Pascal's Wager is brilliant!

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.

How is Jesus a guilt trip? I don’t get your logic.

What is Jesus’s message?

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.

Oh it’s no biggie… no guilt trip.

Jesus’s message was to love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

Free spirit,

Oh my! Are we in a scripture war right now?

biblehub.com/luke/14-26.htm

I would posit this to you freespirit, you basically have 6 people from all walks of life and very different psychologies disagreeing with you.

Maybe this isn’t the right forum for you.

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 :slight_smile:

You, of all the millions of theologians and translators have the only different and correct version here.

That the word is not “hate” it’s just “love me more”

That’s what you’re going with?

You’re the only person on earth who reads Greek correctly?

That’s your big finish?

Yes, because it’s consistent with the rest of the Gospels and what Jesus said.

Atheists always take 1 verse out of context as if it proves their ignorance to be true.

I just want it to be let known, freespirit claims that he’s the only person who’s ever lived who understands Greek.

lol, no. Even the link you gave me had different language in it.

Just curious, what makes you a Biblical scholar?

Because in all the 100+ translations of the Bible, they all use the word “hate”. Not one of them uses “love me more”

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.

So read the Gospels and you will understand more.

Jesus didn’t say, “follow me and others will hate you”, which is rewriting the Bible …

Jesus said “hate everyone including yourself or you cannot be my disciple”

Yes, He did. Read the Gospel of Matthew.

Please stop pretending you are knowledgeable about the Bible.

“You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.”

biblegateway.com/passage/?s … ersion=NIV

That would make sense since he asks you to hate everyone, that you might equally be hated in return.

Jesus hated himself, he had a “splinter in his eye”.

Anything other than absolute perfection was hatred to Jesus …

I’ve read the gospels as well

Jesus even said “be perfect like the father is perfect”

lol troll.

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).

lol i shouldn’t have called this ‘god’ a ‘he’. such gender coding is another insult to ‘god’. my bad. call it an ‘it’.