I have been reluctant to call myself an atheist. Mainly because I associate the label with many negative qualities and find many atheists to be perpetually 14 edgelords who claim to be pro-science but seem to think the scientific method is composed of running into a church and yelling “Fake!”
I could go on if it were my intent to chase away my audience with a stick so I’ll mostly leave it there.
How can I see such angry arrogant bullies chanting “Sky Daddy!” and go “Yes I am one of them?”
It is illogical.
But I have no choice but to wear the label, because God is not real.
If God were real, Christians would be the kindest and most giving people in the world.
I don’t need to tell you how far from the case this is.
I don’t need to tell you about the cruelty of Christian movements. About how all their good will and charitable acts begin and end at “Believe in our God and stop complaining!”
They do not stop suffering, they deny it even exists. Claiming it to be part of God’s plan and how God doesn’t make mistakes. The latter is true because the former isn’t. God doesn’t make mistakes because there is no plan, there is no God.
This is insanity
While I have known Christians who are truly kind people, some of them I call my dearest friends… these are the exception not the rule. And even he, one of my best friends, will ignore his conscience and choose cruelty if he believes it the will of his God. Even if his Pope says it isn’t.
If God were real these Christians would not be so angry that non believers and transpeople exist. They would be fearful of his wrath and joyous of his love.
The rich would not horde wealth but spend it in service to the poor, for the riches of Heaven would be far greater and far more permanent.
If God were real he would heal the sick, we would hear of the miraculous healing of amputees. We would hear of gender dysphoric teenagers who awoke in a new body. We would hear how the angels themselves condemned Israel’s genocide of Palestine.
God would have saved my Christian friend who became brain dead in a hit and run, and actually dead two weeks later.
God would have halted the actions of every man of faith who decided to prey upon children, nay they’d be too scared of his wrath to even have thoughts of doing as such.
But God will never lift a finger to help anyone. Not because he is cruel or indifferent. But because he isn’t there.
Should I hear a voice with an otherworldly glow say “It’s me, the Lord your God. I am sorry for my absence, but I need your help to make this right.”
All would be forgiven and I would bow in reverence to Christ.
But that day will not come.
I am an atheist not because I am heartless and reject him… but because my heart calls out to him and receives nothing.
I have pondered if maybe God is around and some can hear him more clearly than others.
But then I remember how Conservatives behave, either using God for a selfish agenda or being suckered by false holy men…
And there goes that hypothesis.
God, if you’re willing to talk I am willing to listen. But sadly you aren’t because you don’t exist.
So… just to clarify.
Did you know Jesus taught obedience to the Law of Moses (and the commands of the prophets.)? His actual teachings- as recorded in the 4 gospels- are actually pretty horrific, when you understand that he absolutely was teaching adherence to the “old law”. (in point of fact he adresses this directly in Matthew5:17-20)
The law of moses is horrific compared today’s standards. I mean, it allows men to sell their daughters to be a sex slave… rape is basically a property crime, and if a guy rapes an un-betrothed virgin… he owes the father some money and then the woman in question is forced to marry her rapist. And then there’s the explicit endorsement of slavery, the whole thing about stoning women who didn’t bleed on their wedding night (I say it this way, because it was known long before Jesus that most women didn’t actually bleed the first time they had sex… and that commandment was given directly by god, presumably.)
Like… in my limited experience, the people who talk about the teachings of jesus… only take some things, and ignore all of the horrifically objectionable shit. Like. Slavery would have been something that jesus would have encountered on a daily basis… and his father most like;y owned several. (he probably wasn’t a furniture maker- rather he was a builder… likely building houses and other buildings like bridges, etc. It’s also likely that jesus didn’t grow up poor.)
Didn’t he literally say the “old law” didn’t matter anymore?
That was Paul. Who was totally a heretic.
The verse I linked is Jesus explicitly stating he absolutely did not come to abolish the previous law. In fact, he made the law stricter (or wanted to.)
The stuff about “you’ve heard it said… don’t murder… but anger is just as bad, etc. it doesn’t help that a fair amount of the gospels were later inserts to retcon things to be more palatable to a broader audience.
Like gentiles we’re unlikely to convert if they had to give up pork and snip the tip, etc. Jesus was pretty clear about that, too.
He said he came to fulfill it, not make it stricter, fulfill as in complete so it’s no longer needed
That is a lie. Mathew 5:17-20
Yes. Jesus used the word “fulfilled”. But then in the same breath he’s saying “The law will not pass away”. and then- again literally in the next sentence, he says “whoever teaches others to not follow the law will be the least in heaven.,” And then wraps up saying “Hey, if you’re not more strict than the scribes and the pharisees… you’re not going to heaven.”
