Best Questions You Use To Stump Christians

[Justin]

 

Since children and the mentally retarded get a free pass into heaven when they die, as christians say,

 

Isn't it suspect where the vast majority of Christians come up with some of their ideas, especially moderate and conservative Protestants who subscribe to the Sola Scriptura doctrine?  You're really hard pressed to find ANY biblical backing to the idea that children get a free pass. 

 

 

It is really suspect. It seems due to the lack of any hard evidence in the Bible that Christians have developed this thought over the years. I can't really blame them either, for how else can you get around the idea that the young and innocent and the helpless will go to hell without a chance. It's interesting to think that Christians know fully well that Bible god is nothing but crazy and evil and had to come up with this to get around the great silence in the Bible in regards to this.

[Lerk]

Sometimes you can just sneak things in. My wife and I watch NCIS on Tuesdays, and the last episode was about some young women who had been smuggled to the U.S. from a women's shelter Afghanistan, but who were being murdered in the U.S. because their families had found out where they were.

 

She was aghast at the idea that a woman's family would think it was honorable to kill their daughter, and so we discussed a bit about how it actually happens in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Then I worked in that under the Law of Moses a person who was disrespectful to their parents was to be stoned to death. It actually made the point with her that OT god and NT god don't seem like the same god.

 

She seems to be trying harder to be spiritual at the moment, but I think maybe it's part of her doubting. I plan to work in little things like this wherever I can, without being a jackass or even being obvious.

[whatever]

Here's a question that I find Christians have a hard time with:

 

What is the POINT of hell? What purpose does it serve?

 

If we talk about punishing people, then punishment usually has a purpose. For example, children might be punished so that they learn to change their behaviour. Since hell is eternal, there is no hope in changing behaviour, or learning anything from it.

Furthermore, it is unthinkable that an earthly parent would impose even a much milder version of hell on any of their children; how can a Heavenly Father do so?

How do you think it feels to be in heaven, knowing that millions or maybe billions of people are suffering torment?

If you as a sinful person are allowed into heaven by a gracious God (because you accepted Jesus), and if there is no sin in heaven, then he must take away your sin when you go there, and make you sinless such that you can never sin in heaven (we are always told it is a perfect place, God cannot be in the presence of sin etc). If he does this for you, there is no reason he cannot do this for anyone he pleases, including the most abject depraved evil person ever. That person would then be sinless (like the babies that are supposedly given a free pass mentioned above). Christians would say those people would not want to be in heaven. Actually, when confronted with the reality of the situation, a) they probably would choose a perfect heaven over endless torture and once made sinless they would not want to be apart from God afterwards.

The reason normally given for not doing this is that it takes away our free will (but so does taking away our capacity to choose evil once we pass through the Pearly Gates).

I would question that God can be considered to be Love if he allows the majority of his creatures to end up in eternal damnation through the system he set up.

All in all, hell is definitely the area that I found hardest to accept when I believed this stuff.

 

A huge problem with hell, as others have said, is that it is essentially a 'new' doctrine. Not present in the OT, and gradually evolving over time, to include variations like purgatory for some. Some Christians today do believe in annihilation which is an improvement, but very few in universalism.

I also ask - if so many end up in hell, that is a failure for God. His love does not conquer all. Even if you want to believe in the Cross, then at least believe the sacrifice counted for everybody not just for some.

 

In fact that point is also a good one to counter those who say that most Christians basically believe the same thing, like Jesus died on the Cross. Actually there are multiple interpretations of what the Cross achieved: was it a substitutionary atonement, was it penal substitution and so on, and depending on what you believe, you end up believing in a different kind of God. And in fact, most Christians are not really clear what they actually believe on this anyway.

 

Well, I could go on for hours, but will shut up here.

[pawn]

Good stuff, whatever. The clear light of logic and reason always burn away the clouds of delusional religion. Your arguments against hell are very powerful, it's just nonsense, the whole if christianity, pure nonsense.

[RogueScholar]

Unfortunately, I honestly do not think it is possible to stump a hard core Christian. Years ago, I would not have been stumped by any argument and I was quite good at shoehorning my religion into anything. At times I simply did not even entertain logic. Seeing the flaws of my beliefs did not result from a

“stump the chump”, rock solid argument, but was the result of a slow process of thinking, introspection, research and questioning. It seems this is how deconversion often works. I know there will be outliers but it seems that letting go of religion is often not the result of one argument but rather the result of a slow process. Sometime I liken it to slowly dragging my self out of a deep, dark hole into the light. It was slow and I had times when I slid back down.

