Atheist-Christian Debates

Debate 12: "Religion is irrelevant."

A pure philosopher has no direction but educated guesses. A pure fundamentalist has no education.

"Christianity provides no objective truth."

Newspapers and news agencies make objectivity their goal, but one finds they always tend to put either a lieral or a conservative spin on the `facts.'
Science is no better. For example, `naturalism' puts an atheistic spin on any scientific finding by the tacit ignoring of God and all religous issues, no matter how relevant they are to the discourse.
Science organizations, regardless of how much they claim to be objective, ostracize any colleague that puts forth even a remotely religious paper on any scientific finding.

"Christianity provides no objective truth"? Harsh words from a person who believes in scientific theories that cannot be proven (God's alleged nonexistence, the Big Bang, etc.) simply because they have an irrational belief that "there has to be another explanation!" What is truth? It depends on what you define as `truth.' If you define `truth' as `scientific fact,' then of course the bible isn't going to tell you the scientific formula for DNA. But is that `truth' really relevant or important to your daily existence? So what if you eat a few genetically altered foods. If it really made a difference in your personal life, if it wasn't something you didn't really care if you ate or not, it's an unnecessary burden of stress to have to sit down and examine every last item to avoid eating genetically altered foods. You may lengthen your lifespan by a few seconds, but you take away those seconds by the artificial stress you're putting yourself through, so you'll die of heart complications. The bible provides the important truths, necessary for daily living. Science doesn't do much in that regard. The goal of science is merely to improve daily life, not give instructions on how to live a good life. You can doubt and speculate it all you want, you can say, "no, I have the truth. I know what's factual, and it's not Christianity because that's not objective truth," but that's you. Christianity sees the bible as an "objective truth," but Christianity doesn't believe that truth has to be directly testable, that you don't put truth in a test tube. You don't put God to the test. Faith is how you interpret reality. You interpret reality as something where God doesn't need to exist, but that's just your own personal belief. I don't believe what you believe.

"Any religion can change a person for the better. What religion it is doesn't matter."

Matthew 21:28-32 is designed with people like you in mind. Religion doesn't matter, eh?...How about those headhunter religions, or those people who make human sacrifices in hopes of making the sun come up? How is that `better?'

"There is a more fundamental difference between our approaches to war. As an atheist, I believe injustices and cruelties result from the acts of men, and therefore the cure (if any) must occur here."

That implies that your `cure' is greater than that of the armies who seek to `cure' our nation. You are also making the false assumption that Christ didn't command us to love and forgive people in the here and now. Certainly, the majority of injustice and cruelty comes from men. But we are human just like the `enemy,' no better than they. Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek, and forgive our enemy. Your attitude is petty and vindictive. What's the motive? To get oil? Read Matthew 20:20-28. The cure should be love and forgiveness.

"The Judeo-Christian religion is younger than other religions. I prefer one that's got more history."

Judaism was around verbally before it was recorded historically or documented. You have no way to tell if it's truly as young as you say, nor does the age of it matter that much. My God was around a long time before all the religions came into being.

"Who cares if someone misquotes the bible? That's just like misquoting Shakespeare or a dime novel. No big deal."

Misquoting the bible is a very serious offense. Just a thousand years ago, the Crusades were started by clergymen who misquoted the bible. If they had been reading properly, they would have forgiven their enemies, even if someone `desecrated' the tomb of Christ. People wouldn't have killed over relics if they had read the bible properly and worshipped Jesus instead of the wood of the cross he hung on. The Inquisition and the witch trials were also due to misreadings of the bible. Misquoting the bible resulted in Islam, which involves bloody jihads. If words and sentences aren't arranged properly, you can't tell who said what. "I can't tell who wrote this part. Oh. That's you," the athiest said constantly during the course of his audio recordings. The same thing happens if a quotation from Jesus is mistaken for a quotation from Satan. Or a quote from God is replaced by a quote from Job or Aaron or someone. A bible written by a cult is as blasphemous and out of character to me as a furry would find it blasphemous and out of character to see the Ninja Turtles supporting the president's excersize initiative, or Simba from the Lion King singing "Jesus Loves Me." Like, what if someone rewrote the bible so that it said, "Thou should not murder." Just inserting that "should" suddenly makes it okay to murder people. You will probably argue that bible translators do that, but the good ones remain faithful to the original versions of the Old and New Testaments, and I believe God works through them to do it right. And you can always go back to a Hebrew bible to double check. A cult's text will not even bother to check the original versions of the bible.