In decline.

Quote: Evenbob

And none of what they believe is true. This
is our clue that all religions, by their very
nature, are wrong.

Why do you say this? Why are all religions wrong by there very nature. You need to support such an outrageous statement.

Quote:

The truth of anything is
obvious to everybody.

Is this really true? Is it obvious that the earth is round or that it goes around the sun? Is it obvious that stealing is wrong even if you don't get caught?

Quote:

It was obvious to Native Americans
to thank the animals they were killing for
giving their lives. It was not obvious to take
it any further than that. To over think it and
build churches and temples to worship animals.

I think the Great Spirit is beautiful thing that many Native Americans obviously came to by observing the beauty of nature and animals. You might call this over thinking, I call it a step in the right direction. Would that we all overthought the beauty of the world we live in and arrive at spiritual conclusions and the truth that this is most clearly a God.

Quote: FrGamble

Why do you say this? Why are all religions wrong by there very nature.

Because none of them can be proven
in the least bit, they're just opinions,
not facts. When a whole bunch of
people are of the same opinion, it's
still not a fact. And facts always win
out in the end, that's why there are
so many dead religions. You think
people will still be waiting patiently
by the millions for Jesus to return 300
years from now. If you study it closely,
Christianity is losing it's hold on people,
not gaining it. Your heyday was in the
Middle Ages, long gone. Many people
are Christians in name only now, and
it will only get worse.

Quote: ]Is this really true? Is it obvious that the earth is round or that it goes around the sun? Is it obvious that stealing is wrong even if you don't get caught?
.[/q

Obvious if you study it. Much easier to just
have a wrong opinion, though. And stealing
isn't wrong if you haven't been taught it is.
The universe certainly doesn't give a rip if you
steal, or curse your mother, or curse god for
that matter. It has no opinion. Punishing
thieves is a result of society, not the
universe, which is not a moral place.

If you take a risk, you may lose. If you never take a risk, you will always lose.

Quote: Evenbob

The intellectuals of the past are the ones we need to blame for the crap we have to put up today from organized religions.

True, but a young girl is likely to join a Christian Mega-Church because of the very active singles group and her having become disappointed with the men she has been meeting in bars. so she gets counted as a Christian but probably doesn't believe in santa claus, the tooth fairy, the resurection, the virgin birth, or the existence of a Mister Right. she simply adopts the necessary trappings in order to find a Mr. Better.

Quote: Face

Christ was a real dude, too. I don't doubt that at all. All the stuff they say about mortal Christ, I believe it.

Since he never actually wrote anything down, and the mutually contradictory gospels were written years after his death, I don't think all of what's been said about Jesus can be believed.

I'm not saying it' all a fabrication, but neither that it's all true. Certainly the "miracles" were, at best, some kind of flimflam or what we'd call a magic trick, if they were not actually made up by the writers of the gospels.

Beyond that, how can you tell? Even if the writers were trying their best to be accurate, no power in the world would keep their biases out of their own accounts. I certainly don't take Caesar's own writings about his campaigns to be 100% honest and accurate. The gospel writers would have filled in some parts and left out others, at the very least.

A good question at this point is: Why didn't Jesus write down anything at all?

Unfortunately the answer isn't as good. rather we have a bunch of maybes and nothing more. The two I can think of are 1) Maybe he was illiterate and 2) maybe he didn't say or do any of the things he's credited with.

If the first is true, I'd like to know how an all-powerful, all-knowing deity manages not to know how to read and write.

Consider, too, Jesus is never said to have been married or to have a lover. A grown man without a wife was veeeeery unusual at the time, outside of widowers and divorced men. Perhaps a bit less rare among the urban poor, who were the poorest people around, but even among them marriage was the norm. Jesus was not one of the urban poor, but rather one of the very small middle class of skilled tradesmen.

One cannot help but to wonder why. And again we have nothing but "maybes" to throw around. Maybe Jesus was impotent? Maybe Jesus was gay? Maybe he was married, but the gospel writers eliminated that aspect of his life for some reason. Maybe he was widowed soon after marriage and never remarried (not as unusual as a life-long bachelor). Maybe Jesus was asexual?

I know little about sexual and marital mores in Judea at the time. Rome didn't impose moral standards on conquered lands, only taxes and tribute and the cult of the Caesars (later on).

In Rome proper and much of the Mediterranean world at the time, a married man with a male lover would not have raised eyebrows. So long, that is, as the man was seen as the dominant partner in such a relationship. The emperor Hadrian in the II Century CE had a male lover. Julius Caesar was rumored to have slept with a prince or king in what is now Turkey (Bethenia? Pontus? there were several kingdoms in that peninsula at the time). Was Hadrian gay? Bisexual? Who knows. Standards and definitions were different at the time. Rumors aside, Caesar was married and had a famous affair, and a son, with Cleopatra.

But I don't know what was standard in Judea. I know Orthodox Jews today are prudish to the point they make 1950s TV seem orgiastic in comparison. At the synagogue, they keep the women separate from the men to this very day.

Quote: Evenbob

Because none of them can be proven
in the least bit, they're just opinions,
not facts.