 

This is not to say that we should not challenge people on their religious beliefs, only that we should not expect even our best arguments to suddenly change said beliefs.

[Darkillusion]

Thank you everyone for all your wonderful replies! I wanted to come back and give you an update on how things went during my husband's meeting with the pastors.

 

To those of you recommending I just google some questions, I have of course done that, certainly during my own deconversion process. I get a lot out of hearing other's thoughts though and how they interpret problems with the bible. There have been a lot of nice suggestion questions on here that I haven't heard before, and a lot of new twists to questions I had heard before. So thank you all!

 

My husband found his meeting very anticlimactic, which is what I was hoping for. I was hoping he would be disappointed with the lack of answers even learned pastors can give. He gave them some of his objections and found out right away they didn't subscribe to a literal view of Genesis. This surprised me when he told me that, because if the church's stance is a figurative view on Genesis and who knows what else, they certainly don't give that impression during their services! Every time we have a sermon on Genesis, shouldn't it be prefaced with a statement along the lines of "we do not believe Genesis is literal but it sure has some good stories in it so let's learn about those today!" I feel like they are pushing things as true when they know there is no way in hell they are true, but they don't want the rest of the congregation to look too far into things and start asking questions like, "well if this isn't true how do we know what is?" The church leaders are aware science disproves Genesis, but they aren't filling their congregation in on it? That was disturbing to me. Very manipulative.

 

That means they aren't even giving an honest representation of their beliefs. It would be different if they actually believed it, but they are portraying something as true that they don't even believe! What else has obvious holes in it that the congregation doesn't find out about because they don't want to lose members?

 

Then I wonder how many different stories they tell people depending on how much education and knowledge they have...like the wife who is heartbroken because her husband cheated on her and is having some doubts about her faith, I'm sure she'll get quotes from Adam and Eve like it's the gods honest truth. No mention will be made that they don't believe it is true. That might push her over the edge into unbelief. And then my husband comes in, who has obviously done his homework. They know they won't get away with trying to pretend it's true, so they tell him what they really think. Grrrr. Okay end rant...

 

So no literal Genesis threw a wrench into many of the questions he was going to ask. The next obvious question then is, if no Genesis, no fall, why Jesus? They went through the whole sin thing and how it doesn't change the fact that we are still sinners in need of a savior. My husband was completely unsatisfied with that answer and says he kind of shut down after that point. He realized he wasn't going to find out anything useful from these guys. He found the rest of the conversation to be full of fake warm fuzzies as they tried to use the love of Christ to compel him back into the fold.

 

The good news is that he seems to be coming to terms with his loss of Christianity. He abandoned the idea of joining a men's bible study to strengthen his faith and for support. He feels like he would just get more of the same. He is allowing me to read to him some blogs and compelling literature to help him on his way. We still go to church because I teach Sunday school (evil grin) while he attends the service. He says he sits there feeling like an outsider looking in. The messages seem meaningless and forgettable to him. The rituals bizarre and nonsensical. Everything seems so canned and fake to him, like the pastors are just going through a pre set formula.

 

I've been steering him toward deism as a happy medium for him right now. He can still draw comfort from something being out there, but without the dogma and instruction manual that normally goes with it. He's even replaced prayer with meditation. I think this will result on a healthier outlook on life in the long run. No more waiting around for god to come to the rescue at the last minute.

 

If anyone has more questions, please continue! I think this is a good spot where Christians could land that might get their critical thinking skills flowing!

[TristanJay]

Thanks for getting back with us. 

 

I've seen that wiggle-worm style of Q&A on a christian forum, though not over concepts that are rooted in Genesis.  On one occasion I was challenging the beloved importance of Free Will that quite a lot of Christians put stock into, and how it applies when a person's Free Will is spiked or sabotaged by, say, mental illness.  In response to which, along came a spid...Calvinist, who explained that Free Will wasn't a concept that had solid Biblical basis.  Then they proceeded to argue about it back and forth.  I can't remember if I called them out on their inability to figure out what the truth was supposed to be, or God's inability to successfully explain himself; but I guess they just would have trotted out the answer "God is mysterious or works mysteriously" and all that blah blah blah.  Fuckin' wiggle-worms.

 

I'm sorry to hear that your husband wasn't able to get satisfactory answers.  Honestly, I posted some of the questions I have had, because I'm not above giving God opportunities in circumstances that are not emotionally manipulative, but without much hope of straightforward and clear answers.  It's not the first time I've given God the opportunity to come clean, as it were.  And not to be leading about it, but, as Christians might say, this was a great opportunity for God.  I think it was, wasn't it?  The Christian version of God, as he is defined, doesn't seem to have risen to the occasion.

