had my faith very aggressively tested tonight.

[SpaceDinosaur]

This is not about the action, I'm fine with what happened. This is about how I feel now.

What's just happened.
I gave a friend a lift home as I was driving and he was quite drunk.
Midway home he asked how we (group of friends) cope with a mutual friend being religious...she's getting married in a church.
I replied that I was religious, he attended my church wedding 6 months ago.
"You can't be religious, you're supposed to be intelligent"
Sorry?
"You're a scientist, you have an analytical mind, why are you acting like a brainwashed idiot?"
God love him he loves a soap box so I was then treated to a tirade of how there was no God, how if there was a God we would be perfect, how God couldn't exist because of the diseases babies in Africa die of. (That was his pet topic)

No responses from me were heard so I allowed him to rant himself out including a full session of calling God all the names under the sun, asking God to smite or kill him now and laughing at me.

I am at peace with the event. Shocked but not upset. He'll apologise for being so aggressive, confrontational and rude tomorrow (if he remembers)

I felt tested. I wanted to come home and open my bible and see where it fell (something I did a lot as a teenager) but I can't find it which makes me sad. I wanted to find the verse and chapter about not testing God.

I would like to ask for a verse or chapter to read. I have a digi bible. I can't explore the book, I can't find it right now.

I must say that I have come to a similar conception of Jesus and Christianity to noblegiraffe.

I think it’s quite plausible that there was indeed a real historical figure Jesus, a self-styled messiah whose thoroughly Jewish apocalyptic narrative slowly metamorphosed after his death into a new gentile-friendly religion with Jesus as divine saviour.

It would be interesting to know what Jesus himself would make of Christianity if he were able to come back today and take a peek at it, particularly given that, even as related in the Bible, Jesus did not always seem to be following the current orthodox party line:

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.”

These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.”

Personally I think that Jesus would have mixed feelings about Christianity. He would be happy with its function as a custodian of his moral teachings and message of love but I think he would be startled to find that he had been turned into God and that those who cherished him were mainly non-jewish.

In some ways, I think that Jesus would recognise himself more in the way he is portrayed in the Quran, even although Islam is ostensibly a much younger religion.

Muhammad had family members who were Ebionites – descendants of an early Jewish Christian sect who revered Jesus and thought he was the messiah but considered him to be human. This viewpoint of Jesus as a human messiah/prophet is evident throughout the Quran. In fact one of the things God is unhappy about in the Quran is that the pesky Christians are saying that Jesus is divine!

Logic is part of philosophy. Looks like some picking and choosing about which bits of philosophy are OK. It seems that it isn't just people of faith that are not welcome on MN but philosophers as well. Odd on a board named philosophy/religion.

Academic historians don't take Christianity deriving from Mithraism seriously. it is 'DaVinci Code' level history.

So how did Christianity start then BigDorrit? What I have studied and to what level is immaterial.

greenheart- I agree. I think that philosophy is a hugely important tool which allows us to explore and examine our world.

Science uses aspects of philosophy which underpin critical thinking, I have studied philosophy of education, it helps us understand politics and many other aspects of human understanding.

I am an atheist but I think that philosophy is a very important subject.

The dark ages, Iplayer I half watched this the other night, fascinating, Christians currently are worshiping an image of Zeus! But rather more importantly it's about the start of what cultures and why Christianity stole from.

But back to the OP, could you please elaborate on
Sadly I was thinking about everything being said and despite not being heard, answering each point
So can you please answer me each point. I would love to know how you can square up in your own concise who your god choses to help or not?

Yes I do know that Atheism has the "theism" in it and therefore describes the position that does not believe in God. When I said that corresponds to reality I assumed we were all talking about God (why the F does it automatically capitalise G in God ?!) and faith etc.

So - surprise - I don't actually believe atheism covers ones dis/belief in fairies or homeopathy. But glad we got that straightened out

The fast and loose approach to history by some atheists is given a very readable treatment in David Bentley Hart's 'Atheist Delusions; The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies' which shows that some atheists are as bad at history as they are at philosophy. It is odd that the terms belief, evidence etc can only be defined in terms that some atheists approve of even though there is a body of literature and debate over those terms mean.

Atheists who follow the arguments of the four horsemen appear to ignore philosophy, history, theology and philosophy of science. Which is a pity as philosophers, historians and theologians would get short shrift if we entered scientific debate without getting to grips with the basics of the field we are entering and started defining terms to suit our arguments and preconceptions.

John C Lennox (mathematician) writes very well on the difficulties with some of the philosophical and historical arguments used by the four horsemen in 'Gunning for God; why the new atheists are missing their target.'

But atheists don't have to be good at philosophy, history, geography or needlework.

All they have to be is someone who does not accept that there is a god or gods.

Neither do theists, actually. They are just people who do believe in a God or gods.

noblegiraffe Yes, that's quite a realistic stab at the origins of christianity. Of course it depends on what you mean by its start because there are a lot of things before jesus that contributed to it.
e.g.

The Avesta tells the story of how Ormuzd created the world and the first two humans in six days and then rested on the seventh. The names of these two human beings were Adama and Evah. These texts date back as far as the 10th century B.C
The Epic of Gilgamesh predates Genesis by centuries, from which the bible probably got its the creation story and Noah's flood.
The fall of mankind in Genesis is possibly rewriting of the Greek legend of Pandora's box.

