, but this is where my head is at the moment.
I am committed to belief in God, as the most morally demanding, psychologically enriching, intellectually satisfying and imaginatively fruitful hypothesis about the ultimate nature of reality known to me - Keith Ward
