When Atheists Tell The Truth...

[Aletheia]

That's somewhat like asking me if I'd like to see a one-ended stick.  I'm not tempted to want to see such a thing because such a thing couldn't be.  In order for the evidence you suggest to be given, the very God you're saying Hitler might be revealed to be wouldn't actually exist at all.  God would have to violate His nature in order to reveal such a thing, so I'd already know that such a thing, by logic &  nature, simply couldn't happen.  I understand the point of your question, but the logic of the question doesn't allow for it to be answered in the affirmative.  It's self-stultifying.

No, that's like asking you if you would worship an evil deity whose existence has been empirically proven. Of course the question doesn't allow you to answer in the affirmative - because the only way you can is if you agree to worship an evil deity. The rest of this paragraph is you trying to distance yourself from this fact.

I suspect that you're saying something to effect of, "I see your God in a similar fashion as I do Adolf Hitler in that I'm morally repulsed by Him and His behavior.  And you expect me to believe in that just because it's proven that He does in fact exist?"

Is that something akin to the point you're trying to get across?  I certainly don't want to put words in your mouth.

No, I am not saying something to that effect.

If you don't want to put words in people's mouths then the first step is to stop engaging in the act.

Assuming that's the kind of thing you meant, I would answer it this way.  You have a misapprehension of God and His actions.  It would be somewhat akin to reacting to Mother Teresa as if she were Adolf Hitler even though their actions were totally different. 

Assuming that's what I meant = strawman. You are no longer in discussion about the topic at hand. This changes the dialogue to a monologue.

It would be as if the following were true:

Life spent sacrificially helping the poor and needy = Moral revulsion and horror (Your misapprehension of God and His actions)
Life spent directing subjugatory military conflict and systematically murdering people on a racial basis = Deep admiration (Your misapprehension of Christian views)

Sigh... you've ran off on quite the tangent. When you've finished sightseeing, I'll welcome you back to the discussion at hand.

There is no straw man.  If you read the thread, I was reacting to honest answers given, in which various atheist say that if the God of the Bible and what it records were proven true, they still would choose to reject Him.  The way it's set up, it doesn't give you the option of inserting or asserting something different.  In other words, if you're talking about ruthlessness, cruelty, genocidal, etc... then you wouldn't be referring to the God Christians worship.  You'd only be referring to your own misapprehension of that God, and that's not what the original thread said.

Many of your posts are replete with straw man fallacies - including this one. For a thread about honesty, you have remained somewhat inconsistent.

As the atheists here have mentioned - belief in a deity does not mean we accept the deity as worthy of worship. You can believe that Hitler existed but reject him as a ruler worthy of worship.

"Ruthlessness, cruelty, and genocide" are the characteristics of the god Christians worship. A morally good deity would never have these traits. The only one with a misapprehension of the Christian god is you.

In other words, the thread didn't ask how'd you respond if a ruthless, cruel, and genocidal God were proven true.  It didn't say, what if the atheist's conception of the Christian God were proven true.  It was specifically about the Christian God being proven true, which means in the way that Christians understand Him.  So it really doesn't leave you the room to redefine the thought experiment in such a way that it would allow you to smuggle in your rationalization used to reject the Christian God.

You referred to the "Christian God" which is as described in the Bible is a ruthless, cruel, and genocidal being who occasionally does benevolent acts - like killing his son in order to forgive mankind. Even his most kind act had to involve torture and death. This.  is not a deity worthy of worship and therefore would be rejected.

The only one redefining the "Christian God," is you. What you have in mind is not what your Bible describes.

[Hijiri Byakuren]

If it's rhetorical, then you wouldn't be interested in evidence in the first place.  It's not because none exists.  And sure we'd be arguing, even if there were evidence.  That's the entire point of the threat.  If the God of Christianity and the Bible were proven completely true, most of the atheists in that thread indicated that they still would reject Him.  In other words, they were admitting that evidence didn't matter, and even if evidence existed, they would still reject Him.  In short, they were admitting to a mass campaign of denial or otherwise suppression of the truth (Rom 1 & 2).

