The quote above was posted in a discussion thread, and I did not want to interrupt that. Still, there is something here that I think really needs to be discussed, and that is what I've highlighted in red. It says, "[G]od made then cosmos, and then he sent [J]esus [C]hrist to show us the rules of how we should play the game of life.this post is an excellent question.
modern christians believe that god is a magician, that will magically alter the worshiper's life. modern christians believe that, if they pray, then god will grant them every wish, like the genie in the lamp.
but that's not how god works.
god made the cosmos, and then he sent jesus christ, to show us the rules of how we should play the game of life.
modern christians do not care about the rules of how we should live our lives, and instead, they pray for miracles, genie in the lamp god.
Is this really, given the history of the human race as far as we know it, really likely to be the case, or even close?
Consider the human timeline, first (condensed and paraphrased from Wikipedia Timeline of human prehistory - Wikipedia):
200,000 years ago homo sapiens appears in Africa
170,000 years ago humans are wearing clothes (the Bible makes that about 6,000 years ago)
82,000 years ago the earliest evidence of personal adornment (perforated seashell beads) in Morocco
70,000 years ago the earliest abstract or symbolic art in Blombos Cave, South Africa
50,000 years ago the earliest sewing needle
42,000 years ago paleolithic flutes in Germany
40,000 - 30,000 years ago the first human settlement in Australia
28,500 years ago New Guinea is populated
20,000 years ago the Kebaran culture in the Levant
20,000 years ago, storage and cooking vessels in China
13,000 years ago the first domestication of sheep
12,000 years ago, Jericho is settled
I could go on and on and on. There were whole civilizations -- all over the world, including all of continents except Antarctica -- for more than 10,000 years before Christ came along. There were entire religions in every corner of this planet before, in fact, the Jews had even heard from (or rather invented) Yaweh!
And for reasons that nobody can give even a remotely reasonable explanation for, this god and this Jesus -- presumably all-powerful, chose a little place at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea -- and only there -- to deliver these rules, leaving all other places in the world unenlightened until Christians could dream up missionaries to go tell them the "good news?" And even then, we cannot forget, that the majority of humans in the world right up until today do not believe in the Christian "rules of how we should play the game of life."
I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody could ignore all of that in order to believe that the Christian version is true in any sense. What was god doing all that time, and in all those other places? And why? Anybody got any ideas that take this out of the realm of myth and into the realm of believability?