joseph1013:
WISDOM FROM THE BIBLE

The Bible was inspired by God himself, so we can expect to find much wisdom within its weighty pages. Here are some things we've learnt from it:

Holding people as slaves is ok. So is passing your slaves to your children when you die. You can also sell your daughters as slaves with God's blessing.

Beating your slaves, even if you kill them is ok too, so long as they live for a few days after the beating. It's only fair, after all, they are your property.

Raping a virgin girl is a crime. But it's not a crime against the victim, it's a crime against her father because her value will be diminished if she's not a virgin.

The best way to punish a man who rapes an unmarried girl is to have him pay her father compensation, force him to marry the girl and never allow him to divorce her. That will teach him.

A bride who is thought not to be a virgin on her wedding night should be stoned to death. Obviously.

The Earth was created before the stars. Stars are lights in a dome covering the Earth. The dome has water above it with windows that open to allow it to rain. Suck on that science!

These are all things we learnt from the Bible... but had to unlearn. And there is much, much more where that came from.

I have shared these with some christians, only to be met with curious looks. Apparently, they didn't know these are all in the Bible.

Well. wisdom from the Bible is hard to find, but utter nonsense and appalling moral values are easy.

joseph1013:
WISDOM FROM THE BIBLE

The Bible was inspired by God himself, so we can expect to find much wisdom within its weighty pages. Here are some things we've learnt from it:

Holding people as slaves is ok. (Exodus 21: 1-3) So is passing your slaves to your children when you die. (Leviticus 24:46) You can also sell your daughters as slaves with God's blessing. (Exodus 21:7)

Beating your slaves, even if you kill them is ok too, so long as they live for a few days after the beating. It's only fair, after all, they are your property. (Exodus 21:20-21)

Raping a virgin girl is a crime. But it's not a crime against the victim, it's a crime against her father because her value will be diminished if she's not a virgin.

The best way to punish a man who rapes an unmarried girl is to have him pay her father compensation, force him to marry the girl and never allow him to divorce her. That will teach him. (Deuteronomy 22:25-27)

A bride who is thought not to be a virgin on her wedding night should be stoned to death. Obviously. (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)

The Earth was created before the stars. Stars are lights in a dome covering the Earth. The dome has water above it with windows that open to allow it to rain. Suck on that science! (Genesis 1)

These are all things we learnt from the Bible... but had to unlearn. And there is much, much more where that came from.

I have shared these with some christians, only to be met with curious looks. Apparently, they didn't know these are all in the Bible.

Well. wisdom from the Bible is hard to find, but utter nonsense and appalling moral values are easy.

joseph1013:
[color=#550000]WHEN FAITH SCORES AN OWN-GOAL

MYJIST:
Mr, I think you're not just gullible. I also think you're losing who you're and the ability to make sound judgement. You must have been aware that some of the scientists who made major discoveries practised religion. Now, you saying God does not exist... need to show us a concrete proof about your conviction. Unless you do that, you're more like, perhaps even worse than those who practice religion. At least they go to churches and watch miracles happen. And you dare not tell me it's always staged. You practice religion on a different platform. Gullibility have made you blind to see that you've been mocking yourself all along. Show us your proof, stop speculating and 'perhapsing' if you're so different from those who practice religion.

MYJIST:
Mr, I think you're not just gullible. I also think you're losing who you're and the ability to make sound judgement. You must have been aware that some of the scientists who made major discoveries practised religion. Now, you saying God does not exist... need to show us a concrete proof about your conviction. Unless you do that, you're more like, perhaps even worse than those who practice religion. At least they go to churches and watch miracles happen. And you dare not tell me it's always staged. You practice religion on a different platform. Gullibility have made you blind to see that you've been mocking yourself all along. Show us your proof, stop speculating and 'perhapsing' if you're so different from those who practice religion.

joseph1013:
HOW INVINCIBLES DIE

Lehman Brothers, General Motors, Texaco, Global Crossing, and United Airlines are companies with two things in common; they were huge and successful, and they became bankrupt. From the inside, it must have seemed these businesses were invincible--too large and too good to fail but a couple of bad decisions, a changing business environment, a legal squabble, and they were gone.

In some cases, such as General Motors, failure came after months of desperate re-organisations, negotiations, and deals. In other cases, such as Lehman Brothers, collapse came in days and shocked the world.

The lesson here is no organisation is too big to fail. Being large certainly has advantages but all too often it carries the seed of self-destruction--complacency. I recall the time when IBM was the mammoth of the computer industry. It was so dominant that all its competitors looked like tiddlers. There was even a half-serious, half joking motto used by IT Directors everywhere, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM."

