In a nutshell, the less you believe in Christianity, the more likely you are able to understand it. The ability to handwave and justify contradictions is erased by unbelief. That is a big plus towards a firmer reality. We’re not talking one or two contradictions, but a massive patchwork—it’s thematic
In pharmacology there are statistically not eight prescription medicines you can take without drug interaction—basically at that point, taking medication to treat side effects of medication.
Christianity’s circuitous contradictions are so frequent, they now use contradictions to explain the contradictions.
Only through unbelief can we see that this is the great mystery of the kingdom—how does he get us to do that?
This is exactly what happens when you concoct a story without thinking it through. It may sound convincing at first, but as we peel back the layers they have to add another. Today we have no other institution on earth so grand where built-in redundancy is another million volumes of contradictory explanations—per year!
Diabla cooling off after a long run up the mountain.
TheCommonAtheist 
Contradictions of contradictions of contradictions. Does that sound like something a god would have allowed? Not in an authoritative religion like the Abrahamics. God knew all, how could he have wavered on anything, or not been absolutely clear. Another proof there is no Abrahamic god.
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Things that make you go hmm? Did you know in the USA alone, there are 750,000 catalogued publications (books) written every year to explain the simplicity of the gospel? Everyone thinks they have the right wording that will crack the atheist armor (or at least drag in some disgruntled transfers from other faiths)
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Hey, the authors and publishers have a ready and willing audience. They are ready to read and willing to pay for the opportunity. A win-win situation for the providers. One would think the audience would pick up on it, but they are not able to see the hypocrisy. They are so confused they cannot see outside of their predicament.
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Seriously? Three quarters of a million published? I knew it was a lot but I didn’t know it was that bad. It’s so frustrating.
Maybe I should set up a new church worshiping Crom, Conan the Barbarian’s god. Crom is fickle, annoying, angry most of the time, doesn’t answer prayers because he doesn’t give a f*ck what kind of trouble people get themselves into, but at least he really likes having parties and sex.
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Everyone has that little twist to make it make sense. Of course most never go anywhere than a few sales, but I think people struggle to make sense of it all so they find a wording that suits them. Reasoning it out by faith is another contradiction in terms. Once you believe, you are wide open to the mind games. Really, how long will this go on? In 10,000 years of conjecture and guessing I’m pretty sure we’re beating a dead horse. The mystery is there isn’t one, although we have the capacity to imagine quite well.
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A Rational Discussion with a True Believer:
Them: The universe is 6,000 years old.
Me: Uh? We have civilizations that are older than that!
Them: No we don’t.
Me: Yes we do, we’ve done carbon 14 dating…
Them: Your dating technology is wildly inaccurate.
Me: What? No it isn’t! Look, when a living organism dies, it stops taking up carbon from its environment. Carbon 14 decays at a specific rate. We measure how much of the carbon 14 has decayed…
Them: You’re wrong. God created the universe 6,000 years ago.
Me: Okay, where does it tell you that the universe is 6,000 years old?
Them: The Bible.
Me: Uh, sorry, no, it doesn’t.
Them: Yes it does.
Me: No, it doesn’t. There isn’t a single line in the Bible that tells you how old the universe or even the world is. There just isn’t. Have you even read the thing? I have. That 6,000 year old thing is something some bishop who was bad at maths just made up off the top of his head. And even then he fudged the numbers so he’d end up with multiples of 1,000 years on certain key events.
Them: You just aren’t interpreting the Bible correctly.
Me: Interpret? What? Look, if this is the literal word of God why would he make it so it has to be interpreted? Why didn’t he just write it so people could understand what he actually said?
Them: Persecution! You’re persecuting me for my faith!
Me: Stop that right now! Stop yelling and waving that damned sign around. No one is persecuting you. Sheesh, don’t even know what the word persecution means, do you?
Them: Yes I do, and you’re doing it right now. Blasphemer! He’s persecuting me! Stone him!
Me: Oh, stop that, you silly person. Look, if the universe is six thousand years old, how do you explain stars and galaxies?
Them: Uh? Well, God created them too.
Me: At this point I don’t care if Barney created them…
Them: Blasphemy! He committed blasphemy! Stone him!
Me: Oh, stop it and put that damned rock down. Besides, that’s not a rock that’s a piece of styrofoam. You couldn’t stone a flea with that. Look, if the universe is 6,000 years old, we couldn’t see the vast majority of stars and galaxies out there. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second or something like that. I don’t have Google right now and since Google seems to have replaced most people’s brains including mine I’m not exactly sure. But look, we can see objects out there that are ten or more billions of light years away. If God created the universe 6,000 years ago, we couldn’t see objects more than 6,000 light years away because the light wouldn’t have got here yet. But we can. We can see billions of them. So the universe has to be at least as old as the farthest object we can see.
Them: Light moved faster back then.
Me: Uh? Wait, what? Where the hell did you get that from? No, it didn’t. The speed of light in a vacuum is constant. We know that.
Them: No you don’t. God made light move faster back then.
Me: Can you actually prove that?
Them: I don’t have to. God did it that way.
Me: Okay, let’s try this, then. What about fossils?
Them: What about ’em?
Me: How do you explain the fact that we have fossils that are tens of millions of years old?
Them: I don’t have to explain it because they don’t exist.
Me: Uh? What do you mean? This trilobite is…
Them: No, it isn’t. It looks like that because it was buried in sediment by the Noah’s flood.
