Neon Genesis

Fundamentalist Christians see the entire NT as divinely inspired by God, so when fundamentalists interpret Paul as condemning homosexuality, they believe Paul is speaking by the authority of God as much as Jesus was in the the gospels. For fundamentalists, Paul is just as important as Jesus and liberal Christians who reject the authority of Paul are just as sinful as an atheist to the fundamentalist Christian. As I said earlier in the thread, Jesus lived in a time and culture where atheism as understood in modern times as a disbelief in a supernatural god did not exist. Jesus would not have been familiar with any atheistic arguments against the existence of God so it is natural that he would have believed in the importance of loving God because everyone back then believed in God. Jesus' greatest commandments themselves aren't even original to him and he had gotten those teachings from the Jewish rabbi, Hillel, who said that the whole of the Torah was to love God and to love your neighbor. So as Jesus didn't know what atheism was, we can't say for certain what Jesus would have thought of someone who wanted to follow him but didn't believe in God because people like that didn't exist in his time at all. You can't condemn something that didn't exist back then. If you accept it's ok to reject Paul's teachings about homosexuality but insist that you must follow what Jesus taught about God, by what standard are you deciding what material in the NT must be followed to be counted as a Christian and what is acceptable to reject? Why is it ok to reject what Paul said about homosexuality but not cherry pick the teachings of Jesus? As for how you can be a Christian while rejecting the existence of God, this can be done by focusing on acting out the teachings of Jesus rather than focusing on belief. Rather than insisting that being a Christian should be about believing in a correct set of beliefs, being a Christian would be about bringing the kingdom of God to Earth through our own actions by following the teachings of Jesus instead of expecting a magical superhero to come out of the skies and save us from the bad guys.

My point is that there's lots of people who claim they believe in the god of the bible and that they're Christians yet they ignore the teachings of Jesus and use the bible to justify violence and hatred and discrimination of minorities. On the other hand, there are lots of atheists who act more Christ-like than most Christians do. Many Christians would say being gay and being Christian is incompatible with each other, so should gays also be excluded from Christianity? If you allow gays to be Christians, why not atheists when almost every other major religion in the world has atheistic sects? Why should what people believe be more important than how people treat each other?

It's not entirely true that Christianity has always been purely theistic. The Death of God theology was popular enough in the 70s that it wound up on the cover of Time magazine and around 54% of Unitarian Universalists (which has its roots in Christianity) self-identifies as secular humanist. With the exception of maybe Islam, almost every major religion in the world has had some form of atheistic school of thought in its ranks.

Jesus did use religious language frequently but it's not a matter of whether or not Jesus used God-talk but what does Jesus mean by his God-talk. As Marcus Borg puts forth in many of his books, the kingdom of God Jesus describes in his gospel is not necessarily a supernatural kingdom in another dimension that you can only reach by believing in a correct set of doctrines. For Jesus, the kingdom of God is already among us and within you and is a political transformation rather than a supernatural means of salvation. The question again, is not whether or not Philadelphia exists, but is Philadelphia a magical kingdom that exists in another world that you can only get to by chanting a phrase of magic words or is Philadelphia a place that you can make real through your own actions. I don't see how it's "dogmatic" to assert that God doesn't exist anymore than it's "dogmatic" to assert that God does exist. Is it more Christian to say you follow Jesus but don't believe in God than it is for Christians to say they believe in God but they cherry pick the teachings of Jesus to back up their prejudices or act in hypocritical ways? Which do you think is more Christian?

Thanks for the words of support. Sometimes I feel like I'm caught between worlds and I have to keep my true self hidden from both. If I came out as an atheist to my Christian community, I would likely be excommunicated for such blasphemy and sinfulness. On the other hand, while I can be as critical of religion and the supernatural that I want on atheism forums, I also feel like I have to hide my Christian identity from the atheist community. At another forum for skepticism I post at, there was a member there who came out as a Christian atheist and not only that but he revealed he was also a minister in the Lutheran church. While he did get a lot of support from the other members, there was one member in particular who kept harassing him over it. He kept on calling him a liar and a fraud and demanded to know all his contact info so he can contact the church he worked at to find out if he was lying or not so he can out him as a fraud and ruin his career.

