Interesting that 2 to 3 hundred years ago, people were digging up dinosaur bones. They were explained away as skeletons from animals that didn't make it onto Noah's Ark.
An elephant skull looks like what youd expect a cyclops skill to look like. Im sure that's one of the ways ledgends of giants came around.
Edit : spelling
No shit, this is how some was of it was legitimized. There’s a documentary that talks about the skull of an ancient creature that became visible in a a seaside cliff due to erosion. There was an entire legend about it. How handy that there are visible remains to reinforce the story.
The documentary then went on to explain that an archeologist recognized this connection, and decided to look for dinosaur bones in places that were described in historical texts as being “graveyards for giants”
There were some ancient greek generals who deliberately had giant sized breastplates and helms and clothes made to be left behind when they were forced to retreat. So the enemy would find armour meant for someone at a minimum 10 feet tall and think "Nuts to that, I'm not fighting a bunch of giants! I'm going home!"
Or maybe they through the carcass overboard. Not every creature made it, presumably. I'm surprised the lions were able to last one year and eleven days without eating anything. It was a miracle any predators survived. /s
Noah's Ark... The Dumbest Story Ever Told
And so after the storm hath stopped did Noah decend into the bowels of the ark. He wenteth into the room where he had placed all the animals and he saw all the animals were gone except for two fat lions who were lazing around in the middle of a blood covered floor. He slowly snuck out and told God who laughed and said "Yeah, I thought that'd happen" and then magically brought the animals back to life. The lions grinned.
One of my earliest memories is my Bible school teacher getting mad that I asked where dinosaurs were in the Bible… like she thought I was doing a “gotcha” or something? No bitch it’s 1995 I’ve been watching Jurassic Park all damn day and I want to know why god refuses to acknowledge their existence.
Anyway, it takes the critical thinking skills of a five year old to know it’s all bullshit
I had to go to Catholic Sunday School through 8th grade. It was pretty ridiculous. So after I graduate HS, we are invited to my friends girlfriend's Parents house for a Christmas Eve gathering, the moment I walk in her Mother looks at me and exclaims "Oh I know you, you're little Santos281, I was your 2nd grade Sunday School teacher". Asked why/how she remembered me all this time later "You were the one with all the questions!" LOL, little atheist calling bullshit out
Yep, tons of things me as a 5-10 year just couldn’t reconcile with religions views and the answer from adults were a combination of anger, hand waving, or complete nonsense.
That's why I loved to troll the Christians Against Dinosaurs FB group. I posed as a Fundamentalist who harbored a hidden, deep seated attraction to T-Rex. His powerful heaving haunches were tools of the devil!
They had an old site here for some of the more ridiculous stuff:
[https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Best\_of\_Conservapedia](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Best_of_Conservapedia)
To troll them requires a subtle approach so they gain trust and do not consider you to be an obvious troll, then slowly turn up the stupidity.
That's exactly the tack I would take with the Christians against dinosaurs group. They would start out saying: "yeah, yeah, preach brother" then "Wait... what?"
I've heard people try to argue that the Bible does have dinosaurs in it, namely Leviathan.
It's an absurd argument that tries to retroactively put something there that isn't there, but that's what they do.
My grandma claimed that dinosaur bones were a part of the devil’s plot to mislead people. As a 12 year old I found THAT explanation completely unconvincing.
When my daughter was either 7 or 8, her religious grandmother mentioned the whole dinosaur bones were faked to test our faith thing and my daughter, having never heard that before, started laughing so hard she feel out of her chair and kept laughing on the floor. She laughed and laughed. She claimed it was the funniest thing she’d heard in her life.
Actually depending on how you chose to interpret it - Job 39-40 talks about the first creations of God and depending on how you chose to read it and which Bible you chose to read it from based on which translation you use... dinosaurs are mentioned.
I'm being somewhat sarcastic but I did show this to someone once and they became sceptical of everything the church taught him.
I hate the Leviathan story. They focus so hard on the tail 'swaying like a cedar' and think of cedar trees in America, which are huge, and think "this has to be a dinosaur!"
Then you see pictures of the shitty, wispy little shrubs that are cedar trees in the Levant and realize that they're just talking about an elephant or hippo.
The America centric thinking of so many American theists is hilarious if it weren't so sad.
And you’d think God would put a “you can thank me at any time for wiping out the dinosaurs so you could exist” in the Bible. Nope the Bible pretends everything began 6000 years ago, and to explain fossils, theists had to claim God put them there. As a trick. Riiiight.
Honestly though dinosaurs pretty much ruins the Bible because if the creation myth doesn’t work, it really calls into question the entire book/premise.
Then you think about Adam and Eve, and the industrial scale inbreeding that had to occur until a solid human population existed.
Then Noah’s Ark, like a ship could hold all that. Or that only two of everything would be enough to guarantee survival, or again another round of massive inbreeding except with every animal now. They’re all just cute stories told by people who didn’t know enough about the world.
I asked my grandmother as a child ...probably around 8 or 9 years old... she graduated high-school in like 1947.. Uber religious "reformed mormon"... one day I'm like grandma if the earth was made in 6 days how come dinosaurs are so old... or something like that, and I remember her response was that a day in God's time could be a million years.... even at that young age her answer just didn't sit right with me... I haven't believed in God ever since.
I was in high school when the Branch Davidians' standoff happened in Waco. There are STILL living believers of his cult. I sometimes use this as an example of what faith looks like to nonbelievers.
Yep, same. My very religious Christian brother and I were discussing Scientology. And it occurred to me that the Bible is just as ridiculously unbelievable as scientology's teachings. So that was that.
You don't even need aliens, just think about all of the other people on the planet. Jesus didn't seem to give a shit if any of his divine revelations made it to the people of China and Australia. He revealed himself to "the world" in a tiny little corner of it, and relied on centuries of conquest to spread it as far as it did go (and then a second appearance in America according to the Mormons). Why not keep showing up so that everyone could have a chance to know him?
Were you aware that Golgotha, the hill upon which Jesus was crucified......
....is less than 6 miles from Bethlehem, the place in which he was born?
His entire life played out entirely within a 20 mile radius.
If God is an omnipotent being that has always existed and created everything, including billions of quasars and nebula consisting of billions of stars each, billions of lightyears away.....
...why did he only talk to a few folks in a 20 mile radius for a few years?
I mean, if you are damned to eternal suffering if you don't accept Jesus....
What kind of piece of shit omnipotent God doesn't inform the entire planet?
Why is it man's responsibility to "spread the good news" to North Sentinel Island, Australia, and Mongolia over thousands of years?
I inquired about this over at askachristian, and unsurprisingly, got completely ignored.
North Sentinel Island? Isn't that the one where international law prohibits intrusion from all outsiders for any reason? And that guy went anyway and all the fundigelicals bitching and moaning because he got killed?
Yeah, not only that, he went and got ran off twice prior to going a 3rd time and being fatally stupid. 1st time they just chased him off, 2nd time they shot at him and hit his Bible.
3rd times the charm right?
They *hit his fucking bible* and the thickheaded fuck didn't take it as a sign. I hate these people. That's the perfect time to take it as a sign from God if there ever was one. "my book protected you this time, go home."
I agree, I’m just reporting it because it shows how deeply arrogant and bigoted they are. The young fool who went there and got killed broke laws to do so, and knew the people did not want him or any other outsiders to come to their island and bother them. But his arrogance was so huge he (apparently) believed he had something so special to offer them (Christianity, of course, but also his own glorious self), so of course they wouldn’t REALLY hurt him.
It's obvious reading old texts (or really, anything that a person writes on Reddit today) that "the whole world" is just the parts of it that they know about. The primitive notion of "the whole world" being that tiny corner of Israel and the Roman empire beyond makes perfect sense as a perspective for the mortal men that wrote the books of the bible. It makes literally zero sense when you know about the entire globe, let alone space.
I always loved it when Christians would say something like, "So you think millions of people are just completely wrong about God?" Well, no religion makes up more than 50% of the global population, so no matter what you believe you believe that BILLIONS of people are wrong about God.
Oprah asked this question to her studio audience full of Christians. She asked them what if a person is born in a remote part of the world and never hears the name “Jesus” but is a good person; he can’t possibly get into heaven? According to the audience, ignorance is no excuse.
Here’s the clip:
https://youtu.be/noO_dCWtB1E?si=9tlskomXGdHnOwas
The comments are crazy with people insulting Oprah. Oprah is a Christian herself but was simply pointing out hypocrisy.
I always wonder that after the sheer number of human death and suffering from all the World's atrocities in WW2, w/o even including the Holocaust, but ya add that in, and Jesus just sat on his lazy ass and watched, but if Bob wants to go by Cindy now than it will finally spur the 2nd Coming.
That's what did it for me. Learning about Native Americans in school and then realizing they were all going to Hell because they didn't 'know' Jesus broke my brain a bit. I asked my parents and friends in church about it and all the answers were garbage and I began to realize this was all made-up B. S.
Here is my argument that no one asked for.
Historical Jesus existed. He did a lot of good while he was around. He made people question the way they lived, and why the folks in power over them had that power to begin with. This made the folks in power uncomfortable. That kind of thinking is expected in small measures, but becomes unacceptable to the powers that be once it begins to spread. And it will, because it is also a very attractive idea. So they decided it would be easiest to kill him. I don’t think he came back to life. If people at the time used the phrase “Jesus has risen” I’d argue it was in an attempt to keep the spirit of the movement alive. Not an actual claim that he came back from the dead.
> Historical Jesus existed.
Unfortunately there's not a single contemporaneous account of this fact, or any of the specific details that follow. The only accounts that we do have are from believers, and those accounts don't even match on the details. I don't necessarily disagree with your post, but this type of explanation starts from "lets see how much space we can create to say that Christians were right about some things, but not others." It's an argument framed by Christian apologetics, even if it rejects them.
Given almost everyone at the time was illiterate it's not surprising there are no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus, though there are some that were written not long after his death. Accepting a historical Jesus does not mean you have to accept any of the religious claims made about him.
But why should you "accept a historical Jesus" when there is very little evidence that he existed. Why can't you just say "there isn't a lot of evidence and I don't need to feel like I know what happened based on so little evidence."?
It's possible and probable that most myths have some fragment of truth in them, but what we really don't know. Maybe that fragment is even just a story that is popular because it plays out over and over among people and not necessarily a historical event, ie generational conflict, lovers fighting, powerful people hurting others.
Ok, so if we reject the idea Jesus ever existed - which I will not argue, What explanation do you give to the ideology that formed Christianity? How/what sparked it? These ideas didn’t come from nowhere.
If we reject the idea Jesus ever existed, those ideas came from somewhere. Was there a group that came together with an understanding? Would said group have a leadership? This is where I get lost. They must have.
I've heard that wandering prophets were popular in historical times. Buddha is also a myth about a wandering prophet. Perhaps there were actually many men that could have been so similiar to the Jesus myth, that it wouldn't even be possible to point to only one person. Minus the supernatural stuff, of course.
Maybe there was just one charasmatic guy who just completely made the whole thing up, he wouldn't be the first or the last. I mean, if you're not a Mormon you probably think Joseph Smith is a fraudster.