The story of Moses was a copy of what happened to Sargon the Great 800 years prior.
A lot of the book of Proverbs is copied from the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope.
Buddha, who lived 500 years before Jesus, healed the sick, walked on water, flew through the air, birth foretold by a spirit, mother impregnated by a spirit, and was predicted at birth to become a great leader (sound familiar?)
The Egyptian Book of the Dead reads like the Ten Commandments and was written 1000 years before.
Psalms 29 is a hymn that bears so much similarity to Ulgaritic poetry that was originally a hymn to Baal.
There is a strong correlation between the Gathas of Zarathushtra Yasna and book of Isaiah.
The Zoroastrians were the first to believe in angels, the idea of Satan, and the on going battle between the forces of good and evil.
The concept of Heaven and Hell seem to predate Judaism as well.
Even the holy trinity was a Pagan belief, Christianity didn't invert the idea.

The virgin birth, the resurrection ... so much of the bible is just rehashed stories from other beliefs that were around a long time before jesus came along. Is any of it original?

So it does make me wonder if jesus actually existed or was it just a convenient name to hang the religion on.

Seems that the teaching of history and the use of sources needs work on this thread. Popular history tells you more about what people want to be true (philosophical concept that one) rather than what might have happened. Jesus Myth? More likely to be on cable TV with lots of breathy supposition rather than peer reviewed articles.

I cannot understand why listening to someone who holds different views from you might be regarded as a test of faith. And who might have been testing you? And why?

He believes one thing; you believe another. That's fine. He was drunk and probably expressed it in less reasonable terms than he might otherwise, but is that a big deal? I can see no problem at all.

Nah that would be post graduate degrees from secular universities in theology and philosophy.

What I find trying is the assertion from some atheists that all people of faith are stupid and that no intelligent person can be a Christian or Muslim. You hear that in the OP. I've heard it on MN on other threads and in the offline world.

It isn't so much an attack on faith but about identity. If you replace faith with another protected characteristic under equalities legislation then you see why. All women are stupid, all gays are stupid, all disabled people are stupid. See how that sounds? A core part of my identity which is protected in the UK by equalities legislation is being attacked. Assumptions are being made about me, with no knowledge of the level of my education or who I am and how I approach life, based on my faith. Greenheart is stupid because she is a Christian.

What is desperately ironic is that the arguments used against faith by some atheists display a basic lack of education in areas they are entering, the realms of philosophy and history and theology. Be saying you can only use the terms belief and evidence and God in the ways that we, a small sub group of atheists, define them shuts down all debate. This is what happens on MN.

It is in reality pointless trying to enter the debate. The only reason I have is because I've had a few days off from the daily grind of indoctrinating people. Or visiting the sick, caring for the bereaved and listening to the lost which is actually what I plan to do today.

May you be blessed in all you do today.

If by discredited you mean christian then you've proved my point about limiting debate to your terms of reference. JohnLennox is. Professor of mathematics at one of the Oxford colleges and David Bentley Hart holds a number of academic posts at world class universities. The Stanford online encyclopaedia of philosophy is graduate level philosophy. I'm not sure how that is discredited other than all non atheist ideas are discredited.

Must get to work!

Gosh, you really don't like being challenged, do you, the greenheart? Are you generally the most knowledgable and best educated person in the circles you move in? If you are, it can be difficult to have your statements questioned. But questioning someone is not the same as saying they are stupid- you seem to be conflating the two. And you also seem to be very happy to suggest atheists do more reading and learning but don't like it if anyone says the same to you. And the I'm not staying here to be insulted, I'm off to succor the sick and bereaved line was a bit cheap, to be honest.

For the record, I agree that the sources you suggest are deeply partial and lack academic rigor.

Ah. Classic argumentum ad verecundiam.

"For the record, I agree that the sources you suggest are deeply partial and lack academic rigor."

The authors cited by Greenheart certainly are partial in the sense that they make no secret of their Christian faith. Lacking academic rigour though? I don't think you get made a professor at either Oxford or Notre Dame University without a certain amount of academic rigour. You don't have books published by major academic presses without them going through a rigorous blind peer-review process (as I know having published a book with a major academic publisher myself).

Last time I looked at the sources cited by someone arguing that Jesus didn't exist they were all self-published or internet sites. Only one was published by a major publisher and that as a trade book rather than an academic book (and thus not subject to the same rigorous blind peer review processes). I asked the person I was talking with (and it was on MN) to list the sources they were claiming were authoritative so I could look at them. When I checked them out they did not stack up. They had not been peer-reviewed - which is, as we know, the gold-standard for ensuring the rigour and credibility of research in both arts and sciences.

Hey, if it helps here is an atheist blogger explaining why the idea that Jesus is a myth has largely been discredited.

www.strangenotions.com/an-atheist-historian-examines-the-evidence-for-jesus-part-1-of-2/

And it really doesn't matter. Even if he did exist, there is no evidence at all that he was the Son of God, or ascended into heaven or performed miracles.........

It matters because up thread the implied attitude was that Christians are daft for putting their faith in a man who probably didn't even exist, let alone was God...

And every counter argument to that has been dismissed or ridiculed.

As the atheist blog explains it is very rare to get contemporary accounts for people 2000 years ago, there are none for General Hannibal but no one doubts he exists.