The fact that most atheists would reject God were he proven real is no more to the point than the fact that most Jews reject Nazi ideology.

[Feral Atheist]

Yep, the god of the babble is not worthy of being worshipped. He is worthy of the utmost distain and hatred.

In fact he is probably the most unsavory character in all of literature.

[Sal1981]

I could give a simple answer, but since you've uncovered at least two issues, I'll take some time to explain it.  First, you say, "If I was a good person?"  The simple fact is, there are no truly good people, as all human beings violate the moral law.  There is not a single human being that does not freely violate the moral law, and so there is not a single human being on the planet who has ever existed that could actually be considered "a good person."

This is the same level of false attribution that Kirk Cameron does with 'one lie = always a liar' hoopla.

Second, you ask, "would I still go to Hell...?"  To understand this question, let me give a little illustration.  Suppose I'm walking in some big city downtown, and I come across 10 homeless people lined up sitting on the ground against the wall where they tend to sleep.  So a feeling of compassion comes over me, and I look into my wallet.  I have debit cards, credit cards, and a couple of bills.  I have a $100 dollar bill and a $20 dollar bill.  I'm feeling pretty compassionate, so I walk over and give the one guy who's not sleeping and is looking at me that $100 dollar bill.  I keep my $20, but I give him the $100 and walk away.  So after I do that, should I be lauded for my generosity and compassion that I had on the one guy, or should I be attacked and derided for not helping the other 9 people who were down on their luck?  In other words, if I freely decide to help one person, does that mean I'm somehow obligated to help them all?  Think carefully before you answer that.  Lots of people and organizations help people, and none of them help them all, even when they could make choices to help more than they do.  Does that mean that they are doing something wrong?

You're not 'obliged' to do squat. I think this just illustrates, quite glaringly so too, what sort of demented moral quality the Christian deity has, even with some obtuse moral lecture on money allocation.

The answer should be obvious.  Because God has decided to offer a pardon to some does not mean that He must offer a pardon to all.  In fact, He's not obligated to offer a pardon to any.  And given that every single human being has committed crimes against Him hundreds, thousands, or millions of times over, He would be fully justified in simply punishing His creation for those crimes.  Instead, He's chosen to have compassion on us and offer a way out for those who respond to His act of grace, but most people will reject His offer.  So should He be blamed for guilty people going to Hell who either haven't heard or have rejected His offer of pardon when He wasn't obligated to make such an offer in the first place?  No.

This is akin to saying "because my kids are my kids, I can do whatever the hell I want with them". The latter part misses the point - they have never heard of the god in question, so they would neither dismiss or worship it. This is the whole reason why there are missionaries in the first place.

So yes, most people who haven't heard will likely end up paying for their crimes, as will most people who have heard of God's offer of pardon and chosen to reject it.  However, God is light and gives us light.  And if we respond to the light we've been given, He will give us more light.  What I mean by that is that it's possible that God will have chosen to show compassion on those few to whom God has given light but who haven't specifically heard of Christ.  However, if that does occur, they will still be saved by the sacrifice of Christ, and no one can tell you for sure that such a thing will occur.  All I can say is that it's at least possible, should God make that choice.

What grand nonsense.

I hope that answers your question.

Not in the slightest.

[Mike Cl]

It sounds like you’ve been reading Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, and others.  No offense intended, but what you’re saying suggests to me a very limited knowledge of Canonicity itself.  It also suggests that you’re not generally familiar with the manuscript evidence for the scriptures spread across three continents, contemporaneous with each other, and exceedingly early when compared with other works of antiquity.  Pages and pages could be said about, but I’ll address the less complicated issue and point you to resources for the other.  Before I get into that, let me just say that I certainly don’t mind if someone reads Pagels, the Jesus Seminar, Ehrman, and others, but you’re also going to have to read mainstream scholarship as well.  The reason that all of those I’ve just mentioned are somewhat famous is because they are seen as saying something new, edgy, and irreverent.  When one has just a broad knowledge of the topic, not even that deep, you discover that it has virtually nothing to do with the quality and veracity of their scholarship.