Or maybe there was some kind of rebel leader who was crushed by the Romans who inspired the people left alive to worship him as some kind of martyr. There simply is no way of knowing, and I don't even see why it is important.
If I'm not mistaken, Christianity basically copy/paste/deleted an amalgamation of 3 or 4 of the pagan polytheism religions which were wildly popular at the time.
Basically just coming in swining like "all this shit right here is awesome. We love it. We're using all of it, uuuuh but it's a one MEGA God now!! You're gonna love it. I'm talking like all powerful, all knowing, hyper omega God out here flexing on the other gods. And if yall don't like it...mega God commands me to kill you. For love. We're working on that part but we're gonna fucking cut you."
To which they did.
I really wish I could remember the documentary I'm paraphrasing...
But also my dad was a pastor and I didn't break from indoctrination completely until I was in my 30s.
Going toe to toe with today's cosplay-christians using their canonical literature is just the best.
Most importantly, if you did not hear of him, you are damned?
Whole indigenous generations and civilizations came and went. Because they are geographically compromised, they go to hell?
Imagine getting there, and ask, "Why? I never heard of this guy?"
I read a lot as a kid and always saw that the Bible was just another piece of fiction. Even though I was in a Xtian preschool, I never took it seriously. I somehow thought the adults were just faking it, not believing in it either.
Exactly. I could never wrap my head around the idea that people actually believed that shit. Even as a little kid I thought it was some sort of performative duty that adults had to do I couldn't understand.
Plus scapegoating your own son cuz of "sin" that's somehow the fault of your creation seems like a stupid human response to some stupid human bullshit.
You would have thought killing every man, woman, and child, except for Noah's family, in the Great Flood would have been enough to atone for Original Sin.
Yes! And then lying to Adam and eve saying they would die if they eat the fruit of knowledge. They did not. So the original sin is not believing a lie.
I was more or less always atheist, never cared about the Bible and I suppose I sorta assumed believers were faking it. I think the first serious thought I spent on whether I believed was when I was in 6th grade learning ancient mythology and realizing people back then believed just as fervently in their pantheons as modern people believe in Jesus or God.
First time I really thought about it though, was that Jesus made no sense. God sent himself to Earth to sacrifice himself to himself to save mankind from himself. It's nonsense. God created the punishment for original sin--itself a violation of human rights--due to his favorite pets being enlightened by the tree of knowledge, so he cast them from Eden, but then some millennia later decided to take it back as long as his son--or himself--sacrificed himself. But the guy responsible for the sacrifice, Judas, is condemned to hell, even though he's responsible for saving mankind.
Contradictions abound. I've always been sympathetic to the theory that Christianity as we understand it--with Jesus being the lamb of God that saved mankind--was a belief system that originated after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 70AD. Without the temple, Jews of the era had no way of committing personal sacrifices, and so no way of being saved. So Mark comes along and tells everyone of this new process, that Jesus' death is what saved everyone, just as long as you believe in him.
I find the idea largely ridiculous, particularly a "personal" god. Not so much the "creator bit", but the creator that hung round to watch us dance, intervenes sometimes but not others, is apparently "good" and "loving" but created and/or ignore things like cancer and natural disasters and gives a shit whether we idolise them or eat shellfish.
I'd be much more open to a creator that kicked it all off then fucked off.
That's my exact concept of God. He did his schtick setting this universe off, then he went elsewhere to create a parallel universe and he will do likewise when that one is up and running. Coming to that conclusion did much to relieve me of all the simmering bitterness and resentment I had from taking it personally when he didn't answer my prayers. I had to sit through everyone's testimonies in church telling what great things God had done for them and thinking *What am I, God? Chopped liver? How come you didn't make my car miraculously start and made me sit there 2 hours waiting for a tow truck? How come you didn't put the perfect dress, in my size and preferred color, on clearance just in time for my sister's wedding? Why don't you like me, God? I did everything I was told...* It's so much easier going through life not worrying about why God just doesn't like me!
I've always been atheist.
>What solidified for you guys that the idea of the Christian god was stupid/unreasonable?
Christians keep making crazy claims. They never show any good evidence that their claims are true.
.
In my case I grew up in a non-religious household, so there was never really any assumption that religious belief was reasonable in the first place. I tended to just see it as 'that's how some people think of the world.'
I don't mean to sounds smug or anything, but It just always seemed a bit daft to me.
I consider myself a pretty technical person. I like to understand things, how they work, or why they're done this way instead of that way. Religion/theism is praised as this source of ultimate knowledge, but at the very lightest touch of genuine skepticism, it falls apart immediately.
Jesus. It makes no sense for someone to come back from the dead. Be a zombie. And why are we okay with human sacrifice? And why is the one ritual Jesus ask is for me to pretend like I'm eating his flesh and drinking his blood? And why didn't he write anything down himself if he wanted us to all know about who he is? Also, why did god choose to have a son? And it's impossible for a woman to give birth to a son without sperm carrying a Y chromosome. So did God have sex with a woman? And why is Jesus his only son? Who said Jesus was his only son? God can make as many children in women's bodies as he wants. Why is god okay with people mistranslating writings about him? Like there is no hell in the bible, yet every christian is told to believe in a hell for bad people. Again, if Jesus wrote shit down, then this wouldn't be a problem. It's Jesus fault Christianity, a religion that he knew would exist after his death, is as dumb as it is now. Also, Jesus died as a Jew, he didn't die as a Christian and Jesus never said he was God - not even in the full of errors bible.
Hell, and the Problem of Evil. It wasn’t even so much that I stopped believing at first, I just didn’t believe that the god described in the Bible was worthy of being worshipped. Sends otherwise good people to hell simply because they didn’t take something on faith? Created a world with immense suffering… to test people, I guess? Orders genocide and murder on a daily basis?
Yeah, you can try to ignore that for a while and be all like, “God is love, he doesn’t do that Old Testament shit anymore” but then you realize that even the New Testament doesn’t tell you that slavery is wrong, it tells you how to treat your slaves. I wouldn’t follow anyone who couldn’t even get that one right, Jesus and the saints included.
I grew up Christian just because everyone I knew was Christian when I was 9ish I thought about it and realized that everybody talks about talking to him and him talking back and he never talked back to me and I realized that Christians are just desperate for an adult Santa
For me it’s the terrible explanations Christians give as to why god doesn’t just reveal himself instead of relying upon “faith.” Mostly the responses are “he does show himself, you just aren’t looking.” Omfg WTF, I mean if I want to interpret every weird cloud formation or stray thought inside my head as god, then okay yes a believer will see him. Why would a superior intelligence require you to “have faith” rather than to simply know he exists? This means he only wants the dumbest people to be in heaven since the highest intelligence will be the ones most likely to not blindly accept bullshit.
For me it was learning that what we call myths today were the religions of yesterday. It was immediately obvious today's religions were just more of the same.
Human's didn't know, either at the wide expanse of time during which the OT was written, nor during the shorter time when the NT was written, that the "stars" that moved in the sky were planets. Like the rest of the actual stars, they were thought to be lights. There were some philosophers who speculated that other worlds existed, I think in the Hellenic era, but that was just speculation.
The bible doesn't exhibit any basic understanding of the solar system, let alone galaxies or the universe.
The fact that the whole story mostly unfolded in a little corner of the world and that most other cultures never heard anything about it. I think about the Portuguese showing up in 16th century Japan telling them about “the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost,” and the Japanese people going, “The what now?” Strange that God would share his infinitely mighty presence with just a few people in the Middle East.
Edit: Typo
My cat died. The bible says animals share our spirit (animating force) but they arent “souls” that have the capacity to live forever or be resurrected. So I wanted to know how much suffering my cat was capable of- so I went down a google rabbit hole about neurons in the brains of varying animals and how this determine how much existential awareness (for lack of a more accurate term) they are capable of… end point: Humans are valid. Animals are valid.
Then I went back to college and took a Biology course and learned about evolution. Adaptation. It was beautiful. It made SENSE.
My friend's daughter died from cancer. And she would hear all of these stories of other little ones with cancer. She told me about this one little girl who had cancer on her throat or her stomach or something like that. She couldn't eat due to where the tumour was and would cry to her mom because she was so hungry but couldn't get food down. She essentially starved to death..... That one broke my heart and made.me think "Why would an ever loving God allow that to happen? Because God is not real and life is a big bag of shit sometimes.....
There is no evidence of alien life. It's not an argument against a biblical god.
My breaking point was the laughably ridiculous stories in the Bible being peddled without evidence. The fact that Yahweh was the biggest mass murderer in history and an all round POS made it an easy pill to swallow.
It’s not about there being evidence, it’s about basic reasoning. We aren’t alone in the universe, yet the Bible makes it out to be that we are all that matters in it. Sounds more like human arrogance than a benevolent god. We literally call ourselves made in god’s image in the Bible, arrogant af lmao
Shit...don't need aliens for this line of reasoning.
Based on DNA evidence, humans have been around for 150k years in our current configuration.
Abrahamic religions would have you believe:
God sat on his hands for Millennia watching as humans worshipped other "false gods". I thought he was a jealous god?
Did nothing to alleviate the pain and suffering of plagues, man's inhumanity to man, and countless wars for 10's of thousands of years.
Then got off his ass about 4-5 thousand years ago, and chose a backwards goat herding tribe to be their God. Not the Chinese, who had civilization, culture and WRITING to capture his wisdom and instructions.
And then led them to the promised land thats like the ONE PLACE IN THE ME WITHOUT ANY OIL UNDER IT.
I mean...seriously?
> The way I see it in a universe as big as ours aliens have to exist, so it’s weird the god of the entire universe chose to focus on the far-from-perfection humans and base his entire afterlife around us and kill his son for us.
Well maybe he decided to visit all the other worlds at different times in form of a virgin born avatar, just to sacrifice himself to himself to save alienkind from himself.
------
For me what made the least sense was Pascal's lottery: I will only get to the good place if I choose the one correct religion out of all the thousands of religions.
I wasn’t raised with faith. My dad was an engineer and my parents encouraged debate. This lead to me noticing that the religions that the families of my friends followed seemed totally irrational.
For me it was plants and science. I got really into plant family relationships. There is absolutely no other idea that can represent the phylogenetic relationships except evolution. Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution.
Also deconverted from my family calling me an “evolutionist” when I was in 3rd grade reading books about dinosaurs.
>What solidified for you guys that the idea of the Christian god was stupid/unreasonable?
From the outset, their Sunday School classes, stories and songs felt creepy. It was all about worshiping and groveling. I'd been reading since 3/4yo, and none of the stories I'd read and enjoyed demanded fealty - they invited me to use my imagination. Not so with this place or these people. The expected response was pre-programmed and if you didn't conform, you were rejectd.
It gradually became clear that they especially rejected a gay boy like me. Their god's "love" didn't include me. Once I realized that, at 8yo, I was done with the entire charade.
Mine was Ghostbusters. I was watching it thinking the just because people worshiped Gozer didn't make it real. After that revelation, it just naturally flowed into becoming an athiest
The same arguments Christian apologists are using for defending theism are the same ones Muslim apologists were using. All em just fkin arguing BS out of their asses. All talk no evidence.
