Pascal's Wager is brilliant!

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’.

Promethean,

You make a great and obvious point (great points are often obvious)

I’d posit it like this above and beyond your point.

If we assume god to be good, and the creator of all:

All one merely need do is to check in with themselves is say, “is my consent being violated right now?”

Of course, everyone will answer yes to this question.

This is a god disproof.

fuck this is gonna get complicated and i don’t wanna do all the leg work to sort it out for ya. there’s a lot to be said and it takes forever to say it all if it’s to be done right. that’s my dilemma at this juncture; to do it right, or not do it at all. so i’m gonna try and cheat a little.

the concept of ‘god’ which you believe your premise disproves is actually wrong on two counts. first, it’s an anthropomorphic concept of god, and second, it assumes that it wouldn’t be necessary for ‘evil’ to exist if such a god existed, anyway. so even if you were right in your anthropomorphic conception of ‘god’, you’d be wrong in your argument against evil. but since you’re wrong about your conception of ‘god’, you’re argument against evil is fortunately irrelevant.

so ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are completely relative concepts which reflect our incomplete knowledge of the natural necessity and perfect order of everything. shit happens like we like, we call it ‘good’. shit happens that sucks, we call it ‘evil’ (or ‘bad’ for those a little less extravagant in their terminology). but these things are not essential characteristics of substance… rather only attributes of the more crude emotions which we experience. as value judgments they are of a lower order than purely rational knowledge (of which is included the relative and contingent nature of ‘good’ and ‘evil’).

in any case, an existence of universal consent would be something static. it’s in the nature of what exists that it be changeable and dynamic, and therefore generative of the lower order of experiences of joy and sorrow and all those other tedious little emotions that humans feel while moving about in space and time and bumping into each other. particle complexes swirling around in a void sometimes produce the phenomena of pleasure, and sometimes the phenomena of pain. that’s how it works, dude, so you gotta hunker down and deal with it. the good news is, being that we have the power and capacity to modify and control these particle complexes, we can sometimes foresee and prevent particular particle complexes that result in the phenomena of pain. that’s the beauty of our uniqueness; two modes of being - mind and extension - united as if by some mysterious anthropic principle that had us planned the whole time. that great catastrophe of existence that occurred when the balance of the void was disturbed, ended up producing us, bro. who would have thunk it.

I believe in an infinite number of intelligent different species in the universe. My argument is not anthropomorphic.

Also, this reveals more about you than me: you don’t want to be accountable towards any judgement or correct or incorrect or good or bad.

Every being that exists has one dignity that nobody can enslave or steal from them, much to your frustration, they can ask “is this violating my consent?”

You hate this.

What do you mean when you say ‘accountable’?

“if you wish to converse with me, define your terms” - voltaire