6623176
The OT is a pack of lies-truth came through Christ.

6623228 The NT is a pack of lies — the truth comes through the third book engraved on golden plates from the followers of angels.

6623160
Followers of christ kills people all the time.
Devout ones at that. Heck, the church's history is steeped in subjugation and murder.

6630089
You can't follow Christ and kill people. You can SAY you're following Christ, doesn't make it true. Christ never commanded the killing on non-believers. Mohamed did. (Contrast Sura 9:5 with Luke 9:54-yes, I'm making you look it up.)

6630309 Atheists were never commanded to kill people, either. Ergo, if someone in history ever killed a person, she surely wasn't an atheist.

6630309
So, if the Old Testament is a pack of lies… then why is it still included in literally every copy of the Bible?

Also, as an atheist, I oppose the ideology of communism. Since you can't seem to comprehend general arguments for why atheism ≠ communism, perhaps a counterexample will get through your thick skull.

6631567
Because the Church was corrupted by heretics.

6631740
The same church that compiled the New Testament and put it next to the Old? In case you think that's a question; it isn't. It's just me being astonished (though I guess I shouldn't be; it's typical) that you don't know your religious history. The New Testament has never been separate from the Old Testament. Even without the history lessons on how the Bible was compiled, you should know this if you just bothered to read it: The New references the Old constantly.

6631773
Eh, fair point.

Honestly, I think there is no true religion.

6631776
Says the person who came to the group formed around the idea that there's no true religion to tell us that we're evil for saying there's no true religion.

6631779
I believe in God not religion.

6631791
The primary definition of religion that most people use:

the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.
-Google's dictionary feature

By this definition, your sentence is nonsensical. God and religion are intrinsic to each other. But perhaps you mean the slightly more formal, structural definition:

a particular system of faith and worship.
-Also Google; why do other dictionaries even bother anymore?

A ‘particular system’ refers to a set of rules which you use to guide your understanding of this god and how you relate to it. This set of rules is often in the form of one or more ‘holy scripture’. In your case, you cited the Gospel of Luke and only denounced the Old Testament, which indicates that you take the New Testament, or at least parts of it, seriously. You have a set of written rules that you follow in your worship of a god, therefore you fit this definition as well.

Also, the term ‘heretic’ is a strongly religious term, used by one religious sect to denounce another religious sect. You can't use the term without having a set of rules in mind that the other people are ‘violating’. Call me skeptical of your claim that you aren't aware of being part of a religion.

6631814
Look, I'm just...trying to figure things out right now. I know God exists. But pretty much every religion is horribly corrupt.

6631821
How, exactly, do you know that this ‘god’ thing exists? What even is it?

6631822
Intuition. A sacred knowing. God is the life force, the creator. "In him was life." Wish I had a better definition.

6631829
That's not an answer. My intuition tells me there is no god; why should yours be better than mine?

6631829

A few of my thoughts on things you’ve said…

-I’ve always found it strange that people think something created by an omnipotent omniscient god could easily be corrupted by a few humans. Did God not see that one coming?

-Even if we Jesus never directly said 'kill atheists' he did teach that we deserved infinite torture. Like combine all the pain of the one hundred most disgusting events in history you can imagine and multiply it by a billion and Jesus thought that was too good for me. I'm not the least bit surprised when Christians are cruel to me simply because of that.

-Tons of people interpret the bible as not being pro-pacifism at all. ‘I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ ‘But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servent of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on wongdoers.’ ‘blessed be the lord, who trains my hands for war’… Now you likely have your own interpritations that explain these away and will quote the pacifist sounding stuff Jesus said, but how do you think a more mainstream Chrisitian would respond to that? With their own interpritations of the pacifist sounding stuff and give you quotes where it looks like Jesus approves of war.

Ancient books are not at all good ways to communicate these things. That’s all that ever happens with the bible and is why there’s like a million sects of Christianity.

-If God thought sending a single book at a single point in history to us was a good way to communicate his intentions then he’s an idiot. It absolutely did not work. People who devote their entire lives to that book, study it every day, earnestly want to understand it and beg God to ‘help’ them see the truth can’t even agree on very basic things about God, religion, the afterlife and the meaning of the Bible.

-The new Testament was written by Jesus’s followers and it’s really the only account we have of his life and teachings. I put as much trust in it as I would a biography of L. Ron Hubbard written by Tom Cruise. If such a book were the only thing we had about Hubbard, I wouldn’t be comfortable saying I knew anything reliably about the guy. Same goes with Jesus for me.

-People’s intuition tells them that Jesus wants them to hurt non-believers. And 90% of your intuition just comes from what you were told as a kid anyway. Do you think Muslims don’t have similar intuitions about Islam being true? That eating pork is just wrong and wearing a burqa is just right? Inutition doesn’t just come from nowhere and if it came from God I imagine there’d be a lot less disagreement on things.