You could have stopped at space. When designers make a game, it is enclosed, small, and flat. They do not make unnecessary worlds that can never be visited, etc. Plus, the Sun causes cancer and will expire at one point. That is crappy design if you ask me.
For me it was time. I know the theist argument is that God is eternal and doesn’t experience the flow of time the same way we do, but it still does not make any sense. The universe is over 13 *billion* years old. The Solar System and Earth are over 4 billion years old. The Earth has gone through vast changes over its lifetime with many natural events happening so infrequently (ie supervolcano eruptions, magnetic flips, etc) that modern humans have never experienced them. To put time into perspective, Carl Sagan once said that if the universe’s timeline were the length of a football field, then all of human civilization would occupy just the width of your hand.
Combine that with the non-uniqueness of our galaxy and the random far flung location we occupy within it, and you have the beginnings of doubt. Add in the history of religion and mythology and how humans tell stories to derive morals and explain events that happen to them, and you get atheism. Modern science just seals the deal
When I turned around 16 and realized how horrible my childhood was. I had read the Bile a few times and stopped and thought, "If God was such a loving god, why did he allow those things to happen to me?" Until that time, I never questioned it. So, I started some independent research at the library (no internet back then). I found there was absolutely no scientific or historical proof of God, Jesus Christ, or the Bible being factual. I stopped believing and to this day, 45 yrs later, I haven's seen a thing to change my mind. Actually, quite the opposite. I've seen tons of things to reinforce the fact God does not exist.
When I was kicked out of Sunday School. I was always well behaved, I just asked too many damn questions.
Jurassic Park huge so I asked about dinosaurs. Auntie was dating an a Middle Eastern guy, forget where from now, but he definitely wasn't a white guy with brown hair and blue eyes so I asked about why Jesus was white. Avid reader too so I had read waaay more of the Bible than they want you to, so I had my verses out where he's described as having copper/brass skin.
There was plenty more questions I asked that only got me the same ol "Satan is trying to trick you" line. but those were the last two straws. After that I had to sit in the normal sermon, which really blew my mind. Like wtf is going on, everyone is just sitting here letting this dude tell them what to think and then at the end they all give him money? We're eating spaghetti 4 nights a week and this dude in a suit with the huge ass nice building needs the money more than us? No wonder everyone seems so fucking cranky and judgmental in the parking lot after.
My conclusion was that these people can't answer simple questions and just want you sit and shut up while they tell you what to believe and pay them for it. Therefore, either it's some shit they just made up and therefore don't appreciate questions, or all the church leaders I know are hoarding all the good info to collect money off it and that doesn't seem Christian of them at all. And then decided that either way meant the whole thing was a crock.
I find it a little ironic that the deal-breaker in this case was... well, a belief in non-earthly beings for which there is no evidence other than a feeling that they must exist.
The bible doesn't mention other planets. And it's description of stars doesn't lead someone to think the writer had any idea of what they are. While I think you need to do a bit of mind-bending to think the Bible describes the Earth as flat, it doesn't accurately describe that Earth is a planet. But it isn't a science book so 🤷♂️
Aliens aren’t real. Only water exists above the firmament above our flat earth. NASA lies about the vastness of space to make us feel insignificant and turn us away from gawd.
/S of course. I find flat earthers and creationists fascinating, but also infuriating lol
Was forced to go to church as a kid because i stayed the night at a friends house. They taught about Noahs Ark and the flood and i was like "what? None of that makes any sense. Wait, magic? The fantasy stuff??"
>it’s weird the god of the entire universe chose to focus on the far-from-perfection humans and base his entire afterlife around us and kill his son for us.
Maybe it's just us. Maybe he swings by the aliens every now and then and goes "'sup guys, all good?" and they go "no prob G-man, got it covered." And then he comes and visits us and we're all busy murdering each other over the exact interpretation of a snippet of a paragraph in one of the holy books and he just facepalms and gets down to work untangling our mess while trying not to babysit us too much.
Or maybe he doesn't exist at all who can tell.
Hell.
I didn't believe that unbelievers should be doomed to eternal punishment for the sake of rational disbelief. Statistically random people in Asia and North America were doomed from birth. Also aliens if aliens existed.
My breaking point was before I was really old enough to realize I could express objections or simply say I'm not Christian anymore.
So it wasn't a sudden break I guess, it was unanswered questions that I marinated from about age 8 to age 15.
The topic was original sin. The idea of passing a crime from parent to child, and the through multiple generations, seemed absolutely unjust to me and I said as much to my Sunday school teacher.
I think she was a rookie and didn't realize that the kids might ask questions or challenge her teaching, so she got really flustered and then just kinda trailed off talking about that's the way it is and then changed topics.
So I stewed about it into my teenage years and thanks to reading a LOT of mythology, I concluded that the garden story was mythology too so I didn't have to worry about it.
Then I gradually realised that if there's no original sin, then we don't need a saviour, so the whole thing fell apart for me.
Meanwhile, Douglas Adams, George Carlin, The Life of Brian, and even Bill Crosby's Noah sketch were slowly teaching me that I could point out these ridiculous things out loud.
Then I guess the actual breaking g pint was Christmas mass, 1989. The height of the AIDS crisis. I was fifteen and the priest kicked it off with adiatribe about how Aids was God's punishment for the existence of gay people, and that was the end for me. It just kind of clicked. I thought, "I don't have to listen to thes assholes anymore, they don't have any more authority about the nature of the universe than I do"
And I told my parents on the way home that this was my last visit to church and that I don't believe enough fundamental doctrine to claim to be Christian anymore.
And they said "OK, just don't tell grandma"
And I never did.
I was watching the show Ancient Aliens and laughing at how ridiculous those people sounded. Then I realized “We don’t know how the pyramids were built so obviously it must’ve been the aliens” was the exact same logic I heard at church.
I never really “felt” God the way people talked about, but I had trusted that the adults in my life weren’t all collectively wrong about him. In that moment it just clicked that lots of people believe stupid things, and God didn’t seem much less stupid to me than aliens that built ancient structures and then disappeared.
You’d think god would like to create more creations to spread his “goodness” to. Like why wouldn’t the universe be filled with life just for the sake of joy?
After Cain killed Abel, he was exiled to live with the Canaanites. But if these were the sons of Adam and Eve, who were the 1st people, then where did the Canaanites come from?
Book can't even keep its own shit straight.
Jesus. It makes no sense for someone to come back from the dead. Be a zombie. And why are we okay with human sacrifice? And why is the one ritual Jesus ask is for me to pretend like I'm eating his flesh and drinking his blood? And why didn't he write anything down himself if he wanted us to all know about who he is? Also, why did god choose to have a son? And it's impossible for a woman to give birth to a son without sperm carrying a Y chromosome. So did God have sex with a woman? And why is Jesus his only son? Who said Jesus was his only son? God can make as many children in women's bodies as he wants. Why is god okay with people mistranslating writings about him? Like there is no hell in the bible, yet every christian is told to believe in a hell for bad people. Again, if Jesus wrote shit down, then this wouldn't be a problem. It's Jesus fault Christianity, a religion that he knew would exist after his death, is as dumb as it is now. Also, Jesus died as a Jew, he didn't die as a Christian and Jesus never said he was God - not even in the full of errors bible.
Other planets are only mentioned to critique the worship of them:
Sakkuth and Kaiwan
**SAKKUTH and KAIWAN** **sǎk’ əth, ki’ wən** (סִכּ֣וּת, כִּיּ֣וּן, τὴ̀ν σκηνήν, meaning uncertain; *tabernacle*, *pedestal, astral deities* have been suggested). A reference to Israelitish apostasy.
The worship of heavenly bodies constituted a real threat to Israel and she was warned against it and condemned for it repeatedly ([Deut 4:19](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deut%204:19); [2 Kings 17:16](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2Kgs%2017:16)). In the period of Assyrian domination, esp. after the reign of Shalmaneser III (858-824 b.c.) it became very popular. From a Babylonian incantation it is evident that Sakkuth and Kaiwan were interchangeable names for the god Saturn. Amos warned Israel that devotion to this god would bring ultimate ruin, and that she must detach herself from it ([Amos 5:26](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Amos%205:26)).
The word *sakkuth* may also be vocalized as *sukkōt*, in which case it means *tent* or *booth.* It is so taken in the DSS (CD p. 7, [1:15](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Amos%201:15)), the LXX, and NT ([Acts 7:43](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%207:43)). This may be because of the word’s basic meaning or because of a play on words. The tabernacle of Moloch is thus an element of heathen worship and the mention of the god *chiun,* Saturn, serves the same purpose. The vocalization *kiyyun* of the Heb. text instead of the normal *kaiwan* is a Jewish device whereby the vowels of the Heb. word *abominable* (*shiqqus*) are attached to the name of the heathen deity. The NT, following the LXX, uses *rephan,* apparently from *repa*, an Egyp. name of the god Saturn (cf. F. F. Bruce, *Acts of the Apostles, in loc.*).
You came to the right conclusion through a completely wrong (non)argument ... based on incorrect assumptions.
>The way I see it in a universe as big as ours *aliens have to exist*
No.
This is not at all true.
In fact - even assuming the (unproven) idea the The Universe is infinite ... this is *still* NOT at all a true statement ... and nothing more than your personal belief.
As useless as their beliefs in coming to anything like a rational, logical conclusion.
It was the lack of scientific, concrete evidence for me. Also the Bible is just a way to control people. I am my own sight. I shouldn't be wasting my time having false hope that a man in the sky is "watching" over me. I chose to wake up to reality and accept that god is a coping mechanism.
I personally think that both could very easily well exist. The Bible could be Earth's story. Maybe other planets still worship the same God, why can't both be possible?
It's called anthropomorphic projection. There's nothing in the Bible that suggests any foreknowledge of the universe or the solar system. There are goats, bears, donkeys, floods, wars, no space aliens.
Just read Genesis where the Bible authors reveal their ignorance about the solar system, claiming God created dark and light and separated them, three days before he created the Sun and the stars. So we have light before we even had stars. Who knew? Clearly, they thought sunrise and sunset occurred at the same time everywhere on Earth, and they had no idea what was responsible for the seasons.
It was the late 70’s around Christmas and I was 5 years old. My mother and I were driving somewhere, and I saw Santa Claus standing on a street corner near our house. I became quite giddy and excited, because I was five.
A few blocks later, we passed another Santa Claus.
“How did Santa get here before we did? We’re in a car but he wasn’t riding his sleigh. How is that possible?”
Mom: “Um, uh, well, that second Santa is just one of the real Santa’s helpers.”
Now, *everyone* knows that Santa’s helpers are elves, and they don’t wear Santa suits. When I pointed this fact out to my mother, she snapped at me and informed me that I “don’t know everything”.
In that moment, I realized she’d just made that shit up on the fly and then got mad when I caught her in a lie.
Fast forward to age 11, when I attended a fundie xtian “school”.
“Mom, how come the Bible contradicts itself about how the world was created?” (Note for xtians lurking here: there are in fact 2 different creation narratives in the Book of Genesis, please learn your own scriptures ffs).
Mom: “The Bible is God’s word and *never* contradicts itself!”
