"New Age" Atheism

Originally posted by @philokalia
[quote]You expect me to believe that the Transcendent appeared in the body of a Jew 2,000 years ago? You expect me to believe that a virgin gave birth? You expect me to believe that a man rose from the dead? You expect me to believe that the God of Abraham is sui generis and that all the Gods of all the other religions and cultures are either fictions or ...[text shortened]... and I have argued against that before, but I have not heard this business about the 9th century.

Joe Smith claimed he found golden tablets under a rock in NY, that they contained mysterious writings, that an angel helped him to translate them, that after Jesus died he went to North America and preached to the 13th tribe. Do you believe any of that? I'll wager you don't. Is it incumbent upon you to prove:

a) that Joe Smith did not find any golden tablets,
b) that they did not contain any mysterious writings,
c) that no angel helped him,
d) that Jesus did not come to No. America,
e) that there was no 13th tribe?

No, it is not incumbent upon any one to prove all of those things to see that the story is preposterous.

Originally posted by @moonbus
Joe Smith claimed he found golden tablets under a rock in NY, that they contained mysterious writings, that an angel helped him to translate them, that after Jesus died he went to North America and preached to the 13th tribe. Do you believe any of that? I'll wager you don't. Is it incumbent upon you to prove:

a) that Joe Smith did not find any golden tab ...[text shortened]... s not incumbent upon any one to prove all of those things to see that the story is preposterous.

Is all of that based on the word of one person (Joe Smith?) Does Joe Smith have a criminal record for fraud?

Originally posted by @philokalia
Yes, none of that is preposterous.

God reached out to His Creation; He came to earth, born of woman and into a human body, roughly 2k years ago. It was a Hebrew woman. The Hebrews had been delivered out of Egypt & prepared for over a thousand years before to be the cradle of His arrival.

There is nothing preposterous in believing that God would r ...[text shortened]... out the specifics of it, divorcing them from the greater picture, you aren't making an argument.

Joe Smith claimed he found golden tablets under a rock in NY, that they contained mysterious writings, that an angel helped him to translate them, that after Jesus died he went to North America and preached to the 13th tribe. Do you believe any of that? I'll wager you don't. Is it incumbent upon you to prove:

a) that Joe Smith did not find any golden tablets,
b) that they did not contain any mysterious writings,
c) that no angel helped him to translate them,
d) that Jesus did not come to No. America,
e) that there was no 13th tribe?

No, it is not incumbent upon any one to prove all of those things did not happen to see that the story is preposterous.

Just by saying something vehemently which has been said before vehemently, you are not making an argument.


Oops, sorry for the duplication.

Originally posted by @wolfgang59
No it is not.
It is absolutely impossible to deduce that.
Your belief in god is purely based on what you have been told or read.
There is no evidence in the real world to support the notion of gods and
what we observe actually points to no Designer or Creator. (Unless it
were totally perverse and hid all evidence from us!)

How is it impossible to deduce it? This is a common belief in every single culture, including the bulk of prechristian cultures and civilizations that had zero contact with the Hebrews.

The rationale is EXCEEDINGLY simple and comes in many forms, always dealing with the notion of all things come from some origin point and so there must be origins back to some ultimate origin of all things that supersedes the natural world, or the notion that the structure and organization of our existence is not accidental and order does not happen in a vacuum...

There are even further arguments for it that are logically deduced.

OF COURSE, one can also say that these things are not necessarily definitive, and that is fine, because it is likewise incomplete and challengeable to simply assert that the Universe is unoriginated and self-contained...

We have two sets of arguments and it can hardly be said that one set destroys the other in terms of logic.

Originally posted by @romans1009
Is all of that based on the word of one person (Joe Smith?) Does Joe Smith have a criminal record for fraud?

Joe Smith got several elders to sign an affidavit, attesting that they handled the tablets. Oh, btw, the angel took the tablets back to heaven; we can longer examine them for ourselves. C'mon, you believe the angel bit, right?

Originally posted by @moonbus
Joe Smith got several elders to sign an affidavit, attesting that they handled the tablets. Oh, btw, the angel took the tablets back to heaven; we can longer examine them for ourselves. C'mon, you believe the angel bit, right?

Does Joe Smith have a criminal record for fraud?

Originally posted by @moonbus
Joe Smith got several elders to sign an affidavit, attesting that they handled the tablets. Oh, btw, the angel took the tablets back to heaven; we can longer examine them for ourselves. C'mon, you believe the angel bit, right?

Do you think all that exists in the universe can be discerned with your five senses?