We've gone down this road before Bob. If you are talking about mathematical or scientific proof than no. However, we are talking about the accumulation of evidence and probabilities that lead to certain conclusions and in this case Christianity is proven in the same way it is proven that your breakfast is safe to eat or that your wife loves you. Religions can be proven false if they do not help anyone understand themselves, this world, they are proven false, don't make sense, or if they don't help someone be a better version of themselves - these are the dead religions you reference and atheism by the way. Christianity will never ever fall in that category not in 300 years, nor in 3,000 years.

Quote:

Obvious if you study it. Much easier to just
have a wrong opinion, though.

You make this point very clear. If you study Christianity rightly it becomes more and more obvious that it is true.

Quote:

And stealing
isn't wrong if you haven't been taught it is.

This is asinine and completely false. Is raping someone wrong only because we are taught so? Taking another person's property is wrong whether you have been taught it is wrong or not. Check out Face's thread on stealing and stop trying to make morality subjective it is a stupid and dangerous idea.

Quote: FrGamble

If you are talking about mathematical or scientific proof than no.

That's the only kind of proof there is.
Anything else is just opinion or speculation.
You know that.

Quote: FrGamble

If you study Christianity rightly it becomes more and more obvious that it is true.

Only if you believe it before you study it. If
you're a non believer, the more studying
you do, the more obvious becomes it's
falsehood. If what you said were true, the
majority of the worlds scientists would be
Christians, and the opposite is true.

Quote: FrGamble

This is asinine and completely false.

Nature and the universe have no opinion
on crime, I'm afraid. You could rape 10
women a day and nature or the universe
wouldn't even notice, let alone care. Nor
would the animal kingdom. It's humans
who decide what's right and what's wrong,
so we can productively live in society.

I go back to cannibalism in Dark Ages England.
You think those country folk grieved and hung their
heads in shame while dining on a wandering
stranger for dinner? Hell no, it wasn't wrong to
them, he stumbled into their territory, he was
fair game. Part of the rules for their society.

Quote: Evenbob

That's the only kind of proof there is.
Anything else is just opinion or speculation.
You know that.

Is that your opinion or speculation?

Quote:

Only if you believe it before you study it. If
you're a non believer, the more studying
you do, the more obvious becomes it's
falsehood. If what you said were true, the
majority of the worlds scientists would be
Christians, and the opposite is true.

The first premise is wrong and the second does not follow from the first. If you truly study objectively the faith it will become more and more obvious. You need to first let go of a lot of your false teachings and bad experiences and then we can talk about truly learning what Christianity is all about.

Quote:

Nature and the universe have no opinion
on crime, I'm afraid. You could rape 10
women a day and nature or the universe
wouldn't even notice, let alone care.

This is only if you are an atheist. If you are a believer you would know that the "universe" or its creator very much care and very much notices.

Quote:

I go back to cannibalism in Dark Ages England.
You think those country folk grieved and hung their
heads in shame while dining on a wandering
stranger for dinner? Hell no, it wasn't wrong to
them, he stumbled into their territory, he was
fair game. Part of the rules for their society.

It was and is very wrong to kill and eat an innocent human even if they were taught and thought it was right because of the extraordinary and dire circumstances these unfortunate people lived in. Just to test this, think about if someone came brining with him a whole bunch of good food. Would it still be right for them to kill and eat the innocent person who brought it to them? Hell no!

Quote: FrGamble

If you truly study objectively the faith it will become more and more obvious.

What becomes obvious, if you start at
square one, is that the faith is based
on a false premise. Sin. Without sin,
there is no faith, Jesus died for nothing,
there is no Christianity.

Sin is a huge hurdle to get over. It's higher
than Mt Everest. Once you buy into sin,
they have you. Once you buy the faulty
premise of sin, the rest is easy. That's why
the big religions, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity,
take sin for granted. If you believe you can
offend god with your thoughts and actions,
90% of their work is done.

When a scientist looks at it with a scientific method,
he's doesn't see any proof of sin existing. So he
has to reject any religion based on it.

Quote: FrGamble

This is only if you are an atheist.

It's true even if you aren't. If you rape 10 women,
nature won't punish you. No outside natural
force will even notice or care. Even your dog won't
care. Sociopaths know this instinctively. They know
if they are clever enough, they can get away with
anything. If you tell them god will punish them
eventually, they will laugh in your face.

Quote: FrGamble

It was and is very wrong to kill and eat an innocent human even if they were taught and thought it was right because of the extraordinary and dire circumstances these unfortunate people lived in.

Wrong to you because that's what you've been
taught. Not wrong to nature or the universe, he's
just 'food' that wandered into the wrong place.
If you can get to the point where you see the world
for what it really is, and not thru the myths you've
been taught, it's a very sobering place.

Quote: FrGamble

...It was and is very wrong to kill and eat an innocent human...

Was it wrong for the Uruguayan crash survivors to eat human flesh to survive then ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alive:_The_Story_of_the_Andes_Survivors

Do you think it better to starve the vessel to death than to nourish it with crash victims? Tough call, IMO

Conversely, what about people that go on hunger strikes and starve themselves [possibly to death] for a cause?

Would it not be that if the spirit left the body all that would be left would be protein?

I have read in an article that spongiform encephalopathy [mad cow] disease is related [in humans] to whether or not their ancestors had cannibalized? The article state d if your remote kin had eaten humans you had some immunity to human mad cow, [prion disease].