Conclusive proof that Jesus was NOT divine

[Mike Cl]

Arguing with Protestants about infant baptism and transubstantiation gets old after awhile.

Really?  Yeah, I can imagine.  I've had my times on various forums, so I know the feeling.  So, you're just bored.  But the fact that christians of various stripes can argue about minute details such as baptism or transubstantiation underlines one of the reasons I don't believe in any god--not just yours.  But yours created mankind after "us" and "we" found the creation good.  I've often wondered who those were in Gen. 1--; but anyway, I digress.  So, your god created humans to look like god (or gods according to Gen. 1).  Why only in the Mid East?  Why is this all such a mystery--one so convoluted that literally thousands of christian sects have evolved from those writings?  Why not make the message crystal clear, and make it for all time, for all when and for all where--so that even those isolated tribes deep within the Amazon Jungle would know of this power, his love, his rules?  Why are missionaries even needed?  Why churches?  Don't tell me that god is not capable of doing that.  Don't tell me that it is just free will--can't be free will if all are not equally informed.  All this just smacks of human creation.  So far, that's what I have found no matter where in christian history I look--humans playing power politics.

[Randy Carson]

Really?  Yeah, I can imagine.  I've had my times on various forums, so I know the feeling.  So, you're just bored. 

Bored with that, yes. Bored with learning the weaknesses of atheist arguments, no. I'm like a kid with a new video game...exploring and leveling up as I master new skills and material.

But the fact that christians of various stripes can argue about minute details such as baptism or transubstantiation underlines one of the reasons I don't believe in any god--not just yours. 

That's like saying that you don't like women because they don't where the same perfume and shade of lipstick. Christians may not all agree on the filioque, but we are all down for the resurrection.

So, your god created humans to look like god (or gods according to Gen. 1).  Why only in the Mid East? 

Simple. He molded a relatively small group of people in preparation for the incarnation, and that takes time.

Why is this all such a mystery--one so convoluted that literally thousands of christian sects have evolved from those writings?  Why not make the message crystal clear, and make it for all time, for all when and for all where--so that even those isolated tribes deep within the Amazon Jungle would know of this power, his love, his rules?  Why are missionaries even needed?  Why churches?  Don't tell me that god is not capable of doing that.  Don't tell me that it is just free will--can't be free will if all are not equally informed.  All this just smacks of human creation.  So far, that's what I have found no matter where in christian history I look--humans playing power politics.

God is capable, but he chose to covenant Himself with a single people, the Jews, in order to prepare for the Incarnation.

Then God established the Church as an offshoot of the original covenant, and commissioned the Church to take the message to the rest of the world. Just as God gives a man and a woman the ability to share in His creative process when they produce a child, so He allows us to participate in His plan of salvation, also.

It's worked amazingly well given the success of Christianity over the past 2,000 years. Perhaps He knew what He was doing after all.

[Baruch]

The original covenant was a lie from a book.  A new covenant based on that ... is going to be a joke.  The Jews and G-d have proven repeatedly, that there is no original covenant.  The Christians and G-d have proven repeatedly, that there is no new covenant either.  The institutional religion of both parties, has been mostly in vain.

[Baruch]

"But yours created mankind after "us" and "we" found the creation good." ... not hard to understand in the original Hebrew, and if you get past the lies of the rabbis.  Originally one of the names of G-d was "Elohim" which is a masculine/generic plural.  This was converted semantically but not grammatically ... into singular.  This happened after the return of the Babylonian Exiles, who invented Torah Judaism while in Babylon.  Before the Babylonian Exile, almost all Jews were polytheists, not monotheists.  The interpretation, if not the words, of scripture had to be edited to fit in with the new ideology.

Note ... in Hebrew and many other languages ... the male gender is not only masculine, but gender indefinite.  There is only a specifically feminine form to apply, if all members of the group of things or people being discussed, are feminine.  Otherwise masculine gender is the default ... as it still is in the old word "mankind" meaning people in general, not just men.  There are a number of such curiosities in Biblical Hebrew, that betray profound agendas.

[Baruch]

Arguing with Protestants about infant baptism and transubstantiation gets old after awhile.

Arguing about infant baptism is so infantile ... bwaaaaa

Transubstantiation developed in the Early Middle Ages ... it isn't Biblical, except that Pagans falsely accused early Christians of being cannibals.  Are you saying the pagans were right?

[Hakurei Reimu]

You know you're up shit creek when you're a christian and the resident theist tells you you're full of crap.

[Mike Cl]

God is capable, but he chose to covenant Himself with a single people, the Jews, in order to prepare for the Incarnation.

An observation, if I may, Randy.  You are a vain, small and arrogant sort of a person. 

And it is simply amazing how you can read the mind of your god and just know what it is he planned and how he planned it.  Just more proof that your god is a fiction crafted by man.

