Viocjit the Agnostic Christian

[Plu]

You only feel those things because you were taught them as a child. Since I'm dutch, when I was young, my parents told me about sinterklaas, which is a dutch festivity where an old man riding on a horse delivers presents to children by sending his helpers down the chimney to put them near the fireplace.

When I was really small, I could always see the helpers from the corner of my eyes (they were supposed to be watching to see if I was naughty or nice, after all) and hear sinterklaas walking on the roof.

When I got older, my parents told me it was all just a make believe thing, and I never heard them again. The only reason you feel these things and yet consider every other religion with the exact same stories a legend, is because this is the only one your parents told you was true from a young and impressionable age.

It's literally the only thing setting christianity and islam apart; you were told one is real and one is not, and you believed it without thinking about it. The things you feel are attributed to the one and not the other for the exact same reason. Once you gain the mental strength to admit it was all a lie and you have to move on, you will be no longer attribute the feelings to these things, even though you'll still have them. After all; they are just emotions and thoughts in your head that you happen to think belong to something unrelated.

[viocjit]

I liked your story with Sinterklaas. Now I try to understand the origin of religions to better understand. About the writers of the story of Jesus , what was(were) their(s) goal(s) ?

[Plu]

Power, obviously. People want power. So they come up with stories. And then those stories give them power over their followers.

[La Dolce Vita]

I think the most damning thing about christianity is that it depends on Judaism to be correct - but believe that there's one god - and that this one god had a personal/close relationship with the jews for a very long time. However, the jews were polytheistic up until just a few hundred years before Jesus supposedly lived. In fact Yahweh used to be the son of El - the creator god, and have tons of brothers who often fought. A king later decided that they should only worship Yahweh and forced the jews to stop worshipping the rest, including the very popular fertility goddess Asherah who depending on tribe was Yahweh's mother, wife, lover - or with one or more of his brothers: //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah.

[viocjit]

I think the most damning thing about christianity is that it depends on Judaism to be correct - but believe that there's one god - and that this one god had a personal/close relationship with the jews for a very long time. However, the jews were polytheistic up until just a few hundred years before Jesus supposedly lived. In fact Yahweh used to be the son of El - the creator god, and have tons of brothers who often fought. A king later decided that they should only worship Yahweh and forced the jews to stop worshipping the rest, including the very popular fertility goddess Asherah who depending on tribe was Yahweh's mother, wife, lover - or with one or more of his brothers: //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah.

I already hear this. Some people think that el are from Enlil.
Enlil who is this mythological character ? //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlil

[Colanth]

Enlil is no more or less mythological than God, Allah or Jesus.  There was no story about a preacher-son-of-God living in Jerusalem in the first century until the second century.  Paul's Jesus was just another aspect of God.  Jesus-as-a-man was made up so that people could be scared into supporting priests - so that the priests didn't have to work for a living - like an early Sicilian Mafia.  Pay "protection" (tribute, tithe, etc.) or bad things will happen to you (your store will burn down, you'll go to hell).  (If there's a hell, and you burn in it forever if you don't accept "Jesus" as your savior - and do everything his priests tell you to do, you have great motivation to be a Christian and pay for the church hierarchy to be able to live nicely.)

The Christianity everyone is familiar with didn't exist until the 4th century - until then, each church had its own beliefs, customs, rites, etc.  (And there was no "New Testament".)  Modern "Christianity" is an invention of the First Council of Nicaea (in 325 CE).  If there had been more Arianists at the Council, Christianity would be Arianist.  IF there had been more Unitarians it would have been Unitarian, not Trinitarian.  It was invented by men, not decreed by any god.  (They couldn't even agree on how many people attended the Council.  Various claims of actual counts of the participants range from 250 to 318, a difficult error to make if you're actually counting.  Nothing was decided on evidence, it was all decided by majority vote, most likely influenced by Constantine's threat of banishment for anyone deciding in favor of Arianism.

Anyone who thinks that any god had any hand in deciding what Christianity would be is only fooling himself.

BTW, in order to actually know that there's no God, one would have to be a god.  No other form of being could know what exists in all of the universe at any given instant, and an omnipotent god (and God is defined as being omnipotent) could hide from any other being.

[viocjit]

This is maybe like the Gospel of Mark. We tell that this book was wrote around 60 AD. But I think that say that this text was wrote between 60 AD and 100 AD (maybe more than 100 AD) is not speculation.

I like Christians who quote versets from NT because they forget that many of these versets are not in the original text.
Do you know the pericope adulteræ (John 7:53 to 8:11) ? the majority of people don't know that this is an add.

[the_antithesis]

"Pericope adulteræ" would be a great name for a band.

[viocjit]

"Pericope adulteræ" would be a great name for a band.

 =D> I'm OK with you.

[viocjit]

I'm now a Strong Atheist since 2 or 3 years old.

[Hijiri Byakuren]

I'm now a Strong Atheist since 2 or 3 years old.

Welcome to the Dark Side. No more cookies, though, due to an unfortunate oven accident involving condoms. You'll have to settle for these store-brand wafers I bought.

[Baruch]

I liked your story with Sinterklaas. Now I try to understand the origin of religions to better understand. About the writers of the story of Jesus , what was(were) their(s) goal(s) ?

Neither the supporters nor the detractors of Christianity know.  They have their pro or anti ideology.  One can try to reconstruct how people think, by examining their writings etc, we do it all the time with other authors.  Getting into Christian origins used to interest me ... and when I had satisfied my curiosity, I was able to discard it.

Understanding others, is as close as understanding yourself.  You are not too different from others today or in the past.  The primary stage is here and now, and the primary character in the play is yourself.  Of course it isn't easy to understand oneself.

[Baruch]

This is maybe like the Gospel of Mark. We tell that this book was wrote around 60 AD. But I think that say that this text was wrote between 60 AD and 100 AD (maybe more than 100 AD) is not speculation.

I like Christians who quote versets from NT because they forget that many of these versets are not in the original text.
Do you know the pericope adulter� (John 7:53 to 8:11) ? the majority of people don't know that this is an add.

Most people aren't Bible scholars.  In apologetics, the scholars try to put the origins of Christianity as early as possible, but not too early.  They always have an agenda.  In literal terms, there is no nearly complete Gospel document before 200 CE ... other than fragments which don't prove the existence of a complete document comparable to what we have now.  Christianity as an institution is a Gentile invention, anti-Jewish from 135 CE forward, and pro-Emperor since 325 CE forward.  It is a mess, like any other human invention that happened spontaneously without real direction.

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The only kind of theism that makes sense is agnostic theism.  Faith and knowledge are separate categories.