Discussion With Ordinaryclay On Eternal Hell And The Veracity Of The New Testament

[florduh]

....so why give him the negative attention he desires in order to attain self vindication of his beliefs?

 

Lurkers may benefit from seeing Christian "logic" and "debate" in action. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, his shining example of disingenuous and willfully ignorant discourse is the only reason he's still here.

[mymistake]

First, don't be scared off by the fact that I identify myself as a Christian.   I am not your typical Christian. 

 

I don't mind that.  Most of my friends and family are Christian.  What matters is how you treat others.  From what I have seen of you so far you seem fine.

 

 

The people on this website have the exact same problems that hard-core Christians do on theirs: each side fervently fights to defend its dogma.

 

 

 

Uh sorry but that is not the case.  I don't have dogma.  Most of the people here don't either.  The few who did find a new religion usually don't try to convert others.  I do fight in the Lion's Den but what I fight against is harmful ideas.

 

 

 

 I say "screw both groups."  Your goal should be to find real truth, not to sit back and spit out your respective group's dogma.   

 

Actually I do love science.  Except for chemistry that is.  I have no talent for chemistry.  But for the rest of it I love to search for the truth.  I can't peruse it professionally but I settle for the layman's version in documentaries.

 

 

 

 This is not a battle between Christians and ex-Christians.  We are not at war.  We are all on the same airplane. We're all freaking trying to figure how to land the plane safely.  Rather than blaming each other, we just need to freaking work together to find out what is truth.  It's a lazy man's refrain to say, "I have no idea how we came to be.  I don't want to do anything."  We all know that we must do something.   

 

I disagree about the lazy man's refrain.  If you don't know something then the truth is to admit you do not know.  As for doing something about it, well I had my chance to become a scientists back at college and I let my religion get in the way.  I made bad choices.  I can't go back but what I can do is convince new people to ignore superstition and make better choices than I did.

[slave2six]

 

I don't give a flying fuck what Carl Sagan believed about atheism. Love the guy but he's not the authority of atheism.

It's clear the vast majority of atheists cannot defend their position so they simply avoid it with fake definitions.

 

"The majority of atheists cannot defend their position"? What position? You can't prove a negative.

 

Joe: Hey Mike, you have an invisible parrot on your shoulder.

 

Mike: I do not.

 

Joe: Prove it!

 

Mike: What do you mean, "Prove it"? It's not there!

 

Joe: See? You can't even prove that you don't have an invisible parrot on your shoulder. You're such an idiot.

 

This is precisely how you are arguing with us.

[slave2six]

First, don't be scared off by the fact that I identify myself as a Christian.   I am not your typical Christian. 

 

You'll need to define "Christian" before you can make that claim.

 

...strong examples in the New Testament that suggest hell is not what people think

 

Hell is an invention of the New Testament. That no one in the NT can get their stories straight is irrelevant. Trying to convince us that your version of the fairy tale is better than someone else's version makes no difference whatsoever.

[RipVanWinkle]

I have heard many, man, many testimonies of people who's lives improved with Christianity - including mine. The only place I hear of the reverse is hear. Now why do you think that's the case? OC

 

I heard many Xtians testify as to how their lives were better after finding Christ too. But I knew about their lives --and they were lying.

[Astreja]

 

Joe: See? You can't even prove that you don't have an invisible parrot on your shoulder. You're such an idiot.

 

This is precisely how you are arguing with us.

 

 

Along with the occasional squawk as he purports to speak for the invisible parrot.

[slave2six]

 

 

Joe: See? You can't even prove that you don't have an invisible parrot on your shoulder. You're such an idiot.

 

This is precisely how you are arguing with us.

 

 

Along with the occasional squawk as he purports to speak for the invisible parrot.

 

 

Ha!

[mymistake]

 

 

Once, just once I liked to see an atheist own up to their intellectual responsibility and defend their proposition that God does not exist. Over decades of watching atheist burden shifting I've come to the inescapable conclusion they have no defense.

 

 

 

All gods are fiction.  We know this beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

Archeologists and anthropologists have dug up idols and artwork that is tens of thousands of years older than the human invention of writing.  And we made gods and goddesses back then.  Nearly every human culture we have unearthed made gods.  The gods they made reflected what they had come to understand about our world.  As human technology improved so did the gods we invented.  Then eventually humans invented literature.  Once that happened we could make stories with depth and sophistication.  And the gods we created during that time also started to have depth and sophistication.  As human technology, understanding and literature improved over the centuries we would invent new gods that were improvements over the older gods.  As the centuries passed humans made thousands of gods and goddesses.

