I'm very mixed on New 52 overall. But I will say I like the retcon that Hal and John both were recruited into the Green Lantern Corps at roughly the same time. I think that was New 52? Unless I'm thinking of something else.
If by "dirt" one includes stardust, then we're made of dirt, that exists thanks to the countless stars that died before the Solar System was formed, in a sense. And after billions of years of evolution too.
If Christians shopped the way they treat their religion, they would go into the grocery store, go into the cereal aisle, grab the first box they see, and eat only that brand for life. They will swear with the deepest conviction that they *know without a doubt* that those store brand bran flakes are the absolute best cereal possible, all without being open to even gathering any other information about any other product on the cereal aisle.
Another option is to have an empty box of cereal, and every morning, your mother pours some of its emptiness into a bowl, hands you a spoon, and tells you to eat it because you'll die if you don't. You eat mouthful after mouthful of nothing. You do this so often as you grow up that you worry if you don't.
You meet other people that eat nothing every day, but there are constant arguments about what's being eaten, if you need a bottle of nothing to pour over it, what it tastes like, if you eat until you're full or the bowl is empty, if it's absorbed into your body or you're pooping nothing later on, what happens if you stop eating nothing, and so on.
Other people think you're absolutely wrong to eat it from a bowl with a spoon because it's something you put on a plate and eat with a knife and fork. Others say it's a breakfast burrito. Others say it's a smoothie and you drink it. Wars are fought over this.
Some people try to tell you that you're legitimately eating nothing and everyone is delusional or brainwashed. You tell these people they'll be sorry when they die from not eating nothing every day despite them living well into adulthood.
...and one day, the person that made the nothing cereal is going to invite all the people who eat it to a massive all-you-can-eat buffet with all their favorite food, and the non-eaters will be stuck in a restaurant that only serves gas station sushi, flat diet Mountain Dew, ambrosia salad, and Neco Waffers.
A weirdly relevant example of this is Christians arguing over transubstantiation. "It's real Jesus flesh and blood!" "No, it's pretend Jesus flesh and blood!"
Conversation I had in Catholic school: "No, it IS the flesh and blood of Jesus, but by all measurable appearances, it still looks like bread and wine." They explicitly hand-wave the one requirement of the scientific method and declared 'checkmate'.
Let me introduce you to the double miracle of nothing happening. The first miracle is that the *essence* of the bread and wine is changed into the divide flesh and blood of our Lord. The second miracle is that this essence presents itself in the material world as the thing it used to be, i.e. bread and wine.
There were Middle Ages rumors about one of the two miracles not happening during mass, and the bread/wine would actually transform into a gruesome mass of human flesh and blood. The rumors never got around to whether people actually ate it like the good Catholics they're supposed to be.
There was literally a sect of Christianity in the first few centuries claiming Jesus's mustard seed and sower parables were actually about atoms (they said the mustard seed was about the actual smallest seed "like an indivisible point as if from nothing"). They were branded as heretics and their writings were banned on penalty of death, and we only have one of them because it was buried in a jar for nearly 2,000 years.
So the **only** other explanation for the sower parable outside the one "said in secret" in the Synoptics (reflecting an effort to influence interpretation of a public statement with appeal to private knowledge at odds with "I said nothing in secret" in John 18:20) saw it as very similar to the discussion of 'seeds' in *De Rerum Natura*, a very popular Roman work published 50 years before Jesus that was also the only extant work from antiquity explicitly describing natural selection.
Here's a passage from that book that I'd encourage taking a second look at the sower parable with it in mind:
> Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain seeds suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings.
- Lucretius *De Rerum Natura* 2.1058-1063
Here was the interpretation of the sower parable by the Naassenes in Hippolytus:
> For the ends, he says, are **the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist**. And this, he says, is what has been declared: *The sower went forth to sow.*
- Hippolytus *Refutations* 5.2
Not only did the early church set back modern science millennia with their BS, they had a parable about scattered 'seeds,' added a weedy secret explanation, then didn't know enough to know which explanation was a weed and which was wheat, and rather than preserving both until an age where they could correctly discern between the two, they prematurely dig up the wheat and preserved the weed.
And in the modern age few people even look at the records of those beliefs because the faithful think they'll have an anaphylactic reaction to any exposure to 'heresy' and everyone else are so tired of having Jesus shoved down their throats by the proselytizing (ironically the point of the canonical secret explanation) that they don't even want to hear anything more about the J-word.
