Preamble: I am taoist.

Now, as to some of the questions here, my faith can provide for a lot of the answers posed in response to the 'pro-Christian' statements. I am only going to focus on one, it was a while back, but quite frankly it was a horrid example, and horridly defended later on.

I am referring to the "watch your daughter get raped" thing. It is common belief among us taoist that denying any part of yourself, even if it is a willing lie, is denying the whole, and all that came before it. That is why being disowned is the greatest of punishments, because it means we no longer exist. (In a matter of speaking, I don't need to go into a debate about existence, in this case, we no longer have our ancestors watching over us, nor our guardians. We have no family, and in China, one with out a family is nothing. Meaningless.)

How does this relate to the given example. Well, that man who lies about his faith, denies the faith in himself, and plants the seed of doubt, which from my readings of the Bible, is an open invitation to more sin, and even Satan himself.

What strikes me odd, is how this same argument above, that a little 'harmless' something that is considered bad, even when done under duress, leads to greater and greater things. I point to the fiasco about the 'Big League Chew' gum a few years ago, where the liberal side of our government decided that since Big League Chew simulated chewing tobacco that it lead to a greater chance of using tobacco. In that case, the small innocent, wont harm anyone, item was expounded into a greater and more dangerous activity.

Of course, that form of escalating logic only applies when the end conclusion favors the argument you wish to present.

As for writing, I have been taught by both professors of history and linguistics, that the earliest known writing is in layman terms, "he Hindu bible." The existance of a debate about it on wikipedia, doesn't really convince me otherwise.


As far as "inacuracies in the bible" I stil have not found any yet. But ofcourse, the bible is not a science book, and its not a history book, and is not a text book by any stretch of the imagination. It is a book which is the starting point to teach you how to live a happy and fufilling life and how to create a more perfect society. There are some blatant lies in the text to teach you other messages, but these lies are so blatant, I am not sure how you could perceive them to be mistakes. Ofcourse when I say "bible" I mean the 5 books of moses as those are the only ones that attributed to G-d by most.

I think that sometimes we try to draw the line too carefully between Protestantism and Orthodoxism (which includes Catholics, as well as several other denominations like Eastern Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, etc). We disagree about quite a few things, including even which books should be included in the Bible. The Orthodox churches actually include a set of books (the Apocrypha) which are not included in Protestant Bibles. It is from these books that some doctrines come from which we disagree with (prayer to the saints, though even in the Apocrypha it seems like a vague reference).

However, I think it is important to keep in mind that, even though we disagree on a lot of things now, we were once one church. I don't believe it's accurate to say that the Bible we use was propogated by those doctrines which we believe are false. It's more accurate to say that several of these books were selected by us as a church, before the schism. Of course, the church had several different councils to decide on a canon, and different canons were agreed upon at different times. The Protestant church went back to study the councils, and decided on the canon that they believed used the most accurate and inspired criteria for selecting the books of the Bible.



Actually, that's not quite true. Christianity has in the past been the dominant religion, at least of the known world (it's impossible to calculate whether there were more Christians than pagans in the unknown world).

Religious beliefs do correlate very strongly with geographical location, which actually raises a very strong question. How do you suppose Christianity (even more so than Judaism or Islam) has spread to such a wide variety of people, races, and countries? I say more so than Judaism or Islam because the vast majority of both of those two religions is still found in 'cultural religion.' Christianity seems to have spread more readily between cultures and regions.

Also, I believe it's a fallacy that the message was given only once. God spoke to people for thousands of years, always telling the same story. The culmination of that story occurred only once, of course, but God interacted clearly with a huge group of people, over a long span of time. Jesus himself came once, and died once - an event witnessed and believed by only a small group of people who had listened to and understood the beginning of the story.



I believe you're mistaken in a couple of things. First of all, while you might make the case that when speaking to Abraham and Moses specifically, God did not clarify that He was the one and only god. However, God made it clear at other times that there are no other gods. Isaia 44:6 (and context) is one example, as well as several references in the NT.

You have a somewhat viable point that humans have proven themselves malleable to voices in their heads. One has to wonder, though, why we are so easily convinced by such things? To begin with, the very rarity of such an event gives the voice credence. This would be much less effective to those of us living in modern days, given our quickness to attribute all such things to mental illnesses.

The question of universal morality is a different one. I'll actually elaborate a bit more on it in another post, responding to Othero.

Next up is Verithrax! Note that I combined responses to a few of your posts together.

This is an interesting point. The majority of Christians believe that the authors of the Bible were inspired by God, and that the words they wrote were infallible. This leads to some problems with scribal glosses, editions, and emissions. My personal view is that the Council which selected the canon was inspired and led by God in their selection.