Arguably, IBM's downfall began in 1975 when 20-year-old Harvard dropout, Bill Gates, set up a two-man software company with his buddy Paul Allen. They called the company Micro-Soft. In 1980, Micro-Soft (by then re-named Microsoft) teamed up with the Goliath IBM to develop an operating system for the new IBM personal computer. With the clout of IBM behind it, sales of personal computers took off like a rocket. The effect of this was IBM set a hardware standard for PCs and Microsoft set a standard for the operating system. These standards allowed competitors to flood into the market with PCs that were compatible with all the software being produced for the IBM PC.

It was not this competition that damaged IBM though--it was an unforeseen consequence of it. Companies started to buy PCs for their employees and this created demand for networking them. IBM's fortune had been based on mainframe computers that people accessed using "dumb terminals"--display screens with a keyboard that were only able to display data sent to them by the mainframe computer that did all the work.

Once companies had networked their PCs, they found these small computers could do jobs they previously needed a mainframe computer to do, and at a fraction of the cost. It was this that IBM, from their dominant position in large computers, was blinded to. They saw personal computers as a nice little earner to add to their gigantic revenues from mainframes. In fact, personal computers were replacing mainframes in many situations. These tiny computers were eating mainframes for breakfast.

IBM's organisation and culture was suited to selling expensive, high margin mainframe computers in low volumes but the world was turning to cheap, low margin personal computers in high volumes. By 1979, the company's growth rate has stalled and by 1991 it was making heavy losses--it had accumulated losses of $16 billion by 1993.

In the end, IBM survived thanks to hiring an outside executive, Louis V. Gerstner Jr as CEO, and by becoming an entirely different business focusing on its strengths in research, software, consulting and specialist supercomputers.

Sometimes I reflect on these things when I think about the future of religions. The two biggest religions; Christianity and Islam may feel invincible to those on the inside. Well, maybe not Christianity. We can already see serious cracks in Christianity. Congregations are dropping fast in Europe, Australia, and Canada. Even in the religiously conservative USA, the 15 -35 age group has seen a significant move away from Christianity over the past 20 years. Some European countries can now be properly described as post-Christian.

Islam is still growing and must feel very secure to insiders. But stress cracks are appearing. The problem is, Islam partly retains it followers through threats of punishment, violence, and even death, so it is very hard to gauge how many Muslims have turned away from their religion. We have only anecdotal evidence which we cannot rely on.

For what it's worth, there are reports of a significant number of atheists now in Saudi Arabia, online we see the number of ex-Muslim atheist groups growing and you can now find atheist bloggers from most Islamic countries. We also hear reports of young people in large numbers skipping Friday prayers in Iran. I have evidence of an increasing number of ex-Muslims contacting western organisations discussing their plight.

There is something else that is beginning to happen. Muslims are raised to believe their religion and their holy book, the Qur'an, are perfect, and the religion of submission tolerates no dissent. Consequently, very few Muslims hear open criticism of their religion--until now. Now, online, it is easy to find people criticising the Prophet Muhammad, finding flaws in the Qur'an and challenging the vacuous arguments for the existence of God so beloved by Muslims. If you've been told your religion is perfect, you need find only one flaw to know that you have been lied to. That is the fatal weakness of the doctrine of perfection. How many Muslims have realised it?

Islam is the most backward and oppressive major religion in the world. Its treatment of women, of gay people, of apostates and of Muslims who dare to speak out against it, have no place in the 21st century. Islam carries a thread of religious supremacy and domination that has inspired thousands of Muslims to sacrifice their lives in acts of war or terrorism and has killed thousands of others in the process.

Islam is not going anytime soon but it is not too big to fail. Its death will not come from outside but from within as its own supporters realise it is a religion that is not fit for purpose in the modern world, that it is a source of conflict and not harmony, and, ultimately, that it is just another Iron Age religion drawn from the imaginations of our long-dead ancestors.

joseph1013:
Charles Uzor wrote:

If it's beautiful verse, like: "blessed are the kind and generous",

then God inspired it, and it must be interpreted literally;

... if it's unsettling verse, like: "slaves, obey your earthly masters, even those who are cruel",

then we must invoke classic theology and anthropology, taking into account the culture of a dark period in history.

And yet the book is inerrant.
Blame it on cognitive dissonance.

