"Christianity has nothing to do with the Old Testament. The Old Testament says you have to do good in order to go to heaven. The New Testament throws all that out by saying `everyone is forgiven.'"
Jesus himself said that he was not throwing out the law or the commandments. Not a dot of them would pass away, even if heaven and earth did. He told us to love our fellow human beings and to love God with our whole heart, which is the sum of the law and prophets. Furthermore, Christ fulfilled and kept the law by offering himself as a sacrifice, ordained by the commandments, for our sins. In the Old Testament, God commanded people to sacrifice animals for their sins. Jesus is the lamb of God, providing himself as a sacrificial animal. So the Old Testament was not thrown away.
"If there's only one God in town, why does the bible go on about the `most high God'?"
There's a scriptural basis for this expression. The commandments say that there are to be no gods before God. God is said to be a king above all gods. I believe the `gods' in this case are angels, which are his creation anyway. If these `gods' created themselves, like it's said about the gods in other religions, it would contradict the bible. Either that, or there's one God and the other gods don't exist, so he's superior in that he's something while the other `gods' are nothing.
"Which translation of Jesus' letters are you reading from? Each translation only approximates the original meaning, so you don't have His exact words to the letter - or even to the `paragraph'!"
NIV is excellent, so is RSV and KJV and the NRSV versions of the bible. And really, I'll go by whatever the original Greek translation of the New Testament says above all those. It's true that we don't have the exact words of Jesus, but it's close enough. God inspires a faithful recount and translation.
"You aren't supposed to make any graven images of what is in Heaven, Below the Earth, or Seas - yet later there is considerable detail about King Solomon's glorious gold plated temple, complete with huge gold winged Seraphim."
It's possible that those didn't resemble anything on heaven or earth. Besides, God makes the rules. If part of his invisible, gigantic presence decides to sit inside a gold box, and allows worship, then the gold foil(the seraphs) wouldn't be the main focus, thus not idols. The main object of worship is God, not the gold trappings.
"If you must worship God only, why did people worship the angel of the Lord, or Jesus?"
The angel of the Lord is not a mere angel. It's an embodiment of God. So I don't think there's any contradiction about idolatry in there. It's all one God. They're `echad.
"According to Leviticus 20:21 and Deuteronomy 25:5 respectively, a brother can't marry his brother's widow, yet a brother can take a dead brother's wife."
- This is an amendment to the commandments. The first law worked fine for a few years, but God decided to amend it.
- The commandment that says you can't marry a brother's wife applies to a living brother, not a dead one.
- The verse in Deut 25:5 says, "If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies AND HAS NO SON, the wife of the dead shall not be married outside the family to a stranger; her husband's brother shall go in to her, and take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her." It only applies IF THE GUY HAD NO SON. The family name has to continue somehow.
- There's a clause in the later passages saying that the brother may choose not to do it.
- Thou shalt not kill/murder. So the brother couldn't just kill the brother and take the guy's wife.
- The brother won't have much use for her anyway, since he's dead, and plus if he has no descendant, it makes it even more practical.
- A careful reading of the passage in question, including the surrounding verses, should clear up any alleged `contradiction' you might see in this verse.
- The devotional author Richard Beckmen, says, "In ancient Israel a brother was obligated to marry his brother's widowed wife. The purpose was to provide a child and carry on the brother's name, so that the name would not cease to exist. If the name died out, the person died out. There was not a teaching at that time about the resurrection. Jesus' resurrection was a radical move on God's part to reveal and demonstrate a great hope for us all."
"If you say that people who use Christ's forgiveness as a license to do evil can just repent and be forgiven, and if you say that `if you mess up and sin, you can be forgiven,' you have just made good and evil equal in the eyes of God!/Christ's forgiveness is an excuse to do evil."