 

Creating gods is part of human nature.

 

Even today though we don't believe in the new gods we create we continue to make them anyway.  Now we call them super heros.  We fill comic books and movies with these modern gods.  But no sane adult would think that these super heros are real - right?  Comic books are not evidence that Batman is real.  We have just as much evidence that all the other gods and goddesses from our past were created the same way.  Every single god has humans doing the talking, doing the writing, doing the believing, working the literature, telling the story.

 

 

 

 

There you go Clay.  Try to knock it down, if you dare.

 

 

 

Yo OrdinaryClay, you got what you asked for.  Do you have any comment?  

 

*bump*

[sdelsolray]

 

....so why give him the negative attention he desires in order to attain self vindication of his beliefs?

 

Lurkers may benefit from seeing Christian "logic" and "debate" in action. As I mentioned earlier in this thread, his shining example of disingenuous and willfully ignorant discourse is the only reason he's still here.

 

Yes, allow him, and the others, to remain.  Their intellectual and emotional makeup are good examples of what to avoid.

[Bhim]

 

Yes, allow him, and the others, to remain.  Their intellectual and emotional makeup are good examples of what to avoid.

 

 

Well, I don't particularly care to regulate what threads OC participates in.  But I think that my attempt to engage him in a discussion has proven to be a wash.  I don't mind the denigration of my own beliefs or the deflections.  My only problem is that he doesn't write anything.  I cannot communicate with someone who responds to entire paragraphs of text with just a few words.

 

If OC writes a post with at least 200 words of his own thoughts (i.e. excluding Bible quotations and other things that aren't his own words), I'd be happy to respond.  Otherwise I plan to ignore him.  Honestly, I'm not sure he's even a Christian.  If he were, he'd be interested in winning us to Jesus.  He seems more like an Internet troll.  It would be particularly ironic if he's an atheist, given that I am not.

[mymistake]

 

 

 

Once, just once I liked to see an atheist own up to their intellectual responsibility and defend their proposition that God does not exist. Over decades of watching atheist burden shifting I've come to the inescapable conclusion they have no defense.

 

 

 

All gods are fiction.  We know this beyond a reasonable doubt.

 

Archeologists and anthropologists have dug up idols and artwork that is tens of thousands of years older than the human invention of writing.  And we made gods and goddesses back then.  Nearly every human culture we have unearthed made gods.  The gods they made reflected what they had come to understand about our world.  As human technology improved so did the gods we invented.  Then eventually humans invented literature.  Once that happened we could make stories with depth and sophistication.  And the gods we created during that time also started to have depth and sophistication.  As human technology, understanding and literature improved over the centuries we would invent new gods that were improvements over the older gods.  As the centuries passed humans made thousands of gods and goddesses.

 

Creating gods is part of human nature.

 

Even today though we don't believe in the new gods we create we continue to make them anyway.  Now we call them super heros.  We fill comic books and movies with these modern gods.  But no sane adult would think that these super heros are real - right?  Comic books are not evidence that Batman is real.  We have just as much evidence that all the other gods and goddesses from our past were created the same way.  Every single god has humans doing the talking, doing the writing, doing the believing, working the literature, telling the story.

 

 

 

 

There you go Clay.  Try to knock it down, if you dare.

 

 

 

Yo OrdinaryClay, you got what you asked for.  Do you have any comment?  

 

*bump*

 

 

*bump*

 

Hi OrdinaryClay!  Is it safe to assume that you are never going to respond to this?  Is it also safe to assume that you will continue to claim that hard atheists don't take responsibility for their beliefs?  It sure looks that way to me.

 

"Once, just once I liked to see an atheist own up to their intellectual responsibility and defend their proposition that God does not exist. Over decades of watching atheist burden shifting I've come to the inescapable conclusion they have no defense."

 

I'm thinking that many times during those "decades" atheists have met your challenge and you did the exact same thing you did with me.

[midniterider]

 

My goal is to find actual truth.

 

 

As long as it includes Jesus, correct?