Really going ad hom again. OK, you’re a whiny 35 year old who can’t get his own parents to respect him and thinks that getting pressured by parents to come to family events is a real world problem, talk about narcissism. You really think we should take seriously the psychological analysis of someone who goes online to complain about his parents expecting him to come to more family get-
togethers. Your posts are so Jesus like in spirit and so philosophical like this last one.
And, again, I’m not an atheist. If you meant not to include me, then figure out a way to post so you are clear.
I retract the respectful answer I made to your question in the other thread about you and your family. From my experience of you here, you’re probably presenting their behavior in ways that make you look like a victim.
Poor you.
You could learn from the people who responded here how to improve the arguments you made in the OP and later on in the thread. Those arguments were weak and based on a poor read of Pascal.
Is it because they represent atheism that you don’t agree with them?
You mentioned you’d moved on from my “kind” of thinking - have you considered that you have emotional reasons to dismiss them?
Love is nice, if there’s anything that Christianity is good at, it’s persuading love. You don’t need Christianity for it, but if you have trouble with a lack of love, Christianity would probably help you.
Living socially is also good, other primates do it, so it makes sense that we will too with or without religion.
Again, it’s a kind of “sublimation” to project it through an external entity in order to validate it. You don’t need that, unless you do?
I don’t believe I have emotional reasons to dismiss atheism. I believe that logic and reason compels one to be a Christian because of the enormous benefits.
We do need Christianity to love fully. We need to love God in a community. He sent His son to the Earth to teach us how to love.
Okay, just thought I’d ask. It’s interesting that logic and reason led me away from them. Assuming we are both flawless logicians, for argument’s sake - that would only leave the emotional component to differentiate our respective directions.
Sending his son to Earth to teach us how to love by giving us a guilt trip seems manipulative. I know how to love anyway - I don’t need someone to make me feel bad to trick me into it.
Vicarious redemption: he deliberately got himself crucified “for your sins”. Any sin you may commit, “it’s okay”… because Jesus literally got tortured horribly to death in the ultimate sacrifice to take your sin upon himself and be punished on your behalf.
You have to take Scripture in context. You can’t just post a line or two. That verse is Jesus teaching that we must love Him more than we love our own family. That doesn’t mean we don’t love our family, just that we love Him the most.
This is an atheist forum and an atheist world, so I will always be outnumbered
Context is everything. Jesus said His followers would be hated for following him and that following him would divide families. We can see this today; Christians are hated by the world.
But this was just one of Jesus’s messages. If you read the Gospels, you will see that his main message was to love God and love your neighbor. He teaches about love dozens of times.