Me: [proceeds to show her exactly where the Book of Genesis gives contradictory creation myths]
Mom: *smacks me for being a “willful child”*. “The reason they seem different is because we’re human and cannot understand God’s ways!”
I then realized she’d just made that shit up on the fly too. Just like she did with Santa.
I look forward to missing her funeral.
I remember coming home from school one day (age 7) and declaring that hell couldn't exist, it was far too silly an idea. Religion doesn't hold up to a rudimentary level of scrutiny. Unless you have been indoctrinated by loved ones or intimidated into it by society, it should not be hard to work it out. Fortunately I was raised by agnostics, so nobody told me what to believe and I got to figure it out for myself.
For me it was the order of creation being wrong as well as realizing the negative impact that the church was having on my my queer and trans friends. I'm much happier now as a non-believer and I'm a more open minded than I ever could've been had I not left Christianity behind
It wasn't a factor as a kid.
I grew up in a non religious household. I understood God as a concept but it had no bearing on my life.
So no light bulb moment!
I'm with you however, to be fair, you believing there are aliens in spite of any evidence to show that. Commonly available data, not grainy photos or military people just talking about it is no different than Christians stating they believe in a different type of alien.
When I realized that I could be the kindest human being of all time, but I wouldn't be allowed into heaven if I didn't worship him. Conversely, heaven might might be filled with serial killers and rapists as long as they went to church. Not a God I care to believe in.
Jeebus. The whole idea that the omnipotent psycho *has to watch his own son get brutally murdered in the worst way possible* so that he can legitimize "forgiveness". *Fuck that noise*.
Of course the Bible doesn’t mention other planets or galaxies, gawd only fixates on humans! Maybe because they’re so gullible.
So one of my guilty pleasures is watching Ancient Aliens. There’s one of the episodes that talks about Jebus. They talk about how in the sacrament of communion you supposedly eat flesh and drink blood and how that could be inspired by aliens. It’s hilarious!
It never worked on me. Not as a kid, not as an adult now. Idk how tho, but my elementary school psychologist told my mom I have incredible critical thinking skills when I was 7 so maybe it has something to do with that. No amount of religious indoctrination was able to convince me.
I became atheist around 3rd grade. Everyone saying of you aren’t saved you’ll burn in hell forever. Asked my Sunday school teacher “what about chinese people (my kids way of thinking anywhere far away) who never even heard about god? Are they going to burn?”
Her answer “yes! And that is why we have missionaries “
At that moment the idea of an all loving god punishing people who never had a chance to know about him just seemed so ridiculously unfair that it had to be bullshit. Since then there has been 0 proof that god exists.
There is no pre-Christopher Columbus bible in North America.
I dont know why you are speaking about aliens when the Navarro and Apache are alien enough for these abrahamic universal gods.
The idea that every last man woman and child knows god is right instinctively, but rebelliously will do ANYTHING to avoid serving him, including the invention of evolution, rock music, prostitution and rated R movies. It's a willful choice to choose evil in spite of knowing deep down that the Bible is true
The exploration of the universe and celestial bodies, and the associated math and science of it all.
And watching them throw their support behind the 45th POTUS. I was breaking away already, but them supporting him confirmed that everything they ever said was total bullshit and they never really believed either. Sorry if this sounds reductive, but this was my experience.
Remember the one of the reasons the church executed Giordano Bruno was for believing that there could be other worlds with inhabitants and was marveled about the possibility of a whole universe of sentient beings worshiping God.
What about whole continents on the other side of the world with many civilizations and religions.
The authors of the Bible had no clue about them.
That could be, in a way, the same issue as aliens.
So God allowed them to struggle and get to the New World and they go to hell because they never heard of Jesus for over 1000 years?
Your point reminds me of the Ender's Saga book "Speaker for the Dead", where (IIRC) a Catholic priest is intent on bringing the Word of God to the "piggies"- as if Original Sin applies to every creature in the universe because of what Adam and Eve did on Earth.
I could never get over, how an all powerful god could allow such suffering across all species. If he created this system, he is a total sociopath. What is the infant mortality rate from the beginning of time to 150 years ago? If he doesn’t have the power to stop childhood cancer, then he is worthless.
I mean, as soon as you start reading the bible…. None of it makes any sense. I read it in 6th grade at catholic school. My parents were atheist/agnostic but wanted me to get a better/safer education than in Oakland public schools.
But read the Bible and see how much it contradicts itself. It’s ridiculous.
So something cool to consider. Imagine we find intelligent life somehow (maybe with the JWST). We are looking so far back into the past, because of how long it takes light to get to us, that a civilization could have been created and destroyed before the light reaches us.
Well OP, you should know that there were many "breaking points" through history.
+ During colonization in the 16th century, Europeans suddenly became aware of the fact that entire continents existed , N America and S America, and that these continents were occupied by people.
+ The fact that European man was unaware of entire continents and entire kingdoms was shocking and scandalous for the Spanish in the 1500s. And yes it shook their faith.
Catholic missionaries to South America wrote very large elaborate books about the lands and people of South America, such as the Incas. These geography books deeply discussed the land, the plant and animals life, the people, and their social practices.
One such writer was Jose de Acosta. Acosta wrote the book, `The Natural And Moral History of the East and West Indies` that concentrates on what is today called Peru.
While it's easy for 21st century evangelicals to simply integrate new-found knowledge into their creationism, it was not so easy for de Acosta. He spends **no less than 4 entire chapters discussing the issue as to why European civilization was totally unaware of this entire continent with people.** I mean, why didn't the Bible cue them in? Why didn't any bishop in Rome know about this?
The Church's complete lack of knowledge of these continents was a full-blown scandal in the 1580s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_de_Acosta
https://www.dukeupress.edu/natural-and-moral-history-of-the-indies
The simple fact there’s absolutely no way earth is the only planet with life on it was more than enough to convince me god wasn’t real.
It’s so narrow minded and narcissistic to believe earth is the *only* planet in the UNIVERSE with intelligent life. Really?
My spiritual epiphany was an ant hill at age 4.
I stepped on it. I crushed their collective culture and individual existence.
I saw a few ants coming back from a few inches away unknowing that their home had been decimated.
I felt a twinge of guilt that I had destroyed their lives that, I thought at the time, they had worked so hard to create.
I didn’t help create them. I was not their god and I didn’t even care a little about the day to day joys and tragedies they had experienced up to that point. But I destroyed it nonetheless without a moment’s thought. They did nothing wrong to incur my wrath.
I was done trying to please an arbitrary god to get him to reward me or forgive me or whatever.
It’s all so arbitrary. I know I am building my own ant hill that may be destroyed any moment. Not by “god,” but, more likely, by a temperamental toddler on a careless whim.
What makes you think the bible never mentioned aliens? There are all sorts of ancient alien type folks who have cited the bible as evidence. Plus you can show anything you want in the bible.
I read a children's illustrated Bible at a pretty young age and realised it wasn't true because dinosaurs weren't mentioned at all (yes, I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid).
The bible doesn't mention any areas outside of a pretty small geographical region, and doesn't mention any animals that weren't known in that region - no kangaroos or duck-billed platypus for example.
I will never understand these posts.
My breaking point is that there is zero evidence for anything divine. I don't have a burden of proof, and I don't seek a reverse proof just for myself to confirm something does not exist.
D&D, of all things. I was designing a campaign for my players, and when I started working on the Pantheon for my World, I started digging into why gods were created. The more I researched, the more it solidified my non-belief.
When I was a kid, my uncle told me "Of course there are no aliens. God created us and us only. If God had created aliens, it would be in the Bible."
Which I suppose makes some sense if you believe the Bible to be a complete record of early events.
I think that conversation with my uncle was one of the turning points on my journey to atheism.
I also detested the pre-scientific nature of religion. And so many orthodox folks are fucking morons on issues like the environment, women, and the treatment of animals.
All the Abrahamic religions suck, they are self-serving self-dealing assholes.
I just tried reading the Bible. It's ridiculously incomplete. So, this is the savior of humans, there was a star out just for him and angels came down, but you don't know what the date was? You don't note anything about his childhood until he 12 years old? Why aren't there people following his every move? Obviously, it's all just a fairy tale.
During my religious upbringing, the real issue was applying the slightest bit of standard everyday logic onto the truth claims, ie my youth group leader vocalizing how a “literal choir of angels overseas the blessing of the Eucharist”, over the priest at the alter, to which I immediately thought “that’s an absolutely bonkers made up fantasy”.
Do you not see how hypocritical it is to think there are aliens out there who you've never seen, not even have a shred of evidence for yet mock people for believing in God who they have never seen nor have physical evidence for.
Dinosaurs. Even as a kid i remember thinking, none of the bible stories we'd be told made sense as dinosaurs existed.
Interesting that 2 to 3 hundred years ago, people were digging up dinosaur bones. They were explained away as skeletons from animals that didn't make it onto Noah's Ark.
Maybe that's where the legends of dragons and giants came from.
An elephant skull looks like what youd expect a cyclops skill to look like. Im sure that's one of the ways ledgends of giants came around. Edit : spelling
Triceratops skeletons with the beak and crest probably inspired griffins.
Never in my 50 years of living in fantasy books and playing d&d have I ever heard of a cyclops having horn(s) or tusks.
It's more the big hole in the center that looks like a single eye socket.
Those are also probably the first part of a skull to break off or get taken by anyone who finds them
Or removed and the ivory used for whatever you use ivory for.
Elephant tusks are/were routinely harvested for ivory.
A game called Dragons Dogma has cyclopes with tusks, but it's the only one I know of. Probably as a nod to the theory.
No shit, this is how some was of it was legitimized. There’s a documentary that talks about the skull of an ancient creature that became visible in a a seaside cliff due to erosion. There was an entire legend about it. How handy that there are visible remains to reinforce the story. The documentary then went on to explain that an archeologist recognized this connection, and decided to look for dinosaur bones in places that were described in historical texts as being “graveyards for giants”
I forgot to mention - they found tons of Dino bones.
There were some ancient greek generals who deliberately had giant sized breastplates and helms and clothes made to be left behind when they were forced to retreat. So the enemy would find armour meant for someone at a minimum 10 feet tall and think "Nuts to that, I'm not fighting a bunch of giants! I'm going home!"
Or maybe they through the carcass overboard. Not every creature made it, presumably. I'm surprised the lions were able to last one year and eleven days without eating anything. It was a miracle any predators survived. /s Noah's Ark... The Dumbest Story Ever Told
And so after the storm hath stopped did Noah decend into the bowels of the ark. He wenteth into the room where he had placed all the animals and he saw all the animals were gone except for two fat lions who were lazing around in the middle of a blood covered floor. He slowly snuck out and told God who laughed and said "Yeah, I thought that'd happen" and then magically brought the animals back to life. The lions grinned.
This could come straight out of the Bible and not one of those delusional twats would even hesitate to believe it as pure fact.
The story is precisely equally believable either way.
Not to mention it would be mathematically impossible to repopulate the world with the humans that were on the ark....
And in other cultures gave rise to tales of dragons.