Omooba224:
Cherry Picking at its peak. They will even go as far as saying'Christianity doesn't follow the OT'. They leave themselves with some mental gymnastics. It sounds preposterous.

joseph1013:


It's preposterous. They say they agree that all scriptures is inspired by God, yet when Paul says women should not speak in the Church, they say it is Paul's opinion and not binding on believers.

Let's pick whatever verse we want and leave all else.

joseph1013:
WHO ARE THEY KIDDING?

Ask a god-believer why they believe in their god and there's a good chance they will start explaining how the universe could not create itself, so there must be a creator.

BULLS...IT!! This is horribly dishonest. Let's imagine how a believer might pray if it were true.

"Hello creator. I don't know if you can hear me or if you want to hear me but I'm reaching out to you. You might know I exist or you might not. Or you might not care anyway. You might be able to communicate with me or you might not or you might not want to. I don't know.

I don't know if you are male or female or both or neither. I don't know if you are huge, small, subatomic or look like an octopus. I don't know if you are a lone creator or whether you were a member of a team of dozens or billions of creators.

I don't know if you are wise or stupid, loving or hateful, kind or wicked or maybe you are none of these things. Or perhaps these ideas are utterly incomprehensible to you.

I don't know if you care how I live or what I wear or how I cut my hair or what I should do with my prepuce. And if you do care, I don't know what you would like.

I don't know if you are alive or dead or if you have moved on to other universes and lost interest in us. I don't know where you came from or even if you were ever alive. Perhaps you never were. Perhaps, you were no more than a glitch in quantum time that made all hell break lose.

The truth is, I don't know anything about you at all. But I would like to. Honestly I would. And that's why I'm praying to you today."
.

But this is not how god believers pray. They pray to specific gods, with specific prophets and specific holy scriptures with specific rules and rituals.

They do not pray to whatever being/force/entity/process might have created the universe. That is just the excuse they give to salvage some dignity, when none is deserved.

Omooba224:
Cherry Picking at its peak. They will even go as far as saying'Christianity doesn't follow the OT'. They leave themselves with some mental gymnastics. It sounds preposterous.

joseph1013:
Charles Uzor wrote:

If it's beautiful verse, like: "blessed are the kind and generous",

then God inspired it, and it must be interpreted literally;

... if it's unsettling verse, like: "slaves, obey your earthly masters, even those who are cruel",

then we must invoke classic theology and anthropology, taking into account the culture of a dark period in history.

And yet the book is inerrant.
Blame it on cognitive dissonance.

Omooba224:
Sorry bros! you are the gullible here. How on earth would you believe something (the supposed creator of the universe for crying out loud) without proof? Before spewing trash, make sure you are loaded with enough evidence. .

Karleb:
I could remember when I read basically everything on this thread. These days I just want to be a low key unbeliever.

If I can't die for what I believe then I definitely can not die for what I "unbelieve".

That mean no arguments, but when my christian brethren start with their illogical talks, I just slowly disengage them most time.

I mean, many still believe you need to pray to pass.

joseph1013:
UNDERSTANDING THE CHRISTIAN DEBATER

On Social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc), I have observed that Christian debaters have a language of their own. Here is an explanation of some of their popular idioms.

“Your mind is closed. You don’t want to know the truth”
Really means: You understand this better than me, I need to read Answers In Genesis again.

“[Say nothing] ” then click the Block button (or the Delete button to delete a post or a thread)
Really means: Phew, I don’t think my friends have enough faith to see stuff like this.

“Jesus loves you” or “Amen...Thank you.”
Really means: I have no clue how to answer that point.

"I'll pray for you."
Really means: If you won't believe me, I'll report you to God.

“But what about .....?”
Really means: OK, I lost the last point so I'll try a different one.

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."
Really means: Hahaha, you can't get out of this one!

“You have faith every time you sit on a chair”
Really means: Faith may be stupid but you use faith too so we're both stupid!

"You're going to hell!"
Really means: Hell scares the sh*t out of me so it should scare you too.

“The wisdom of men is foolishness to things of the spirit.”
Really means: The evidence does support your view but I just CANNOT believe I'm wrong.

“One day Jesus will open your heart so you can see the truth”
Really means: I hope someday you will get to be as crazy as I am.

9inches:
You still believe there is truth out there even though you aren't sure what it is, don't you? The truth that explains the realities you and I experience in this complex universe. The truth that makes logical sense when you assimilate to it. The truth that puts every darn thing in clear cut perspective....

If there is such truth out there, would you not want to know it?

Karleb:


No! I've read, listened and seen a lot of things people consider as "the truth" and trust me what you have to offer is just another repackaged "the truth" package. So my answer again is NO!

The truth is, there is no truth.