How God could fail to convey His message?

Is there a God? If so, what is She like?

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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:06 am
So you believe there are Christian ideologies that contradict my understanding that we should adhere to 10 commandments and believe in the words of Christ as expressed in the Gospels? Please to extrapolate on these 'other' ideologies!
I don't believe what you claim here I believe. I did say that your stated ideals were UNIVERSAL, and then I said there were other Christian ideals that are not universal.

The proof for the latter is the proliferation of Christian sects, from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, to Protestantism, to Evangelistic sects.

If the entire body of the Christian teaching was universal, then there would be no splintering.

But there is splintering.

Therefore, while there are universal ideals common to each, there are non-universal features of Christian teaching as well. This is what I object to.

The ideals you mentioned I never said they were non-universal. Please check the wording of my previous post. You actually applied a Strawman argument there. You claimed something that I had said which I did not say, you proved the thing I did not claim false, and you declared victory.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

Post by attofishpi »

-1- wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:13 am
attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:06 am
So you believe there are Christian ideologies that contradict my understanding that we should adhere to 10 commandments and believe in the words of Christ as expressed in the Gospels? Please to extrapolate on these 'other' ideologies!
I don't believe what you claim here I believe. I did say that your stated ideals were UNIVERSAL, and then I said there were other Christian ideals that are not universal.

The proof for the latter is the proliferation of Christian sects, from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, to Protestantism, to Evangelistic sects.

If the entire body of the Christian teaching was universal, then there would be no splintering.

But there is splintering.

Therefore, while there are universal ideals common to each, there are non-universal features of Christian teaching as well. This is what I object to.

The ideals you mentioned I never said they were non-universal. Please check the wording of my previous post. You actually applied a Strawman argument there. You claimed something that I had said which I did not say, you proved the thing I did not claim false, and you declared victory.
I am victorious. The fact that the religion has 'splintered' is simply because humans are fickle about such matters, and often has been politically motivated - it has nothing to do with a poorly conveyed message.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:16 am I am victorious. The fact that the religion has 'splintered' is simply because humans are fickle about such matters, and often has been politically motivated - it has nothing to do with a poorly conveyed message.
How can man be fickle if a simple or complex, but non-ambiguous truth was presented to him, in proper language? If he accepted a text written so, then there would be no splintering.

For instance, everyone agrees that humans are or can be fickle. But nobody misunderstands that. Not even the most fickle ones would splinter over whether we as a species are fickle or not.

The Bible has, however, failed in imbuing the same faith in all humans who read it as if it were Gospel.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 2:29 am
-1- wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 2:19 am Yeah, there are stupid people, who use emoticons, and there are smart people, who are first to point that out, but we still don't have an answer to how god had been unable to intelligently pronounce the things he wanted to say, and why he defaulted to a self-contradictory and unclear text as his message.

I am an atheist, and I believe there is no god. However, I do appreciate that the possibility exists that there is a certain number of gods.

This is not a belief, purely, but an intelligent guess, that worshipping on the basis of the bible is a hugely flawed thing.

And finally, if the bible is indeed the true source of worship, then I insist that the god that inspired it has been a not very intelligent god, not even by human standards.

Lastly: Barring that, meaning if he is really intelligent, then the literary and informative mistake we call the bible has been inspired by god to be written by incredibly untalented people.
Yes, but to the contrary I've known a 'God' of some sort to exist since 'it' made 'itself' fully aware to me in '97, and every year since.
Knowing god immediately after getting knock on the head does not help your case. And ignoring -1- 's point in his post reduces your case to zero.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:16 am
-1- wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:13 am
attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:06 am
So you believe there are Christian ideologies that contradict my understanding that we should adhere to 10 commandments and believe in the words of Christ as expressed in the Gospels? Please to extrapolate on these 'other' ideologies!
I don't believe what you claim here I believe. I did say that your stated ideals were UNIVERSAL, and then I said there were other Christian ideals that are not universal.

The proof for the latter is the proliferation of Christian sects, from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, to Protestantism, to Evangelistic sects.

If the entire body of the Christian teaching was universal, then there would be no splintering.

But there is splintering.

Therefore, while there are universal ideals common to each, there are non-universal features of Christian teaching as well. This is what I object to.

The ideals you mentioned I never said they were non-universal. Please check the wording of my previous post. You actually applied a Strawman argument there. You claimed something that I had said which I did not say, you proved the thing I did not claim false, and you declared victory.
I am victorious. The fact that the religion has 'splintered' is simply because humans are fickle about such matters, and often has been politically motivated - it has nothing to do with a poorly conveyed message.
Not everyone is willing to receive a knock on the head to receive the one true message of God, like you did.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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Hobbes' Choice wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 5:01 pmKnowing god immediately after getting knock on the head does not help your case.
How many times have I gone over this for you Hobbes? You really do lack basic English comprehension.