6630309
I'm bored, so I read a bit of Luke 9. First, it's amusing that the passage you reference is itself referencing Elijah of the Old Testament, who did, in fact, kill people in the name of God. That Jesus says he's not here to do what Elijah did doesn't change that he is referencing the Old Testament as a history.
But more fun is if you keep reading. Luke 9:59-62 go:

And he said unto another, Follow me. But he said, Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. Jesus said unto him, Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God. And another also said, Lord, I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house. And Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.

Translation into modern English: To first guy: Your dead father is of no consequence; either you come with me now or go back to bury him, you can't do both. To second guy: You are not fit to enter Heaven if you say goodbye to your family before coming with me.
Not seeing a lot of love, here. People get the ‘Jesus is a great guy’ thing by picking out a handful of passages and ignoring everything else. I only had to read three sentences past a verse you cited to find something morally repugnant: Reject your family completely and totally in favor of Jesus.

6632823
Yeah, that is disturbing and I can't explain it.

6632833
I can: The New Testament, like the Old Testament, was written by petty humans trying to spread their particular rules, and not by anybody who actually knew anything about the origins of the universe or the ultimate meaning of life. It's a pretty simple explanation, actually. And you can use it for every other holy book, too.
Let me summarize the options:
1. Take the known attitude of petty humans to do stupid things to each other and write that stupidity down (think literally every religion you don't follow) and extend it to one more example.
2. Do mental backflips to explain why a loving creator-deity would say stupid things, or have his followers say stupid things in his supposed sacred message.

As for me, I don't pretend to have a book that has all of the answers, so I don't have to defend anything silly that such a book might say. I've found that some religious people have trouble comprehending this; they try to pin me down to some other book that I must follow (it's common to hear The Origin of Species or some book written by Dawkins thrown about for this), because they just can't understand the possibility that no one book or person holds the reins of truth. I don't follow a book or a person, because I've never found one that was clearly and undeniably right, and I don't expect to because I understand that all people are imperfect and all books are written by people.

The world is a complicated, confusing, and often scary place; people like to make up simple answers, a little log raft in the wide open waters. But eventually those logs break up, and reality swallows the oversimplifications and comforting illusions. Skeptical atheists are people who choose to forgo the logs and learn how to swim. And that, I think, is what makes us so scary to so many people: Not what we believe or don't believe, but what we represent: The possibility of having to face the unpleasant reality of the world as it actually is.

6631829
You can make a religion of that.
Oh wait, they already did...three almost identical ones.

6632823
After deep meditation, I have arrived at an answer to your question. Jesus was a king (quite literally-of the House of David, rightful ruler of Israel.) He was seeking soldiers to fight against the indolence and corruption of both the Roman Empire and Jewish state. He was looking for soldiers and one thing they'd have to sacrifice is family ties-like soldiers heading for a battlefield and leaving family behind.

6643566 So, it's okay to be a dick, as long as you make up an excuse for it? Is that the lesson?

6643808
Are you saying a recruiter who tells his soldiers the honest facts about war (you have to leave your family, good chance you might die or be hurt) a dick?

6643863 Jesus didn't tell. He demanded.

Imagine you were that family and your spouse just disappears all of a sudden. You search for your spouse for days, spend all your money on detectives and 'have you seen him' posters. You could have been spared all that if only Jesus allowed your spouse to say goodbye to you for one minute.

Tell me. If you were gathering followers, would you allow them 1 minute to say goodbye to their families?

6643947
I think in this case, the man simply had too many other commitments to be a disciple. Honestly. you seem to be wanting to find the most negative interpretation.

6643956 Why don't you just answer my question? Is it too hard?

6644103
Yes, I would. But if the follower had too many responsibilities at home I wouldn't take them as a follower.

6644280 But why would you allow them to say their goodbyes? That's not very Jesus like.

6643566
Here's a fun fact: I live in the United States, a country built upon the idea that monarchies are morally unjust. From where I stand, saying "Well, Jesus was a king" doesn't justify his actions. Someone who claims to be a king doesn't get special privileges.

And it's you taking an interpretation that the text doesn't lend itself to. It literally says "Man asks Jesus if he can say goodbye to his family, Jesus says no" and "Man asks Jesus if he can bury his recently deceased father, Jesus says no". Your whole "well, he must have had too many responsibilities at home" excuse was something you made up out of whole cloth, with no justification from the text. I don't want the Bible to depict Jesus as horrible, or great, or anything else, I want to judge it for what it actually says. Can you say that? Can you say that you are trying to understand what the Bible actually says, or are you just trying to find ways to twist these passages to say what you wish they said? I'll give you a hint: It's the latter. The real question is, can you admit it to yourself?

Also, using war metaphors for Jesus's gathering of disciples doesn't exactly scream "peace and love". Just saying.

(I would have replied sooner, but my computer went belly-up, and I just got around to finding my password for this site again.)