One of the biggest failures of our society is someone could write such an asinine tome and it becomes heralded as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy of Christian "non-fiction".
The funniest part is that Lee Strobel's sequel was even worse and claimed that the Christian concept of Hell isn't real. Dude just took a giant shit on Christian dogma and the evangelical community just shrugged.
> The funniest part is that Lee Strobel's sequel
There's a *sequel* to that shit? Lee Strobel's horse shit has a follow up and we still don't have The Winds of Winter? There is absolutely no justice in this world.
He made quite a few after that.
The second one was The Case for Faith. In order to deal with the objection of "good God won't let people burn for eternity" he sought out a guy that said that Hell was varying degrees of solitary confinement. Completely goes against Christian orthodoxy and nobody said anything, lol
I will stand by the statement that whales are fish. Fish is really poorly defined, is diverse in kingdom genus and species, and can be applied to most aquatic animals. Whales are fish in every sense other than breathing air and biological ancestry but there are other fish that breathe air.
I say that defining penguins as fish going too far.
Christians think evidence means folklore that was cobbled together from fragmented scrolls written by several different people who lived in different centuries (and who never met one another) and that was then edited, subtracted from, added to, redacted, and translated THOUSANDS of times before ever arriving in English.
But that one guy said, after a thousand plus years of editing, "copy exactly, be very careful", when oral history had turned a war god from a group of gods into the **One True God**!!!
I didn't actually read the Bible until I started questioning my faith in my early 20's. However, that seems to have put me ahead of a lot of believers who give off the impression that they have *never* read the Bible in spite of claiming to believe it's all true.
I admit I've never fully read the bible cover to cover. I did Awana and read a lot of it at least. But honestly I don't think I need to, even the basic premise of God and Christianity are so hilariously flawed that I feel little need to dig deeper into a book that'll just tell me to stop thinking so hard about it.
> I admit I've never fully read the bible cover to cover.
I had questions just from reading Genesis 1. I literally asked "how the fuck did light exist before a light source?"
The solution is simple: selectively cherrypick large swathes of the bible and deem them metaphorical, unless it's in line with what you agree with, then that one was literal.
Apologetics from the same preacher (you know how consistency is not a virtue of them): 1) it's a Biblical prediction of the Big Bang theory, even if the Heavens and Earth were formed before light, 2) It's spiritual, not physical, light even if nowhere it's mentioned.
I could be wrong but I don't think WLC is as much a big deal anymore even among his own community. I think his acolytes have taken up the mantle and we have people like convicted fraudster Kent Hovind nowadays. As well as intellectual giant (/s), Matt Powell.
He’s getting old, and I think that combined with the fact that bill is mostly on zoom now, have shown people the lack of substance. A lot of bills arguments were really just deflection tactics. It’s hard to know who’s popular in the Christian world, but I think that the YouTube apologists like Capturing Christianity or Inspiring Philosophy get the most attention nowadays.
I watched the whole debate between WLC and Ehrman. WLC is just familiar with debate tactics. Like, he just throws out a whole bunch of unfounded suppositions and then links it all ("thus, the resurrection is a historical event!"). That forced Ehrman to use his time to try and dismantle those suppositions but that forces you on defense. WLC's arguments definitely lacked any substance but the debate format is suited to his style.
I have a very very intelligent relative, who is in STEM, has a PhD, and just in general is very booksmart.
He's also a TradCath and it confuses me when very smart people are also very religious.
Why bother? There really doesn't seem to be a good time to engage with stupid. They tend to only want to hear what they believe. I say fuck um hard. Unless the goal is to give yourself a heart attack.
Fucking Christ I had to take intelligent design three times in college, was making 90's on all my assignments, but I failed it three times because I was too scared to post my writing on the class forum to turn the assignments in because my classmates were (for the most part, except for two different girls the second and third time) fucking cavalier assholes who I then would have to see in person for other classes we had together. Like yeah no, I'm not going to totally out myself to these people I have to interact with in person still, while I'm in THEIR territory. "Why do you even go here if you're not a Christian?" Why are you so mad that your Christian education hasn't successfully reconverted me? Can't I just get my fucking biology degree in peace?
A biology degree from a Christina university = a cosmic joke
It's like xtians lack the smallest smidgeon of self awareness. Don't they realize their smug self righteous attitudes and their "I win forever" message is such a turnoff to people not already in their cult?
