Worst apologetic argument?

[Wertbag]

We all know there are many terrible apologetic arguments, from "Look at the trees!" to "Wow, this banana fits your hand so perfectly!" but I'm interested to hear which arguments you consider the absolute worst.

I'm thinking strong contenders would be Pascal's Wager (go on force belief in something you don't think exists!), "the bible proves the bible is true, therefore Jesus is God!", or "some mundane coincidence occurred which seems strange, therefore God did it!" 

 

What's your vote?

[Weezer]

The thing that occured to me early on was a huge inconsistancy.  People talking about the love of God, but then noticing the big difference between Old Tetament narcissistic, vendictive God, and Jesus teaching.   The answer I got for years was, "The old law was to bring us up to the new law".  And that,  "we simply cannot always understand God.  His ways are not always our ways".   It didn't make sense even as a kid, but I shoved it to the back of my mind and "went with the flow."

[♦ ficino ♦]

Quote

We all know there are many terrible apologetic arguments, from "Look at the trees!"

Haha, I was on a subway platform and two 20-somethings came up inviting me to their church. I asked why I should think Jesus exists. "Well, just look around at everything!" Oh brother.

[☆ pantheory ☆]

4 hours ago, ficino said:

Haha, I was on a subway platform and two 20-somethings came up inviting me to their church. I asked why I should think Jesus exists. "Well, just look around at everything!" Oh brother.

 

Yes, that's a common nonsense phrase often said. Unfortunately, it might be very difficult for those believing such ideas to even imagine a valid alternative.

[older]

Well I don’t know if this would be number one, but it is one that I find hilarious. We all have heard about how the Israelites were sent by God to kill all the Midianites including the boys and non-virgin girls, and that these soldiers were also told to keep the virgin girls for themselves.

 

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, what could an army of 12,000 men possibly want with 32,000 virgins? (This seems complicated. 12,000 men and 32,000 virgins works out to 2.66 virgins per soldier. I can't quite visualize that. Perhaps the officers got more than two and the enlisted men got two or less. But I digress.)

Well here’s the answer from Freethinkingministries.com:

 

Let’s go back to the text. Does it say what the Israelites could do with the virgins? No. Does the word “rape” appear? No. Of course my objector thought the worst, that they were to be kept as sex slaves or something. But they could have become tennis partners or platonic friends. Thus, there is nothing at face value that compels us to think these women were raped.

…
While it was common for other nations to rape female POWs, there is NO reason to think the Israelite men raped the Midianite virgins.
…
[T]hese women would have been treated with dignity and there was provision for them to become integrated into the Israelite society.

 

So let me get this right. This army, after invading the Midianite community, burning all the towns and camps and plundering all the animals, gold, and other objects, slaughtering a whole bunch of people, and capturing all the surviving women and children and then killing off all the boys and non-virgin women, are then going to treat the virgins with dignity.

 

Well silly me. Soldiers just off the battlefield never rape women. And of course, any virgin Midianite girl, whose family has been slaughtered by a bunch of marauding Israelites, would certainly become a platonic friend of an Israelite soldier. (And we all know that a virgin makes a great tennis partner.)
 

[Weezer]

4 minutes ago, older said:

Well I don’t know if this would be number one, but it is one that I find hilarious. We all have heard about how the Israelites were sent by God to kill all the Midianites including the boys and non-virgin girls, and that these soldiers were also told to keep the virgin girls for themselves.

 

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, what could an army of 12,000 men possibly want with 32,000 virgins? (This seems complicated. 12,000 men and 32,000 virgins works out to 2.66 virgins per soldier. I can't quite visualize that. Perhaps the officers got more than two and the enlisted men got two or less. But I digress.)

Well here’s the answer from Freethinkingministries.com:

 

Let’s go back to the text. Does it say what the Israelites could do with the virgins? No. Does the word “rape” appear? No. Of course my objector thought the worst, that they were to be kept as sex slaves or something. But they could have become tennis partners or platonic friends. Thus, there is nothing at face value that compels us to think these women were raped.

…
While it was common for other nations to rape female POWs, there is NO reason to think the Israelite men raped the Midianite virgins.
…
[T]hese women would have been treated with dignity and there was provision for them to become integrated into the Israelite society.

 

So let me get this right. This army, after invading the Midianite community, burning all the towns and camps and plundering all the animals, gold, and other objects, slaughtering a whole bunch of people, and capturing all the surviving women and children and then killing off all the boys and non-virgin women, are then going to treat the virgins with dignity.

