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The Atheist Experience


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I was good friends with an older couple. He was a WW II vet, an intellectual and as understood it, an atheist. He and his wife were very active members of the local Methodist church, which did a lot of outreach in the community. He enjoyed the intellectual debates he had with the pastor, and the pastor enjoyed them, too. It seemed to work out pretty well. The churches that embrace community in the true sense of the word are fine with me. 

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2 hours ago, Frott Scost said:


Not only is the question I posed not silly, but it is arguably the most important question in our world. 

I don’t believe your intent was silly, but as far as the question.....to you, is there a “reliable “ first hand account of anything that happened 2,000 years ago?

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2 minutes ago, Decoy73 said:

I don’t believe your intent was silly, but as far as the question.....to you, is there a “reliable “ first hand account of anything that happened 2,000 years ago?


No, which is why I dont understand why god made himself known to them, but not to us. 

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2 minutes ago, Decoy73 said:

Why don’t these accounts count?   
 


Because they werent eyewitness accounts and even if they were, eyewitness accounts arent 100% reliable. Which is why we cant convict people on eyewitness accounts alone in our court systems. 

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5 minutes ago, Frott Scost said:


No, which is why I dont understand why god made himself known to them, but not to us. 

I wonder that too. Maybe they were instructed to document it for future generations and didn’t do so as clearly as we would have liked. 

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2 minutes ago, Frott Scost said:


Because they werent eyewitness accounts and even if they were, eyewitness accounts arent 100% reliable. Which is why we cant convict people on eyewitness accounts alone in our court systems. 

Looking at it that way, how would anything not personally witnessed be believable?

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1 minute ago, Decoy73 said:

I wonder that too. Maybe they were instructed to document it for future generations and didn’t do so as clearly as we would have liked. 


So whos fault is it that these mistakes are not corrected? Let me ask you this, do you think the Judeo-Christian God is all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful. In other words does he know what is going to happen before it happens and can he minipulate the outcome if he wants to? And is every story in the bible true?

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4 minutes ago, Frott Scost said:


So whos fault is it that these mistakes are not corrected? Let me ask you this, do you think the Judeo-Christian God is all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful. In other words does he know what is going to happen before it happens and can he minipulate the outcome if he wants to? And is every story in the bible true?

Short answer:  No I do not.  

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5 minutes ago, Frott Scost said:


Pictures, historical artifacts, video, etc. 

Artifacts are just things that can be carbon dated, but the true story of their significance would rely on written accounts and/or assumptions by scientists and therefore not believable to you. Correct ?

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8 minutes ago, Frott Scost said:


Pictures, historical artifacts, video, etc. 


For all answers above?

I don’t necessarily buy into that definition of God, nor do I believe everything happened, exactly as written, in the Bible.
Although I do have questions, I don’t require myself to understand how it all went down or to truly understand how God works.   

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3 hours ago, Decoy73 said:

Artifacts are just things that can be carbon dated, but the true story of their significance would rely on written accounts and/or assumptions by scientists and therefore not believable to you. Correct ?


Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Im not saying Jesus didnt exist at all, just how do we know he was the son of God? That requires more evidence than anonymous authors, who dont cite their sources, who were not eye witnesses to the events and whos stories change from book to book. We dont have the original manuscripts. Its already been stated in this thread by Christians that the bible may have gotten things wrong and/or the translation is bad. These claims are different than say, Napolean won a war. Now we have written statements about Napolean, but the writers are not anonymous. We know Napolean existed. We know humans fight wars. Now if you told me Napolean jumped off his horse, flew through the air with his sword, landed on his enemies horse and cut him down, Id need more proof than just someone saying so, because we know, by the law of physics, that humans cant fly, so it isnt possible. Just like we have no documented proof of someone dying and rising days later. I need more than an anonymous person telling me this happened. Just like Id need more than the word of someone telling me they were abducted by aliens. And people do claim this. Do you believe them?

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2 hours ago, Decoy73 said:

I don’t necessarily buy into that definition of God, nor do I believe everything happened, exactly as written, in the Bible.
Although I do have questions, I don’t require myself to understand how it all went down or to truly understand how God works.   


Then you dont believe in the judeo christian God because thats exactly what it claims to be. All knowing and all powerful. And if hes not all knowing and all powerful then its not a god. 

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