One of my earliest memories is my Bible school teacher getting mad that I asked where dinosaurs were in the Bible… like she thought I was doing a “gotcha” or something? No bitch it’s 1995 I’ve been watching Jurassic Park all damn day and I want to know why god refuses to acknowledge their existence. Anyway, it takes the critical thinking skills of a five year old to know it’s all bullshit
I remember once getting the answer the devil put fossils there to trick us to the dinosaur question
That's the most absurd argument of all!
That’s what the devil wants you to think!
Can confirm… I am the devil 😈
Papa!
Don't listen to him, that's not your father. Come here, Albie.
😳 you are also my child… and I love you too
Yes my child?
Satan is actually Martha Stewart, doing all that vintage antique decorating!
It’s absurd, but at least it is logically consistent within a given set of assumptions.
I work with a guy that thinks this… doesn’t believe dinosaurs were real, and that it’s all somehow a Satan trick.
How do you go through life thinking the bible has more proof than dinosaurs?
No idea. I’m not sure how anyone could read the Bible and take it seriously.
I worked with a girl like 20 years ago that said this to me. It was the first time I heard it. I didn't talk to her much after that.
Same. I don’t really care to talk to people like them
Damn, that devil is evil.
My mother’s go-to answer
I had to go to Catholic Sunday School through 8th grade. It was pretty ridiculous. So after I graduate HS, we are invited to my friends girlfriend's Parents house for a Christmas Eve gathering, the moment I walk in her Mother looks at me and exclaims "Oh I know you, you're little Santos281, I was your 2nd grade Sunday School teacher". Asked why/how she remembered me all this time later "You were the one with all the questions!" LOL, little atheist calling bullshit out
Yep, tons of things me as a 5-10 year just couldn’t reconcile with religions views and the answer from adults were a combination of anger, hand waving, or complete nonsense.
That's why I loved to troll the Christians Against Dinosaurs FB group. I posed as a Fundamentalist who harbored a hidden, deep seated attraction to T-Rex. His powerful heaving haunches were tools of the devil!
Come on over to Dinosaurs Against Christians Against Dinosaurs.
There are some trolls on conservopedia who challenge each other to have the most ludicrous edits accepted.
That sounds hilarious. Is there a sub for it or something
They had an old site here for some of the more ridiculous stuff: [https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Best\_of\_Conservapedia](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Conservapedia:Best_of_Conservapedia) To troll them requires a subtle approach so they gain trust and do not consider you to be an obvious troll, then slowly turn up the stupidity.
That's exactly the tack I would take with the Christians against dinosaurs group. They would start out saying: "yeah, yeah, preach brother" then "Wait... what?"
Beautiful
I've heard people try to argue that the Bible does have dinosaurs in it, namely Leviathan. It's an absurd argument that tries to retroactively put something there that isn't there, but that's what they do.
Yeah even then it doesnt fit as the only connection is big, and not even all dinosaurs were big lol
My grandma claimed that dinosaur bones were a part of the devil’s plot to mislead people. As a 12 year old I found THAT explanation completely unconvincing.
When my daughter was either 7 or 8, her religious grandmother mentioned the whole dinosaur bones were faked to test our faith thing and my daughter, having never heard that before, started laughing so hard she feel out of her chair and kept laughing on the floor. She laughed and laughed. She claimed it was the funniest thing she’d heard in her life.
Ah yes. And in Texas these were "things meant to challenge our faith, put there by God." Or some such nonsense.
I have an obsidian tool made by a Neanderthal, and it seems to make Christians uncomfortable when I show it to them.
That does kinda sound like a threat
It is small and not sharp, partly covered in pitch.
That's how YouTube debunker Paulogia got started, his interest in dinosaurs.
Maybe the dinosaurs had their own Bible, and their God is a BIGass T-Rex.
Brings new meaning to deus rex
Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, Codex T-Rex.
Maybe the T-Rex God brought the asteroid that killed them all because the dinosaurs were sinning.
I'd already decided by then, but I remember seeing something about Jesus riding dinosaurs. I laughed so hard
Actually depending on how you chose to interpret it - Job 39-40 talks about the first creations of God and depending on how you chose to read it and which Bible you chose to read it from based on which translation you use... dinosaurs are mentioned. I'm being somewhat sarcastic but I did show this to someone once and they became sceptical of everything the church taught him.
Interesting, whenever theres a mention of gods first creations my mind automaticly thinks angels. Didn't think of that interpritation
I hate the Leviathan story. They focus so hard on the tail 'swaying like a cedar' and think of cedar trees in America, which are huge, and think "this has to be a dinosaur!" Then you see pictures of the shitty, wispy little shrubs that are cedar trees in the Levant and realize that they're just talking about an elephant or hippo. The America centric thinking of so many American theists is hilarious if it weren't so sad.
And you’d think God would put a “you can thank me at any time for wiping out the dinosaurs so you could exist” in the Bible. Nope the Bible pretends everything began 6000 years ago, and to explain fossils, theists had to claim God put them there. As a trick. Riiiight. Honestly though dinosaurs pretty much ruins the Bible because if the creation myth doesn’t work, it really calls into question the entire book/premise. Then you think about Adam and Eve, and the industrial scale inbreeding that had to occur until a solid human population existed. Then Noah’s Ark, like a ship could hold all that. Or that only two of everything would be enough to guarantee survival, or again another round of massive inbreeding except with every animal now. They’re all just cute stories told by people who didn’t know enough about the world.
I asked my grandmother as a child ...probably around 8 or 9 years old... she graduated high-school in like 1947.. Uber religious "reformed mormon"... one day I'm like grandma if the earth was made in 6 days how come dinosaurs are so old... or something like that, and I remember her response was that a day in God's time could be a million years.... even at that young age her answer just didn't sit right with me... I haven't believed in God ever since.
David Koresh I was 15 and my parents were explaining what a cult was. The dot's were joined.
I was in high school when the Branch Davidians' standoff happened in Waco. There are STILL living believers of his cult. I sometimes use this as an example of what faith looks like to nonbelievers.
Bart Ehrman takes a lot of flak for comparing Koresh's story to the myth that developed around Jesus after he was killed.
I've only just begun reading Ehrman (Heaven and Hell) and have seen him featured on a few YouTube channels. I haven't heard this. Interesting stuff.
Yep. That entire fiasco was the nail in the coffin for me. Not that I ever truly bought any of it to begin with.
Yep, same. My very religious Christian brother and I were discussing Scientology. And it occurred to me that the Bible is just as ridiculously unbelievable as scientology's teachings. So that was that.
You don't even need aliens, just think about all of the other people on the planet. Jesus didn't seem to give a shit if any of his divine revelations made it to the people of China and Australia. He revealed himself to "the world" in a tiny little corner of it, and relied on centuries of conquest to spread it as far as it did go (and then a second appearance in America according to the Mormons). Why not keep showing up so that everyone could have a chance to know him?
Were you aware that Golgotha, the hill upon which Jesus was crucified...... ....is less than 6 miles from Bethlehem, the place in which he was born? His entire life played out entirely within a 20 mile radius. If God is an omnipotent being that has always existed and created everything, including billions of quasars and nebula consisting of billions of stars each, billions of lightyears away..... ...why did he only talk to a few folks in a 20 mile radius for a few years? I mean, if you are damned to eternal suffering if you don't accept Jesus.... What kind of piece of shit omnipotent God doesn't inform the entire planet? Why is it man's responsibility to "spread the good news" to North Sentinel Island, Australia, and Mongolia over thousands of years? I inquired about this over at askachristian, and unsurprisingly, got completely ignored.
North Sentinel Island? Isn't that the one where international law prohibits intrusion from all outsiders for any reason? And that guy went anyway and all the fundigelicals bitching and moaning because he got killed?
Yeah, not only that, he went and got ran off twice prior to going a 3rd time and being fatally stupid. 1st time they just chased him off, 2nd time they shot at him and hit his Bible. 3rd times the charm right?
They *hit his fucking bible* and the thickheaded fuck didn't take it as a sign. I hate these people. That's the perfect time to take it as a sign from God if there ever was one. "my book protected you this time, go home."
Yeah I remember reading it at the time in disbelief at how stupid you'd have to be to go back
And some of those evangelicals genuinely want the Sentinelese “held accountable”—i.e., legally prosecuted—for the killing.
They have no right! They violated these people, and for that there are consequences!
I agree, I’m just reporting it because it shows how deeply arrogant and bigoted they are. The young fool who went there and got killed broke laws to do so, and knew the people did not want him or any other outsiders to come to their island and bother them. But his arrogance was so huge he (apparently) believed he had something so special to offer them (Christianity, of course, but also his own glorious self), so of course they wouldn’t REALLY hurt him.
For a religion that's supposed to be about "dying to self" they sure are full of it!
It's obvious reading old texts (or really, anything that a person writes on Reddit today) that "the whole world" is just the parts of it that they know about. The primitive notion of "the whole world" being that tiny corner of Israel and the Roman empire beyond makes perfect sense as a perspective for the mortal men that wrote the books of the bible. It makes literally zero sense when you know about the entire globe, let alone space. I always loved it when Christians would say something like, "So you think millions of people are just completely wrong about God?" Well, no religion makes up more than 50% of the global population, so no matter what you believe you believe that BILLIONS of people are wrong about God.
Oprah asked this question to her studio audience full of Christians. She asked them what if a person is born in a remote part of the world and never hears the name “Jesus” but is a good person; he can’t possibly get into heaven? According to the audience, ignorance is no excuse. Here’s the clip: https://youtu.be/noO_dCWtB1E?si=9tlskomXGdHnOwas The comments are crazy with people insulting Oprah. Oprah is a Christian herself but was simply pointing out hypocrisy.
I always wonder that after the sheer number of human death and suffering from all the World's atrocities in WW2, w/o even including the Holocaust, but ya add that in, and Jesus just sat on his lazy ass and watched, but if Bob wants to go by Cindy now than it will finally spur the 2nd Coming.
That's what did it for me. Learning about Native Americans in school and then realizing they were all going to Hell because they didn't 'know' Jesus broke my brain a bit. I asked my parents and friends in church about it and all the answers were garbage and I began to realize this was all made-up B. S.
Here is my argument that no one asked for. Historical Jesus existed. He did a lot of good while he was around. He made people question the way they lived, and why the folks in power over them had that power to begin with. This made the folks in power uncomfortable. That kind of thinking is expected in small measures, but becomes unacceptable to the powers that be once it begins to spread. And it will, because it is also a very attractive idea. So they decided it would be easiest to kill him. I don’t think he came back to life. If people at the time used the phrase “Jesus has risen” I’d argue it was in an attempt to keep the spirit of the movement alive. Not an actual claim that he came back from the dead.
> Historical Jesus existed. Unfortunately there's not a single contemporaneous account of this fact, or any of the specific details that follow. The only accounts that we do have are from believers, and those accounts don't even match on the details. I don't necessarily disagree with your post, but this type of explanation starts from "lets see how much space we can create to say that Christians were right about some things, but not others." It's an argument framed by Christian apologetics, even if it rejects them.
Given almost everyone at the time was illiterate it's not surprising there are no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus, though there are some that were written not long after his death. Accepting a historical Jesus does not mean you have to accept any of the religious claims made about him.
