I recently saw the history of life on earth described as an hour: 50 minutes of microbes and single celled organisms, 10 minutes of animal life, and all of human life fitting into the last hundredth of a second. This was from Reddit. Later in the thread the allegory is expanded to a year, in which case dinosaurs would have existed from December 5th until the 24th.
Which brings up an interesting example for reasons to believe in a being that is no longer present. We have fossils of many dinosaurs with intermediaries that directly link them to birds. They occur worldwide in the appropriately carbon dated layer of the earth. But they are not in the Bible. Maybe Noah left them behind when he impossibly fit all the land-going animals into an ark. It's amazing with all the ensuing inbreeding that we vastly managed to escape birth defects. For a perfect God, He seems to have often needed to erase His mistakes.
Another mistake was taking two people and putting them in a paradise and then making an Angel called Satan who would tempt those creatures first by telling them that they should eat of the apple of knowledge despite your warning. Satan managed to convince the female and eventually God was pissed when Satan tried to take over heaven so now he's not an Angel anymore. Whereas God had no problem destroying a bunch of mortal men, he's left Satan to tempt us into masturbation, and shellfish, and figs, and Harry Potter, and gay sex.
God even adulterously impregnated a married virgin (or temporarily divorced and remarried her? And isn't he her father? Who forbade incest?) to make a miraculous messiah who was crucified by the Romans after he tried to get everyone to drop all their possessions and leave their families and live communally in the desert because the end was nigh 2010 years ago. Also you have to convince everyone you know of this and give donations to support the passing on of this very important message. All of this to fix the original sin. I guess it's better than the Aztecs who did human sacrifices. The sacrifice of a God is much more Christian. It's also OK to regularly cannibalize this deity's human form and son but that might just be a twisted symbol of love and faith. And this is absolutely true. And blasphemers, and apostates shall go to hell. But I think you may also be able to stone them, in God's love.
Now I don't think any of you believe all of this. You have adapted the stories from millennia past to your modern life which could not have been conceived of by the men who conceived the Bible. They would be in awe of our lights and guns and bombs and planes and cars and bikes and homes and food. They could check out all their old desert hangouts from the comfort of an air-conditioned Hummer while listening to the oddities of auto-tuned songs which emanate from a little black box instead of a band. If one of them had reduced vision we could use Lasers to correct their vision to near perfection.
Why would any being powerful enough to create the universe also decide to give the absolute truth to Christians and simultaneously give false truths to a multitude of other peoples of various times and places? It's already massively improbable that we exist, although if the scale of the universe is infinite then I suppose it would happen sooner or later. But on a scale of improbable to commonplace, our existence almost does reach to the realm of miracles. Now add onto that the existence of a being capable of implicitly creating the expansive universe just so that this tiny planet Earth could be ruled by his chosen people, who look just like him. He tells them all to be good because he really wants to you to come to this everlasting party at his exclusive Heaven club but you have to show you deserve it first. If you don't then he'll send you to be tortured forever.
To me this this seems ridiculous. Why should God exist?
But I haven't convinced you to go against years and years of prayers, and family, and friends, and community, and doctrine, and repetition. To deny that worldview would be much more shattering than denying Santa was.
That's fine. You have every right to your beliefs. I've just laid out mine, which I also have every right to.
Can we now agree that in a Democracy in which the people have many different beliefs, the public schools should not be encouraging their students to recite a pledge that includes the Christian phrase "Under God?" It was added to the pledge in the fifties, the same time period that established the official motto of the US as "In God We Trust" and stuck it on all the money? I like E pluribus unum better. We are a diverse people united by values of Freedom, Justice, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Except I suppose for the Natives. But God wanted them dead. Even though they lived in communes largely without possessions just like Jesus preached. They didn't know the Lord's Prayer.
As you might have guessed, I'm brimming with Doubt. Which made a great parable. I've only seen the movie though.
Which brings up an interesting example for reasons to believe in a being that is no longer present. We have fossils of many dinosaurs with intermediaries that directly link them to birds. They occur worldwide in the appropriately carbon dated layer of the earth. But they are not in the Bible. Maybe Noah left them behind when he impossibly fit all the land-going animals into an ark. It's amazing with all the ensuing inbreeding that we vastly managed to escape birth defects. For a perfect God, He seems to have often needed to erase His mistakes.
Another mistake was taking two people and putting them in a paradise and then making an Angel called Satan who would tempt those creatures first by telling them that they should eat of the apple of knowledge despite your warning. Satan managed to convince the female and eventually God was pissed when Satan tried to take over heaven so now he's not an Angel anymore. Whereas God had no problem destroying a bunch of mortal men, he's left Satan to tempt us into masturbation, and shellfish, and figs, and Harry Potter, and gay sex.
God even adulterously impregnated a married virgin (or temporarily divorced and remarried her? And isn't he her father? Who forbade incest?) to make a miraculous messiah who was crucified by the Romans after he tried to get everyone to drop all their possessions and leave their families and live communally in the desert because the end was nigh 2010 years ago. Also you have to convince everyone you know of this and give donations to support the passing on of this very important message. All of this to fix the original sin. I guess it's better than the Aztecs who did human sacrifices. The sacrifice of a God is much more Christian. It's also OK to regularly cannibalize this deity's human form and son but that might just be a twisted symbol of love and faith. And this is absolutely true. And blasphemers, and apostates shall go to hell. But I think you may also be able to stone them, in God's love.
Now I don't think any of you believe all of this. You have adapted the stories from millennia past to your modern life which could not have been conceived of by the men who conceived the Bible. They would be in awe of our lights and guns and bombs and planes and cars and bikes and homes and food. They could check out all their old desert hangouts from the comfort of an air-conditioned Hummer while listening to the oddities of auto-tuned songs which emanate from a little black box instead of a band. If one of them had reduced vision we could use Lasers to correct their vision to near perfection.
Why would any being powerful enough to create the universe also decide to give the absolute truth to Christians and simultaneously give false truths to a multitude of other peoples of various times and places? It's already massively improbable that we exist, although if the scale of the universe is infinite then I suppose it would happen sooner or later. But on a scale of improbable to commonplace, our existence almost does reach to the realm of miracles. Now add onto that the existence of a being capable of implicitly creating the expansive universe just so that this tiny planet Earth could be ruled by his chosen people, who look just like him. He tells them all to be good because he really wants to you to come to this everlasting party at his exclusive Heaven club but you have to show you deserve it first. If you don't then he'll send you to be tortured forever.
To me this this seems ridiculous. Why should God exist?
But I haven't convinced you to go against years and years of prayers, and family, and friends, and community, and doctrine, and repetition. To deny that worldview would be much more shattering than denying Santa was.
That's fine. You have every right to your beliefs. I've just laid out mine, which I also have every right to.
Can we now agree that in a Democracy in which the people have many different beliefs, the public schools should not be encouraging their students to recite a pledge that includes the Christian phrase "Under God?" It was added to the pledge in the fifties, the same time period that established the official motto of the US as "In God We Trust" and stuck it on all the money? I like E pluribus unum better. We are a diverse people united by values of Freedom, Justice, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Except I suppose for the Natives. But God wanted them dead. Even though they lived in communes largely without possessions just like Jesus preached. They didn't know the Lord's Prayer.
As you might have guessed, I'm brimming with Doubt. Which made a great parable. I've only seen the movie though.
