Christianity's true origin's/Immorality

[xChrizOwnz]

Question 1:
As a young atheist, a very young one at that. (12 years old) I told my parents and my debates were too much for them to answer. Now they're trying to get preachers and other's on me. I usually focus my debates on morality and other issues of the Christian god.

However, my mom's to-be-husband gave me this question which I cannot come up to an answer to:
Where can you trace Christianity back to:
I tried to keep on telling him that it was likely Greece. However he said the Christian god can not be traced back to any time or anything of that sort. Where would you trace something like that back into. More like; what's the oldest true mention of the Judaistic faith. Who wrote that? And why, if you have a guess.

Question 2:
The good old "...he knows the reason for death, suffering, and more." argument. How can I fight against this argument. It's a very well guarded argument (although it breaks the rules of logic as a whole). How could someone get against this repetitive circular-y reasoning argument.

-Twelvie Atheist.

[Jebus]

what's the oldest true mention of the Judaistic faith. Who wrote that? And why, if you have a guess.

I have to say you write awfully well for a 12-year old.

Not sure, but I've heard Judaism is over 3000 years old. The stories were probably told by parents and story tellers for generations before they were written down. In my opinion, not important who wrote them. The reason they wrote them is that they finally had the tools and ability to do so.

Question 2:
The good old "...he knows the reason for death, suffering, and more." argument. How can I fight against this argument. It's a very well guarded argument (although it breaks the rules of logic as a whole). How could someone get against this repetitive circular-y reasoning argument.

Your right in that it is a cop-out illogical argument and you should point that out. Why not ask them some questions on your own, such as:

Why did it take 200000 years of human history before Christ finally revealed himself and are all the people who before Judaism in hell for not being believers?

Why does God never heal amputees?

Is the Bible perfect? (If answer is yes, you have an infinite number of biblical contradictions you can ask about, if answer is no ask why something inspired by God would not be perfect.

Does praying work? (If answer is yes, ask why it has never worked in a controlled research setting).

It's unfortunate that you are having so much bullshit dogma shoved down your throat, but good on you for seeing through it.






-Twelvie Atheist.

[brimstoneSalad]

Welcome!

However, my mom's to-be-husband gave me this question which I cannot come up to an answer to:
Where can you trace Christianity back to:
I tried to keep on telling him that it was likely Greece. However he said the Christian god can not be traced back to any time or anything of that sort. Where would you trace something like that back into. More like; what's the oldest true mention of the Judaistic faith. Who wrote that? And why, if you have a guess.

This is called an argument from ignorance. "We don't know, therefore X assertion is true."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance

This is a matter of history, and it's completely irrelevant.

It doesn't matter if you can or can not trace something back to its first mention.
If we couldn't figure out exactly where the myth of the Tooth fairy came from, would that mean the tooth fairy must be true?
Of course not.

It's history, things get lost all of the time. Particularly word and myth origins. They get lost because they migrated from culture to culture through trade, and there's no surviving written record of most of these things.

You know how dinosaur fossils work, right? You have to get lucky to find one. The dinosaur had to die in the right place and time, get buried in silt, etc. and have its bones mineralized. It's hard to find a well preserved fossil.

It's the same thing for ancient texts (when they were ever written down, which wasn't often, because most of it was oral tradition).

Just because there are missing pieces (ignorance), doesn't mean somebody's assertions are true.



That's how you answer that one.


If you want to know, though:

The Christian god traces back only to Saul of tarsus, who was Roman, and 'made the whole thing up'.
He invented Christianity loosely based around the teachings of a Jewish sect, that may or may not have been led by a real Yeshua (Jesus), whom we know almost nothing about because the vast majority of the life story and ministry is obviously fabricated through retellings, from person to person (do you know the game "telephone"?).
Yeshua never wrote anything that we have, and it's not clear who he was or if he existed. He probably did in some sense (possibly as multiple people), but we don't have any evidence to that end.

Now the Jewish god, YHWH, was a very different character, and that traces back about 600 years earlier (the story of Moses is most likely a fabrication), before which the Jewish people, who hailed from Canaan, were henotheistic (believed in many gods, worshiped one; to roughly a thousand years back), and then earlier fully polytheistic (they believed in and worshiped a bunch of gods).
YHWH's wife was Asherah, and YHWH's previous name for the Canaanite Israelites was El (You know how in Greek and Roman mythology gods have two names? E.g. Greek Zeus became Roman Jupiter). There are numerous references to YHWH being El in scripture.