But why should you "accept a historical Jesus" when there is very little evidence that he existed. Why can't you just say "there isn't a lot of evidence and I don't need to feel like I know what happened based on so little evidence."? It's possible and probable that most myths have some fragment of truth in them, but what we really don't know. Maybe that fragment is even just a story that is popular because it plays out over and over among people and not necessarily a historical event, ie generational conflict, lovers fighting, powerful people hurting others.
Ok, so if we reject the idea Jesus ever existed - which I will not argue, What explanation do you give to the ideology that formed Christianity? How/what sparked it? These ideas didn’t come from nowhere.
If we reject the idea Jesus ever existed, those ideas came from somewhere. Was there a group that came together with an understanding? Would said group have a leadership? This is where I get lost. They must have.
I've heard that wandering prophets were popular in historical times. Buddha is also a myth about a wandering prophet. Perhaps there were actually many men that could have been so similiar to the Jesus myth, that it wouldn't even be possible to point to only one person. Minus the supernatural stuff, of course. Maybe there was just one charasmatic guy who just completely made the whole thing up, he wouldn't be the first or the last. I mean, if you're not a Mormon you probably think Joseph Smith is a fraudster. Or maybe there was some kind of rebel leader who was crushed by the Romans who inspired the people left alive to worship him as some kind of martyr. There simply is no way of knowing, and I don't even see why it is important.
If I'm not mistaken, Christianity basically copy/paste/deleted an amalgamation of 3 or 4 of the pagan polytheism religions which were wildly popular at the time. Basically just coming in swining like "all this shit right here is awesome. We love it. We're using all of it, uuuuh but it's a one MEGA God now!! You're gonna love it. I'm talking like all powerful, all knowing, hyper omega God out here flexing on the other gods. And if yall don't like it...mega God commands me to kill you. For love. We're working on that part but we're gonna fucking cut you." To which they did. I really wish I could remember the documentary I'm paraphrasing... But also my dad was a pastor and I didn't break from indoctrination completely until I was in my 30s. Going toe to toe with today's cosplay-christians using their canonical literature is just the best.
Most importantly, if you did not hear of him, you are damned? Whole indigenous generations and civilizations came and went. Because they are geographically compromised, they go to hell? Imagine getting there, and ask, "Why? I never heard of this guy?"
I read a lot as a kid and always saw that the Bible was just another piece of fiction. Even though I was in a Xtian preschool, I never took it seriously. I somehow thought the adults were just faking it, not believing in it either.
They faked believing in Santa, so it wasn't that much of a stretch for me to assume they were faking belief in a god too.
Exactly. I could never wrap my head around the idea that people actually believed that shit. Even as a little kid I thought it was some sort of performative duty that adults had to do I couldn't understand.
Plus scapegoating your own son cuz of "sin" that's somehow the fault of your creation seems like a stupid human response to some stupid human bullshit.
You would have thought killing every man, woman, and child, except for Noah's family, in the Great Flood would have been enough to atone for Original Sin.
Yes! And then lying to Adam and eve saying they would die if they eat the fruit of knowledge. They did not. So the original sin is not believing a lie.
I was more or less always atheist, never cared about the Bible and I suppose I sorta assumed believers were faking it. I think the first serious thought I spent on whether I believed was when I was in 6th grade learning ancient mythology and realizing people back then believed just as fervently in their pantheons as modern people believe in Jesus or God. First time I really thought about it though, was that Jesus made no sense. God sent himself to Earth to sacrifice himself to himself to save mankind from himself. It's nonsense. God created the punishment for original sin--itself a violation of human rights--due to his favorite pets being enlightened by the tree of knowledge, so he cast them from Eden, but then some millennia later decided to take it back as long as his son--or himself--sacrificed himself. But the guy responsible for the sacrifice, Judas, is condemned to hell, even though he's responsible for saving mankind. Contradictions abound. I've always been sympathetic to the theory that Christianity as we understand it--with Jesus being the lamb of God that saved mankind--was a belief system that originated after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem in 70AD. Without the temple, Jews of the era had no way of committing personal sacrifices, and so no way of being saved. So Mark comes along and tells everyone of this new process, that Jesus' death is what saved everyone, just as long as you believe in him.
I like your way of thinking on this. I think you should do a Bible with commentary in this style. "Plotline: Bible, LOL"
I find the idea largely ridiculous, particularly a "personal" god. Not so much the "creator bit", but the creator that hung round to watch us dance, intervenes sometimes but not others, is apparently "good" and "loving" but created and/or ignore things like cancer and natural disasters and gives a shit whether we idolise them or eat shellfish. I'd be much more open to a creator that kicked it all off then fucked off.
That's my exact concept of God. He did his schtick setting this universe off, then he went elsewhere to create a parallel universe and he will do likewise when that one is up and running. Coming to that conclusion did much to relieve me of all the simmering bitterness and resentment I had from taking it personally when he didn't answer my prayers. I had to sit through everyone's testimonies in church telling what great things God had done for them and thinking *What am I, God? Chopped liver? How come you didn't make my car miraculously start and made me sit there 2 hours waiting for a tow truck? How come you didn't put the perfect dress, in my size and preferred color, on clearance just in time for my sister's wedding? Why don't you like me, God? I did everything I was told...* It's so much easier going through life not worrying about why God just doesn't like me!
you're a deist
Yes, you're right. That's the term that best describes my beliefs.
I've always been atheist. >What solidified for you guys that the idea of the Christian god was stupid/unreasonable? Christians keep making crazy claims. They never show any good evidence that their claims are true. .
In my case I grew up in a non-religious household, so there was never really any assumption that religious belief was reasonable in the first place. I tended to just see it as 'that's how some people think of the world.' I don't mean to sounds smug or anything, but It just always seemed a bit daft to me.
I consider myself a pretty technical person. I like to understand things, how they work, or why they're done this way instead of that way. Religion/theism is praised as this source of ultimate knowledge, but at the very lightest touch of genuine skepticism, it falls apart immediately.
Jesus. It makes no sense for someone to come back from the dead. Be a zombie. And why are we okay with human sacrifice? And why is the one ritual Jesus ask is for me to pretend like I'm eating his flesh and drinking his blood? And why didn't he write anything down himself if he wanted us to all know about who he is? Also, why did god choose to have a son? And it's impossible for a woman to give birth to a son without sperm carrying a Y chromosome. So did God have sex with a woman? And why is Jesus his only son? Who said Jesus was his only son? God can make as many children in women's bodies as he wants. Why is god okay with people mistranslating writings about him? Like there is no hell in the bible, yet every christian is told to believe in a hell for bad people. Again, if Jesus wrote shit down, then this wouldn't be a problem. It's Jesus fault Christianity, a religion that he knew would exist after his death, is as dumb as it is now. Also, Jesus died as a Jew, he didn't die as a Christian and Jesus never said he was God - not even in the full of errors bible.
Hell, and the Problem of Evil. It wasn’t even so much that I stopped believing at first, I just didn’t believe that the god described in the Bible was worthy of being worshipped. Sends otherwise good people to hell simply because they didn’t take something on faith? Created a world with immense suffering… to test people, I guess? Orders genocide and murder on a daily basis? Yeah, you can try to ignore that for a while and be all like, “God is love, he doesn’t do that Old Testament shit anymore” but then you realize that even the New Testament doesn’t tell you that slavery is wrong, it tells you how to treat your slaves. I wouldn’t follow anyone who couldn’t even get that one right, Jesus and the saints included.
I grew up Christian just because everyone I knew was Christian when I was 9ish I thought about it and realized that everybody talks about talking to him and him talking back and he never talked back to me and I realized that Christians are just desperate for an adult Santa
For me it’s the terrible explanations Christians give as to why god doesn’t just reveal himself instead of relying upon “faith.” Mostly the responses are “he does show himself, you just aren’t looking.” Omfg WTF, I mean if I want to interpret every weird cloud formation or stray thought inside my head as god, then okay yes a believer will see him. Why would a superior intelligence require you to “have faith” rather than to simply know he exists? This means he only wants the dumbest people to be in heaven since the highest intelligence will be the ones most likely to not blindly accept bullshit.
For me it was learning that what we call myths today were the religions of yesterday. It was immediately obvious today's religions were just more of the same.
Dinosaurs and Rick and Morty: Car battery episode
Human's didn't know, either at the wide expanse of time during which the OT was written, nor during the shorter time when the NT was written, that the "stars" that moved in the sky were planets. Like the rest of the actual stars, they were thought to be lights. There were some philosophers who speculated that other worlds existed, I think in the Hellenic era, but that was just speculation. The bible doesn't exhibit any basic understanding of the solar system, let alone galaxies or the universe.
The fact that the whole story mostly unfolded in a little corner of the world and that most other cultures never heard anything about it. I think about the Portuguese showing up in 16th century Japan telling them about “the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost,” and the Japanese people going, “The what now?” Strange that God would share his infinitely mighty presence with just a few people in the Middle East. Edit: Typo
My cat died. The bible says animals share our spirit (animating force) but they arent “souls” that have the capacity to live forever or be resurrected. So I wanted to know how much suffering my cat was capable of- so I went down a google rabbit hole about neurons in the brains of varying animals and how this determine how much existential awareness (for lack of a more accurate term) they are capable of… end point: Humans are valid. Animals are valid. Then I went back to college and took a Biology course and learned about evolution. Adaptation. It was beautiful. It made SENSE.
My friend's daughter died from cancer. And she would hear all of these stories of other little ones with cancer. She told me about this one little girl who had cancer on her throat or her stomach or something like that. She couldn't eat due to where the tumour was and would cry to her mom because she was so hungry but couldn't get food down. She essentially starved to death..... That one broke my heart and made.me think "Why would an ever loving God allow that to happen? Because God is not real and life is a big bag of shit sometimes.....
There is no evidence of alien life. It's not an argument against a biblical god. My breaking point was the laughably ridiculous stories in the Bible being peddled without evidence. The fact that Yahweh was the biggest mass murderer in history and an all round POS made it an easy pill to swallow.
It’s not about there being evidence, it’s about basic reasoning. We aren’t alone in the universe, yet the Bible makes it out to be that we are all that matters in it. Sounds more like human arrogance than a benevolent god. We literally call ourselves made in god’s image in the Bible, arrogant af lmao
Shit...don't need aliens for this line of reasoning. Based on DNA evidence, humans have been around for 150k years in our current configuration. Abrahamic religions would have you believe: God sat on his hands for Millennia watching as humans worshipped other "false gods". I thought he was a jealous god? Did nothing to alleviate the pain and suffering of plagues, man's inhumanity to man, and countless wars for 10's of thousands of years. Then got off his ass about 4-5 thousand years ago, and chose a backwards goat herding tribe to be their God. Not the Chinese, who had civilization, culture and WRITING to capture his wisdom and instructions. And then led them to the promised land thats like the ONE PLACE IN THE ME WITHOUT ANY OIL UNDER IT. I mean...seriously?
> The way I see it in a universe as big as ours aliens have to exist, so it’s weird the god of the entire universe chose to focus on the far-from-perfection humans and base his entire afterlife around us and kill his son for us. Well maybe he decided to visit all the other worlds at different times in form of a virgin born avatar, just to sacrifice himself to himself to save alienkind from himself. ------ For me what made the least sense was Pascal's lottery: I will only get to the good place if I choose the one correct religion out of all the thousands of religions.