Me: Well, if your flood took place about 500 million years ago maybe… Look, it takes thousands of years for tissues to fossilize… Look, do you even know how fossils are made?
Them: God made them to test our faith. He tests us to make sure we really believe by making fossils that only seem to be older than 6,000 years. He’s testing us to make sure we believe the Bible.
Me: The Bible doesn’t say the world is 6,000 years old! We’ve been through this before.
Them: Blasphemer! Spawn of Satan!
Me: Oh, stop that. It’s hard to have a serious discussion with you when you keep acting like that. And put down that… Why are you putting up that wooden pole with all of that wood piled up around it.
Them: Hm? Oh, never mind. I’ll be done here in a minute. Just keep going. Hey, George, you got the kerosene and kindling? Oh, don’t forget the rope. Oh, good.
Me: Look the Bible doesn’t say God planted fake fossils to test our faith. The Bible doesn’t say anything about how old the world actually is! Bishop Usher even fudged the numbers so the dates for Solomon’s temple…
Them: Usher? Who’s Bishop Usher?
Me: You don’t know… Oh dear. Okay, forget that… Never mind, I see you already have. Look, God is, well, God. He knows everything, right? If he knows everything certainly he knows if you really believe or not so he doesn’t have to test anything. He just knows.
Them: Persecution! He’s persecuting me for my belief! Blasphemer! Get the stones…
Me: Why are you tying me to that pole. Hey, watch what you’re doing with that torch! There’s wood soaked with kerosene all around here…
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An interesting thing about carbon 14, if it is wrong it’s probably wrong the other way. Things may be much older then we have supposed. But, we are at an impasse over face
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That is much closer to the truth than I’m comfortable with. It is a fine example of what we are dealing with.
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Jim, as you say, “Less belief equals more objectivity”. I imagine the people who got scammed by Bernie Madoff got the shock of objectivity which ended their dreams of riches. The scam of “belief” seems almost to be embedded in the human psyche because it has been around for so long. GROG
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Have you ever seen this fantastic interactive map of bible contradictions?
http://bibviz.com/
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I have not! But I’m about to. I knew I kept you around for a reason… Is it as interesting as the dog, Or just different?
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Dog’s lovely. Yours?
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My Daughter. They’re on vacation so I take him running twice a day up on the mount. There’s two https://share.icloud.com/photos/0HF-nAPAm7bURNJexisXJRiwA
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Gorgeous. Bet they loooove the snow.
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Much more than I do. They’re like kids in it.
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Ooh! And it comes with a poster!
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And inter-active. The active is important.
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Fantastic and overwhelming. Holy smokes. I will have to get back to it.
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Kinda’ fun, isn’t it?
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When I saw the pic of the dog I immediately thought of the one of the stoned pup in pot field.
Yes, when the questioning, studying, and doubting begin; the earth shakes. Not because a god did it, but because we did. The basis for this truth must apply to more than Christianity.
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It’s really simple actually. No matter the faith, if you can’t agree with someone outside your belief, it’s not real. Any truth would apply to an atheist as well as a baptist. Convincing them to seein’ it that way is another story. Chasing imaginations down rabbit holes really doesn’t go anywhere.
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Wait… you dogs name is she-devil?
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wow, the story that keeps on giving. you gotta appreciate the creativity😃
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Humans have great imaginations. Some people run out of blog topics. I’ve got at least a hundred more in my cue. I just happened to pick a topic that never dies (I’d be better inclined to write more short stories)
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they are all stories. weather biblical, scientific, or personal, all we have is stories. until we become…the witness of these stories 👀
is it not your birthday?
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Correct. It is not my birthday. Witnesses are unreliable. As a medic I know first hand this is a very unreliable source.
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ah, yes. but not that kind of witness. more like when one wakes up from the dream of life, or when consciousness is fully awaken. like the buddha
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I was reading about the EEG monitoring of several monks while in meditation. Their brains record the decisions several seconds prior to them being aware of it. Like the ideas are coming from elsewhere and the conscious person has a delay in the time of recognition to when the thought is actually stimulated their conscious awareness.
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yes, the mind works like an antenna that catches the thoughts. why the meditator tries to go beyond the thought, because by the time it reaches us, it’s already old news! heheh
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Learning the truth about Christianity is supposed to give believers stronger faith. But when you learn about the history of the religion and actually study the text, nothing is as we were taught. The truth is that there is nothing to back up what we’ve been taught to believe. Nothing. There is no evidence, only words in a book. Excuse after excuse. The truth reveals the lies we’ve been taught. The contradictions become impossible to ignore and the absurdity of it all is like a slap in the face, waking us from the slumber of faith.
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https://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/paine/proph.htm
This is Thomas Paine’s Examination of the Prophecies. If I had to pick something to distribute to Christians to make your point, this would be it. Reading this as a kid is what really got me questioning things. This is by far more damaging to Christianity than anything else in the Bible.
There is also an old series of Youtube videos I remember that addresses this issue at length, even including things used by Christians that are not cited in the canonical New Testament.
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Some people are so gifted to see through the deception (bullshit). Everyone should have that one friend..”What gross imposition is it to gut, as the phrase is, a verse in this manner, render it perfectly senseless, and then puff it off on a credulous world as a prophecy. I have the age of reason but have only skimmed through it. Thank you for reminding me. Spectral evidence is bad enough, but here I read the Bible with the supposition it was all true, and learned many of the cherry picked prophecies before I even read the Bible at 13. I was looking for corroboration and got it. That’s what we do with our indoctrinations from a poisoned well.
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