Luke says similar in 16:14-17:
if you take the scriptures as truth, Jesus is literally saying that the Law will remain.
Personally, I don’t take the scriptures as truth, and I doubt very much that what’s attributed to him were actually said. At best a historical jesus was a jewish mystic running a faith healing racket. a fraud. a sham. Paul is the one who taught that the law was now irrelevant, and most of the things attributed to jesus saying it… well… those were written after Paul. Further, none of the gospels are eye-witness accounts, were written anonymously, and some fifty years or more after the events they purport to descibe.
there are exactly zero reasons to believe they’re accurate.
Read the Gospel of Matthew today and when I got to this part, it’s obvious that what he wants people to still follow is the ten commandments
Oh. It’s not the Ten Commandments. It’s the entire law.
Like “don’t wear linen and wool together” and “snip the tip” and “hey, if your bride doesn’t bleed on the wedding night, you can wave the bedsheet around and stone her.” Or “you can buy slaves and keep them And give them to your kids as inheritance, as long as they’re not Israelites. Oh. And you can sell your daughters, too.”
Except he proceeds to very clearly only reference the ten commandments and refer to them specifically as commandments.
You’re clearly projecting something that’s just not there onto the text.
Not sure why. Is “There aren’t non-biblical records of a Rabbi and his 12 homies running through Israel healing people of leprosy, a literal miracle, through touch alone.” Not enough of a reason to discount the text?
except the Law of Moses is not the ten commandments. The Law contained the Ten Commandments, yes, but generally, “The Law” referred to The Torah, and specifically, all of the laws given to the Israelites directly by god. Which are far more than just the 10. Sometimes, it can also be used to refer to the an Oral tradition (which is what the Pharisees were following… and which Jesus was critical of.)
No.
This is not me projecting anything. This is very, very basic hermeneutics. Everyone around him knew what he meant, and we also know what he meant. “the Law of Moses” means the Torah- that is, the first five books of the Tanakh. those books are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This was, and remains, common knowledge.
When Jesus also adds “…and the Prohpets”, he’s referring to the prophetic books of the Tanakh. (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi.)
At no point did “the Law of Moses” ever refer to just the Ten Commandments. And at no point in the scriptures did Jesus ever just discuss the ten commandments. It was always the full law. Always.
The idea that Jesus came to create a “new convent” and overturn the old law is to justify and explain away why the jewish people largely did not accept him as the Messiah. (which they did not accept him because he did not fulfill any of the messianic prophecies. You can tell because we’re not in the Davidic Age where the Kingdom of Israel reigns supreme over all earth, having conquered every last nation and brought the most Sith-like “peace” imaginable.)
Why is this important, you ask? Because, when people say “i like the teachings of christ” and such things, and espouse his morality… they’re espousing all the awful shit he taught. They probably don’t know about that stuff, because no one really likes to talk about all the bad shit in the Bible. No one really wants to understand the really ghastly nature.
Because when one says “I think the Teachings of Christ are cool” one is really saying things like:
-I think slavery is Cool
Leviticus 25:44-47:
yes. this is chattel slavery. Yes. Jesus taught this was cool. He almost certainly encountered this type of slavery on a daily basis, and his adoptive father - Joseph- likely owned a few slaves, seeing as how he would have had need for laborers.
- It's cool to murder 60% of your daughters on their wedding night because of a misunderstanding of basic biology!
Deuteronomy 22:13-21:
Which. To be clear. Part of the Oral teachings the pharisees followed but Jesus rejected included the understanding that this particular law was in fact totally unjust. 60% of women do not bleed the first time they have sex.
The evidentiary standard for whether or not a bride was a virgin was, if on her wedding night, when her husband goes and has sex with her, and she does not bleed, she was not a virgin.
Given that only 40% of women do in fact bleed, 60% of women are condemned to death regardless if they had premarital sex or not. ergo… this law commands killing innocent women simply because “god” was too stupid to understand the biology he created. or rather, the men pretending to be god.
-I think it's cool that, If you wait 30 days after abducting a woman whose family you slaughtered, you can take her as your wife" and rape the fucking hell out of her
Deuteronomy 21:10-14:
This is literally saying that it’s completely okay to go into a city, kill all men there, and take the young women and hold them captive, and after you ever-so-generously allowed these captives to mourn their families- which you just slaughtered- to force them to become your “wife”, and have sex with them.
This is, to be perfectly clear, rape. a captive cannot consent to marry their captor, and cannot consent to sex. we would recognize this as a very horrific warcrime today. it is a horrific practice which was common in the bronze and iron ages. Women were not people. They were property- and in war, they were spoils of war.
