Counter-Apologetics

Personally i think that debating the bible is just literary criticism; similar to discussing the works of Shakespeare but less important.The problem which can not be overcome, is that those that believe in biblical inerrancy do so because they believe it to be The Word of God - quite literally - and they believe it because they believe that god has revealed the truth to them personally through it.That kind of deep delusion can't be argued against from any rational angle.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Tell me, when you say apart from his insistence that he once believed it all. are you saying that I'm lying? Or do you think that my belief was inferior to yours?And what exactly is this supposed to mean One cannot assume that everything is simply fiction just because they have never had reason to think otherwise. ?Serious question.

I didn't have a good reason, my belief in the thing just evaporated and wasn't as a result of any other experience. It was just like how my belief in Santa disappeared - pretty much exactly like it. These things obviously feel real to you so there's not much more to be said about them other than there are clear and obvious other explanations for them. Why anyone else should feel they have any relevance to how Paul went about creating a religion is not terribly clear to me. It's the reverse, far too few people ask questions of their beliefs. I learned several years after I gave up my beliefs that many of the things I was told by priests were not true and they knew it. They were peddling lies to the masses. If your beliefs can't stand up to objective scrutiny and critical challenge they're pretty poor beliefs. If those that believed stopped indoctrinating children there wouldn't be any counterpart (such that it is). Religions don't have a special pass in society, they're not beyond criticism. If you want to see what happens when closed systems think they have their own rules that can't be challenged by outsiders look no further than the child abuse in the Catholic church.

This 'truth' concept is a purely religious one, it really has no meaning when you're referring to secular matters. Secular stuff is about dealing with the messiness of real life where there's rarely if ever anything absolute and choices are temporal and conditional.All religious beliefs throughout time have obviously been wrong. If you can step outside your own head for a moment - I know you find this impossible, but if you can't, take it from people that can - you agree that all other religions apart from Christianity are wrong. You even agree that other Christians are also wrong eg Faith. So your insistence that yours is 'the Truth' is simply absurd. Of course it isn't.Putting aside the choice of no god, simple probability tells us that your variant is unlikely to be 'the Truth'. A better argument would be that because most peoples over all time have believed in gods of various sorts, then the god is universal, not unique to a particular cult.

Belief is not a choice.Put yourself in the shoes of the child born of Muslim parents in a remote village in the Atlas mountains of Morocco. He will be a believer, I can absolutely guarantee it. Not of Christianity of course, it's impossible for him to believe in Christianity because unless you're taught about Jesus by a Christian you can't believe in him. Sad but true, so he's damned to hell for all eternity. As is right and proper.That's the way it was for all of us not so long ago. Including you and me - we can only believe what we're taught which meant what we were born into. And we're equally damned if Islam is correct.It's the opposite of a choice. You do not believe because you chose to, you believe - in Christianity - because that's what you know.I didn't choose to believe when I believed and I didn't choose not to when I didn't. You didn't choose either did you? You're making the usual mistake of conflating deism with theism. I doubt whether most people here rule out an “invisible power that permeates the universe” - I'm an exception - because that's unknowable and irrelevant. We do object to yourassumption thar the God is the Christian god and that he intervenes with his creation though.

But people don't reach the age of 21 without being taught the religion of their parents or society. Even atheistic parents can't keep Jesus out of the heads of their kids in a Christian culture. You know this is true because you know that religious belief is not equally distributed in your town between all the world religions. People do not choose their religion. A very few change their religion and a few drop it, but the numbers are totally immaterial. You know that practically all of them wil - if at all. No it doesn't. It doesn't matter a damn what the local religion is, you'll adopt it if you're born into it. You *know* this. You can not be a Christian if you've never heard of Jesus. If instead, you've grown up a Muslim, you're going to believe what you believe just as strongly as any Christian that Islam is One and you'll have the same religious feeling experiences.Get you're head into this Phat - your experiences are not unique. People of all religions have the same feelings about their faith and equivalent 'revelations'. You would not be a Christian if you'd been born in the Atlas mountains to Muslim parents. You'd believe something different and you'd be just a fervent. You didn't choose your religion - hardly anybody does.

Speaking for myself, I've never read any, it seems a pointless thing to do. They're just religiously motivated people making stuff up. It's not even philosophy, they're pure works of imagination - fantasy.I've occasionally watched historians talk about the historicity of the bible and Christian religion because they attempt to be factual, but such programmes are rare. The problem there is that most non-religious people have no interest in it and religious people would be outraged by the debunking of their beliefs.I was at university with an atheist that was doing a Christian theology degree. (A rare thing indeed.) She'd been born a Christian so she knew what was being preached. Well it turned out that what was being preached to the masses from the pulpit is not what the accademics where teaching in theology classes. And that of course is true. Virtually nothing in religion as preached is the way it actually is. For example, I was well into my 40s before I found out that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are actually unknown teams of authors and never met Jesus. Nor that there were many 'bibles' not just those. Nor that they were written decades after Jesus's death. Nor that Paul never met Jesus. Nor that there's virtually no evidence of there ever even been a Jesus. The list goes on...

You're making a distinction between 'taught' and preached'? Why? Fact aren't conclusions, they're facts - they stand alone. Conclusions are drawn from them.The things I quoted above are all preached - “Luke says in chapter 4...” As if Luke was an actual person that Knew Jesus. No, we know that they're not facts; we know that they're just stories. But that is not what is taught and preached is it?