Originally posted by @romans1009
Does Joe Smith have a criminal record for fraud?

Why should that impugn his story? Jesus was convicted of sedition.

Originally posted by @romans1009
Do you think all that exists in the universe can be discerned with your five senses?

Of course not. I'm not a thorough-going materialist.

Originally posted by @moonbus
Of course not. I'm not a thorough-going materialist.

Then you believe in the supernatural?

Originally posted by @moonbus
Joe Smith claimed he found golden tablets under a rock in NY, that they contained mysterious writings, that an angel helped him to translate them, that after Jesus died he went to North America and preached to the 13th tribe. Do you believe any of that? I'll wager you don't. Is it incumbent upon you to prove:

a) that Joe Smith did not find any golden tab ...[text shortened]... s not incumbent upon any one to prove all of those things to see that the story is preposterous.

The points that I brought up in my initial response to you about why you should believe those things were quite important to me, and you've now just totally shifted everything so that I am supposed to spend time arguing against Mormonism.

My guess is that you believe you are setting up a trap where, by arguing against Mormonism, you will use the nature of my arguments to argue against Christianity in general.

But I am not sure how that would be done.

Christianity follows a linear series of events:

I. The Universe is created & man is created.
II. The destruction of Sodom & Gommorrah, the foundation of the nation of Israel, Moses leads Israel out of Egypt.
III. The rise & fall of Israel/Judeah.
IV. The Babylonian captivity.
V. The triumphal return under Cyrus the Great, who the Bible says is anointed by God.
VI. The functioning of Israel as a client state of various empires and a temporary conqueror of their neighbors; the occupation by Rome.

And the second series of events:
I. The birth of Christ, Immanuel, God with us.
II. Crucifixion & resurrection; the Great commission.
III. Emperor Constantine, in hoc signo vinces: In this sign, conquer.
Christianity, from this point, spreads to all of Europe.
IV: Christianity spreads throughotu the totality of the world, enlightening countless peoples besides the Europeans, and bringing with it the things that make life meaningful by ascribing worth to every person and noting that they have a soul and are an ikon of God.

This is the triumph of the church militant.

And now you could say that we are actually regressing out of this.

But you might ask: why is Emperor Constantine relevant? Why should I care about this timeline?

Because, just as Joshua & David set up the Israel Kingdom through victorious and tremendous events and battles to commemorate the victory of God, so, too, would Christianity go on to conquer the whole of Europe, then, through Europe, it was destined to conquer the world & revolutionize existence everywhere.

The Christian message is utterly unique and philosophically flooring & epoch defining, and it has been blessed by God wherever it goes, watering seeds everywhere.

There's the signs of its rightness and the ways in which we can see that there are reasons to have faith in it.

We can attack Mormonism, or Buddhism, or any other religion as having inappropriate and incomplete philosophical systems while also not being blessed comparatively in the least to Christendom.

Originally posted by @moonbus
Why should that impugn his story? Jesus was convicted of sedition.

One has nothing to do with the other.

Originally posted by @moonbus
there is no extant complete MS older than the 9th c. AD? Fail.

Which bible are you referring to?
I think the Codex in the British Library is generally considered to
be the oldest bible in existence but it has a few bits n pieces missing.
(It's 4th Century)

I think it is important to note that you can come to faith in Christ through various ways. Some are lucky to be born into it and to never have faith far away from their heart, and others go through their own personal lapse from the faith to rediscovery...

As this is a spiritual thing, it is decidedly not empirical.

It is logical, and conforms entirely with the logical, and presents to us the supreme thread of logic to use to understand the whole world (as in the idea of 'natural theology'😉, but logic in the hands of humans is flawed and incomplete.

Logic is also something that exists within different epistemologies and within different value judgments, and so we can say that two things that conflict with each other are actually both logical (this is a point I was making earlier)...

But Christianity is also meta-logical or meta-rational, as it is somethign that is deeper than simply deducing something from the given material, and it involves the holistic exercise of the spirit.

The operations that occur beyond logic perhaps are best thought of as things rooted in faith...

Faith is increasingly maligned by people.

Hopefully what I said above, though, will help in understanding the perspective more holistically...

... And I am aware that the initial line of argumentation that I presented may not have universal appeal. May you find the right path to appeal to you -- the one universal suggestion that I have is fasting and prayer.

Originally posted by @philokalia
But Christianity is also meta-logical or meta-rational, as it is something that is deeper than simply deducing something from the given material, and it involves the holistic exercise of the spirit.

Are Islam, Judaism and Hinduism - and other religions - all "meta-logical or meta-rational"?