More about YHWH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
Here's an interesting article on some of the archaeological links: http://contradictionsinthebible.com/are ... -same-god/

The name YHWH probably either came from another region, just as did the Roman god Jupiter, brought by a particular cult (a possible historical version of Moses), or was shortened from a phrase meaning something like "El the creator".

You can read more about El here, who is an earlier god with different stories, from which YHWH evolved: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_(deity)

When does one god become another? Were do you stop tracing it, and decide that's the end of the road? Because you'll have a harder time following the lineage as it goes back further.

It's like asking what the first fish was. Animals, like gods, evolve over time, and they do so pretty gradually. There's no animal you can really call the first fish, but eventually you get to something that looks very unlike the things we understand today to be fish.

Question 2:
The good old "...he knows the reason for death, suffering, and more." argument. How can I fight against this argument. It's a very well guarded argument (although it breaks the rules of logic as a whole). How could someone get against this repetitive circular-y reasoning argument.

If somebody breaks the rules of logic, it is not a valid argument. Simply dismiss it, and explain how it isn't logical.

Just because you can come up with absurd ad hoc explanations for things doesn't make those things true. You can rationalize any opposition somebody may have to the flying spaghetti monster too, with complicated excuses, and appealing to ignorance.

If somebody isn't presenting a logical argument, they aren't presenting an argument.

If the discussion is not to be bound by the rules of logic, present this simple and irrefutable disproof of god:

Banana + squirrel / cucumber * 92 = god does not exist.

Checkmate. (See why using logic is important?)

[Jebus]

The Christian god traces back only to Saul of tarsus, who was Roman, and 'made the whole thing up'.
He invented Christianity loosely based around the teachings of a Jewish sect, that may or may not have been led by a real Yeshua (Jesus), whom we know almost nothing about because the vast majority of the life story and ministry is obviously fabricated through retellings, from person to person (do you know the game "telephone"?).
Yeshua never wrote anything that we have, and it's not clear who he was or if he existed. He probably did in some sense (possibly as multiple people), but we don't have any evidence to that end.

I haven't heard this theory before and it is quite interesting. Any idea what would motivate Saul of Tarsus to do this? Since we are still talking about this guy 2000 years later there must have been some shtick to his whole show.

[brimstoneSalad]

I haven't heard this theory before and it is quite interesting. Any idea what would motivate Saul of Tarsus to do this? Since we are still talking about this guy 2000 years later there must have been some shtick to his whole show.

Well, Acts says he was struck blind and had a vision of Jesus, but it's of anonymous authorship, written something like twenty years after Saul died, and contradicts Paul's own words and accounts many times.

The thing is, Saul wrote, and he wrote a LOT, and we have a lot of surviving works from his letters, and he never mentioned any of that (beyond a few things he does mention which contradict Acts). So, like many other figures, Acts itself is likely a historical fabrication of his life based on rumors and speculation, choosing the more dramatic and exciting elements where possible and as always pushing an agenda (a much more anti-Semitic one).

Saul's actual conversion is a bit more mysterious, where just just claimed to have direct revelation, and that it wasn't based on reason.

He was an educated man, very well educated. He was also a megalomaniac who craved attention. He got his start by persecuting Christianity, as he claims, and that's something I can believe. He just loved showing off his intelligence and scriptural knowledge. At some point, he realized he chose the wrong side of things, and that Christianity wasn't going anywhere; but that he could shape it to his will because it was a growing movement without a strong leader. He had his instant conversion, and the rest is history; he did exactly that. If you can't beat em', join em'.

He anointed himself another apostle of Christ (the most important one, because Jesus made a special trip back to Earth just for him), and used his knowledge to gain immense following. In his letters, you can see that he broadly disagrees with the other founding church fathers on almost everything, and he always beats them down with his superior education and rhetoric skills (he had a hard time of it, which was a challenge he was after).

Switching sides got him everything he ever wanted. He got his war of words, and he won.

Aside from persecuting Christianity just for attention, which isn't the most charitable view, he may also have strongly disagreed with the church on philosophical matters; and if that's the case, he still managed to reverse the church's course and bend it to his own preferences, so even without gratifying his megalomania it would have been a win from a philosophical or theological perspective (assuming he drank his own Kool-Aid, which is as likely as not; most cult leaders end up buying into their own nonsense in some way).