Say you murdered someone. Learning about the forgiveness of Jesus, you sincerely repent of your sin, and don't kill anyone else ever again. But, say, you then intentionally go out and shoplift from a store, thinking, before you ever do it, that Jesus will forgive you, so it's okay. Well, it's not okay. You're still dead in your sin. To be forgiven of wasting the blood of Jesus in this way, you would have to sincerely repent not only of shoplifting, but also of your arrogance towards God, and wasting the blood of Jesus. Besides, if you did the sin intentionally, expecting to be forgiven, your repentance would not be genuine, because you planned it that way all along. It's not true remorse. You have to believe you have done wrong, and be genuine and sincere when you tell God you're sorry. And you should never do that particular sin again. But I always accidentally sin. I can't help it. It's human nature. I occassionally have adulterous thoughts, I occassionally hate people, I occasionally do what is wrong. I repent of it. I need that forgiveness. But, some people become Christians for awhile, then something happens and they stop believing in God or Christianity or they get pressured by friends to do crime, or some kind of problem arises in their life, where they're given a choice between following God or earning lots of money (prostitution or perhaps something else ethically but not legally wrong, like using an overseas sweatshop to produce toy or appliance components), or whatever, and they don't choose to follow God. But God allows for second chances. If they have a change of heart, repent and stop their sin, they will be forgiven. But that's totally different from doing it on purpose, just because Jesus died for our sins. Sincere repentence is needed for forgiveness to be given. Even non-Christian rabbis agree that God will not forgive you if you plot out a sin, thinking in your heart, `I will repent.' Even though Christ has forgiven us for all the sins we will ever do in our lifetime, it is not an excuse to do evil. But as human beings, we cannot avoid doing wrong in God's sight. As an atheist, you may argue that it is easy to obey the law, because you focus on doing right in the sight of human beings. You ignore the possibility of making a black mark between you and God. If you fail to keep God's commandments, even the slightest one, you have sinned, doing evil in God's sight. It's tough to avoid doing wrong (nobody is perfect besides Christ), so we were given Jesus to pay for our sins. Forgiveness is a license to be good, not do evil. If you have sinned intentionally, thinking you will be forgiven, it is best to turn away from that evil, repent of your arrogance, sincerely, recognizing that you shouldn't have taken advantage of the Lord in this way. You will be forgiven if you turn from your hard-hearted ways. The salvation of Jesus is a scholarship for being perfect. I cannot possibly be perfect because I'm human and I naturally do what is wrong. Even when I try to do right, I mess up all the time and do what is sinful. It's hard to love God with your whole heart/mind. I try hard to follow the commandments, and follow my conscience when the commandments don't apply to the situation, but I often fail by accident. I slip up a lot. But Jesus died, he became a sacrifice, to remove my sins and failings from God's record book. Normally, people have to pay their way through college. A lot of people never get their degree because they can't afford the high tuition fees, or they work too much and it cuts down their performance in class, dropping their GPA. But the sacrificial death of Jesus is like the full ride scholarship. You no longer have to work to get into the "college," that is, the kingdom of God(The kingdom of God is both an earthly and a heavenly phenomenon, unlike the kingdom of heaven). Since that issue is taken care of, you can pay more attention to your classes. You're expected to keep a "GPA average" or "do well in the classes," in other words, keep the commandments, but if you mess up, if you couldn't handle the "class" or the situation life throws at you, you still get a second chance. Unlike a normal scholarship, the sacrifice of Jesus can't be revoked. You get to keep it forever. It's a gift. But it's no excuse to be a drunken, pot smoking partier, either. In other words, it's not an excuse to sin intentionally. Just like a normal college, you get expelled from God's kingdom for wasting the blood of Jesus. But this is a nice "college." It allows for second chances. If that "drunken partier" gets clean and sober and comes grovelling back, the "college" is willing to forget that the incident ever happened. Once a person sincerely repents of their wrongs, stops doing wrong, and begs God for forgiveness through Jesus, that person is forgiven anew. The "scholarship" is renewed. A Talmudic rabbi once wrote, "To he who says, `I will sin and repent, I will sin and repent,' atonement is not vouchsafed to him.
"The Old Testament contradicts what the New Testament says about hell."
The confusion about this arises from the conflict between what people perceive in the New Testament as describing a place of eternal torture, and the Old Testament idea of a soul's punishment. A careful reading of both Old and New Testaments should indicate that people won't be tormented forever and ever without end in hell, but that their existence is wiped out, and the non-existence will be forever. This concept really brings the New Testament more in line with what the Old Testament says about a spirit's fate. The word Hades means unseen realm, which is similar to the Old Testament `Sheol.' Daniel 12:2 describes a fiery Sheol. Deuteronomy 32:22 speaks of God's anger burning to the depths of Sheol. This is definitely not a grave being described. 2 Samuel 22:6 says the cords of Sheol surrounded the author. I think the grave is an insufficient explanation for that one.
"Christianity says that the Old Testament is nullified."
The bible says forgiveness isn't an opportunity to sin/do evil, but to do good. The commandments of the Old Testament are not nullified. To be truly forgiven, you have to repent and sin no more. No human being besides Jesus is perfect, so sin is inevitable no matter what we do, but that's a far cry from willingly sinning for the sake of sinning because we insist on the forgiveness of Jesus. To intentionally sin after knowing that Jesus has removed your sins is wasting Christ's blood, and angering God.
"One day God's loving, the next day he's smiting someone. How can you believe in that?"
Well, he smote people because they weren't perfect. They had to sacrifice lambs or bulls or something like that all the time to make God happy. That didn't change until Jesus showed up and offered himself as the sacrificial lamb. So now God doesn't smite people like that. God also didn't have to show himself in the same way. He showed himself through Jesus. Christians are being remade in the likeness of Jesus, because Jesus made it possible for all of us to be children of God.