On a more tangible note, I'll admit that I did not start off accepting the Bible. I actually grew to accept the Bible by the process I described to Shamarah. I came to believe that there was a higher power, and started looking around to learn what I could about it. Step-by-step, my own studies and beliefs led me to the same conclusions taught in the Bible. So, I suppose you could say I simply reached the same point as those who selected the canon, rather than simply taking their collective word for it.



This is a bit of a strawman, in that you're framing of the argument is a bit skewed. There is much more to it than simply a belief. I believe in the Law of Gravity - and most likely God could care less about that. Belief in itself doesn't get anyone anywhere. James 2 points out that even the demons believe in God. What God cares about is that I worship him perfectly. Seeing that I would fail in that, he offered me an out. If I choose to reject that (for ANY reason), then I have earned hell for myself. I can make excuses about the circumstances ("someone might suffer!") but the reality is that I failed and earned it hell.

If God made us infallible, where would the point be? He can build robots, that doesn't accomplish what He wanted. As for the information, he did give perfect information. The problem is that it is twisted by so many imperfect people that we get confused. People have a less-than-fair chance of getting into heaven, but that is by our own mistakes, not because of anything we can attribute to God.

As for people who lived before Jesus, that is a deeper theological issue that I didn't expect to come up. God Himself is atemporal (there is a much longer explanation behind that, but I'll leave it off for now). His plans and interactions are independent of time itself. Christ came and died a couple of thousand years ago, but it was for people both before and after him. The New Testament holds up people like Abraham, Moses, Noah, etc. as strong examples of our (collective) faith. In other words, we are not better than the people who came before Jesus, he died for them too.



You're an intelligent person, surely you see the irony in this...As part of accusing someone of bad physics, you propose a statement that is a logical impossibility. Using the Scientific Method, it is IMPOSSIBLE to conclusively DISprove anything. All you can hope to do is show a trend. You can not, for example, conclusively prove that hydrogen is the lightest discovered element - maybe we have flawed testing, or every test previously has been a freak coincidence. In the same way, it is logically impossible to 'conclusively prove' that the universe is nondeterministic; the best you can really say is that there might be an underlying order, we simply can't detect it (though even that case is weakening in the face of things like the String Theory, the One Force, etc.).

There are a few problems here. First, you are reading the Bible as one book, when in reality it's a collection of several books (66 books, around 40 authors over the course of a few thousand years). You cannot read it beginning to end. Some books are written in the voice of the day - those genealogies you mention, for example, were vitally important to Jews, who stressed and studied their lineage above nearly anything else. There are very few contradictions, none of which are on important points. The most important parts are surprisingly simple to understand (try reading the Iliad in its original scripts, and see how difficult it is to extract the full meaning) so that even children know everything that is vitally important to them. From that point, there is more to the bible for those who want to delve for deeper understanding of the God they've decided to serve.



What we actually have here is a case of ethnocentrism. You're basically saying 'Why couldn't God inspire those people several thousand years ago to write in a way that reflects my worldview and experiences today?' When re-worded this way, it doesn't make much sense. If I were to write a perfect, top-selling book today, and try to send it back even 100 years, no publisher would want to print it.

This does bring up a contrary point, though. If we follow your line of arguments, we have to eventually wonder...if the Bible is such a horrible book, how did it survive? Wouldn't the majority of people have the gut reaction to reject it? Yet somehow, billions of people have come to believe in it. What do you suppose they all saw in it?

This is in response to Critter's post. I appreciate this post in particular, it seemed especially genuine, and it mirrors a lot of the things I've thought about quite a bit.

This is a very difficult question, and one most Christians still have a hard time with. Ultimately, there were only a few logical options. First, God could have chosen not to create people at all. Second, He could have chosen to create people who were absolutely perfect and would never do anything wrong. Third, He could have chosen to create people who could choose to worship Him or to reject Him.

I think we agree that the second one was problematic, so I'll skip over that one for now. The real question is why God chose to create people at all, rather than creating nothing. Unfortunately, that's a question that I can't really answer. I have thought about it quite a bit myself, and I don't really know for sure. It is important to keep in mind that this works the opposite way as well, though. God created some people, knowing that they would go to hell. He also created some people who will live in ultimate bliss and joy for all of eternity - those people would not have had that opportunity if he chose never to create anyone.




You mentioned your family, so let me rephrase your question a bit. The world we live in today is difficult - quite honestly, it sucks a great deal of the time. Everyone has to deal with death, disease, and suffering of all different kinds. I won't bother listing crime statistics, but we've all lived in the world long enough to know that every person who lives has to suffer.

Do you expect that this knowledge will stop you from ever wanting to have children? After all, if you have no children, they will never be exposed to all of the suffering...

I still won't pretend I know what God's intentions were, but when I think about myself, I intend to have children anyway, for the opportunity to bond with them, and the chance that they will experience some amount of joy as well.