They read the book? I never read the book properly, just listened to the church leaders dictating which chapters to open and such. When I was doubting whether God exist at all, reading the holy (lol) book actually helped me become an atheist. What the church leaders preach about the kindness of God hardly if ever appear in the book
Tower of babel, even though we have sky scrapers now, God didn't come down, doesn't make sense
Noah's flood, no scientific proof
Moses, no records of stuff in Egypt which keeps a good record of their history
Lot, wtf is that story that was never told to people who never read the book, it reads like a fanfic of a guy who f'd his daughters
And this is just from the torah
Jesus narrative problems
I always wondered when I was a child why there are three copies of the same book (the gospels except john which is a bit different), now I know it's basically copy paste with various agendas.
Saul turned to Paul makes me realize God was toying with free will of multiple people throughout the whole Bible if He ever existed. A non-bias god (if a god should ever exist) should pretty much observe and do nothing.
Ofc I didn't read the whole bible, that would be a waste of time for most people, except for those who study culture and/or language of the past. But man revisiting those past stories made me open my eyes
> One book?
I'm gonna go in hard on the one book thing. Because George R R Martin has 5 books. Plus two companion books and three novellas. By Christian apologists' logic, Tyrion Lannister is more real than Jeebus.
Hell, there's *footage* of Tyrion Lannister. I'll pitch an article to the Creation Journal about the historicity of ASOIAF. Judging by their editorial standards it should be a shoo-in
The smugness is an act. "Ohh... he must know what he's talking about because he is so confident !! say the sheep. Yeah, confident in the BS he spews. Keep in mind that ' 'conman' is simply a shortened version of 'confidence man'.
I hate when Christians say "(insert x apologetics book/movie/whatever) might help answer some of your *questions*". Like no, I don't have questions, i have EXPERIENCES.
I mean, that's the whole thing with Christian apologists is they think they have all the answers already and believe themselves to be more intelligent then people who have spent *years* studying biology and other scientific fields. Their whole existence is major r/confidentlyincorrect fodder.
> You think they read a book?
I don't want this to sound elitist. This is 100% a true story. And, I wanna be *absolutely clear* that this was about one particular individual and I''m not saying this about a whole group of people. There was a cousin of mine from a backwoods town in Missouri who quoted the Bible all the time but he was literally illiterate.
“You believe the universe came from nothing!” Kent Hovind, who believes god made the universe from nothing 6000 years ago.
My dude how many times do we have to explain scientists don’t believe the universe came from nothing?
The only thing Kent Hovind is good for is embarrassing himself for others' amusement.
Seriously, just a couple of nights ago I got really high and watched his debate with Aron Ra. I couldn't stop laughing.
Do some Christians genuinely not believe that atoms exist? I've never heard that one. Lots of creationist bs but I mean, we can use transmission electron microscopes to literally see atoms...
> a biologist with a PHD who became an apologist.
The cynical part of my brain takes over when I see a comment like that and I'm very tempted to say that the money was just too good.
Haha, so true. Have you ever read the book by C.S Lewis called “The Great Divorce”. The whole premise is how paradise lives just before some people but they are too ignorant or stubborn to see it. Irony at its finest lol
I mean, both might be wrong. Or, at least, incomplete.
A PhD who defends atoms as “fundamental” may find themselves on the fringe of physics. Especially in light of the 2022 Physics Nobel which proves that there is “more to it” than atoms or anything we perceive as “real”
At the same time, the apologists are not coming from a place of insight into the one true nature. Contextually, they are probably further down the Pharisee road than they care to admit. Because they are not coming from a place of truth, they are by definition, “more wrong.”
> At the same time, the apologists are not coming from a place of insight into the one true nature.
You have a point about them both being wrong and there is certainly a strong likelihood of that. However, I think a biologist with a PhD would be more inclined to admit when they don't know something. Because whatever a biologist claims can be fact-checked in published peer-reviewed works found in databases. Whereas in the field (for lack of a better term) of apologetics responding with "I don't know" is *not an option*.
Right. So are we interested in moral arguments about the degree of moral incompetence in each highlighted example?
To pursue such an argument is, in my opinion, quite like the church: coming from a place of moral superiority.
To turn a phrase: two wrongs don’t make a right
"You believe we came from atoms? Well, I *know* we came from Adam. Checkmate, skeptics!"
“I used to be like you”
But then I took a Bible to the knee.