"But I thought you were supposed to worship Yahweh above all gods! This sounds like Tritheism! What is all this Jesus worship, then? Isn't that idolatry? Isn't he another God?"
That is a misconception. According to the Hebrew bible, whenever they say "God is one," they use the word `echad. `Echad is a plural form that literally translates as "one," like "one nation under God." There is nothing in the bible that says that God has an absolute unity, i.e. that he cannot be divided into separate parts. Christians believe that God has a compound unity. This is hard to explain, because God doesn't feel like proving himself or explaining himself about it. But, basically, the argument that worshipping Jesus is idolatry is like saying, "America shouldn't have separate individuals in it. It should be just one big person, because it's one nation under God." Or, to put it differently, it would be like saying that a car is not "one car" because it has parts on it besides the front driver's side radial tire. Or it's like soap. It might have vitamin e and aloe in it, but it doesn't mean the vitamin e and aloe are different soaps. It's all part of the same bar. And then in Genesis, God says, "Let us make a man in our own image." The only thing "one" means in the bible, like "God is one" is that people aren't supposed to worship tree spirits, or Baal or Buddha. To worship the "one God," the invisible God of the bible. Beyond that, it's a divine mystery, something beyond our feeble human comprehension. If you've seen the movie, Gremlins, you see an example of how something can be `one' while simultaneously being composed on many creatures, which separate from the whole body with water. In the cartoon movie, Little Nemo, there are creatures called `Oomps,' which, while being three or four separate entities, could join together to form one solid object.
"There is no such thing as Hell in the Old Testament. Sheol merely means `the grave,' nothing more."
Isaiah 14:9 is the best reason why that interpretation isn't always correct. `Shades' are mentioned in association with the word. It gets `stirred up to meet you.' Ezekiel 32:21-25 is also good because you can see the difference between the Pit and Sheol and grave, and a `nether world' is also mentioned. I'm not sure why `the grave' would have depths like Deuteronomy 32:22 describes, and why there'd be a fire down there. 2 Samuel 22:6 and Psalm 18:5 talk about the `cords of Sheol,' which doesn't seem appropriate for merely `the grave.' Proverbs 27:20 says that Sheol and Abbadon are never satisfied. That's not grave - like. Isaiah 5:14 talks about Sheol having an appetite that expands. Isaiah 38:18 uses the phrase `the pit,' which is associated with Sheol, and is used in the New Testament to describe hell.
"If people who commit suicide go to Hell, then martyrs would be there, too. It's willful death - both ways."
A martyr lives in addition to dying for Christ. Martyrdom is to die before denying belief in Jesus and God. And it's not suicide by your own hand. Someone else hypothetically would come along and threaten your life. "Do you believe in Jesus? If so, you can't live anymore." There are Islamic countries where things like this have happened. It's happened in China. I'm fortunate enough to live in a country where it doesn't happen. Some might will the death, but they do not kill themselves with their own hands. There's a difference between wanting to kill yourself and wanting to witness for God at the cost of your life. Martyrs look forward to heaven, but they do not order their persecutor to kill them. If forced to choose between denying Jesus and being killed, they choose being killed. But God wants his faithful to have life to the full. Even though `to die is to gain,' to paraphrase one of the disciples, we still `live for Christ.'
"Maybe the bible translations are wrong and we are still supposed to be sacrificing sheep."
Only if you throw out the beliefs about Jesus completely. If so, then God is truly mad. The Temple of Jerusalem is a sign that God has favored mankind. Currently it is called The Dome Of The Rock, run by Moslems. No one's offering sacrifices there. Some rabbis put up the excuse that prayer replaces sacrifice, but Michael L. Brown's book refutes that idea. There is so much more Talmudic and biblical evidence suggesting that the lack of a temple indicates God isn't happy. Unless, of course, that Jesus is the true messiah, and that he did away with the need for ritual sacrifice forever, so we don't need to offer sacrifices in the temple anymore.
Social Contradictions
The following arguments come from the mistaken assumption that Christians follow crowds and charismatic leaders instead of the bible. This would have been in the hypocricy section, but these are too general for that.
"In (sound file) you will hear the pastor say that we are judged on our actions, and rewarded or punished to the degree that we know God (or something like that - which differs from you and Bill Weise, who say Jesus is the answer)."
That's why I follow the bible, not crazy pastors.
"You might be `serving' the wrong God (misled by translation errors)."
Not if you go back and double check the scripture with the Septuagint and Hebrew translations.
"I think the `present' always has a poor opinion of the `past', so how is one to know the right thing to do?"
Tough talk for a person who won't stop beating me over the head with arguments about the Holocaust and Crusades. If you truly follow the words of the bible, you'll know what to do. And you conscience will help you.
