Do you want to know why I think God wants innocent people killed? He gave the people the Old and New testaments, correct? Both of them state specifically which people are sinners, which people are evil, and so on. To make this even more simple: suppose that there is a Muslim talking about Islam with your children. Wouldn't they be far more dangerous than a murderer? After all, if a murderer slays your child, your child will go into heaven for being a good Christian. However, if they got interested in Islam and converted, they would be damned to eternal torture. Hence, these backwards apes that God allegedly gave his word to would want nothing more than to kill and convert, simply to save their own people from damnation. After all, to be an atheist back then was to be a heretic deserving of being burnt alive. Sounds real fair, correct?
Religion, whenever it is in a debate, has nothing but 'what ifs'. That is because religion is nothing more than a set of books with similar beliefs, but different names etched in. To give you an idea of why religion is so similar...it's not the word of God. Simple as that.
Listen to this: Mithra was a Persian/Indian God of 6th century BC. Apparently, he was born of a virgin on December 25th, as many early Gods were. This birth was witnessed by shepherds and gift bearing Magi who followed a falling star. He was known as the son of God, and was capable of healing the blind, lame, and sick. Mithra was sacrificed at the spring equinox, rose up after three days, and ascended to paradise. Mithra celebrated his last supper with 12 disciples before this, however. In his memory, his followers would 'eat' their God in the form of wafers and bread, in fact, the bread was marked with a cross, a symbol borrowed from a different God. Followers of Mithra believed a day of judgment would occur where sinners and the 'unbaptised' would be dragged into the abyss.
That...was written before the bible. Uh...so...did Jesus mimic them? Or did they somehow mimic Jesus before he came? If so, it looks like God blessed a different crowd with foresight of a savior they would never see.
So...what makes your Mithra better than that Mithra?
The thing that you have to understand is that finding the right religion is not just about looking at the living ones. You have to look at the dead ones, too, and usually, that leads to a lack of faith, not a burgeoning amount of it. You look back at the dead religions, and you will find that Christianity is hardly an original text. It didn't do much on its' own, in fact. It borrowed a lot from religions no longer in existence. So, God apparently felt the need to plagiarize the writing of 'sinners'. Hence, the entire book was writ in sin, instead of holiness. Stolen from 'false texts' to raise a messiah on 'false beliefs'.
In order to choose a religion, you can't start by thinking "Christianity is the right path, but I'll go ahead and look at these other crappy religions". To strictly believe that good people, regardless of how good they are, will go to hell for disbelief, is to be a hypocrite. God would be a hypocrite, then, throwing innocent souls into hell just because they didn't sit in a stuffy building for three hours on a Sunday.
And honestly, I know this lovely little gay kid that wouldn't hurt a fly. He gets picked on constantly by 'good Christian' boys that do whatever they can to beat him up and alienate him. Going by your NT laws, those Christian boys are going to heaven, and that gay kid who is the nicest kid I've ever met, would be sent into a lake of fire to be tortured endlessly for all of eternity.
God is allegedly judging us on a tiny amount of time, too. This is something that would be considered ridiculous if it was suggested as scientific. Our lifetime, put up against eternity? A proper measurement in a human life of this sort of judgment would be if you were pulled from your mother and didn't instantly kick your left foot, you would be thrown into a jail cell and kept barely alive with constant torture until you died as a very old man. God's judgment is terrible. He is judging our entire existence off of 70+ years of life. To give you an idea of how barking long that is, forty thousand years wouldn't get you any closer to the end of eternity, and that is already ridiculously longer than your entire time spent on Earth. It is an unfair judgment, then; like taking someone who didn't brush their teeth one time and spanking them for fifty years straight. By two hundred years later, you probably wouldn't even know why you were still there, or why God still demanded you be tortured. God is not a forgiving deity, at all, by a longshot. He can't even forgive someone for not following Christ, let alone someone who kisses the same gender. That sort of God is an idiot with a huge ego, claiming to be loving and just when he can't even manage to be good...by human standards. You do realize that if a higher being can't even be moral to mankind that he can't possibly be better than us, right?
You know, there was something on about Theresa recently...supposedly, she spent most of her life feeling empty, without any real belief in God. If she had died before she finally managed to accept this emptiness and decide that God was real, she would have been tossed in hell for her lack of belief. Oh yeah, God is totally just. Like a kid with a magnifying glass staring down at an ant colony.
EDIT: And, as far as science goes, God can't even begin to wedge his way into it. The only way is for his followers to state: well, God made these things works. Or: these wouldn't work without God. However, ask for proof of God, and here's what you get:
The Bible says it.
Look around you: everything is too pretty to be coincidence.
If you look at a painting...
It's all abstract and poetic, not factual and serious at all. If scientists said that the sun works because 'it just does', or 'it's there', or 'the sun warms us, so it works', it would be laughed at and shot down. That can't be used as utter fact. Similarly, if we found an old book that claimed the sun was really made from everyone passing gas, we wouldn't automatically say "That MUST be true!" That would be ridiculous. However, the Bible claims God exists because he just does, and the entire story has him acting like a background while hundreds of proverbs are thrown in about why being a whore is bad, and so on. So...should we instantly assume it is right because it claims God exists? Does that make it instantly true, without so much as room for argument? No; and it is ridiculous to assume that an old book like that would be totally correct simply because a lot of people say God exists for any of those aforementioned reasons. Some of the stories about Jesus don't make much sense when put up to the timeline, either. His birth in a manger is silly: why would Joseph drag his very pregnant wife out to be added to the census on the wrong year? It's too dangerous of a trip for a pregnant woman; so why endanger someone that was obviously carrying the son of God? Why nearly cause a miscarriage? To fulfill a prophecy? Even then, they did it wrong; hence why there are still Jews. It seems really crude to grab their book and add on to it, claiming you know the real messiah, when they are still there, waiting for their messiah to come. If they are still there...then why would Jesus be the real messiah? Because Christians say so? Look, if the Jews don't think that's the messiah predicted in THEIR book, then I doubt it's the real messiah.
Edited by Akira, 25 August 2007 - 05:52 PM.