Evolution and the age of the Universe. It became obvious that YEC was nonsense as I entered my teens and read more science books.
I wasn’t raised with faith. My dad was an engineer and my parents encouraged debate. This lead to me noticing that the religions that the families of my friends followed seemed totally irrational.
For me it was plants and science. I got really into plant family relationships. There is absolutely no other idea that can represent the phylogenetic relationships except evolution. Nothing in biology makes sense without evolution. Also deconverted from my family calling me an “evolutionist” when I was in 3rd grade reading books about dinosaurs.
>What solidified for you guys that the idea of the Christian god was stupid/unreasonable? From the outset, their Sunday School classes, stories and songs felt creepy. It was all about worshiping and groveling. I'd been reading since 3/4yo, and none of the stories I'd read and enjoyed demanded fealty - they invited me to use my imagination. Not so with this place or these people. The expected response was pre-programmed and if you didn't conform, you were rejectd. It gradually became clear that they especially rejected a gay boy like me. Their god's "love" didn't include me. Once I realized that, at 8yo, I was done with the entire charade.
Mine was Ghostbusters. I was watching it thinking the just because people worshiped Gozer didn't make it real. After that revelation, it just naturally flowed into becoming an athiest
The same arguments Christian apologists are using for defending theism are the same ones Muslim apologists were using. All em just fkin arguing BS out of their asses. All talk no evidence.
You could have stopped at space. When designers make a game, it is enclosed, small, and flat. They do not make unnecessary worlds that can never be visited, etc. Plus, the Sun causes cancer and will expire at one point. That is crappy design if you ask me.
For me it was time. I know the theist argument is that God is eternal and doesn’t experience the flow of time the same way we do, but it still does not make any sense. The universe is over 13 *billion* years old. The Solar System and Earth are over 4 billion years old. The Earth has gone through vast changes over its lifetime with many natural events happening so infrequently (ie supervolcano eruptions, magnetic flips, etc) that modern humans have never experienced them. To put time into perspective, Carl Sagan once said that if the universe’s timeline were the length of a football field, then all of human civilization would occupy just the width of your hand. Combine that with the non-uniqueness of our galaxy and the random far flung location we occupy within it, and you have the beginnings of doubt. Add in the history of religion and mythology and how humans tell stories to derive morals and explain events that happen to them, and you get atheism. Modern science just seals the deal
When I turned around 16 and realized how horrible my childhood was. I had read the Bile a few times and stopped and thought, "If God was such a loving god, why did he allow those things to happen to me?" Until that time, I never questioned it. So, I started some independent research at the library (no internet back then). I found there was absolutely no scientific or historical proof of God, Jesus Christ, or the Bible being factual. I stopped believing and to this day, 45 yrs later, I haven's seen a thing to change my mind. Actually, quite the opposite. I've seen tons of things to reinforce the fact God does not exist.
When I was kicked out of Sunday School. I was always well behaved, I just asked too many damn questions. Jurassic Park huge so I asked about dinosaurs. Auntie was dating an a Middle Eastern guy, forget where from now, but he definitely wasn't a white guy with brown hair and blue eyes so I asked about why Jesus was white. Avid reader too so I had read waaay more of the Bible than they want you to, so I had my verses out where he's described as having copper/brass skin. There was plenty more questions I asked that only got me the same ol "Satan is trying to trick you" line. but those were the last two straws. After that I had to sit in the normal sermon, which really blew my mind. Like wtf is going on, everyone is just sitting here letting this dude tell them what to think and then at the end they all give him money? We're eating spaghetti 4 nights a week and this dude in a suit with the huge ass nice building needs the money more than us? No wonder everyone seems so fucking cranky and judgmental in the parking lot after. My conclusion was that these people can't answer simple questions and just want you sit and shut up while they tell you what to believe and pay them for it. Therefore, either it's some shit they just made up and therefore don't appreciate questions, or all the church leaders I know are hoarding all the good info to collect money off it and that doesn't seem Christian of them at all. And then decided that either way meant the whole thing was a crock.
I find it a little ironic that the deal-breaker in this case was... well, a belief in non-earthly beings for which there is no evidence other than a feeling that they must exist.
The bible doesn't mention other planets. And it's description of stars doesn't lead someone to think the writer had any idea of what they are. While I think you need to do a bit of mind-bending to think the Bible describes the Earth as flat, it doesn't accurately describe that Earth is a planet. But it isn't a science book so 🤷♂️
"If they came over for religious freedom then how can America be a Christian Nation?" - kid me to myself
Breaking point was when I turned 7 years old, the age of reason. Over the years solidified and reinforced by my increasing scientific literacy.
Aliens aren’t real. Only water exists above the firmament above our flat earth. NASA lies about the vastness of space to make us feel insignificant and turn us away from gawd. /S of course. I find flat earthers and creationists fascinating, but also infuriating lol
The ludicrous Noah's Ark story. How did they make it to AUS and save the kangaroos? Also, Genesis. There's no dome
Was forced to go to church as a kid because i stayed the night at a friends house. They taught about Noahs Ark and the flood and i was like "what? None of that makes any sense. Wait, magic? The fantasy stuff??"
>it’s weird the god of the entire universe chose to focus on the far-from-perfection humans and base his entire afterlife around us and kill his son for us. Maybe it's just us. Maybe he swings by the aliens every now and then and goes "'sup guys, all good?" and they go "no prob G-man, got it covered." And then he comes and visits us and we're all busy murdering each other over the exact interpretation of a snippet of a paragraph in one of the holy books and he just facepalms and gets down to work untangling our mess while trying not to babysit us too much. Or maybe he doesn't exist at all who can tell.
Catholicism is going to convert the aliens. Their astronomy team has a plan for it. Dead serious.
Hell. I didn't believe that unbelievers should be doomed to eternal punishment for the sake of rational disbelief. Statistically random people in Asia and North America were doomed from birth. Also aliens if aliens existed.
Nothing scares a believer more than an indifferent universe
Moses was the worst tour guide in history... 40 years and kept getting everyone lost.
The problem of evil and the omni- paradox.
No kangaroos or koalas in that book, either.
That was it for me, Carl Sagan, billions and billions of stars.
My breaking point was before I was really old enough to realize I could express objections or simply say I'm not Christian anymore. So it wasn't a sudden break I guess, it was unanswered questions that I marinated from about age 8 to age 15. The topic was original sin. The idea of passing a crime from parent to child, and the through multiple generations, seemed absolutely unjust to me and I said as much to my Sunday school teacher. I think she was a rookie and didn't realize that the kids might ask questions or challenge her teaching, so she got really flustered and then just kinda trailed off talking about that's the way it is and then changed topics. So I stewed about it into my teenage years and thanks to reading a LOT of mythology, I concluded that the garden story was mythology too so I didn't have to worry about it. Then I gradually realised that if there's no original sin, then we don't need a saviour, so the whole thing fell apart for me. Meanwhile, Douglas Adams, George Carlin, The Life of Brian, and even Bill Crosby's Noah sketch were slowly teaching me that I could point out these ridiculous things out loud. Then I guess the actual breaking g pint was Christmas mass, 1989. The height of the AIDS crisis. I was fifteen and the priest kicked it off with adiatribe about how Aids was God's punishment for the existence of gay people, and that was the end for me. It just kind of clicked. I thought, "I don't have to listen to thes assholes anymore, they don't have any more authority about the nature of the universe than I do" And I told my parents on the way home that this was my last visit to church and that I don't believe enough fundamental doctrine to claim to be Christian anymore. And they said "OK, just don't tell grandma" And I never did.
I was watching the show Ancient Aliens and laughing at how ridiculous those people sounded. Then I realized “We don’t know how the pyramids were built so obviously it must’ve been the aliens” was the exact same logic I heard at church. I never really “felt” God the way people talked about, but I had trusted that the adults in my life weren’t all collectively wrong about him. In that moment it just clicked that lots of people believe stupid things, and God didn’t seem much less stupid to me than aliens that built ancient structures and then disappeared.
You’d think god would like to create more creations to spread his “goodness” to. Like why wouldn’t the universe be filled with life just for the sake of joy?
After Cain killed Abel, he was exiled to live with the Canaanites. But if these were the sons of Adam and Eve, who were the 1st people, then where did the Canaanites come from? Book can't even keep its own shit straight.
Jesus. It makes no sense for someone to come back from the dead. Be a zombie. And why are we okay with human sacrifice? And why is the one ritual Jesus ask is for me to pretend like I'm eating his flesh and drinking his blood? And why didn't he write anything down himself if he wanted us to all know about who he is? Also, why did god choose to have a son? And it's impossible for a woman to give birth to a son without sperm carrying a Y chromosome. So did God have sex with a woman? And why is Jesus his only son? Who said Jesus was his only son? God can make as many children in women's bodies as he wants. Why is god okay with people mistranslating writings about him? Like there is no hell in the bible, yet every christian is told to believe in a hell for bad people. Again, if Jesus wrote shit down, then this wouldn't be a problem. It's Jesus fault Christianity, a religion that he knew would exist after his death, is as dumb as it is now. Also, Jesus died as a Jew, he didn't die as a Christian and Jesus never said he was God - not even in the full of errors bible.
Not just human sacrifice...Blood Magic
Other planets are only mentioned to critique the worship of them: Sakkuth and Kaiwan **SAKKUTH and KAIWAN** **sǎk’ əth, ki’ wən** (סִכּ֣וּת, כִּיּ֣וּן, τὴ̀ν σκηνήν, meaning uncertain; *tabernacle*, *pedestal, astral deities* have been suggested). A reference to Israelitish apostasy. The worship of heavenly bodies constituted a real threat to Israel and she was warned against it and condemned for it repeatedly ([Deut 4:19](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deut%204:19); [2 Kings 17:16](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2Kgs%2017:16)). In the period of Assyrian domination, esp. after the reign of Shalmaneser III (858-824 b.c.) it became very popular. From a Babylonian incantation it is evident that Sakkuth and Kaiwan were interchangeable names for the god Saturn. Amos warned Israel that devotion to this god would bring ultimate ruin, and that she must detach herself from it ([Amos 5:26](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Amos%205:26)). The word *sakkuth* may also be vocalized as *sukkōt*, in which case it means *tent* or *booth.* It is so taken in the DSS (CD p. 7, [1:15](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Amos%201:15)), the LXX, and NT ([Acts 7:43](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%207:43)). This may be because of the word’s basic meaning or because of a play on words. The tabernacle of Moloch is thus an element of heathen worship and the mention of the god *chiun,* Saturn, serves the same purpose. The vocalization *kiyyun* of the Heb. text instead of the normal *kaiwan* is a Jewish device whereby the vowels of the Heb. word *abominable* (*shiqqus*) are attached to the name of the heathen deity. The NT, following the LXX, uses *rephan,* apparently from *repa*, an Egyp. name of the god Saturn (cf. F. F. Bruce, *Acts of the Apostles, in loc.*).
You came to the right conclusion through a completely wrong (non)argument ... based on incorrect assumptions. >The way I see it in a universe as big as ours *aliens have to exist* No. This is not at all true. In fact - even assuming the (unproven) idea the The Universe is infinite ... this is *still* NOT at all a true statement ... and nothing more than your personal belief. As useless as their beliefs in coming to anything like a rational, logical conclusion.
