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).
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?”