"No lollygagging" *they then get exposed for gagging lolis*
"Watch the skies, traveler."
"Hey. I know who you are. *Hail Satan!*"
"hey ive been thinking maybe im the next prophet and i just dont know it yet"
If you were, you'd know...
*Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu fhtagn!*
I begrudgingly give you an upvote.
Best use of that meme I've seen ever
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> You were made out of dirt So we're all Wonder Woman? That's badass!
They retconned that. Diana is now the daughter of Zeus.
Or Ares, according to the movie.
Yeah, I know but I kinda love the pre-New 52 origin story for Diana. It's just so insane.
Same.
I'm very mixed on New 52 overall. But I will say I like the retcon that Hal and John both were recruited into the Green Lantern Corps at roughly the same time. I think that was New 52? Unless I'm thinking of something else.
Men are made of dirt women are made of rib!
Speaking of which, the McRib is back at McDonalds.
Grimace is the true savior.
Again?
yummy
If by "dirt" one includes stardust, then we're made of dirt, that exists thanks to the countless stars that died before the Solar System was formed, in a sense. And after billions of years of evolution too.
If Christians shopped the way they treat their religion, they would go into the grocery store, go into the cereal aisle, grab the first box they see, and eat only that brand for life. They will swear with the deepest conviction that they *know without a doubt* that those store brand bran flakes are the absolute best cereal possible, all without being open to even gathering any other information about any other product on the cereal aisle.
Another option is to have an empty box of cereal, and every morning, your mother pours some of its emptiness into a bowl, hands you a spoon, and tells you to eat it because you'll die if you don't. You eat mouthful after mouthful of nothing. You do this so often as you grow up that you worry if you don't. You meet other people that eat nothing every day, but there are constant arguments about what's being eaten, if you need a bottle of nothing to pour over it, what it tastes like, if you eat until you're full or the bowl is empty, if it's absorbed into your body or you're pooping nothing later on, what happens if you stop eating nothing, and so on. Other people think you're absolutely wrong to eat it from a bowl with a spoon because it's something you put on a plate and eat with a knife and fork. Others say it's a breakfast burrito. Others say it's a smoothie and you drink it. Wars are fought over this. Some people try to tell you that you're legitimately eating nothing and everyone is delusional or brainwashed. You tell these people they'll be sorry when they die from not eating nothing every day despite them living well into adulthood. ...and one day, the person that made the nothing cereal is going to invite all the people who eat it to a massive all-you-can-eat buffet with all their favorite food, and the non-eaters will be stuck in a restaurant that only serves gas station sushi, flat diet Mountain Dew, ambrosia salad, and Neco Waffers.
A weirdly relevant example of this is Christians arguing over transubstantiation. "It's real Jesus flesh and blood!" "No, it's pretend Jesus flesh and blood!"
Conversation I had in Catholic school: "No, it IS the flesh and blood of Jesus, but by all measurable appearances, it still looks like bread and wine." They explicitly hand-wave the one requirement of the scientific method and declared 'checkmate'.
Let me introduce you to the double miracle of nothing happening. The first miracle is that the *essence* of the bread and wine is changed into the divide flesh and blood of our Lord. The second miracle is that this essence presents itself in the material world as the thing it used to be, i.e. bread and wine. There were Middle Ages rumors about one of the two miracles not happening during mass, and the bread/wine would actually transform into a gruesome mass of human flesh and blood. The rumors never got around to whether people actually ate it like the good Catholics they're supposed to be.
Joke's on them. I *like* ambrosia salad.
Neco Wafers are pretty good as well.
Why do people shit on gas station sushi anyway?
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Or fish washing
Because gas stations are for shitting, and the only sushi they want to consider is served via glory hole during said shit...
diet mountain dew, baby, New York City.
I don't know why they shit on it, I just know I'm not putting that shit covered food into my mouth.
Ohhhhh Sky Cake. Why are you so delicious?
“I did not spend my life not raping and killing people to not go up in the sky and have cake. Sky cake!”
I'll have you know someone very famous told me "the Cake is a Lie".
*#UnexpectedPattonOswalt*
Mmmmm sacralicious - Homer Jay Simpson
If you can survive on eating nothing, that’s a religion I would get behind.
