As a christian.

[Seducio]

Originally Posted by Lune [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Satan as a concept is super cool though so score 1 for Christians

Pretty sure the Gnostics created that and the other Christians killed them for it.

Also most modern Chistians understand of the bible as a version is closer to Milton's Paradise Lost as compared to what the original writers said in the gospels written in aramaic.

[Lune]

Originally Posted by Seducio [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Pretty sure the Gnostics created that and the other Christians killed them for it.

Also most modern Chistians understand of the bible as a version is closer to Milton's Paradise Lost as compared to what the original writers said in the gospels written in aramaic.

That would be a product of the immense amount of telephone that got played with Christianity in the West, and particularly the US; from a Roman cult, to catholicism, to protestantism and all its variations for the germanic and nordic cultures, carried across the Atlantic in the hands of religious dissidents to eventually go through the Great Awakening and become evangelicalism. Really all just products of a Christian essence applied to different cultures... orthodox in the east, coptics, etc. You end up with this truly wild take on Christianity

The views on Satan almost feel pagan in influence, like Christmas and Easter.

[Seducio]

Mos def. Monotheism has created a paradigm for humans in the last several thousand years with tremendous evolutionary fitness. Basically god believing babes bang way more than secular babes.

[Seducio]

Part of why they might (the high level of banging that religious babes engage in) is that Christianity has been infused with all sorts of really cool pagan concepts because the pagans that Christians met along the way had more kids with them initially. If you can't beat them have their customs join yours. So Christianity adopted their heroes and their holidays for the express purpose of having higher rates of sexual moments and that is still a part of what it means to be Christian.

That Christmas Party that your company is throwing for the team this year. Remember to thank the pagans while celebrating a fake date of when a guy was born.

Humans are incredible story tellers.

[Lune]

Originally Posted by Seducio [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Part of why they might (the high level of banging that religious babes engage in) is that Christianity has been infused with all sorts of really cool pagan concepts because the pagans that Christians met along the way had more kids with them initially. If you can't beat them have their customs join yours. So Christianity adopted their heroes and their holidays for the express purpose of having higher rates of sexual moments and that is still a part of what it means to be Christian.

That Christmas Party that your company is throwing for the team this year. Remember to thank the pagans while celebrating a fake date of when a guy was born.

Humans are incredible story tellers.

And thus 'fairy tale' is exceedingly apt for organized religion if you're gonna be harsh. There is such strong natural selection inherent in stories over time, especially apparent when you look at actual fairy tales. These are stories that are thought to have existed in some form for thousands of years, and have been whittled down to the most highly viral story structure when retold, over countless retellings. Japan ended up with an alternate version of basically Cindarella, and One Thousand and One Nights is highly syncretic across the entire middle east.

[Seducio]

Originally Posted by magnetaress [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How do you deal with athiests or satanists who don't want to understand you, disrespect you and your boundaries, and lack all integrity and trust worthiness?

To give OP an honest response. Your faith would perhaps say turning the other cheek and that the meek will inherit the earth. Your answer is in heaven not here. As in the answer lies when you reach the divine presence in heaven. On the other hand worldly wisdom would suggest The Golden Rule.

If you want wisdom from your own faith then forgiveness is the answer. And prayer. The whole 'what would Jesus do' thing? Ultimately though since you are endowed with free will according to Christian faith you ultimately get to decide. And you will be judged regardless of your decision and also forgiven.

The cosmopolitanism of the The Golden Rule says to do under others as you would want to have done unto you. For this reason the Golden Rule will exist long after all of us are gone also. Humans thousands of years from now will be asking the same question you just asked. Including Christians. Christianity will be around for a long long time. Have solace in that.

The historical perspective is to procreate your way to victory. We usually just hear about the wars instead though.

[Seducio]

Very last bit of advice would be if OP is actually serious which I honestly can't tell for this one.

Go speak to your trusted advisor in whatever faith you prescribe.

If you don't have a priest/rabbi/something like that then talk to the person who shares your beliefs that you most admire and is good an communicating with you.

Someone you would listen to.