 

I'm not surprised, but I guess I do feel a little disappointed that nothing new seems to have emerged as answers.  Something beyond those herculean and acrobatic feats of apologetics and scriptural interpretation.  Good luck to you and your husband, I hope you find some kind of peace, comfort and truth.

[ClaraOlive]

I'm glad that he's starting to reach some conclusions.

 

I like to ask questions that force people to look at what they know and observe rather than focusing on Biblical contradiction questions because a smart person can always pull themselves into an endless loop of explanations - sometimes the smarter the person, the better they are at coming up with barely plausible but not impossible answers.

 

If you know some other non-Christians who he likes and respects, it helps. I ask people to think carefully of the people they know who are Christians - I acknowledge that a lot of those people are good people, and a few really show kindness and goodness. Then I ask them to think of non-Christians who they respect (this is harder with Fundies because they might not know a single non-Christian well but even when I was forced by my parents to only be in a Christian environment, I still sensed this) - and I ask them to tell me what is different about the Christians that should make anyone want what they have. When they actually have to look at the lives of the Christians they know, they often can't answer. I make sure not to focus only on hypocritical and nasty Christians so they can't no true Scotsman the answer or insist that I left the church because of a few bad people - there are Christians who are wonderful people... but I can find an equivalent atheist who has the goodness they have WITHOUT god.

[amateur]

I've heard too many xians answer the argument above ^ with "We're saved by professing belief in Jesus, not by acts.  So it doesn't matter if an atheist is a good person.  That's not going to save them."  

 

And pastors are very good at directing their answer to their specific audience.  A little kid whose dog recently died asked a pastor if the dog would go to heaven and if he'd get to see the dog again someday.  Of course, the pastor answered in the affirmative, but using a lot of words and leaving some outs.  Another time I was listening to a discussion with no kids around and a pastor (not the same one) said that people sometimes think they'll see their dead dogs in heaven and he made that smug laugh they make when people say something stupid and said, "Of course not.  Only humans have souls."

 

Thanks, darkillusion, for letting us know what happened with your husband's meeting.  I agree that the pastors are very manipulative and disingenuous.  And they will never ever ever admit they are wrong or don't know something.  They will just keep throwing words at you.

[RipVanWinkle]

"Any one got any questions related to Calvinism?"

 

Why did god allow a fanatic (Calvin) to be considered venerable in Christianity for centuries even until now,though he was a fanatic who burned people alive at the stake for disagreeing with him, in direct

violation of Jesus' words: "judge not that ye be not judged"?

And why did you allow the horrors of the Crusades, Inquisition, witch hunts, and genocide against the

American Indians, all of which were in contravention of Jesus' words? Indeed, why should we believe

anything you supposedly said in the bible, in view your refusal to have any compassion as demonstrated by the referenced horrors? bill

[Darkillusion]

Yea the whole "well we don't believe that part of the bible is true" just reminds me how varied bible interpretation is. There are plenty of people who do take a literal view on Genesis. You would think with the Holy Spirit, Christians could come to a consensus on something, anything!

 

Wiggle worms is a good name for them. It's hard to have an intelligent conversation with such people, it seems like they don't even really know what they believe cause they are too busy flipping back and forth between literal interpretation here, figurative there, verse out of context here, verse taken to an extreme over here, and all on top of telling whoever their audience is what they want to hear.

 

I think that's a great point claraolive. One that created another crack in my Christian armor back in the day. When I started making friends with people of other faiths, and saw what good and happy people they were, content and at peace with what they believed...they acted more in line with Christian principles then what my Christian friends did! It was then that I started having a problem with thinking such people would go to hell. I think amateur's point is valid, most Christians would say being a good person means nothing. I think those are typically Christians who don't know anyone but other Christians! I think those with a diverse group of friends would typically have a problem with what their faith teaches. It's okay to send those good people to hell when you can't put a face to it!

 

And amateur you are right about them throwing words around. At one point, hoping to knock my husband off his chair I suppose, they threw out an amazing fact they were certain he didn't know. We aren't spending eternity in heaven! (The pastor paused here waiting for my husband to express his surprise.) We are all coming back to the new earth and the new Jerusalem, hooray! Well his shock value didn't quite hit its mark since my husband had read through revelation several times. It seemed like a distraction tactic, like look how great god is to us, you wouldn't want to miss out on that now would you?? So yea...let's just throw random words and concepts out there so maybe this person will stop asking tough questions I can't answer!