Once again, I have known God to exist since 1997.
On the morning of Nov 13 2005 I climbed out of bed and the words "tonight, bad luck" were said to me from the aether. That night I was assaulted and had my ARM broken. After leaving hospital and attempting to get some sleep in my own bed, I kept being awoken by an energy surge. I called out "Who are you, are you God?" and the voice from the aether replied, "I am a sage."

Stop wasting my fucking time you wanker.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 5:46 pm
Hobbes' Choice wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 5:01 pmKnowing god immediately after getting knock on the head does not help your case.
How many times have I gone over this for you Hobbes? You really do lack basic English comprehension.

Once again, I have known God to exist since 1997.
On the morning of Nov 13 2005 I climbed out of bed and the words "tonight, bad luck" were said to me from the aether. That night I was assaulted and had my ARM broken. After leaving hospital and attempting to get some sleep in my own bed, I kept being awoken by an energy surge. I called out "Who are you, are you God?" and the voice from the aether replied, "I am a sage."

Stop wasting my fucking time you wanker.
Where was god when you were attacked?
And you do know that a knock on the head can give you false memories don't you?
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

Post by attofishpi »

Hobbes' Choice wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 5:59 pm
attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 5:46 pm
Hobbes' Choice wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 5:01 pmKnowing god immediately after getting knock on the head does not help your case.
How many times have I gone over this for you Hobbes? You really do lack basic English comprehension.

Once again, I have known God to exist since 1997.
On the morning of Nov 13 2005 I climbed out of bed and the words "tonight, bad luck" were said to me from the aether. That night I was assaulted and had my ARM broken. After leaving hospital and attempting to get some sleep in my own bed, I kept being awoken by an energy surge. I called out "Who are you, are you God?" and the voice from the aether replied, "I am a sage."

Stop wasting my fucking time you wanker.
Where was god when you were attacked?
And you do know that a knock on the head can give you false memories don't you?
God was holding a baseball bat.
I only received a broken nose where the arm I used to break the impact clashed with my KNOWS.

I have had almost daily interaction with God\sage since 1997, the fact that you are a short-sighted atheist that seems to think he has a good grasp of sub-atomic reality and therefore ALL my memories feeding back to October 1997 are a result of a broken nose really does render you fucking stupid.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 6:08 pm God was holding a baseball bat.
I only received a broken nose where the arm I used to break the impact clashed with my KNOWS.
I think you've said all I need to hear.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

Post by attofishpi »

Hobbes' Choice wrote: Tue Oct 17, 2017 10:01 am
attofishpi wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 6:08 pm God was holding a baseball bat.
I only received a broken nose where the arm I used to break the impact clashed with my KNOWS.
I think you've said all I need to hear.
Jesus, I didn't realise the forum had sound effects.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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-1- wrote: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:23 am How can man be fickle if a simple or complex, but non-ambiguous truth was presented to him, in proper language? If he accepted a text written so, then there would be no splintering.
This is a good question.
The Bible has, however, failed in imbuing the same faith in all humans who read it as if it were Gospel.
Do you believe that to believe the Bible shows some sort of "bad faith" on the part of the humans who read it? (Your "as if" suggests that maybe you do, and that maybe you think it's somehow "bad" to listen to the Bible in that way; correct me if I misunderstand, of course.)

If you do, you've just answered your own question -- namely, human beings are (to use your word) "fickle", and sometimes refuse to hear what they should hear, and what they could hear, if they actually chose to listen in a fair-minded attitude.

But whether or not a hearer will hear is dependent on the disposition of the hearer, not just the message. The message, "Your house is on fire" may be perfectly lucid and clear; and yet a resident of the house may decide it's merely a metaphor, that it's not true, or that he dislikes the messenger and wishes to twit him by ignoring him.

Jesus said, "Let him who has ears to hear, hear." Everybody has ears. Everybody could choose to hear. Not everybody Is willing to hear.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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Immanuel Can wrote: Wed Oct 18, 2017 1:59 pm Jesus said, "Let him who has ears to hear, hear." Everybody has ears. Everybody could choose to hear. Not everybody Is willing to hear.
Your entire message was nice rhetoric, but what about the 2 billion Christians who all desperately strain their ears to hear the sound, and they are WILLING and they do choose to hear... yet they do not hear universally.

You can't argue that their life circumstances and their personality development made them listen different ways. You could argue that if the text was unambiguous and universal; but it is not, and therefore your nice rhetoric has not diminished my argument even a small bit.