Okay, with regard to the idea that there are too many of them, I think not.  There are so many manuscripts from across the world available, that you can actually use the various traditions to check on the others to see if things have been changed.  In addition, you can read the words of the early church fathers, often called the Patristic Fathers, and reconstruct nearly the entire New Testament just from quotes in their own writing.  And the broader point that I’m making is that there are multiple ways in which you can test and cross-check the various texts to see if there are any variations.  And the fact of the matter is that there are very few.  Those that are of any minor significance are usually notated in every Bible, and they include things like the long ending of Mark and the woman at the well in John, Chapter 8.  However, none of those variations touch on any core Christian doctrine and could therefore be completely removed without changing anything about Christianity.  The rest of the variations have to do with punctuation and spelling changes or errors, not genuine corruptions of the text itself.  There is more historical attestation for the Bible than for any other document of antiquity and this attestation is greater by orders of magnitude.  Also, there have been more discoveries just in the last 15 or 20 years that are providing still more attestation.  I would point you toward the following books on the topic.  Feel free to read them alongside those that agree with the points of view you hold now.

The Canon of Scripture by F. F. Bruce

The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate by Michael J. Kruger

Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books by Michael J. Kruger

The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture's Fascination with Diversity Has Reshaped Our Understanding of Early Christianity by Andreas J. Köstenberger

Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament: Manuscript, Patristic, and Apocryphal Evidence (Text and Canon of the New Testament) by Daniel B. Wallace

Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions by Craig L. Blomberg

Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels by Craig A. Evans

Reinventing Jesus Paperback: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss The Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Culture by J. Ed Komoszewski

The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the Truth Behind Alternative Christianities by Darrell L. Bock

Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way by Philip Jenkins

The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable & Relevant? by Walter C. Kaiser Jr.

Jesus & the Rise of Early Christianity: A History of New Testament Times by Paul Barnett

I hope that’s helpful.  A huge amount of detail could be gone into on this topic.  If you’re interested, those versions that come closest to a word-for-word translation of the text are the New American Standard Bible (NASB) and the English Standard Version (ESV).  You can always get a side-by-side treatment of both and see if they are actually saying different things.  I think that you will find, they are not.

This post is to just list some of my personal library, which is not the sum total of all that I've read.  This is about 25% of my personal religious library:
The Making of the NT--Arthur G. Potzia
The NT--Duling and Perrin #3rd ed.  I was told this was used in many seminaries.
The Canon of Scripture--FF Bruce
NT Fundamentals--Stevan Davies
Who Wrote the Bible--Richard Elliott Friedmann
In the Beginning--Alister McGrath
Who Wrote the NT--Burton L. Mack
The Lost Gospel Q--Burton L. Mack
The Five Gospels--Funk, Hoover and Jesus Seminar
What the Bible Really Says--Manfred Barthel
Jesus and the Essenes--Dolores Cannon
The Birth of Christianity--John Dominic Crossan
Jesus Christ the Sun of God--David Fideler
Intro To NT Textual Criticism--J.Harold Greenlee
And a great, great web site--TC:A Journal of Biblical Criticism.

This is not all that I have read, nor will read.  It is just a smattering to show you that I do like to look at this from many different angles. 

[PickelledEggs]

In other words, they were admitting that evidence didn't matter, and even if evidence existed, they would still reject Him.  In short, they were admitting to a mass campaign of denial or otherwise suppression of the truth (Rom 1 & 2).

Um.. no.

Most atheists are swayed by evidence. If there is a substantial amount of evindence proving a god, then we would accept it... but as we search for god, the facts and evidence point more and more away from proving the claims of the bible and more towards there being no room for the judeo-christian god at all in reality.