[sdelsolray]

Here's a few questions directed at personal responsibility:

 

1)  Have you confronted your parents and other trusted adults for indoctrinating you as a child with infantile and nonsensical religious dogma?

 

2)  Why do you prefer cognitive dissonance and disingenuous apologetics over clear and and logical rational thinking?

 

3)  Why do you think you are so important?

[rach]

Why God create a world that he despises?  ("Friendship with the world is enmity toward God.")  Ok I know the official Christian answer is he created a "perfect" world and sin ruined it.  But look later on he was so pissed by what he had made he drowned it in a flood. And the bible says the earth will end by being burnt up.  Why God create races of people he despises (caananites, Egyptians) when he only wanted Jews?  Why not just make a whole world of Jews then? 

[RenaissanceWoman]

Another question is the age old problem of evil. I picked this up from Wikipedia, because I'm lazy, lol. Remember, Epicurus was active around 300 BC, and this argument still holds true. For pages and pages of more info and arguments from other philsophers and apologists, see the Wiki entry or search online for other sources.

-----

 

Epicurus is generally credited with first expounding the problem of evil, and it is sometimes called "the Epicurean paradox" or "the riddle of Epicurus":

 

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

- 'the Epicurean paradox'^.

 

Epicurus himself did not leave any written form of this argument. It can be found in Christian theologian Lactantius's Treatise on the Anger of God where Lactantius critiques the argument. Epicurus's argument as presented by Lactantius actually argues that a god that is all-powerful and all-good does not exist and that the gods are distant and uninvolved with man's concerns. The gods are neither our friends nor enemies."
 

(end clip)

----------

 

Why are we praising this god, and asking for his intervention?

 

The answer is always free will and sin and stuff like that. Nice try.

[Cousin Ricky]

“How can I be happy in heaven if my wife is burning in HELL for all eternity?” This one stumped my mom. (Substitute “son” for “wife.”) I think she resolves it by “knowing” that I will return to the cult faith before I die.

 

“Do we have free will in heaven and/or the New Jerusalem (H/NJ)? If there is free will in H/NJ, does that mean there is sin in H/NJ? If not, then why can’t we have a sinless form of free will on present-day Earth? If there’s no free will in H/NJ, then why is it so important on Earth that God should tolerate evil for its sake?”

 

If Christians are supernaturally filled with the love of Christ, why are so many of them greedy, scared, backstabbing, politically motivated, corrupt, controlling, money grubbing, sexually deviant, mean spirited, unforgiving assholes?

 

If Christians are supernaturally infilled with the Holy Spirit, why are so many of them ... (same as above)?

 

The answer is usually Satan, and this is Satan's realm. [...]

 

This is a form of one of the biggest questions I had during my end stage crisis of faith. Satan does not answer the question; after all, if we are filled with the Holy Spirit, shouldn't we be better able to resist him than non-Christians?

 

The next obvious question then is, if no Genesis, no fall, why Jesus? They went through the whole sin thing and how it doesn't change the fact that we are still sinners in need of a savior. My husband was completely unsatisfied with that answer and says he kind of shut down after that point.

 

Good for him. I would have completely bought the pastors’ answer, if they had given it—which they never had a chance to, because I never asked the question in the first place. (I was a theistic evolutionist who was never taught that Genesis was literal, and therefore came up with that same answer on my own.) I still cannot see this argument as a slam-dunk against Christianity.

 

I'm sorry to hear that your husband wasn't able to get satisfactory answers.

 

I’m not.

 

I've heard too many xians answer the argument above ^ with "We're saved by professing belief in Jesus, not by acts.  So it doesn't matter if an atheist is a good person.  That's not going to save them."  

 

Red herring. Answer the question, Reverend!

[chrisstavrous]

1. How can God claim that He's better than us when He rules us with a "Do as I say, not as I do" policy; setting us with the rule that we should not kill while indulging frequently in genocidal acts?

 

2. How can God claim to have a higher standard than us, when we hold ourselves to pretty high standards? He tells us "Do not lie" and we'll even take ourselves to task for lying by omission; which would mean that God is lying by omission of massive amounts of information that would help us make better informed decisions.

 

If he gets any answers other than "God is God, and because we are his, he is entitled to do whatever he wants to us" to these questions, I would love to know what they come up with.

 

3. Why does God think that infinite punishment for finite crimes (only a lifetime of sin warrants eternal torment) is a fair system?

 

4. If God can only forgive because of Jesus's intervention on our behalf, then how come we are able to forgive without the intervention of sacrificing our own son (or loved one) to stand in their place to absolve someone of their sins against us? Again the refrain, how does God qualify himself as better than us?