In other words, if you applied a randomized plot design test to understanders of the Bible and their interpretation, you'd find that there are tenets differing from each other between sects of Christians which is not due to randomization. If the "hearing" was imperfect, or largely inadequate, then the effect of "fickleness" would be random. But it is not. Yet the effect is different between any two given sects of Christianity, put side-to-side for comparison.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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Duplicate post.
Last edited by Immanuel Can on Fri Oct 20, 2017 2:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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-1- wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 12:49 am ...what about the 2 billion Christians who all desperately strain their ears to hear the sound, and they are WILLING and they do choose to hear... yet they do not hear universally.

In other words, if you applied a randomized plot design test to understanders of the Bible and their interpretation, you'd find that there are tenets differing from each other between sects of Christians which is not due to randomization. If the "hearing" was imperfect, or largely inadequate, then the effect of "fickleness" would be random. But it is not. Yet the effect is different between any two given sects of Christianity, put side-to-side for comparison.
Imagine yourself walking around in a foreign country. You hear that they have a game they love -- call it "splatball." You hear that the nation is mad for it.

So you're walking by a huge stadium, and hear a great roar go up. But you're not in the stadium. You don't know the game or the rules. You just know it's a splatball stadium.

How many people are playing on the field? How many are just waiting to get on the field, but are legitimately on the team? How many are officially on the team, but aren't doing anything about it? How many are on waivers or injured reserve? How many should be?

How many support workers are there, like coaches, trainers and assistants? Are they "on" the team? And how many people are just fans, who say they are "with" that team, but are no more than hangers on?

You would never know. You could never know. You don't know splatball.

You would need to know a) the rules, and b) the condition of the individual persons in the stadium.

But one thing for sure: to assume that every person who came out of that stadium was actually a splatball player would be foolish -- even if they came out cheering, waving flags and screaming. If some of them had uniforms, how would you know which were players? And the fat jokers with their bodies painted blue -- are they players, or just fans? And for which team? Are there teams? :shock:

You see, just as not everybody who calls himself a "Christian" is actually one, so too there are groups that are genuinely Christian, and those who are so only in name -- but without the essential practices or beliefs that make a Christian a Christian. You may say, "Well, they CALL themselves Christians," but what do you know? You're not even in the stadium. You have no idea.

So don't judge by "sects": judge us all by the degree to which we obey what is clearly taught in Scripture. It's nowhere near so hard to figure it out as you seem to be imagining. But you'd have to know what Christians really are in order to see that. From outside, you would really have no way to judge.
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Re: How God could fail to convey His message?

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Immanuel Can wrote: Fri Oct 20, 2017 2:32 pm You see, just as not everybody who calls himself a "Christian" is actually one, so too there are groups that are genuinely Christian, and those who are so only in name -- but without the essential practices or beliefs that make a Christian a Christian. You may say, "Well, they CALL themselves Christians," but what do you know? You're not even in the stadium. You have no idea.

So don't judge by "sects": judge us all by the degree to which we obey what is clearly taught in Scripture. It's nowhere near so hard to figure it out as you seem to be imagining. But you'd have to know what Christians really are in order to see that. From outside, you would really have no way to judge.
This is the longest-standing faulty reasoning by any and every Christian. You can only see its fault as an outsider. Each Christian will swear and actually defend his or her faith by arms that he or she is the follower of the ONLY true version of Christianity. You Christians discount each other's strength and trueness of belief. This is not good, man, this is not good. No two atheists have ever disagreed on the tenets of their beliefs. Yet Christians' only plausible defense of lack of unity is that other sects are not true believers.

Bah! Your argument can only be proven and it can only prove the trueness of the scriptures, if a positive reinforcement by logic can be found. But it can't be found. The Faith of A Catholic Christian is the same as the faith of an Evangelist Christian: both are based on the bible, yet they are different.

Of course the Evangelist will argue that the Catholic faith is based on other things as well as the bible; and the Catholic believer will argue that the Evangelists are heretics.

This is why I decry your faith, or the strength of the bible: Christians can't agree on their most sacred thing, on their faith, and they blame other followers for it, who otherwise have the same right to claim their own sect to be the only true one.

To make things worse, the believers truly believe that other sects' followers are horribly wrong. It takes an outsider to see that you are all different, and yet you each claim the one book to be the source of your faith. To an outsider Christian Faith X is equivalent to Christian Faith Y, inasmuch as both are based on the life of Christ. To each Christian, whether he belong to version A, B, C... or X or Y their own version is the only unassailable faith.

However, there is a tenet in logic, "Nothing can both be true and not true at the same time and in the same respect." This is the law of the excluded middle. Christianity proves itself wrong, without any outside pressure, by being the same and different as itself and from itself at the same time and in the same respect.

This is why I say that the word of god as spelled out in the Gospels is a proof that God failed to convey his message. It may mean other, more plausible things, of course, as well: for instance, that he does not exist, and the entire exercise of believing that the bible is written by people inspired by god is wrong, a mistake, a hyped-up faux faith, and this makes more and more sense to a lot more people than before.
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