Legitimate reasons not to believe in God

[joelr]

Firstly, a word of advice, joel. Please stop with the “Oh wows” and the many unnecessary question marks and exclamation marks. It is very immature and lowers your credibility considerably. You sound like an overwrought teenager.
Why do you need all these question marks anyway? As you can see, one is sufficient.

Sorry, not looking for advice from someone who waits until I'm in the middle of a debate and enters with cowardly, immature attacks on my character. In fact here is yet another.
Clearly you are upset about something. I'm sure I know what it is.

At last! I have discovered a Fundy literalist atheist who knows nothing of metaphor, allegory, poetry! (I am tempted to add an abundance of !!!!s, but I am an adult).

Oh so the passages in scripture that don't conform to your modern interpretation of God are suddenly "metaphors". WOW!!!!!!!!!! How about that. Now source a PhD historian who believes these are in fact metaphors. I can source one who will say this was how the Israelites actually thought of Yahweh as. Actually I can find several. These are not metaphors. That is a modern reading and not what is meant by the text.

The truth is your "God" was believed to be a warrior deity who rode a sky-chariot and spoke in a loud booming voice and had actual bodyparts. He also lived in temples when visiting Earth. A temple was found with giant footprints carved into the floor to lead Yahweh into the "holy of holies" room.
Professor F. Stravopolou has a new book on this subject. Historians are 100% sure this was the literal view of Yahweh in Judaism until the modern age.

Since no revelations have come lately this is clearly just an attempt to make a mythical character into something modern people can find realistic.

I am amazed that I have to explain this to you, joel. But here you are – read and learn…

It is not rational to read it literally. God is not a literal king in a literal sky. A ‘king in the sky’ is a metaphor, joel -- a metaphor.

It is also a mental picture usually used by children. It is figurative. It is symbolic.

Tell me, do you think that we Christians believe that Jesus is a lamb? Or a door? Or a lamp? Or that we ought to hate our parents?[/QUOTE]

Insisting on nonsensical interpretations, especially from literal readings of nonliteral texts, erodes your credibility.[/QUOTE]


I'm sorry, your source didn't show up in the html code?? Did you forget it??????
Well Professor Stavrakopoulou will explain that these readings of Yahweh in the OT is very literal.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou Discusses Her Latest Book,

3:15 Yahweh is the same as older Greek gods. Anthropormorphic, dynamic, colorful, emotional, vivid, changeable, masculine, real body parts. In "God: An Anatomy" Francesca explains the Hebrew text is very explicit in this. Your modern re-working is an incredible admission that scripture is total mythology and you have had to pretend that this scripture was "metaphor" to continue believing in this deity.
Now the modern idea of God has been shaped by theologians like Aquinas and Origen who used 100% Greek theology. I'll source this if you like.
So now we are clear - Yahweh is a myth (metaphor) for a modern idea that is fiction based on Greek concepts. Nowhere in there is an actual God who is real.


Genesis 1:26 God said let US make humankind in our image

Job 1:6 One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the Lord and Satan also came among themLeviticus 3:5 Aarons sons sacrificed, pleasing aroma to the Lord.

15:35

Ain Dara temple - footprints of Yahweh walking in to the holy of holies. Gods lived in temples.

Not unique to Jerusalem.

18:15

Jacob wrestled with God, forced him to bless him and God renamed him Israel.

Genesis 32:24-30

Similar to Mesopotamian deities.


By John 1:18 the theology has changed and “no one has seen God”.


Genesis 18:16-17, 20-22 God appears to Abraham as a normal man with 2 other men who are also divine beings. God is also mulling over if he should tell Abraham what he is about to do.

Exodus 24:9-11 Moses, Arron etc, saw God



watch and learn.

Sounds like? To a literalist, of course it does.

(Are you sure that kings are often warriors?)
“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.”
― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1241712

The Israelites were quite literal. I can find more scholars to explain this to you. Why not, you need some education from this apologist psuedo-science.