 

5. Why did God create the Devil, when he should have known what he was going to do? Why does he allow his interference on Earth, when we can do bad things all by ourselves; why overcomplicate the situation? Why stack the deck in this way against maximizing the souls that God could save from eternal damnation?

 

6. Is Heaven nearly empty and is Hell bursting at the seams? If so, then who is really winning the numbers game, who is doing a better job at winning or losing souls? If God is not collecting as many souls, why is he not doing more to maximize his son's sacrifice?

 

7. Why didn't God anticipate some of the major questions that are so important to the development of theology, to the point where we have some of the major branchings in the denominations? Free Will versus Self determination, why did he not clarify this kind of issue for us better? Again, this goes back to withholding information that is important for us to determine how we relate with God and the universe, and formulate our understanding.

 

8. Why do we have to bear the burdens of Adam and Eves' sin, when he could have arranged things so that each one of us had the chance to be born with a clean slate, and make our own mistakes free of a tainted universe. Why didn't God create the universe in such a way that Adam and Eves' sin only tainted themselves as individuals, and not the universe and their own children? How come I could imagine constructing the universe that way, and given the choice and ability, would construct the universe that way? How does God claim to be kind and benevolent and only able to make the universe the way it is, when I can imagine doing it differently?

 

9. What use is Christianity to an individual with mental illness that would predispose them to be depressed and obsess about guilt, when Christianity would compound such a sick person's worry, guilt, obsession and depression to the point that it paralyzes them?

 

These are just some questions I'm thinking of off the top of my head. If your husband is talking with thelogians with collegiate level training, then there may be subtle nuances with my wording of these questions that are lacking; if anyone wants to refine how I've articulated them please do, they will need to be as airtight as possible when they are asked of these pastors.

These are all so true, especially the one about mental illness.

[DrNo]

If sin is inescapable, meaning we are born into it and will fall prey to it almost daily with no way to avoid it because of our "evil" human nature, then why punish us for what we cannot help? Moreover, why punish us with eternal torment in hell to burn forever?

 

Indeed, punishing people for things that are inherent in their nature sounds an awful lot like eugenics. And heck, at least with eugenics the process ended in death. With hell they are simply tormented forever. Maybe we can take a page from the Christian playbook and use a parable to illustrate the point:

 

One day a traveler was walking through a village when he encountered a mentally retarded man trying to steal food and attacking anyone who would attempt to stop him. Upon seeing the mentally retarded man, the traveler hoisted his walking stick, calmly walked toward the retarded man, and began savagely beating him. He was careful not to strike any vital areas, as he wanted the man to live, but he wanted to make the beating last as long as possible. The beating lasted for hours, and the villagers were haunted with the screams of agony coming from the retarded man, who wept and gnashed his teeth, begging for help. Finally, when the beating was over, the traveler asked for the mentally retarded man to be nursed back to health under guard, as he would return the next day to give him another beating, and another the next day, and so on.

 

A villager approached the traveler and asked why he had beat the retarded man so mercilessly.

 

"He was stealing food and frightening the people," the traveler replied. "He was punished for his crimes."

 

"So he was," said the villager, "but why return to beat him again when he has already paid for his crimes?"

 

"Because his nature prevents him from ever really learning," said that traveler. "He may steal and frighten again."

 

"Then why not simply kill him to prevent him from doing this again?" asked the villager.

 

The traveler looked surprised at such a question. He wiped the blood off of his walking stick before he set off on his way again and answered, "Because killing is wrong."

[SquareOne]

That story is creepy as fuck.

[par4dcourse]

The old question of healing amputees is still valid.

 

Why pray if gods will is going to be done regardless?

[Cousin Ricky]

That story is creepy as fuck.

 

And so much like Christianity.

[mymistake]

That story is creepy as fuck.

 

Yes.  Kudos to DrNo.  I'm going to have to quote him someday.

[OnceConvinced]

Here's some I can never seem to get a straight answer for that come to mind right now:

 

Why did God curse all snakes to travel on their bellies and eat dirt when it was only Satan masquerading as a snake?

 

If our punishment for sin is eternal death or eternal suffering, how did Jesus take that punishment for us?

 

How does the blood of an innocent cleanse sin? (Not why, but how?)

 

Why did God send an evil spirit to torment Saul? (1st Sam 16:14)

 

If the holy spirit helps you understand scripture how is it that no two Christians can come to a unified agreement on what the bible says?

 

Why did God create things in a way that would become corrupted once sin entered creation?