Why (or why not) be Christian?

[Mustardseed86]

Continuing the "Will you make it to heaven?" threads started by @VincitVeritas which have become a more wide-ranging discussion about matters of faith, Christian belief.

Hope to see you on here when the last thread runs out of space! And new posters welcome too.

We've recently been discussing the evidence for God, the soul and life after death, and debating what constitutes reliable evidence in this context.

Also some talk about whether it's accurate to say humans are 'sinful' and why/why not, some discussion of Paul and the validity of his writings and status as an apostle, how the Bible was formed (and why other writings didn't make the canon) the basis of morality/ethics, whether Jesus's message was intended for an excusively Jewish audience, the meaning of Christ (or Messiah), church tradition and different denominations, end times and probably more I've forgotten!

If god was real and if he wanted us to know about him, he could make his presence known to us today.

Just curious if you've ever asked Him to? You say 'us', but literally billions of people on earth do believe in God and many (most) of those would probably say he has made his presence known to them.

I did once “ understand”, because I was born into a highly religious culture and belief system. I accepted god and “his” truth because that is what I was indoctrinated to believe. It was a given, therefore the „”truth”. But once I started to question this, once I asked questions (which religion absolutely and actively discourages), the view and reality of faith becomes a lot more objective. Religion is hearsay. If we fought and believed in, for a positive collective humanity, in oppose to an unseen, ever demanding but unaccountable god, the world would be in a much place, for sure.

Very, very different from other historical figures of the time. There are actually an awful lot of contemporary writers, who documented all kinds of things, including histories of Herod and Pilate. Not a single one of them ever mentions the Jesus character.

You’re confusing religion with the divine

This was probably because he was just another Rabbi at the time. Most historians agree that Yeshua Ben Josef existed as a man. The “Success” of Christianity is down to events some time after his death so not surprising that contemporary historians didn’t mention him

So basically all just nonsense then. There were literally dozens of people claiming to be the Messiah at the time, and Jesus is pretty much the only one that nobody bothered to mention!

Just curious if you've ever asked Him to? You say 'us', but literally billions of people on earth do believe in God and many (most) of those would probably say he has made his presence known to them.

Why would I need to ask someone that i don't even know exists?

Why doesn't he contact us directly?

Why is he being so cryptic and will only communicate to those that ask him??

Because, according to religious doctrine, this god moves in mysterious ways, and we, the average Joe/Jane just have to go with that.

I don't know, if there was a man running around curing the dying and lame, walking on water, turning water into wine or any of the many claims of miraculous things in the bible, you'd think that would have garnered some attention. That the Roman historians of the time would have noted a man who was such a threat to the Roman leaders that they tried to kill him as a baby then finally succeeded as an adult but nothing, not even a record of his execution.

If he was just another Rabbi then all these stories must be false, or there were many other Rabbis running around performing miracles so another one was not worth noting! Either way nothing shows he, if real, was the son of any god.

The gospels refer to Jesus performing 37 “miracles ”. Billions upon billions of years of earthly and human evolution, but gods emissary/god incarnate only turns up on earth, during the Iron Age, and performs a few (37) miracles in only one tiny region of earth, to actually a few spectators? Only 37 miracles to demonstrate “his” power? Why not help and heal thousand of more people? Bill Gates (for all his flaws) and his foundation, and his overall philanthropy, have saved millions of lives, throughout the world, bettered millions more, and he’s not asking for their souls, in exchange.

The claim that Jesus has made, as being the son of this all mighty, omnipresent, all seeing god, surely 37 miracles is disappointing and proves absolutely nothing. And again these miracles were written down by men who had only heard about them, over hundreds of years after Jesus’s death.

So what is he responsible for then? Just the good things?

Of these miracles referred to - no one can walk on water - fact!

Then let’s do away with all religion, once and for all, so that we can finally stop fighting over this god and arguing over our interpretations of him. I think then humanity would have a better chance, instead of devoting its self do a being that refuses to show its self to us.

If religion is to be taught in British schools, it needs to be all religions not just Christianity. Although I’m a big supporter of separation of church and state and neither DH, DT’s or I had any religious education at school.

I have no problem with teaching the influence of Christianity on Western society. I have an issue with teaching any religion as 'the true faith' - whether that be Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hunduism - any of them. Religion should live in the home, not in schools. I would do away with all faith schools that receive state funding. I would also do away with the compulsory act of broadly Christian worship in schools because the words 'compulsory' and 'worship' should never sit in the same sentence.

If religion is to be taught in British schools, it needs to be all religions not just Christianity.

