If you remove monuments of slave owners, then also don't endorse the books they wrote (Bible).

We are secular, yes.

 

Because Jesus was such a poor communicator (so the Bible is likely dead wrong in the many verses that say he's god), we'll never know what he really meant. So for argument's sake, can we both agree that if, repeat if, hypothetically, he did say that non-believers do go to an actual place of physical torture that you'd condemn him as immoral and unfair and a tyrant like I certainly do? Can we agree on that? If I send your family to brutal physical torture for simply not "believing in me", would you condemn me, Jake?

 

An open letter to Jesus:
Jesus, you've failed spectacularly in your goal of trying to create ethical followers as I constantly, CONSTANTLY, run into followers of yours that fully defend not only slavery, but GENOCIDE, AND TORTURE, AND HATRED TOWARDS GAYS AND WOMEN (and any other atrocity found in the book about you.)
You, sir (Jesus), have failed.

 

Getting people to stop believing in fairy-tales, and leave beliefs that are immoral and cruel, is a very very worthwhile endeavor.
Here's hundreds of examples of the cruelty and violence and barbarity that 2.1 billion people can't seem to improve on: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/long.html

 

This is so hilarious because I'm constantly being accused of only condemning ISLAM!

 

You can't answer "yes!" to this question like us Modern Secular Humanists very very easily can, can Dayton3?
"Dayton3, if you had Jesus' alleged magic ninja super-powers, would you have given us the final cure for cancer at some time over the last 2000 years?"

If you can't answer "yes!" (the most loving answer, for sure), then you might just want to consider going home and rethinking your life. Just a thought.

 

Are you arguing against what? Specific.
The words in the Bible?
The doctrine of ancient Christianity?
Organized religion?
Belief in God or gods?

Let me tell you my bottomline view. To the extent I judge anyone, it is on what the person does or does not do. Their motivations are their own, not my concern. The same applies to any ideology in exact relation each person acts in relationship to it. What difference does it make to me what their motivation is?

However, I also looking at it locally and in the present. What Incas, Spanish, Mao, a Pope or whoever or whatever organization did in the past? Doesn't affect me or mine in the slightest.

So, in terms of "Christians" my evaluation is very simple. How do Christians act in relation to me and my own (family and nuclear social circle.) This is NOT a question of do I agree with them. No one has to agree with me. I don't have to agree with anyone. Rather, in real terms, what is their conduct in real effect on me and my own people? Personally, in real actual terms, the finest people I have known in real interactions and effects upon me have for the most part (not exclusively) been Christians and still are.

All religions to people not raised to it are extra weird. Atheism of everything including all properties of physics and physical reality just "poof," popped into existence out of absolute nothingness a gzillion years ago also is weird and makes no sense.

Thus, given I am not omniscient, omnipotent or entirely benevolent, all that is beyond my ability to comprehend. If there is a God or gods, by comparison I'm as an bacteria living in a human body in a universe that I as bacteria can not grasp any of it. How can I evaluate "omniscient, omnipotent and pure benevolence?" I can't. Don't pretend I can. Nor pretend it matters to me. In this universe, even that of it I can comprehend, I am mere temporal bacteria. But, by another measure to myself, I am everything. Both irrelevant and the centrix at the same time.

I evaluate people on a human level. Generally. In groups and identities (somewhat) and mostly individually. In this, I share neither your anger or quest for understanding or agreement. If a child is drowning in a pool, and someone shouts out "Zeus demands we save that child!" I will respond "Yes! We must save the child." I would not say, "There is no Zeus!" explaining why I think so. What difference does it make whether Zeus decreed that or not?

IF you drop your view that God must be 100% proactively benevolent, may not be 100% omniscient or 100% omnipotent - which neither you or I are ourselves - this fundamentally changes all the questions and issues on both religion and god. For every evil thing done in the name of God, I can name a wonderfully good thing done in the name of God. And then you can name another evil thing - endlessly.

OR we can do the same with atheists, can't we?

 

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It's truly stunning the lengths that religious people constantly go to to JUSTIFY OR AT LEAST MITIGATE THE BARBARITY OF SLAVERY, it really is. Yes, I said slavery! One of the worst crimes in all humanity, and religious people run interference for it. I bet if Jesus had said "end slavery w/in the next 25 years" that religious people would say "slavery is bad!!"....proving once again that they have a real hard time thinking for themselves. They need people who didn't even know where the sun went at night to guide them morally. Wow.

Perhaps when one reads in their religious texts that those texts teach to kill gays that they should abruptly LEAVE SAID CULT.
Read these passages, and then leave Jesus/Mohammad: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/gay/long.htm

 

Illogical thought processes, and unscientific teachings.

 

So please give us a list of all the things (say 20 or more) that god can NOT do. Thanks.

Let me start you out:
1. God can not summon the moral courage to lift his allegedly all-powerful fingers and simply snap them and give us the final cure for cancer. He just can't do that, for some strange reason (yet "he loves us"!) - he prefers to see innocent children die horrific deaths, families torn apart, instead of just give us the final cure. Doesn't sound too terribly ethical, to me - but maybe I just care more for innocent children than Christians do, I don't know.