I can understand your concerns. While I consider myself a Christian atheist, I have turned down an offer to teach Sunday school at my church. I was once offered an opportunity to teach Sunday school because they thought I knew a lot about the bible more than most Christians do. For one thing, I don't like getting up in front of everybody else to teach and I don't think I would be organized enough to be a Sunday school teacher. But I also I would feel hypocritical agreeing to teach when I don't agree with their conservative beliefs. But I don't think disbelieving in a supernatural god means that you can't find value in the teachings of Jesus or even in religious rituals. Atheism itself is a modern belief that didn't really exist in Jesus' time and culture. The furthest to disbelief you could have reached would have been some kind of deism but atheism was used more as political insult towards "heretics" that rejected the state gods. Socrates, for example, was accused of being an atheist because he rejected the authority of the state gods but he was actually a deist and the early Christians were actually labeled atheists by the Romans because they didn't believe in the Roman gods. It's only in modern times due to the advances in science that atheism has become a reasonable position to hold, so nobody knows what Jesus and the apostles would have thought of atheism. Have you tried the Unitarian Universalist church? I've never been to one myself being still in the closet but I've heard nothing but positive things from other atheists who have attended and they're very accepting of all religions and philosophies and many UUs are also atheists. I've heard the liberal Quakers are also pretty non-theistic friendly.

The one passage I've heard Christian apologists trot out in response to this was that one verse (I think it was in Matthew?) where Jesus talks about a man leaving his parents to be joined with a wife as proof Jesus believed marriage was between a man and a woman. On the other hand, I've heard pro-gay Christians argue that the verse where Jesus said some people are born to be eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom meant that Jesus approved of homosexuality and transgenderism.

As much as I enjoy reading Borg and find his writings inspiring and thought provoking, I don't understand why some Christians think that viewing Jesus as an enlightened teacher is "shallow." There have been plenty of famous philosophers and religious activists throughout history who were nothing more than enlightened individuals and yet we consider them to be some of the greatest heroes and heroines of all time. MLK Jr, Susan B Anthony, and Leo Tolstoy were just enlightened individuals and not deities and yet we would hardly consider them to be shallow. As fascinating as I find the development of the post-Easter Jesus to be, I personally think the teachings and life of the pre-Easter Jesus to be much more inspiring and relevant to today's society and culture. While I'm aware that many Christians find the post-Easter Jesus to be comforting to them, so many Christians tend to treat the post-Easter Jesus as being like Santa Claus, where being a Christian becomes more about making sure you're on Jesus' nice list instead of the naughty list so you can get free gifts on Christmas, as opposed to fighting against poverty and social injustice like the pre-Easter Jesus was concerned about. The Greek word for faith in the NT is psitis, which was an action. Faith in the NT was not about having a correct set of beliefs in human-made creeds written centuries after the historical Jesus lived but it was more like a contract of being committed to Jesus' teachings and living out the Way in your daily life. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus divides the sinners and the saved based on their actions and how they treated each other and not because of what they believed about him. When the apostles are confronted by someone who isn't a part of them who is casting out demons in Jesus' name, in the earliest of the gospels, Mark, Jesus warns the apostles not to stop him because those who are not against him are with him. The Nicene creed and the Apostles' creed weren't written until decades after the historical Jesus lived and most of the doctrines espoused in them were voted in by the church for political purposes as much as theological reasons. Early Christianity was incredibly diverse with some Christians believing in up to over 300 gods and some Christians who didn't even believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus such as the various Gnostic groups that were only branded as heresy when Christianity became the official religion of Rome and used its political power to force itself on everyone else. I myself consider myself to be a Christian atheist. While I would gladly wish that there was a supernatural god, I don't believe in a supernatural being that intervenes with the natural universe to answer some people's wishes while ignoring other people's wishes. I do believe that prayer can transform people's lives even if it's not through supernatural means, and I still pray every day myself and I read the scriptures everyday. I'm also still actively involved in my church community though since my church community is a fundamentalist church, I have to be in the closet about my "heresy". While I reject most of the doctrines of the various "official" creeds, I do believe in the teachings of Jesus found in the gospels and I even believe that the other NT authors like Paul and James had their own contributions worth considering. I don't claim to know what will happen to us when we die though it would be nice if an afterlife existed for us of some sort though I could do without all the fire and brimstone of hell. The only "creed" I accept is that Jesus is Lord, which according to Bishop Spong, is the earliest creed found in the NT. I believe in a radical Christianity that's inclusive of all walks of life that promote social justice, tolerance, and love for everyone and I believe in a Christianity that's more focused on helping the least of these than on judgemntalism and being intolerant of other religions and ways of life. If this makes my view of Jesus shallow, I would much rather be shallow than be part of a Christianity that emphasizes the concerns of the next life over the concerns of this one and focuses more on getting into God's exclusive club for white heterosexual men than loving your neighbor as yourself.

As I've already said several times in this thread which seems to keep getting ignored, it's not the natural act itself which is evil but the concept of a god that chooses to intervene for some people but chooses not to intervene to others. Why is it that whenever something good happens, like getting sunshine when you need it, people will give God the credit for it yet when they get so much sunshine that it causes a drought, suddenly God is excused from having anything to do with it?