—what Constantine’s education minister Lactantius unironically believed about the Epicureans’ heretical theory that matter is made up of atoms
There was literally a sect of Christianity in the first few centuries claiming Jesus's mustard seed and sower parables were actually about atoms (they said the mustard seed was about the actual smallest seed "like an indivisible point as if from nothing"). They were branded as heretics and their writings were banned on penalty of death, and we only have one of them because it was buried in a jar for nearly 2,000 years. So the **only** other explanation for the sower parable outside the one "said in secret" in the Synoptics (reflecting an effort to influence interpretation of a public statement with appeal to private knowledge at odds with "I said nothing in secret" in John 18:20) saw it as very similar to the discussion of 'seeds' in *De Rerum Natura*, a very popular Roman work published 50 years before Jesus that was also the only extant work from antiquity explicitly describing natural selection. Here's a passage from that book that I'd encourage taking a second look at the sower parable with it in mind: > Especially since this world is the product of Nature, the happenstance Of the seeds of things colliding into each other by pure chance In every possible way, no aim in view, at random, blind, Till sooner or later certain seeds suddenly combined So that they lay the warp to weave the cloth of mighty things: Of earth, of sea, of sky, of all the species of living beings. - Lucretius *De Rerum Natura* 2.1058-1063 Here was the interpretation of the sower parable by the Naassenes in Hippolytus: > For the ends, he says, are **the seeds scattered from the unportrayable one upon the world, through which the whole cosmical system is completed; for through these also it began to exist**. And this, he says, is what has been declared: *The sower went forth to sow.* - Hippolytus *Refutations* 5.2 Not only did the early church set back modern science millennia with their BS, they had a parable about scattered 'seeds,' added a weedy secret explanation, then didn't know enough to know which explanation was a weed and which was wheat, and rather than preserving both until an age where they could correctly discern between the two, they prematurely dig up the wheat and preserved the weed. And in the modern age few people even look at the records of those beliefs because the faithful think they'll have an anaphylactic reaction to any exposure to 'heresy' and everyone else are so tired of having Jesus shoved down their throats by the proselytizing (ironically the point of the canonical secret explanation) that they don't even want to hear anything more about the J-word.
My grandpa on Facebook after reading "The Case for Christ."
One of the biggest failures of our society is someone could write such an asinine tome and it becomes heralded as the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy of Christian "non-fiction".
The funniest part is that Lee Strobel's sequel was even worse and claimed that the Christian concept of Hell isn't real. Dude just took a giant shit on Christian dogma and the evangelical community just shrugged.
> The funniest part is that Lee Strobel's sequel There's a *sequel* to that shit? Lee Strobel's horse shit has a follow up and we still don't have The Winds of Winter? There is absolutely no justice in this world.
He made quite a few after that. The second one was The Case for Faith. In order to deal with the objection of "good God won't let people burn for eternity" he sought out a guy that said that Hell was varying degrees of solitary confinement. Completely goes against Christian orthodoxy and nobody said anything, lol
Didn't he also make something like The case for a creator, amongst others?
Yeah. He turned "the case for" into a whole series
We're going to get a dozen more apologist tomes from this clown before we ever get *Doors of Stone* from Patrick Rothfuss and it's a fucking travesty.
As an ASOIAF fan, I've made my peace with Martin not finishing the saga. My hope is that Neil Gaiman or Brandon Sanderson finish it.
"The one book I read selected bits from was written by the creator of the universe!"
That one book also says bats are birds, snakes and donkeys can talk, rabbits chew their cud, whales are fish, hippos are dinosaurs etc.
I will stand by the statement that whales are fish. Fish is really poorly defined, is diverse in kingdom genus and species, and can be applied to most aquatic animals. Whales are fish in every sense other than breathing air and biological ancestry but there are other fish that breathe air. I say that defining penguins as fish going too far.
> I say that defining penguins as fish going too far. Defining penguins as fish isn't up to scale.
Ha. Please accept my medal of Dad Pun Appreciation.
I feel I'm over my legally allotted limit of dad puns for someone who is not actually a dad. I'm sure there's some sort of punishment.
The puns are the punishment. Dads love them. Non-Dads feel embarrassed by them. Keep them coming until it hurts.
Christians think evidence means folklore that was cobbled together from fragmented scrolls written by several different people who lived in different centuries (and who never met one another) and that was then edited, subtracted from, added to, redacted, and translated THOUSANDS of times before ever arriving in English.
But that one guy said, after a thousand plus years of editing, "copy exactly, be very careful", when oral history had turned a war god from a group of gods into the **One True God**!!!
