It is freeing to recognize that I have never sinned and it pissed Christians off when I say this. To clarify, in Christianity sin is not simply “the bad things we do” it is specifically an offense against god. God does not exists so i have never sinned against him.
I’ve been an atheist for for 16 years but it was only recently that I realized this distinction. It short-circuits the guilt based evangelism. It forces the christian to first demonstrate that god exists before they can convince me I have sinned and need to be saved from that sin. And to say the least, they are ill equipped to demonstrate the existence of god.
I know you’re illustrating the circular logic at play here. But don’t these people ask how the words got onto paper? Like didn’t Yahweh need a scribe and a printing press or something? And which version did he write anyway? The ancient Greek one? The King James version from well over a millennium later? The modern one used at their local church?
I had a couple Christian missionaries ring my doorbell last week and I brought some of that up.
She was reading from the King James New Testament I think… I asked her who controlled the text between the time God wrote it and today. She didn’t have an answer and seemed confused as to why I was asking.
I said that the message of the Bible has been controlled by the Church or the State since its inception, and both of those entities have an acute interest in guiding the will of the people, for good or for ill, depending on when and where. It’s how society has always worked.
I asked if she could see how that message could have been altered over time in the interest of maintaining a complacent (I didn’t say it, but also “ignorant”) populace. Needless to say, it wasn’t very effective.
If they aren’t allowed to question it, then you aren’t allowed to question them on it. That must make them feel powerful.
What’s really fun is that I’ve talked to Christians who have told me in all seriousness that the King James Bible is the “correct” version and all others, including all those that predate it, are wrong.
I assume some Christians who speak German say the same thing about whatever German edition they consider to be the “correct” one.
I don’t get it, but that is really what they believe. That it wasn’t the true Bible until it was put into English.
The original Klingon is obviously the correct version.
Oh no! That means all those millions of people that read it in Aramaic or Greek had the wrong version and are in hell now. Bummer for them.
god’s version was like a shitty draft of short stories and some people made a really terrible translation of it and tried to tie it all together in the same universe
Like how Nintendo tries to say the Zelda series is cohesive, lol
(Except Zelda is amazing, imo)
Hey, if you take out all of the preachy bullshit, the Bible has a lot of pretty amazing stories too. The entire world drowns except for one family and a boat full of animals. A lady turns into a pillar of salt. A group of people try to build a tower, but can’t finish it because suddenly everyone speaks a different language. That’s just in the first chapter.
So maybe we can look at the Bible as someone playing Zelda games, but really badly.
I don’t think you’ll ever convince me the Noah’s Ark story isn’t hot garbage. It’s like the shittiest knockoff version of the flood myths from thousands of years prior because someone wanted to shoehorn it into the Bible. Even if we accept it as myth, the water didn’t form the earth or give birth to any primordial gods or anything, it was just Yahweh having a childish ecocidal tantrum.
I don’t know, I think the childish ecological tantrum part of the story is part of what makes it interesting, divorced from the religious context. Angry gods are more interesting than benevolent ones, at least to me. And sure, it was a derivative story, but so what? So was much of Shakespeare. I would suggest to you that the very fact that it was derivative is evidence that people think it’s a good story.
Sure, but that’s also in some of the older, better versions. Noah’s flood has the extra tacked on crap about the boat and gathering two of each animal, as if somehow any of that is plausible or sensible. This isn’t Shakespeare putting an interesting new spin on the tale of Julius Caesar, IMO it’s just sad.
I don’t think you can look to Iron Age mythology for plausibility and sensibility.
My favorite is when Lots daughters got him fucked up and rode his cock.