 

To lighten this up, this is hilarious to me:

 

Your reply just proved the point that I was trying to make.
However, I thank you for your well-thought-out reply, though (I wish I gave as much thought to each post I make as you often do to years.)

 

It is the only rational perspective of value.

Metaphysics by definition is not scientific.

 

Because when I've written "end slavery!" people complain that doing that immediately would throw the economies of those nations into a tail-spin - so I'd do it GRADUALLY, as soon as feasible, but not TOO fast. If their economy collapsed I suppose that even the SLAVES would suffer more than needed. No one can reasonably complain about a gradual (not 100 years, though!) elimination of slavery.

We try to - for example, we condemn Jesus for saying that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and not also between a woman and woman and between and man and a man. We try to eliminate the evil of Jesus saying that by passing more loving gov't regulations like allowing gays to marry. Jesus never, in 2000 years of "watching over us", approved of gay marriage. That's because he's a homophobe. The Bible says gays don't get into heaven, but that zombie could change that policy with a snap of his (allegedly) all-powerful fingers. He won't, because he's either unloving or not real - either way, people will want to leave him, of course.

 

The only way to take Torah & Bible & Koran as being on a coherent continuum is to take the Islamic point of view - that the first two were failed attempts by God to communicate holy truths to man. (The failure is implied to be humanity's.) I can't decide if that's a valid POV - the differences between the first two taken together & Islam seem too large to bridge easily.

& I don't know that Moses wrote Torah - I understood that to be a much longer period of development by many writers. The Christian Bible - the New Testament - is similarly a product of many hands, over time, with the sequencing & selection of the canonical books in Constantine's time in the Roman Empire. I remember that the individual scrolls of the NT were selected & sequenced as part of fierce discussions about the nature of God, the triune God, the miracles of Jesus, the virgin birth, the nature of Jesus, & similar debates.

Mohammed said he didn't write the Koran, he was told it & transcribed it as best he could.

This subject - the origin of the seminal documents of the three religions - is enormous. I think the argument in the OP is too facile - the topic is too big to neatly encapsulate into a few bullet points. In the West in general, religious belief seems to be yielding on a lot of the day-to-day topics to science & technology. Islam is much the younger religion - whether it will fall into this same pattern remains to be seen.

 

The Bible also talks about very real physics concepts, at least indirectly - the geneologies in the Bible (Adam to Jesus) is only around 4000 years, so it implies the world is about 6000 years old - very very real world non-mystical stuff, arguably. If I were in Jesus' shoes I'd have the moral courage (unlike Jesus) to say "ok, look we screwed up, we got Genesis wrong, so there is actually no need for to atone for original sin because the Adam/Eve story was just made up - can you forgive us?"
I'd forgive Jesus - because I'm more forgiving than Jesus is, because I'd forgive, say, the Muslims, for not believing in the Biblical Jesus - but Jesus harbors so much hatred for those that reject him that he can't find it in his heart to forgive.
.

 

What kind of person would let some ancient ruler (Constantine) determine which books in their overall belief system are good or not!? WTF!? Some people just can't think for themselves.

 

Correct, from what I understand.
Why would god choose an ILLITERATE person, out of the billions of very literate people who have ever lived, to be the effective author/conveyor of his (allegedly) most important and final message of all time!? Was god high at the time? Apparently Plato, Shakespeare, and Homer (not Simpson, the other one) were just too busy, I guess.

You'd THINK he could also find a person who was NOT a pedophile to be his hand-picked #1 role model of all time, too. His did pass on giving the final message to Jared of Subway, though, so I'll give him credit for that.

 

Sounds like an incredibly impotent god for one that's supposed to be "all-powerful", actually.

 

While Jesus did not approve of hatred of any kind directed at a person, he did teach to "hate the sin but love the sinner".

And Jesus did talk about sin many times.

 

If he actually believed that, then he'd "hate" the fact that non-Christians don't "believe" in him, but would love the "sinner" (that person) enough, enough, to not have them be sent to "hell" - he'd let them into "heaven" if they were ethical even if they were a non-believer. I'd do that, because I'm more loving than you and Jesus are....or am I wrong, Dayton3? If so, please enlighten me as to where.
Have a great night.

 

So he seemed kind of judgmental? But I thought that is a "bad" thing?

 

So when Jesus sends Gandhi to endless torture in "hell", that's just pure "love", and not "hatred" of any kind whatsoever, eh, Dayton?
Jesus is full of hatred - that psycho condemned all the villagers in those 3 villages in the Bible to endless torture (after they die) simply because they didn't believe that his magic tricks ("miracles") were real.

 

Did he talk about his own sin of sending ethical non-believers to "hell", just for not being Christians? In America we DON'T make being a, say, Hindu or Buddhist a crime at all, so why would Jesus make it a crime to be a Hindu or Buddhist as well? It's because we today are more ethical, more loving, more compassionate, than Jesus was.

 

It's fun to make fun of god and Jesus because of course they can't actually defend themselves - it's like taking candy from a baby.