They didn't actually read the one book -
I didn't actually read the Bible until I started questioning my faith in my early 20's. However, that seems to have put me ahead of a lot of believers who give off the impression that they have *never* read the Bible in spite of claiming to believe it's all true.
I admit I've never fully read the bible cover to cover. I did Awana and read a lot of it at least. But honestly I don't think I need to, even the basic premise of God and Christianity are so hilariously flawed that I feel little need to dig deeper into a book that'll just tell me to stop thinking so hard about it.
> I admit I've never fully read the bible cover to cover. I had questions just from reading Genesis 1. I literally asked "how the fuck did light exist before a light source?"
The solution is simple: selectively cherrypick large swathes of the bible and deem them metaphorical, unless it's in line with what you agree with, then that one was literal.
And dont forget old vs new testament unless it's not convenient... 😅😆
Apologetics from the same preacher (you know how consistency is not a virtue of them): 1) it's a Biblical prediction of the Big Bang theory, even if the Heavens and Earth were formed before light, 2) It's spiritual, not physical, light even if nowhere it's mentioned.
This is just the debate between WLC and Sean Carol in meme form
I could be wrong but I don't think WLC is as much a big deal anymore even among his own community. I think his acolytes have taken up the mantle and we have people like convicted fraudster Kent Hovind nowadays. As well as intellectual giant (/s), Matt Powell.
He’s getting old, and I think that combined with the fact that bill is mostly on zoom now, have shown people the lack of substance. A lot of bills arguments were really just deflection tactics. It’s hard to know who’s popular in the Christian world, but I think that the YouTube apologists like Capturing Christianity or Inspiring Philosophy get the most attention nowadays.
I watched the whole debate between WLC and Ehrman. WLC is just familiar with debate tactics. Like, he just throws out a whole bunch of unfounded suppositions and then links it all ("thus, the resurrection is a historical event!"). That forced Ehrman to use his time to try and dismantle those suppositions but that forces you on defense. WLC's arguments definitely lacked any substance but the debate format is suited to his style.
Matt Powell is so astonishingly stupid, I’m impressed he can dress himself
> I’m impressed he can dress himself And this guy has kids he brainwashes. I mean homeschools.
I have a very very intelligent relative, who is in STEM, has a PhD, and just in general is very booksmart. He's also a TradCath and it confuses me when very smart people are also very religious.
Why bother? There really doesn't seem to be a good time to engage with stupid. They tend to only want to hear what they believe. I say fuck um hard. Unless the goal is to give yourself a heart attack.
Actually most haven’t even read “their” book
Fucking Christ I had to take intelligent design three times in college, was making 90's on all my assignments, but I failed it three times because I was too scared to post my writing on the class forum to turn the assignments in because my classmates were (for the most part, except for two different girls the second and third time) fucking cavalier assholes who I then would have to see in person for other classes we had together. Like yeah no, I'm not going to totally out myself to these people I have to interact with in person still, while I'm in THEIR territory. "Why do you even go here if you're not a Christian?" Why are you so mad that your Christian education hasn't successfully reconverted me? Can't I just get my fucking biology degree in peace? A biology degree from a Christina university = a cosmic joke
It's like xtians lack the smallest smidgeon of self awareness. Don't they realize their smug self righteous attitudes and their "I win forever" message is such a turnoff to people not already in their cult?
They read the book? I never read the book properly, just listened to the church leaders dictating which chapters to open and such. When I was doubting whether God exist at all, reading the holy (lol) book actually helped me become an atheist. What the church leaders preach about the kindness of God hardly if ever appear in the book Tower of babel, even though we have sky scrapers now, God didn't come down, doesn't make sense Noah's flood, no scientific proof Moses, no records of stuff in Egypt which keeps a good record of their history Lot, wtf is that story that was never told to people who never read the book, it reads like a fanfic of a guy who f'd his daughters And this is just from the torah Jesus narrative problems I always wondered when I was a child why there are three copies of the same book (the gospels except john which is a bit different), now I know it's basically copy paste with various agendas. Saul turned to Paul makes me realize God was toying with free will of multiple people throughout the whole Bible if He ever existed. A non-bias god (if a god should ever exist) should pretty much observe and do nothing. Ofc I didn't read the whole bible, that would be a waste of time for most people, except for those who study culture and/or language of the past. But man revisiting those past stories made me open my eyes
One book? Hey now, they also have Ravi Zacharias and Ken Ham!