Are you here to ask questions, btw? or assert your fact-less beliefs on to us?

[Munch]

The thing I love most about such well thought out rhetoric like our friend here, is how much it serves as the further push people need to stepping out that door and into the rational world, while they remain behind rambling in the padded cell of their belief.

[Aletheia]

The thing I love most about such well thought out rhetoric like our friend here, is how much it serves as the further push people need to stepping out that door and into the rational world, while they remain behind rambling in the padded cell of their belief.

Our friend here does offer insight into how indoctrination into an extensive and well-organized cult can disengage a person from their empathy and logic while substituting in their place denial and hypocrisy.

[aitm]

  God would have to violate His nature in order to reveal such a thing, so I'd already know that such a thing, by logic &  nature, simply couldn't happen.  I understand the point of your question, but the logic of the question doesn't allow for it to be answered in the affirmative.

You know, I feel such a pity for you, a real sorrow for how you have rationalized this to the point of absurdity.

If your car would not start tomorrow, your knowledge and logic along with common sense easily help you identify ready such causes. If the engine doesn't run over, logic suggests the battery is dead, if the engine turns over and occasionally fires but dies, perhaps it is as simple as no gas,,, or a problem with the carburetor, if it clicks real loud the starter is most likely out….you have learned all this and you willingly and knowingly use common sense and logic to help you find the problem. But when it comes to something that you have a invested cost in, a real invested cost, time, emotion and the added problem of ego and embarrassment, you choose not just to deny logic, but to reject it so your ego cannot be embarrassed by logic. That you could be wrong so embarrasses you what with all the emotion and energy that you have gone through to deny logic and affirm your beliefs must be a terrifying thing. Your mind deep inside knows you are wrong but yet you continue to reject the obvious because to now, come out of the closet, would to admit that you were duped. I feel sorry for you… a real pity for you.

[Mike Cl]

Our friend here does offer insight into how indoctrination into an extensive and well-organized cult can disengage a person from their empathy and logic while substituting in their place denial and hypocrisy.

Yes!  And a HUGE tie to a particular worldview--a tie that would amount to a repudiation of self.  To change a worldview that deeply ingrained would be almost impossible. 

[eylul]

If i should speak about being muslim, there will be no difference between me and religious people. Because when you look at those people, you could see that all of them do the things that religion doesnt let them to do. Many of them stole, many of them liar, many of them wear trending clothes, many of them eat too much and they are not healthy. And i feel better than those people because i am good person but not for god just for humanity. i am not selfish and i dont do favors for heaven i just do that because i want to be like that. i deserve to be forgiven because i was a good person at all and i dont need any reason.

Dont make it complicated. Its just simple haha.

[Mike Cl]

If i should speak about being muslim, there will be no difference between me and religious people. Because when you look at those people, you could see that all of them do the things that religion doesnt let them to do. Many of them stole, many of them liar, many of them wear trending clothes, many of them eat too much and they are not healthy. And i feel better than those people because i am good person but not for god just for humanity. i am not selfish and i dont do favors for heaven i just do that because i want to be like that. i deserve to be forgiven because i was a good person at all and i dont need any reason.

Dont make it complicated. Its just simple haha.

Welcome, eylul--and I forgive you.  :)) I think a lot like that.  And there is no need to seek forgiveness from anyone, except yourself.  If you have done something that needs to be forgiven, then undo it as best you can, forgive yourself and move on. 

[1liesalot]

He doesn't.  If He did, you'd be worshipping.

Biblical literalism isn't for you, then?

[1liesalot]

It's Sunday, shouldn't you be in church or something? Or do you troll atheist forums to stock up on Jesus points for the week?

lol

[1liesalot]

I should be, but unfortunately, I have to work.  The upside is that I get to post here in between making events, running plates, etc...  Sunday is a pretty slow day for law enforcement, at least where I am.  Besides, I can livestream my Pastor's sermon at 11am anyway.

Don't tell me you've been gathering sticks on the Sabbath.