A poser for thiests

You forgot this in your sermon. Your god is a piece of shit.

Opera Snapshot_2023-05-16_163411_www.biblegateway.com

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So evil happens without god’s will or approval? Are you sure that’s what your bible says?

John 15:4-5

He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

Hmm…

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I found the trolley thought experiment to be interesting, but not original.

There is a legendary science fiction short story called “The Cold Equations” that was written by Tom Godwin in 1954 that seems essentially identical to the runaway trolley problem.

In this short story, a space ship is bringing thousands and thousands of doses of a life-saving vaccine to a planet that is suffering from a plague.

Because they needed to carry as much medical supplies as possible, every ounce of mass that could be discarded was removed.

Unfortunately, an 18 year old girl stowed away, and her extra weight would cause the ship to crash . . . as there is no leeway or margin of error given the mission.

So . . . the pilot can’t discard vaccine (thousands of lives), he can’t discard himself (he has to fly the ship), and if he lets the girl stay . . . then the ship will crash and kill both the pilot and the girl, and the vaccine will be destroyed.

If you’re interested in the trolley problem, then you should look up this story . . . which predates the trolley problem by well over a decade.

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God is certainly not good according to ANY modern religious text. So, how did you arrive at this imagining?

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Jesus

“As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up, knelt down before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?
“Why do you call Me good? ” Jesus asked him. “No one is good but One — God. You know the commandments: Do not murder; do not commit adultery; do not steal; do not bear false witness; do not defraud; honor your father and mother.” He said to Him, “Teacher, I have kept all these from my youth.” Then, looking at him, Jesus loved him and said to him, “You lack one thing: Go, sell all you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” But he was stunned at this demand, and he went away grieving, because he had many possessions.”
‭‭Mark‬ ‭10‬:‭17‬-‭22‬

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Have you done this? If not, why not?

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No i haven’t. Because Jesus was talking about richness standing in the way of eternal life the message gets to the heart of this rich man that is to say that our treasures on earth can choke up our eternal life.

You see a different example:

Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly.

7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.”

9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Christ cares about out hearts and where our confidence is at and eternal life. Christ is far more interested in our hearts:

“You do not want a sacrifice, or I would give it; You are not pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. God, You will not despise a broken and humbled heart.”
‭‭Psalms‬ ‭51‬:‭16‬-‭17‬ ‭

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So you’re saying your riches do not choke up your eternal life? And this is despite the fact that there are those who have much, much less than you, even to the point of their starvation?

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Unevidenced hearsay from an anonymous source, this has been explained to you already, you might as well be quoting Harry Potter at us as evidence for magic, at least we know who wrote that.

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LOL… No one is good but God? We already dealt with that and Jesus himself admits to not being good. After all, he did not come to bring peace but a sword. His whole goal was to turn family members against one another.

So we are in agreement then? God is an ass and Jesus is most certainly not good. He tells you this himself.

I see you are still using that computer of yours. Hmmm? I smell a hypocrite. Aren’t all true believers to turn everything they own over to the poor and follow Jesus? Even though he is not good? LOL

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They scream to us that God is real, that Jesus is God, and the Bible is his word; then they don’t take it seriously themselves the instant it is inconvenient.

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Aw, c’mon, Cyber! You are being totally unreasonable. If W.A.Y. were to give up all his worldly possessions to feed some starving schmuck, how could he be on here to tell us how wonderful and loving and good his god is that allows the poor schmuck to starve? Duh! :roll_eyes:

Sooooooo… :thinking:… Uhhhh… :thinking:… Hmmmm… Let’s seeeeee… Jesus is God… God is Jesus… God and Jesus are one in the same… Yet… Jesus says that he is NOT good, and only God IS good… But if God is good, that means Jesus is good… But if Jesus says he is not good, it should mean God is not good… Right?.. And if Jesus admits he is not good, then wouldn’t that mean God is admitting he fucked up when he impregnated Mary with himself as a means to make himself a perfect sacrifice to himself? Seems to me even God/Jesus cannot even decide whether or not they are good or evil. Aw, hell… STOP THE MERRY-GO-ROUND! I WANT OFF NOW!

(Edit for motion sickness.)

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And to introduce a note of boring historical fact into this conversation…This is a verse that points to the original copies of the gospels being devoid of the virgin birth and divine jesus narrative. The earliest “christians” (Followers of “The Way”) were to a man, Adoptionists and JEWS. They accepted (and their gospel texts told them) that Mary and Joseph were Jesus’ natural parents, as did the Gospel of Thomas, in more particular terms.
They believed and this verse bears it out that Jesus was the perfect Jew (not “man”) and because he observed the Law and Holy Days so perfectly says he was ADOPTED by god, not “was god” but was taken by god in a spiritual rebirth after his death. In that light the verse makes perfect sense. No need for apologetics or hermeneutics.

As the Roman church had a prelediction for murdering alternates and destroying (as far as they could) any trace of these original followers of “the Way” it is difficult to reconstruct their exact texts.

Safe to say that none of the original followers of the jesus figure would recognise WAY’s form of christianity or indeed the jesus figure’s “Big Adventures in Judea” he seems to think are accurate. In short WAY is a parvenu, a butterfly, or rather, a moth on the fabric of grand story telling. An intellectual starveling unable to separate fact from reality, or probability from impossibility.

Be kind

Edit: To pat educationally deprived orphans on their heads,

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Not just one … the best one :joy:

“Stricken from the mountain of the Lord …”

Must be Mount Everest. That’s the biggest one.

Holy cow! That DOES make perfect sense now! Fascinating info, Old Man. Even after all the time on here, I don’t think I’ve heard it explained like that before. Thanks for that input. :smiley:

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No, it’s not. Olympus Mons is 16 miles (24 kilometers) high, which makes it about three times higher than Mt. Everest.

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Ah. Makes sense. God lives on Mars. Of course! :slight_smile:

Like the others were saying, Adam, “good and evil” are just subjective concepts. They pertain to an individual’s beliefs. If there was an objective analogue of good and evil, it would only be the positive and negative values on a number line, mathematically speaking.

But neither values actually correspond to good or evil, logically. They’re distinct, separate terms; they only share similarity as objective/subjective analogues of each other. Indeed, one needs only view something differently for what’s “negative” to become “good”. But what can be extracted as valuable from such thinking is just realizing that the number line is balanced, in terms of possible numbers.

The subjective analogue to balance then, in the case of good and evil, is just that good exists just as much as evil does (in possibility), but that’s just a statement made in terms of all possibility, and made relative to something objectively similar (the values on a number line); i.e., nothing else.

But just because something can exist in equal amounts, doesn’t mean it always does. To summarize, good and evil can exist disproportionately, and in either direction of each other, or even in terms of balance. But “good” and “evil” are, in the end, just subjective attributes.

That gives some background for my answer, though:

Good doesn’t require evil to exist, and conversely. Yes in a way, but no in a way. Both are equally possible, in any case.

I hope my reply helps clarify how to think about that, even though it isn’t religious.

Duplicate post. oops