I thought that is what is being taught - a look at the different religions of the world. I know that the GCSE in Religious Studies looks at several religions including Buddhism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
The idea that Jesus was a purely mythical figure has been and still is considered an untenable fringe theory in academic scholarship for more than two centuries,[note 4] but has gained popular attention in recent decades due to the growth of the internet.[8]The criterion of multiple attestation is used to argue that attestation by multiple independent sources confirms his existence. Besides the gospels and the letters of Paul, non-biblical works that are considered sources for the historicity of Jesus include a mention in Antiquities of the Jews by Jewish historian Josephus (dated circa 93–94 CE) and a mention in Annals by Roman historian Tacitus (circa 116 CE).

I don't see how it persuaded the villagers! I suppose all she had to do was convince the most influential person in the village and all the others would follow. It's extremely exploitative really.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/14/what-is-the-historical-evidence-that-jesus-christ-lived-and-died
The first Christian writings to talk about Jesus are the epistles of St Paul, and scholars agree that the earliest of these letters were written within 25 years of Jesus’s death at the very latest, while the detailed biographical accounts of Jesus in the New Testament gospels date from around 40 years after he died. These all appeared within the lifetimes of numerous eyewitnesses, and provide descriptions that comport with the culture and geography of first-century Palestine. It is also difficult to imagine why Christian writers would invent such a thoroughly Jewish saviour figure in a time and place – under the aegis of the Roman empire – where there was strong suspicion of Judaism.What did non-Christian authors say about Jesus?As far as we know, the first author outside the church to mention Jesus is the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote a history of Judaism around AD93. He has two references to Jesus. One of these is controversial because it is thought to be corrupted by Christian scribes (probably turning Josephus’s negative account into a more positive one), but the other is not suspicious – a reference to James, the brother of “Jesus, the so-called Christ”.About 20 years after Josephus we have the Roman politicians Pliny and Tacitus, who held some of the highest offices of state at the beginning of the second century AD. From Tacitus we learn that Jesus was executed while Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect in charge of Judaea (AD26-36) and Tiberius was emperor (AD14-37) – reports that fit with the timeframe of the gospels. Pliny contributes the information that, where he was governor in northern Turkey, Christians worshipped Christ as a god. Neither of them liked Christians – Pliny writes of their “pig-headed obstinacy” and Tacitus calls their religion a destructive superstition.Did ancient writers discuss the existence of Jesus?Strikingly, there was never any debate in the ancient world about whether Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. In the earliest literature of the Jewish Rabbis, Jesus was denounced as the illegitimate child of Mary and a sorcerer. Among pagans, the satirist Lucian and philosopher Celsus dismissed Jesus as a scoundrel, but we know of no one in the ancient world who questioned whether Jesus lived.

To answer your question, because it is a patriarchy based on an illusion of male dominance. All Abramhic Monotheism religions are. I much prefer Polytheism, at least the female gets a look in.

Because the man they knew was blind in one eye for 30 years was healed overnight after a Christian prayed for him. He was a very powerful man and when he converted from Islam to Christianity and told the villagers what happened they converted as well. It had nothing to do with my friend persuading anyone. She is actually really shy and doesn't talk much!

It’s not physically possible to regain your slight if you are totally blind. Some vision problems can regain some sight from surgery but a prayer won’t change anything.

A man with an unknown malady of the eye regains his sight, not out of the ordinary in places without access to modern medicine. At that point a woman claims responsibility for it for her god saying she prayed for him last night and his sight returned. This man believes her, or dares not disbelieve her, and converts to her religion persuading the rest of the village to do the same.

All we know is she claims she prayed for him the previous night (and I assume that she'd never done that before for some reason) and she believes the Christian god asked her to do it. For some reason it makes sense for god to ask a woman to pray for a man so god can then heal man rather than just healing him and/or speaking to him directly! I don't see why you don't see problems with her story.

Who'd have thought that a theory that would have resulted in your torture and death for hundreds of years would have taken a while to gain traction!

I was brought up as a Christian and totally and utterly believed that Jesus was my Lord and saviour. Pretty much everything in my life was centred around God - I read the Bible, I prayed and talked to God constantly. I asked for him to work through me, to guide me. He was truly the centre of my life.

Then I slowly came to realise that all the experiences I'd had of God throughout the years could easily be explained by human psychology. That feeling of God moving during worship - the power of music and suggestion. The times I'd heard God speaking to me were just me wanting to believe. The amazing things that happened were just a combination of deep desire to see what I wanted to see and coincidence.

I'm now an atheist and my life is much better and happier and I feel more free because I'm no longer constantly worrying about what 'god' wants me to do. I make my own choices and I choose to live a life that I hope is good and moral, but because it is the right way to live, not because an imaginary god wants me to.