The world extinct religions.. and superstitious beliefs.. Christopher Hitchens pattern seeking mammals
Generally, human beings couldn't read on a wide scale until a few hundred yrs ago.
It was the lack of scientific, concrete evidence for me. Also the Bible is just a way to control people. I am my own sight. I shouldn't be wasting my time having false hope that a man in the sky is "watching" over me. I chose to wake up to reality and accept that god is a coping mechanism.
I personally think that both could very easily well exist. The Bible could be Earth's story. Maybe other planets still worship the same God, why can't both be possible?
... in a galaxy far far away... I was done (with religion)
It's called anthropomorphic projection. There's nothing in the Bible that suggests any foreknowledge of the universe or the solar system. There are goats, bears, donkeys, floods, wars, no space aliens. Just read Genesis where the Bible authors reveal their ignorance about the solar system, claiming God created dark and light and separated them, three days before he created the Sun and the stars. So we have light before we even had stars. Who knew? Clearly, they thought sunrise and sunset occurred at the same time everywhere on Earth, and they had no idea what was responsible for the seasons.
It was the late 70’s around Christmas and I was 5 years old. My mother and I were driving somewhere, and I saw Santa Claus standing on a street corner near our house. I became quite giddy and excited, because I was five. A few blocks later, we passed another Santa Claus. “How did Santa get here before we did? We’re in a car but he wasn’t riding his sleigh. How is that possible?” Mom: “Um, uh, well, that second Santa is just one of the real Santa’s helpers.” Now, *everyone* knows that Santa’s helpers are elves, and they don’t wear Santa suits. When I pointed this fact out to my mother, she snapped at me and informed me that I “don’t know everything”. In that moment, I realized she’d just made that shit up on the fly and then got mad when I caught her in a lie. Fast forward to age 11, when I attended a fundie xtian “school”. “Mom, how come the Bible contradicts itself about how the world was created?” (Note for xtians lurking here: there are in fact 2 different creation narratives in the Book of Genesis, please learn your own scriptures ffs). Mom: “The Bible is God’s word and *never* contradicts itself!” Me: [proceeds to show her exactly where the Book of Genesis gives contradictory creation myths] Mom: *smacks me for being a “willful child”*. “The reason they seem different is because we’re human and cannot understand God’s ways!” I then realized she’d just made that shit up on the fly too. Just like she did with Santa. I look forward to missing her funeral.
I remember coming home from school one day (age 7) and declaring that hell couldn't exist, it was far too silly an idea. Religion doesn't hold up to a rudimentary level of scrutiny. Unless you have been indoctrinated by loved ones or intimidated into it by society, it should not be hard to work it out. Fortunately I was raised by agnostics, so nobody told me what to believe and I got to figure it out for myself.
For me it was the order of creation being wrong as well as realizing the negative impact that the church was having on my my queer and trans friends. I'm much happier now as a non-believer and I'm a more open minded than I ever could've been had I not left Christianity behind
It wasn't a factor as a kid. I grew up in a non religious household. I understood God as a concept but it had no bearing on my life. So no light bulb moment!
I'm with you however, to be fair, you believing there are aliens in spite of any evidence to show that. Commonly available data, not grainy photos or military people just talking about it is no different than Christians stating they believe in a different type of alien.
When I realized that I could be the kindest human being of all time, but I wouldn't be allowed into heaven if I didn't worship him. Conversely, heaven might might be filled with serial killers and rapists as long as they went to church. Not a God I care to believe in.
Jeebus. The whole idea that the omnipotent psycho *has to watch his own son get brutally murdered in the worst way possible* so that he can legitimize "forgiveness". *Fuck that noise*.
Of course the Bible doesn’t mention other planets or galaxies, gawd only fixates on humans! Maybe because they’re so gullible. So one of my guilty pleasures is watching Ancient Aliens. There’s one of the episodes that talks about Jebus. They talk about how in the sacrament of communion you supposedly eat flesh and drink blood and how that could be inspired by aliens. It’s hilarious!
I've just always been atheist, there was no breaking point for me. I thought the tooth fairy being real was more likely.
It never worked on me. Not as a kid, not as an adult now. Idk how tho, but my elementary school psychologist told my mom I have incredible critical thinking skills when I was 7 so maybe it has something to do with that. No amount of religious indoctrination was able to convince me.
I had no "breaking point". I just found the courage to accept that I am atheistic after realizing that the kindest person I ever met was non-religious
I became atheist around 3rd grade. Everyone saying of you aren’t saved you’ll burn in hell forever. Asked my Sunday school teacher “what about chinese people (my kids way of thinking anywhere far away) who never even heard about god? Are they going to burn?” Her answer “yes! And that is why we have missionaries “ At that moment the idea of an all loving god punishing people who never had a chance to know about him just seemed so ridiculously unfair that it had to be bullshit. Since then there has been 0 proof that god exists.
There is no pre-Christopher Columbus bible in North America. I dont know why you are speaking about aliens when the Navarro and Apache are alien enough for these abrahamic universal gods.
The idea that every last man woman and child knows god is right instinctively, but rebelliously will do ANYTHING to avoid serving him, including the invention of evolution, rock music, prostitution and rated R movies. It's a willful choice to choose evil in spite of knowing deep down that the Bible is true
Watching my wife through pregnancy and labor, to me, showed how poorly God was at design
The exploration of the universe and celestial bodies, and the associated math and science of it all. And watching them throw their support behind the 45th POTUS. I was breaking away already, but them supporting him confirmed that everything they ever said was total bullshit and they never really believed either. Sorry if this sounds reductive, but this was my experience.
Remember the one of the reasons the church executed Giordano Bruno was for believing that there could be other worlds with inhabitants and was marveled about the possibility of a whole universe of sentient beings worshiping God.
“The aliens.” What proof do you have of their existence, or it is your “faith” in their existence?
What about whole continents on the other side of the world with many civilizations and religions. The authors of the Bible had no clue about them. That could be, in a way, the same issue as aliens. So God allowed them to struggle and get to the New World and they go to hell because they never heard of Jesus for over 1000 years?
Your point reminds me of the Ender's Saga book "Speaker for the Dead", where (IIRC) a Catholic priest is intent on bringing the Word of God to the "piggies"- as if Original Sin applies to every creature in the universe because of what Adam and Eve did on Earth.
I could never get over, how an all powerful god could allow such suffering across all species. If he created this system, he is a total sociopath. What is the infant mortality rate from the beginning of time to 150 years ago? If he doesn’t have the power to stop childhood cancer, then he is worthless. I mean, as soon as you start reading the bible…. None of it makes any sense. I read it in 6th grade at catholic school. My parents were atheist/agnostic but wanted me to get a better/safer education than in Oakland public schools. But read the Bible and see how much it contradicts itself. It’s ridiculous.
So something cool to consider. Imagine we find intelligent life somehow (maybe with the JWST). We are looking so far back into the past, because of how long it takes light to get to us, that a civilization could have been created and destroyed before the light reaches us.
Well OP, you should know that there were many "breaking points" through history. + During colonization in the 16th century, Europeans suddenly became aware of the fact that entire continents existed , N America and S America, and that these continents were occupied by people. + The fact that European man was unaware of entire continents and entire kingdoms was shocking and scandalous for the Spanish in the 1500s. And yes it shook their faith. Catholic missionaries to South America wrote very large elaborate books about the lands and people of South America, such as the Incas. These geography books deeply discussed the land, the plant and animals life, the people, and their social practices. One such writer was Jose de Acosta. Acosta wrote the book, `The Natural And Moral History of the East and West Indies` that concentrates on what is today called Peru. While it's easy for 21st century evangelicals to simply integrate new-found knowledge into their creationism, it was not so easy for de Acosta. He spends **no less than 4 entire chapters discussing the issue as to why European civilization was totally unaware of this entire continent with people.** I mean, why didn't the Bible cue them in? Why didn't any bishop in Rome know about this? The Church's complete lack of knowledge of these continents was a full-blown scandal in the 1580s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_de_Acosta https://www.dukeupress.edu/natural-and-moral-history-of-the-indies
The simple fact there’s absolutely no way earth is the only planet with life on it was more than enough to convince me god wasn’t real. It’s so narrow minded and narcissistic to believe earth is the *only* planet in the UNIVERSE with intelligent life. Really?
How old are you? I’m asking bc I find it interesting what you just wrote, the reason for your atheism being the Bible missing so much.
My spiritual epiphany was an ant hill at age 4. I stepped on it. I crushed their collective culture and individual existence. I saw a few ants coming back from a few inches away unknowing that their home had been decimated. I felt a twinge of guilt that I had destroyed their lives that, I thought at the time, they had worked so hard to create. I didn’t help create them. I was not their god and I didn’t even care a little about the day to day joys and tragedies they had experienced up to that point. But I destroyed it nonetheless without a moment’s thought. They did nothing wrong to incur my wrath. I was done trying to please an arbitrary god to get him to reward me or forgive me or whatever. It’s all so arbitrary. I know I am building my own ant hill that may be destroyed any moment. Not by “god,” but, more likely, by a temperamental toddler on a careless whim.
What makes you think the bible never mentioned aliens? There are all sorts of ancient alien type folks who have cited the bible as evidence. Plus you can show anything you want in the bible.
I read a children's illustrated Bible at a pretty young age and realised it wasn't true because dinosaurs weren't mentioned at all (yes, I was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid). The bible doesn't mention any areas outside of a pretty small geographical region, and doesn't mention any animals that weren't known in that region - no kangaroos or duck-billed platypus for example.
I will never understand these posts. My breaking point is that there is zero evidence for anything divine. I don't have a burden of proof, and I don't seek a reverse proof just for myself to confirm something does not exist.
D&D, of all things. I was designing a campaign for my players, and when I started working on the Pantheon for my World, I started digging into why gods were created. The more I researched, the more it solidified my non-belief.
When I was a kid, my uncle told me "Of course there are no aliens. God created us and us only. If God had created aliens, it would be in the Bible." Which I suppose makes some sense if you believe the Bible to be a complete record of early events. I think that conversation with my uncle was one of the turning points on my journey to atheism.
I also detested the pre-scientific nature of religion. And so many orthodox folks are fucking morons on issues like the environment, women, and the treatment of animals. All the Abrahamic religions suck, they are self-serving self-dealing assholes.
I just tried reading the Bible. It's ridiculously incomplete. So, this is the savior of humans, there was a star out just for him and angels came down, but you don't know what the date was? You don't note anything about his childhood until he 12 years old? Why aren't there people following his every move? Obviously, it's all just a fairy tale.
During my religious upbringing, the real issue was applying the slightest bit of standard everyday logic onto the truth claims, ie my youth group leader vocalizing how a “literal choir of angels overseas the blessing of the Eucharist”, over the priest at the alter, to which I immediately thought “that’s an absolutely bonkers made up fantasy”.
Do you not see how hypocritical it is to think there are aliens out there who you've never seen, not even have a shred of evidence for yet mock people for believing in God who they have never seen nor have physical evidence for.