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.
if there was an intelligent ‘god’ out there, this ‘god’ would not make possible the knowledge of itself through the revelatory experiences we read about in religious text, because such experiences would be credited as dubious by intelligent people (which we have done). in other words, if this ‘god’ wanted to be known by 21rst century people, he would not have placed the evidence for his existence in the testimony of those who lived thousands of years ago. it’s very simple; god knows that we can’t know if these guys were full of shit, so he wouldn’t have used them.
therefore the knowledge of this ‘god’ would be purely rational; knowledge that is gained through deductive reason alone and impartial to any reputed historical experience that can’t be trusted, e.g., paul and jesus and muhammad and the gang. so revelatory religious text is not substantial enough to be taken as evidence for a ‘god’s’ existence. if there was a ‘god’, to hold faith in such text as evidence would be an insult to ‘god’s’ integrity.
knowledge of this ‘god’ would be accessible to anyone who had the capacity to reason, and a posteriori experience would be irrelevant (and muddled, as spinoza put it).