- It's pretty cool that raping a woman was treated as a property crime, and if she was yet to be betrothed, I can just pay a fine and rape her for the rest of her life!
Deuteronomy 22:28-29:
I mean think about it. you go and rape a girl who is probably under 12 (because that’s about when people started doing betrothals.) … the punishment is to pay some silver to the father; and she becomes his wife. the silver he pays is the bride-price that the father would have lost. The daughter has no choice is this.
Back in the bronze age, women were essentially property, and they had no conception of marital rape. Like the warbrides above, there’s no consent here. Because property can’t consent.
I mean, there’s more. By today’s standards of moralitiy, “biblical morality” is legitimately fucked up. When people, I dunno, base their policies off “the teachings of christ” what they don’t know can fuck us all over. In some regards, assholes like Mike Johnson are the correct ones on the issue.
Not entirely because they’re good people, but because Jesus was largely a product of his time. (basically equivalent to an evangelical fundie, in terms of how he viewed the Law and morality.)
This is not to say all christians suck. This is to say that the good people who happen to be christian are not good because of their faith, but in spite of their faith; and that the reason there seems to be a disconect between what is perhaps the majority of christians and assholes like Mike Johnson is that most christians either don’t read their bible or quietly ignore the bad bits where Johnson embraces the unpleasant bits. The irony being, that the only reason Jesus wasn’t a white supremacist too, is that jesus wasn’t white.
It’s possible to Chery pick nice things about Jesus. Moses was a piece of shit, and Yahweh a minor Caananite god appearing late in Caananite/Egypt/Greece (who syncretized/recognized each other’s gods) between 1400 and 850bc), even if Moses truly received commandments from him, would be a Caananite coup where Yahweh is not honoring his parents, where idolatry commandment was specifically a warmongering “destroy everything Caananite” instead of coveting any metalic value inside of them. The freedom of Israelites was the freedom to enslave all others with Moses at head of Israelite hierarchy.
The disciples all brought their own perspective, and some of the gospels are written by people who never met Jesus. Matthew was a Roman tax collector, wealthy enough to host a banquet, and appreciative of the trickle up benefits of slavery.
That Jesus needed to be politicaly polite/correct to establishment beliefs as a constraint in contradicting Moses would certaily allow disciples to hear what they wanted to hear, or quote the polite parts before the “, but …”.
If you start with “ranked mandate priorities” (means all contradictions to higher prioritized mandates are invalid), which makes far more sense than every biblical statement is equally true, no matter the author, and put “do onto others as you wish done onto you.” as top mandate, then it is possible to revise the bible into something more Humanist, and even to accept Jesus while rejecting Yahweh/Moses.
You can cherry pick anyone. I bet hitler said one or two things that weren’t totally awful. Same for Trump, Mao, Stalin, Putin… musk.
You can cherry pick, yes. But that means your understanding doesn’t comport with reality.
“Some” of the gospels? Try “all.” None of the gospels were written by the people they were named for. The rest of what you said is word salad and, it sounds like what you’re saying is that words don’t mean words.
The reality is we don’t know if these are even his words- the earliest gospel was written 50 years after his death, does not mention a virgin birth, does not mention anything before his ministry at all…. And doesn’t really mention any of the prophecies that Jesus “fulfilled”
Mathew was written next., at around the first century ce. It was written specifically to address that last bit about Mark not fulfilling prophecy. And fails miserably.
For example,
the virgin birth thing? Comes from Isaiah 7:14. Isaiah is sent by god, to tell Ahaz to chill, that god was going to deal with the kingdoms that were allying against him.
The child mentioned by Isaiah- who would be nard Emanuel- was not the Messiah. In fact the child’s sole purpose here is to indicate time. The woman is not a virgin- she’s just a “young woman”. Who was already pregnant. The kid was born and that prophecy was fulfilled in the time Isaiah said it would be.
The only reason for this mistake is that the author of Mark was likely a Hellenic Jew, heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, and was almost certainly working solely off the Septuagint. In koine Greek, the word for “virgin”- parthenos- was also used sometimes to just denote a young woman. They never read the original Hebrew, which absolutely does distinguish the two.
It doesn’t make sense to say the child was Jesus- the kid was literally born and used for timekeeping and the actual prophecy fulfilled a few chapters later.
Luke was just as bad as Mathew. None of the “prophecies” they mention were ever meant to be about Jesus, and Ike half were never actually meant to be prophecy in the first place. (Like the psalm of David they use to say him being pierced which said nothing of being pierced and was just a poem about David being surrounded and abused by enemies.)
There’s zero reason with that kind of known mistakes (or out and out lies,).
The main thing I said. Instead of reading salad, understand what was said.
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