[reasonist]

"But yours created mankind after "us" and "we" found the creation good." ... not hard to understand in the original Hebrew, and if you get past the lies of the rabbis.  Originally one of the names of G-d was "Elohim" which is a masculine/generic plural.  This was converted semantically but not grammatically ... into singular.  This happened after the return of the Babylonian Exiles, who invented Torah Judaism while in Babylon.  Before the Babylonian Exile, almost all Jews were polytheists, not monotheists.  The interpretation, if not the words, of scripture had to be edited to fit in with the new ideology.

Note ... in Hebrew and many other languages ... the male gender is not only masculine, but gender indefinite.  There is only a specifically feminine form to apply, if all members of the group of things or people being discussed, are feminine.  Otherwise masculine gender is the default ... as it still is in the old word "mankind" meaning people in general, not just men.  There are a number of such curiosities in Biblical Hebrew, that betray profound agendas.

Wasn't that a bad turn in human history when the Messianists replaced the Hellenists.

[Blackleaf]

There ya go! Finally the light came on! Now you know why we don't believe in this mumbo jumbo. Whatever science proposes can be tested and replicated/calculated repeatedly, which cannot be done with any of the religious claims. Science works with observation, you work with revelation. The first has verifiable facts, the latter needs blind faith. The first is the search for truth, the latter is obscurantism.
Despite your attempts to convert people on an atheist forum, I owe you a great deal of gratitude. I can't speak for anybody else here, but you prompted me to do some additional research and digging in and that had the opposite effect from what you intended. Anybody with an objective mind has to come to the same conclusion: religion is a man made racket.
The difference between us is that I (we) have an open mind to any new information. I'd like to see a loving, caring entity that protects us and helps us in time of need. Your god is a cruel monster and doesn't deserve a thought wasted, but a loving sky daddy would be cool. But such an entity would have interfered long time ago and saved us from stupid superstition.
So if you would be as open to new evidence, we wouldn't have this debate. But what you are doing is defending nonsense at any cost. How is it working for you?
See, it's not who wins or loses this exchange. It's about who has the truth through facts. You certainly don't have any, which makes you credulous and gullible.

I wish I could like this more than once. If idiots like Randy could read this and comprehend it rather than ignore it and deflect, they'd be much less idiotic.

Science is falsifiable, with scientists trying to prove themselves wrong in order to reach a more reliable conclusion. Apologists already know their conclusion, and they search for whatever "evidence" they can find to support their beliefs.

Scientists do not regard their findings as "facts." They do not prove anything; they support their hypotheses. Apologists are too arrogant to see the difference, even when it's repeatedly pointed out to them.

The differences between atheists and Christians are similar. Atheists are not biased in their lack of belief. Many would like to believe that there is a loving God watching over them, but they look around and find no reason at all to believe that such a god exists. Christians, on the other hand, are convinced that they are right, and are not even open to the possibility that they could be wrong. Each one creates their god in their own image, picking whatever verses from the Bible are convenient for them and ignoring the rest, hence why there are so many denominations. To a clear minded atheist, this is obvious, but each denomination is filled with people who are 100% sure that THEIR interpretation is the right one.

[Baruch]

Wasn't that a bad turn in human history when the Messianists replaced the Hellenists.

The devil is in the details, or course ... about 400 years worth, the inter-testamental period nobody talks about.

The Hellenists got labeled the bad guys in the Hannukah legend.  The winners write the history (Maccabees book 1, 2, 3).  The Maccabees were a bunch of Hamas terrorists ... though one has to admit that the Greek government in Antioch went out of its way to piss everyone off.  Until then, in Antioch and Alexandria in particular, there were growing populations of Greek speaking Jews, or at least bilingual in Aramaic and Greek.  This had developed strongly after Alexander's conquest and for the following 200 years.  In the meantime, there were Buddhist missionaries and Hindu fakirs in Antioch and Alexandria.  You didn't even have to travel to Babylon or India to meet some.

With the rise of the Maccabees, there was a long guerrilla war between Syria and Judea.  Judea managed to get some autonomy, because Syria developed problems elsewhere, even Roman problems.  Pretty soon Syria was a Roman province (that is why Obama is attacking it), and the autonomy of Judea became a Roman problem (see modern Israel).  As soon as Jew was fighting Jew, the Romans came in and brokered the convention, in their own favor.  Shortly afterward, they also did the same to a much larger protectorate, Egypt.  So now the three largest areas of Judaism, outside of Babylon, were Roman occupied.