Paula Fredriksen PhD
1:30
Yahweh was a merger of Canaanite and other Semitic Gods. The attributes they had are found in Yahweh

Dr. Stavrakopoulou
Looks like the almighty God of the Bible has a bit of a taste for blood and surprise! He apparently doesn't look like what most of us would expect the creator of the universe to look like. I mean, who would've thought that the all-powerful, all-knowing God would be described in the Bible as having a human-like form and a penchant for sacrificial meals? Talk about a curveball. It's like finding out Santa Claus is actually a vegan.


Yup, Yahweh was a typical Near East deity. Body, flew in chariot, enjoyed the sweet aroma of a sacrifice and ate food. Your metaphor thing is wrong wrong wrong. What happened is modern people don't believe such nonsense so you have to say it's all poetic. They were not saying that. These are the people who God "talked to, gave laws, messages, revelations, made appearances" so they would know.
It's a myth. It doesn't matter how you frame Baal today, he's still fiction. Same with Yahweh.

You are very welcome. Truth is truth, even 70 year-old truth.

Right, an author from the 50's making a claim a Hellenistic/Persian myth is real. Cool, nice evidence. Do you have any actual evidence?

Have you read any of Lewis’ work, joel? For example, have you read about his conversion to Christianity?

Yes. He is an apologist who didn't know the good rebuttals to things like the problem of evil but also didn't yet know the extent to which the religion wasn't original and the first known writings and so on. His arguments are all standard apologetics, easily debunked. He had no idea it was a mythology. This was before critical historical scholarship on religion was a field.
He's a good writer.

I just want to be clear about what you’re saying here, joel. I wonder if you would answer the following questions…

1. When you say ‘across the board’, do you mean that every historical scholar considers the Gospels to be mythical narratives?

It's the vast consensus. One apologist who may have gotten a PhD in history is Mike Licona. He presents the same tired arguments and debated Carrier and literally his only response to Carrier's use of available evidence was "well I disagree but let's move on"
Again, as Carrier says:
"
When the question of the historicity of Jesus comes up in an honest professional context, we are not asking whether the Gospel Jesus existed. All non-fundamentalist scholars agree that that Jesus never did exist. Christian apologetics is pseudo-history. No different than defending Atlantis. Or Moroni. Or women descending from Adam’s rib.

No. We aren’t interested in that.

When it comes to Jesus, just as with anyone else, real history is about trying to figure out what, if anything, we can really know about the man depicted in the New Testament (his actual life and teachings), through untold layers of distortion and mythmaking; and what, if anything, we can know about his role in starting the Christian movement that spread after his death. Consequently, I will here disregard fundamentalists and apologists as having no honest part in this debate, any more than they do on evolution or cosmology or anything else they cannot be honest about even to themselves.

Here I will summarize the best arguments for historicity and the logic behind the best case for it. And this only means mundane historicity; not the Gospel Jesus, but the Jesus of honest mainstream scholarship. I am most interested in finding out if I have left any good arguments out. So please add more in comments, if any you think remain that aren’t ridiculous and can be taken seriously by mainstream experts. Likewise if you think the logic of any argument I do present can be better formulated."

2.

Do ‘mythical narratives’ mean, to you and to every historical scholar, stories which are not true?

All euhemerized deities were celestial deities who were later set on Earth. Fictive families were often given but sometimes they interacted in real places and real kings and leaders were in the legends. The fictive founder of Rome, Romulus had obviously many true things in the story. Romulus is a supernatural being who isn't real. The story was likely used in Mark as a transfiguration (changed from a millitary warrior to a peaceful warrior)

3.

Do all historians consider every defence of the Gospels complete psuedo-science crank?

Bart Ehrman was asked about apologists and credibility and he pretty much said standard apologetics is ridiculous, uneducated and crank. I cannot find the video.
What is the best apologetic?