 

Well silly me. Soldiers just off the battlefield never rape women. And of course, any virgin Midianite girl, whose family has been slaughtered by a bunch of marauding Israelites, would certainly become a platonic friend of an Israelite soldier. (And we all know that a virgin makes a great tennis partner.)
 

 

A truely pathetic example of christian denial of reality.

[Weezer]

31 minutes ago, Weezer said:

 

A truely pathetic example of christian denial of reality.

 

I don't think it was from the same website you visited, but a couple of years ago I presented a similar question to a christian answer site .  The quy who answered my question said God was justified in doing what he did because the Cannanites were so sinful.  And when I mentioned the innocent children, he said they would have grown up to be just like their parents, so god was justified.  About the virgins, he said that gods ways were not always the same as mans ways. 

 

Christians with those attitudes are a really dangerous robots.  

[♦ Fuego ♦]

I asked the same question about the girls once on a forum. I could tell there was an in-crowd on the forum that responded "Israel was forbidden from raping." Sure, they became their "wives" like the Vikings and other tribes did with raids. It's a naive attitude, and actual scholars are more "of course they raped them, and then they became wives by default". Just like in the Mosaic law, a rapist has to marry the girl. 

 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

I think the Bible itself contains one of the worst apologetics. Paul, raised to be a pharisee with all kinds of religious rules, makes an appeal to nature to prove that men should not have long hair. 

"Does not nature itself teach you that for a man to wear long hair is degrading to him, 15 but if a woman has long hair, it is her pride? For her hair is given to her for a covering. 16 If any one is disposed to be contentious, we recognize no other practice, nor do the churches of God." 

 

In nature, females tend to be drab while males are colorful. Male lions have the big manes, while females are butch. Horses are about equal, though males have thicker manes. Gorillas all have short hair, but males have somewhat longer hair. Long hair was given to her as a covering? So what about clothing? And why does male hair grow as long if god didn't want it that way? And what is long? He doesn't really say. Pathetic argument, and then he gets all pissy about not arguing with him. Again, pathetic argument. 

[TheRedneckProfessor]

7 hours ago, Fuego said:

Paul, raised to be a pharisee with all kinds of religious rules, makes an appeal to nature to prove that men should not have long hair. 

When I look back on the bible from the vantage point of objective skepticism, a lot of what "Paul" wrote sounds like something somebody made up in the spur of the moment because they didn't have a real answer but needed to be in control and sound like they knew what they were talking about. 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Putting Paul in quotes is correct, because there are epistles in his name that are probably from someone else. The whole idea of him even being an apostle when he never met Jesus outside of a mystical vision really seems to have stuck in the craw of the ones that did know Jesus in person, if that part even happened. Paul barely mentions Jesus as a man. His version of the religion seems different than the other apostles. And they barely seem to do anything compared with Paul, who kind of took over the whole thing and exported it to Gentiles. Some great vids by Ehrman and others on YT about whether or not Jesus was just a local failed apocalyptic preacher, or if he was a contrived person based on previous myths, or some kind of mishmash of both. 

[Wertbag]

20 hours ago, older said:

T]hese women would have been treated with dignity and there was provision for them to become integrated into the Israelite society.

Isn't it strange that the little boys and babies couldn't be integrated into Israelite society, but virgin girls could?  And for girls, the act of having sex makes them unable to be integrated?  If this was really about saving those who were innocent then it wouldn't have been by sex and wouldn't have mattered if they were virgins.  

[older]

Thinking some more about this virgin thing, if each soldier in the 12,000-man army got two virgins out of the total of 32,000, that would leave 8000 virgins left over. But if those 8000 were divided equally among the 12,000 soldiers, each soldier would have to share a virgin with two other guys. Somehow that doesn't seem right. Doesn't that ruin the whole idea of having a virgin? So then what criteria should be used to decide how to divide up the remainder? And isn't 32,000 extra girls suddenly coming into the Israelite society going to cause a collapse of the market for girls?

 

I think I'm going to take some aspirin and lie down for a while.

[chatpilot69]

I think the absolute worst argument for God is the teleological argument or the argument from design. Mainly because it ignores all the disorder in the world and the universe. God did it in my mind is always the wrong answer. I remember my sister referring to the so called "miracle of birth." I replied there is no miracle there that is entirely a natural process that is well understood by science. She insisted that I was wrong and continues in her ignorance to this day!