People misunderstand Faith. There is no such thing as real 'blind faith' - that's foolishness. Faith in the Biblical sense is starting with simple evidence, then expounding the next step. Only a fool would jump from knowing nothing to completely believing something without reason or evidence. God did not leave us without evidence. He simply expects us to take the next step.

As for making himself known...what do you suppose it would take? Would He have to send fire from the heavens, flood the entire earth, raise people from the dead? Maybe everyone would believe if He came down and worked a bunch of miracles, like healing people nobody else could (without any medecine), walk on top of water, or feed thousands of people with food that would normally feed only one little boy...

God did all of that, and more - seeing it did not convince everyone. Some people would watch even the most amazing miracles, then look for a way to explain it away, for their own comfort (the stereotypical 'denial' effect). In fact, miracles do still occur, we just simply don't hear about them, or don't recognize them when we do.

For Othero (and others, regarding the concept of universal values):



I'll take this challenge. Now, I would not say that everything that I believe is wrong has been universally accepted as such. However, there are some things that have been universally accepted.

First, loyalty has always been valued, by every major culture. There is some disagreement over just who deserves that loyalty, but the loyalty itself has always been valued. Deceipt is acceptable and even encouraged in some societies (the tribes of Papua, New Guinea, for example), but only outside of the core 'unit' of friends/family/etc. It is the definition of the unit that changes.

Murder has always been considered wrong. I should clarify by differentiating murder from killing - it's this very definition that has been the difference between cultures. Some cultures accept killing in different situations (rituals, people who tresspass or comit other crimes), but never has a culture freely allowed baseless murder.

Courage has always been considered right. Regardless of the society, if two people are equal in every other way, the braver is considered the better. People have always, universally felt some amount of guilt because of fear leading to perceived failure.

There is a much longer list of things that are universally valued (or shunned, as the case may be). People have lived in different times, in different cultures, with different experiences over thousands of years, and somehow we still agree on all of these things.

Last on the list for now is Serge...I ran out of time for any of the other posts for now. If anyone brought something up that I skipped that you'd like to discuss more, remind me and I'll try to throw in my thoughts.

There are a few things to correct here. You're right, in that there were several different canons of both the New and Old Testaments (not all by the Roman Catholich Church, though - some were from long before the Church's inception). Their criteria varied from canon to canon, however, they did not amount to the cultural beliefs of the time. The canons spent a great deal of time studying and examining several different texts, which were accepted or rejected based on relatively well-developed criteria. The question in the end is whether or not you agree with the criteria.

The Bible was recopied several times, but it was not often translated. The first five books were translated into Greek relatively early, and it was translated into Latin and a few other languages. For awhile, the church made it a practice to base other translations off of the Latin, but that didn't last all that long. Most modern translations come from old scripts written in Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew. As a general rule, we also accept that the older a script is, the more likely it is to be true - which is why some newer translations (like the NIV) are possibly more accurate than older favorites (like the KJV).



Actually, I agree with you. I argue with proclaiming Christians more than anyone else. Religious institutions become corrupt quickly, including Christian churches. This is what led to the fairly recent slogan 'True Christianity is a relationship, not a religion.'

FYI, you have it backwards. The key concept in the scientific method is falsifiability--basically, the ability to conclusively disprove things. That's why things like Creation Science get such a blacklisting. It's not science. It's an attempt to explain apparent inconsistencies with a pre-existing belief. They do not offer any grounds by which Creation could be disproven. They offer rhetorical arguments as to why Creation hasn't been disproven and should still be considered a viable belief.

Did you read all books they rejected, just to be on the safe side?
That goes against the mainline of evangelical Christian thinking. Is belief alone sufficient or not?

You can't expect infallibility out of fallible beings. God didn't give perfect information; unless you are a young-earth creationist (I don't remember seeing any mention of that in your posts), then all the people before the Jews received their revelation from God were not given any information at all. As a matter of fact, people living during Biblical times in other parts of the world never had access to the Bible. Christianity is (And your argument makes that blindingly obvious) based entirely on guilt; Christians never even say "We don't understand why God did that"; instead, they say "It's our fault". For that matter, why are there natural disasters? Are they our fault too? Do they only kill the impious?
I'm glad I don't have to take care of this one.

If you look at each book separately, it gets even worse. Many are bereft of religious significance (Say, the Song of Solomon). Most depend on previous books for context and relevance, and most suffer, internally, of the same problems the bible as a whole has. "Boring and repetitive", for example, is perfectly accurate when talking about Leviticus.
That's the problem. God's word should be universal; God isn't writing to that particular group of people then, he's writing to everybody who ever lived and will live. The word of God would have to be relevant and meaningful to everybody, not just a few tribes of semitic people who were, in reality, massively small, petty, and unimportant compared to greater and more numerous peoples and civilizations that existed elsewhere at the time. Even the fact that great swathes of the Bible are essentially dated would be fine if God would bother to update it; but modern Christians, whilst living in a wholly different environment, are expected to follow the same rules and norms and beliefs of Bronze Age shepherds.