[Jebus]

This is all very interesting to me, so thank you Brimstone for your post. My only sticking point is the "can't beat them-join them" comment. He would be taking a huge risk joining this "growing movement without a strong leader" as the Christian movement was politically and militarily weak in the first century BC and many of their leaders suffered awful persecution often ending with torture and execution. Doesn't sound like a group of people a power hungry intellectual would want to join.

[brimstoneSalad]

My only sticking point is the "can't beat them-join them" comment. He would be taking a huge risk joining this "growing movement without a strong leader" as the Christian movement was politically and militarily weak in the first century BC and many of their leaders suffered awful persecution often ending with torture and execution. Doesn't sound like a group of people a power hungry intellectual would want to join.

He was a Jew; not exactly in the best position as it was. Christian persecution, however, is greatly exaggerated in general, and what little involuntary persecution there was (Christians regularly volunteered for execution during the height of their persecution) didn't really pick up until late in Saul's life, around 30 years after his conversion. It was a growing cult, none the less.

When the persecution really did start taking off, Saul vanished. There is no record of his execution. Hmm...

[xChrizOwnz]

Very good response, I like this response alot. I'll throw in an extra question I got because you guys answer with expertise and valid logic.

How do you know your brain exists? As I will continue claiming that you can see things like that, they say that I've been told these things. The good old: "Atheists require faith" argument. Any answers to that please.

Thank you very much for your answers.

[EquALLity]

Very good response, I like this response alot. I'll throw in an extra question I got because you guys answer with expertise and valid logic.

How do you know your brain exists? As I will continue claiming that you can see things like that, they say that I've been told these things. The good old: "Atheists require faith" argument. Any answers to that please.

Thank you very much for your answers.

Appeal to hypocrisy? https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/tu-quoque

You- "I do not believe in God because there isn't evidence."
Your mom- "Well, you believe in this other thing without evidence. So you have faith too!"

But you kind of do know your brain exists, unless she's suggesting that maybe God powers your entire body (or something else like that), and that that would render your particular brain unnecessary, and therefore possibly non-existent?

[brimstoneSalad]

How do you know your brain exists? As I will continue claiming that you can see things like that, they say that I've been told these things. The good old: "Atheists require faith" argument. Any answers to that please.

In empirical matters, evidence is never 100% certain; 99.999999% sure, but never perfect, since observations can always be wrong or even misled.

The important thing is to have belief in proportion to the evidence.

If there is a 50% chance of something being true, and you believe it with a 50% certainty, you are being rational.
If there's a 50% chance of something being true, and you believe it with a 100% certainty, you are probably not being rational; likewise if you disbelieve it with 100% certainty.

The existence of brains in humans is inductive, but it is supported by all evidence that we have. Every major world government, University, Doctor, scientific body.

You don't need to be certain about it, but it is rational to be 99.9999999% sure you have a brain, which is good enough for most purposes.


That is for empirical matters.

In logical matters, there is 100% certainty.

If A means B, and B means C, then A means C. This is certain. If A is not B, then B is not A.

Logic is different from empiricism in that it is perfect and certain (when done correctly), but it's also conditional. There are IF type statements.

For example, examining the definition of 'God", IF 'god' is defined as X, where X contains contradictions, we can be 100% sure that this god does not exist. Logic gives us that kind of certainty which no amount of empiricism does.

However, if 'God' is defined as Y, where Y contains no contradictions that we can identify, then we can only say that as far as we can tell, it is not certain that this particular god does not exist. It becomes an apparent possibility.


In order to overcome logical objections, theists merely need to present a definition of a god which is acceptable and does not contain any apparent contradictions.

That only gets so far as "this god is not proved to be impossible".

If they want to prove that their god exists with logic, they need to first do that, and then use the process of elimination to prove (through showing contradictions) every other conceivable apparently possible universe is actually impossible, and that the case with their god is the only possible one remaining.

No theist or apologist has ever done this.

As it stands, all common definitions of 'god' are logically impossible, so it is rational to believe with 100% certainty that those gods do not exist.

If they are so kind as to provide you with a logically consistent definition of a god, then you can be "agnostic" towards that god until you get empirical evidence for or against it. However, the rational thing is to default to the simplest and most useful explanation in the mean time, and that is not that 'a god did it'.