If all that is something you have no interest in then try this: When was the last time you laughed? Go watch a killer standup comedy and laugh your brains out. Works wonders.

[Ruien]

Not even atheists believe that the universe came from nothing, but the quantum fields and eternal inflation they postulate must have existed in order to produce such a universe are no less incredible.

But the real difficult problem that atheists and agnostics struggle to account for is something called the "fine-tuning of observability". Suppose there are an infinite number of universes produced in sequence- most of them dead- but a select few with the perfect fundamental constants exist somewhere, and those eventually beget life. By the anthropic principle it is unsurprising that we find ourselves in a universe that supports complex life, no matter how rare or unlikely the odds.

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of these life-supporting universes only barely do (with relatively high entropy), but we find ourselves in a much-better-than-typical universe in which it is even possible to discern that the universe had a beginning. See [1], [2], and [3]. Now, an intentional creator God would be interested in the universe being observable, so that his divine nature could be seen from the things that were made [4]. No natural explanation remains for why our universe is exceedingly low-entropy and highly-observable except that it was intentional.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0208013.pdf (Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant), Dyson, Stanford University
[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.08448.pdf (Relative Likelihood for Life as a Function of Cosmic Time), Loeb, Harvard University
[3]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0704.0221.pdf (The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology), Krauss, Case Western Reserve University
[4]: Romans 1:20 (CSB): For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.


The above outlines the background and reasonableness of theism but it does not say anything about Christianity being true compared to any other religion. The veracity of Christianity depends entirely on the truth of the physical resurrection of Jesus circa AD 33. The stories of the resurrection were not oral tradition passed down for generations before finally being recorded centuries later. Mark was written in the AD 60's- a fact not even disputed by secular biblical scholars.
The issue that agnostics and detractors struggle with here is this: There hasn't been any successful alternative theory as to how this group of defeated apostles radically changed and took their conviction to their grave even under persecution. There have been many attempts (stolen body, swoon theory, conspiracy theory, etc) but they do not hold up under scrutiny. Liars make terrible martyrs. (and even the concept of a resurrected messiah was utterly foreign to first-century Jews). [5]

[5]: A fun illustration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23UNLLbOS3w

Ultimately, sure- some things may have been lost or altered in translation/transmission, and Jesus was probably not born on Dec 25. But these end up just being nit-picks- a distraction, and nothing more, and they're not significant enough to change the conclusions above.

So, how do I deal with athiests or satanists who don't want to understand / disrespect / etc? You just give the best evidence you can and that's good enough. Rejection is not something to be scared of- it's sometimes just part of the process[6]. If something is true, disbelieving it doesn't make it disappear. I cannot imagine standing before the throne of God with a defense of "I ignored everything, and so I didn't know."

[6]: See the entirety of Mark 5 for examples of this.

[Seducio]

Thanks for giving it a shot. You appear to find what you have said compelling.

I don't find what you wrote compelling.

You're probably a cool dude though.

[Seducio]

Put 100 random atheists in a room and test their individual belief structures via written test. The results might not look like they all believe the same thing. The atheists most likely would disagree with each other as much as they would with believers.

Put 100 random Christians in a room and test their individual belief structures via written test. The results might not look like they all believe the same thing. They would disagree with each other despite being all Christian. Hence there are all the different churches and sects of Christianity.

What you find is each individual human has a belief structure that differs enough that the label given cannot account for the complete world view that each human has.

As best as I can tell most humans that call themself Christian do it as virtue signal not as a matter of what they believe in their day to day behavior. Rather it is a signal to others in their community that they share the same beliefs so they can belong.

That Christian virtue signal use to carry more weight in USA than it currently does and so some folks are struggling on how to act in the current environment because it used to be simple to just be on the right team. It's harder to tell now. The Woke virtue signal is going through a similar mea culpa on the left as people are questioning whether that is the right team also.

Confirmation bias is the default for humans. The wiser among us attack our own beliefs with all we've got. Whatever survives is what was actually strong enough within us in the first place.

In the age of information I have awareness that the amount of information available is doubling at astronomical rate. If I were a Christian I wouldn't be worried about atheists. I would be worried about AI creating a better story of heaven.