There were recurring problems of course, leading to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Jewish-Roman wars.  In the 1st Jewish-Roman war and 3rd Jewish-Roman war, the Hellenizers were again on the wrong side, collaborators.  In the first war Galilee was ravaged and Jerusalem destroyed.  In the 2nd Jewish-Roman war, the Romans had temporarily gotten as far as the Persian Gulf, and started interfering in Babylon.  But it didn't last, thus a large group of anti-Roman, pro-Persian, anti-Hellenizer Jews were left intact for later fun and games (see Babylonian Talmud).  Elsewhere in that war, the Hellenizers were the target of Rome, particularly in Alexandria where they were destroyed.  The miracle of Hannukah and false messiahs was a gift that kept on giving ... so there had to be a 3rd Jewish-Roman war that destroyed Jerusalem a second time.

By this time, Gentiles in general and Romans in particular were pretty anti-Jewish for good reasons.  Surviving Jews after the 1st Roman-Jewish war, concentrated north of Jerusalem in Galilee ... and started the Jerusalem Talmud, which was never finished, and started the Jewish calendar we have today in the 4th century CE.  Once Rome went Christian, the Romans had an additional reason to hate Jews, and the Jews in Galilee and Antioch were suppressed but not massacred.  Work on the Jerusalem Talmud stopped, but the version on the Babylon Talmud was continued, out of Roman reach.  From 400 CE until 650 CE ... the Jews in Antioch were quiet, not wanting to get massacred by the Antioch Christians (ironically this is where they were first called Christians ... a Greek term of derision, meaning Messianic Maniac ... not unlike how the group that William Penn was part of became known as Quakers.  Pretty soon the Muslims arrived, taking over Babylon and Antioch, and eventually building a new capital in Baghdad, not far from Babylon.  Jews did quite a bit better under Islam than under Christianity, being seen as the same ethnicity as the Arabs, just inferior cousins.  And Aramaic is similar to Arabic ... though Hellenizers again were seen as a fifth column, because the Roman Empire was now Greek, not Latin.  Christian anti-Semitism was enhanced by the attacks of the Arabs, and by the presence of Jewish communities in those parts of the old Roman Empire that weren't Muslim.

In summary, there were Jewish Greek speakers in declining numbers all the way to the end of the 20th century.  But back in the day, most of the messianics weren't Hellenizers, they were Palestinian Jews, not unlike Hamas.  In the 1st and 3rd Jewish-Roman wars they were exterminated while awaiting miracles that never came ... because of the spin doctoring about Hannukah.  The Hellenizer messianics were pro-Roman and pacifist ... aka Pauline ... they were still guilty of a felony though ... because it was illegal to create private clubs, even religious ones, without the support of the pagan government, which views all private activity with suspicion.  Normal pagan ritual was done in public, in the open.  Not privately in someone's house church.

[Randy Carson]

An observation, if I may, Randy.  You are a vain, small and arrogant sort of a person. 

And it is simply amazing how you can read the mind of your god and just know what it is he planned and how he planned it.  Just more proof that your god is a fiction crafted by man.

What I know of this comes from reading what God has said on the matter in the scriptures. No mind reading is required.

And more ad hominems, Mike?

[u196533]

"He just operates on a different level than us. The 'source' for energy is only a valid question if there was nothing before. Surely you know that energy and matter are exchangeable, so if there was mass before the big bang, you get all the energy needed."

Just because he operates on a different level doesn't mean he can piss on my leg and tell me it's raining.  His logic is so flawed I doubt he believes it himself.  That video is like an infomercial of a celebrity endorsing a political candidate. 

Yes, converting all that matter could give you the energy needed.  (It still begs the question of the source.)  Surely you know that condensing all of that energy into a single point would be the ultimate violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.  That would clearly be supernatural.

[Mike Cl]

What I know of this comes from reading what God has said on the matter in the scriptures. No mind reading is required.

And more ad hominems, Mike?

You can't seem to get through your thick skull that I hold none of the assumptions about your god, your jesus or your religion.  I reject them all as fictional or not good.  So, reading from a fictional book about a fictional god does not inform any of my thoughts or actions. Your beliefs and faith has only served to entrench my thoughts about your fictional god and jesus even more firmly.   

[Randy Carson]

You can't seem to get through your thick skull that I hold none of the assumptions about your god, your jesus or your religion.  I reject them all as fictional or not good. 

You're kidding? All this time we've been chatting and you're just now telling me this?

So, reading from a fictional book about a fictional god does not inform any of my thoughts or actions. Your beliefs and faith has only served to entrench my thoughts about your fictional god and jesus even more firmly.

The point, Mike, is that if God exists and has all of the attributes that theists acknowledge, then:

"God is capable [of revealing himself worldwide], but he chose to covenant Himself with a single people, the Jews, in order to prepare for the Incarnation."

[marom1963]

You're kidding? All this time we've been chatting and you're just now telling me this?

The point, Mike, is that if God exists and has all of the attributes that theists acknowledge, then:

"God is capable [of revealing himself worldwide], but he chose to covenant Himself with a single people, the Jews, in order to prepare for the Incarnation."

Stingy bastard!