It survived by riding a popular religion. First Judaism; while the Bible is silly and of little relevance to modern people, it was a big thing in Jewish culture before Christ. Then early Christians appropriated it and added to it the Jesus myth, and carried it over. While the Bible is a terrible read, it stll contains lots of passages which have a great allure for people. Historically, the vast majority of Christians never read the Bible - Most were illiterate, in fact. But the religion was kept alive by a machine of indoctrination and conversion which was primarily oral, and that kept the book itself alive. Holy books of dead religions don't tend to survive as well; one major reason we don't have them is that the religions involved died, either through failing to infect a sufficient part of the population to become self-sustaining (Because they had no real appeal, because they were more hateful than the average religion, because they weren't a mystery religion that could keep cohesive... lots of reasons for a memeplex to die) or because the ethnical group that kept them alive was wiped out, by genocide (The common reason) or sheer stupidity (What happened to the Essenes). The Dead Sea Scrolls are an example of a holy book that never made it to modern times for lack of a religion to support it.

It's called dogmatism. It'll be interesting to see how major religions which were designed to be dogmatic and unchanging will cope with a modern world in which technology and societal behavior change ever more rapidly. Arthur C. Clarke predicted that Buddhism would be the major religion of the future because it's the most adaptable one and least vulnerable to new scientific discoveries. I wonder.

I would just have to say that I agree 100% that the bible is a terrible book. Any highschool student could write a much better book, and could convince more people to follow that religion. (see Scientology)

You would think that people would pick up on the idea that the bible is not meant to be read the way most books are read.

If you would like to know how it was meant to be read its simple. You divide the book up into sections, then each week you read that section a minimum of 3 times. At the same time, you take other books, and read those alongside the sections. Ideally, you would read one sentence a day, from 1 - 3 hours and discuss it with other people.

Mostly because Buddhism doesn't try to go against reality; it realises that reality tends to win. As the Dalai Lama says, if some part of Buddhism was consistently and empirically proven wrong, Buddhism would have to change.

Buddhism is not a religion... its a fracking philosophy, that is why it is 'more' successful then Christianity. It doesn't replace religion, it supplements it. Most Chinese are either Taoist, or a variation of Confucius animism. (Which predated the introduction of Buddhism.) Sorry to tell you that. Please people, stop using Buddha in your religious arguments, it only makes you look more ignorant of the Eastern World.

You realize that, to the unreligious, any philosophy that supplants a religion with religion-like social constructs is going to be considered close enough to be called a religion, right?

But to call it that just displays that persons ignorance. With Buddhism, there is no belief in anything. You simply follow teachings, and attempt to attain enlightenment. Now most 'Buddhist Practices' I have seen American Converts doing are actually Taoist Practices, which makes no sense to me, because unless your ancestors made offerings to a guardian in order to get it to protect your spiritual ancestors, no point in really keeping a shrine, but what ever...

To get offended when it gets called that is nitpicky. I mean, by the same standard, Confucianism isn't a religion, but it's sure followed as though it is, even in the absence of the traditional animism/ancestor worship (and isn't that a Taoist practice?) Taoism hardly refers to one thing, it seems like. I think there are a fair number of "practicioners" aren't religious in the sense that you insist we apply to Buddism. I'm sensing a sort of homeland holier-than-thou here.

Well I was born in... well Taipai, but my mother had been married and a US Citizen for a while, and I was conceived in Maine. (She just wanted to have as many children with her mother around as possible.) So I am American First, Chinese second. I just get annoyed that eastern religions and philosophies always get 'simplified' and then westerners complain about their own beliefs being misrepresented etc...

Funny, most of the Western world seems to classify it as a religion. Go open up any textbook or encyclopedia and look for 'major world religions', you'll see it listed. The word religion stems from religare, 'to reconnect'. Just because Buddhism's goal is to reconnect us with the true nature of reality itself ("Welcome to the real world.") and not to a Divine being(s) which may or may not exist, doesn't exclude it from the definition of a religion.

Although, to be fair, it is a philosophy to -me-. I don't see any conflict with someone being a Christian and accepting the Truths, following the Path and so on (as long as the local priest doesn't find out - I don't expect the Church to be too open minded about this).

Look at the bolded section, reread what I posted, look at the bolded section, and then explain to me why this is relevant to explaining how Buddhism is a religion...

What you posted, plus the bolded part, means you're calling every textbook writer in the West ignorant. And, I'm too sleepy and getting short tempered, the original text here was too mean sounding.