I don't normally talk about this with others because it's something that's embarrassing to me but I have a chronic skin disease called psoriasis. it causes my skin to inflamme and sometimes will start bleeding. It first appeared on my arms but has now spread to my feet, my stomach, and now it's going after my hands, too. Its causes are genetic and not contagious and while there's treatments that can help, there's no known cure for it. While it's not as bad as some other diseases out there, it does cause me a lot of embarrassment and it can be painful sometimes when my skin starts stinging and bleeding. Some bible scholars also think the disease condemned in the OT that is typically referred to as leprosy was a broad term that includes other skin diseases such as psoriasis. So if natural "evil" is somehow a necessary part of life and serves some sort of greater good in God's grand design, what is necessary about my psoriasis and what greater good does it serve God's grand design?

I would say that the traditional understanding of a supernatural god that picks and chooses which prayers he answers is the problem and there's never been a successful answer from traditional theists to the problem of evil. As I said earlier, the only solution to the problem of evil I've seen that has made sense to me has been either the Gnostic tradition of the universe being the product of an evil god or the deist position of the universe being the product of a distant god, though I lean more to the latter than to the former.

I think the question of whether there is such a thing as natural evil or not is a red herring and irrelevant to the problem of evil. The problem with the traditional theistic god is not whether you can say a natural disaster is evil or not, but that a god that chooses to save some people from natural disasters but chooses not to save other people is either an incompetent god or an evil god. This is best summed up by Epicurus

NDEs are a form of lucid dreaming caused by increased activity in the left temporal lobe. If there's so much overwhelming proof of the existence of the afterlife and if being dead is so wonderful that we should praise it, why don't more Christians commit suicide so they can be with the Lord? Why continue living in life if heaven is so much better?

And you're misrepresenting my views and using an ad hominem attack. I do accept the existence of a historical Jesus but I don't believe Jesus was ever buried in a tombr. If there was an empty tomb, where is it? Why didn't the early Christians leave behind some sort of marker indicating where such important proof to the early Christians would be located at? Why doesn't Paul mention anything about the empty tomb or the women at the tomb or anything in the gospel narratives' accounts of the empty tomb at all?

And don't you presume to speak for all bereaving parents, either. I've known other bereaved parents who lost their children and were unable to reconcile their tragedy with a god that answer prayers and intervenes with the universe. To tell someone who questions why a god would allow so much pain and suffering in the world that they're being selfish is judgmental and highly offensive and it's the same kind of blame the victim mentality that Christian fanatics like Pat Robertson use when they tried to blame the suffering of the Haitians on their actions.

The only two theodicy solutions that have ever made sense to me was either the Gnostic solution, that an evil or incompetent deity created the universe, or the deist solution; that God created the universe and then left it alone and doesn't intervene with the universe at all.

So if someone loses their child in a disaster and they question why God would allow their child to die, you would tell the grieving parent they're being selfish? If you did that, you would get a slap in the face.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/empty.html#7

Pontius PIlate's predecessor's may have been respectful to Jewish customs but we know explicitly from Josephus' writings that Pilate, the man in charge of executing Jesus, was very disrespectful to Jewish customs and that it would have been uncharacteristic of him to just give back Jesus' body to his followers. So I ask again, how does he reconcile his argument with what the historical record tells us about Pilate?

In part 2 of the debate, Dr. Evans claims that all the resurrection accounts of the early Christians in the NT completely cohere with the accounts of the gospels and that the gospels accounts were written early enough to be considered historically reliable. If he really believes that the resurrection accounts are coherent and that the gospels are historically reliable, I would find his claims to be rather dubious. I'm also curious how he reconciles his portrayal of the Roman empire as being kind and respectful to the Jews with the negative portrayal of Pontius Pilate that Josephus describes in his historical accounts.

I do question how objective Craig Evans is being and how much he's misusing far fetched archeological claims to justify his fundamentalist Christian worldview and I've never understood this whole "the empty tomb is evidence that it's all true" line of reasoning apologists love to use. Here's a debate between Ehrman and Evans on the historical accuracy of the gospel accounts you may be interested in:

So if this was peacetime where the Romans would be extra nice to the Jews, why would the Romans have executed a Jew in the first place?

In his book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan argued that it's highly unlikely that the Romans would have easily given back the dead body of an executed criminal back to his family and followers just because some random rich Jewish guy paid them off. Crossan argued that the empty tomb story was a myth from later Christian tradition and most likely the Romans threw Jesus' body in Gehenna with the rest of the criminals where his body was eaten by wild dogs. Does Evans address this argument in his book?

If evil is necessary to have good then why would God answer any prayers at all? Wouldn't God's intervening with the universe by answering prayers disrupt this supposed balance of good and evil?

Natural "evil" may not be evil in and itself but what is evil is this idea of a god that chooses to save only some people from harm by answering their prayers but chooses not to save other people.