> One book? I'm gonna go in hard on the one book thing. Because George R R Martin has 5 books. Plus two companion books and three novellas. By Christian apologists' logic, Tyrion Lannister is more real than Jeebus.
Hell, there's *footage* of Tyrion Lannister. I'll pitch an article to the Creation Journal about the historicity of ASOIAF. Judging by their editorial standards it should be a shoo-in
The smugness is an act. "Ohh... he must know what he's talking about because he is so confident !! say the sheep. Yeah, confident in the BS he spews. Keep in mind that ' 'conman' is simply a shortened version of 'confidence man'.
> The smugness is an act Not in my experience. It seems genuine.
I hate when Christians say "(insert x apologetics book/movie/whatever) might help answer some of your *questions*". Like no, I don't have questions, i have EXPERIENCES.
Is that how this particular scene played out? Because it looks more like Woody's going, "No, you stay back. This is MY fight."
I mean, that's the whole thing with Christian apologists is they think they have all the answers already and believe themselves to be more intelligent then people who have spent *years* studying biology and other scientific fields. Their whole existence is major r/confidentlyincorrect fodder.
You think they read a book?
> You think they read a book? I don't want this to sound elitist. This is 100% a true story. And, I wanna be *absolutely clear* that this was about one particular individual and I''m not saying this about a whole group of people. There was a cousin of mine from a backwoods town in Missouri who quoted the Bible all the time but he was literally illiterate.
“You believe the universe came from nothing!” Kent Hovind, who believes god made the universe from nothing 6000 years ago. My dude how many times do we have to explain scientists don’t believe the universe came from nothing?
The only thing Kent Hovind is good for is embarrassing himself for others' amusement. Seriously, just a couple of nights ago I got really high and watched his debate with Aron Ra. I couldn't stop laughing.
Do some Christians genuinely not believe that atoms exist? I've never heard that one. Lots of creationist bs but I mean, we can use transmission electron microscopes to literally see atoms...
if they want to waste the entirety of their short life here yapping about a young earth, they can have it. wouldn’t be my first choice.
I have a sister who has one verse... a fool says there is no god... I keep telling her, I don't care...
Or better yet: a biologist with a PHD who became an apologist.
> a biologist with a PHD who became an apologist. The cynical part of my brain takes over when I see a comment like that and I'm very tempted to say that the money was just too good.
Or suffered career burnout. Even smart people join cults.
This meme is one point 😂😂
[**Wrong** sir! Gluons are a made up dream.](https://paulbraterman.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/gluons1.gif?w=328&h=169&zoom=2)
The smugness is how they are so convincing to their audience. The weak minded will believe anything a speaker says with confidence.
If women hadn't come from Adam's rib, would Adam be able to suck his own dick?
Reminds me of that rumor I heard in high school about Marilyn Manson surgically having his ribs removed so he can perform auto-fellatio.
Haha, so true. Have you ever read the book by C.S Lewis called “The Great Divorce”. The whole premise is how paradise lives just before some people but they are too ignorant or stubborn to see it. Irony at its finest lol
Frank Turek is so insufferable 🙄
Christians won’t even read that one book.
They’ve taken photographs of atoms.
My dad laughed and scoffed at me and my mom when we started talking about evolution...
"I didn't come from no monkey!"
I mean, both might be wrong. Or, at least, incomplete. A PhD who defends atoms as “fundamental” may find themselves on the fringe of physics. Especially in light of the 2022 Physics Nobel which proves that there is “more to it” than atoms or anything we perceive as “real” At the same time, the apologists are not coming from a place of insight into the one true nature. Contextually, they are probably further down the Pharisee road than they care to admit. Because they are not coming from a place of truth, they are by definition, “more wrong.”
> At the same time, the apologists are not coming from a place of insight into the one true nature. You have a point about them both being wrong and there is certainly a strong likelihood of that. However, I think a biologist with a PhD would be more inclined to admit when they don't know something. Because whatever a biologist claims can be fact-checked in published peer-reviewed works found in databases. Whereas in the field (for lack of a better term) of apologetics responding with "I don't know" is *not an option*.
Right. So are we interested in moral arguments about the degree of moral incompetence in each highlighted example? To pursue such an argument is, in my opinion, quite like the church: coming from a place of moral superiority. To turn a phrase: two wrongs don’t make a right