u/JoeBrownshoes

Richmonder? Richmondite? Richmondian?

I know I could look it up but figured it'd be more fun to ask you guys.

In fact it is worse since (some interpretations) say that you will be tortured for ETERNITY

In the US, Christians often decry that atheism is being "pushed as a religion" or "forced on kids" or something of that nature. So I can safely assume that those complaining about it would be absolutely up in arms if an atheist government ever came into power and started enforcing atheism as a belief under threat of a lifetime of imprisonment and torment.

I know the usual apologetic for this and that some Christians believe in annihilation rather than torment, so let's change it up slightly. Let's say the atheistic government said "If you fully accept atheism into your heart then we will provide you with a good, happy life in our nation. You will have full liberty and benefit of citizenship. However if you still have doubts about atheism being true and correct (and we have special thought machines that can tell if that's true) then you will be rounded up and murdered.

To be clear, I ALSO think this would be a horrible, unjust system that I would never wish to be implemented in any way, shape or form so I would be right along side you fighting it if it happened. But the fact that I feel that way means I feel the same way about a religion that declares essentially the same thing, only worse.

And yet this same concept is exactly what most Christians interpret the Bible to be saying and they somehow describe it as "love" or "justice" when it clearly isn't.

I think this applies very exactly to Islam as well, but not so much to Judaism so I didn't it the "Abrahamic" tag and went with Christian.

Quote:

"No. It's not supposed to be. There isn't supposed to be a way to resolve the paradox neatly, because that would make God a logical construct - something we deduce from reason instead of being above it entirely and often acting in a way that does not respect what humanly makes sense. You can say that in the time it was written, no one had much respect for human rights and the mosaic law was actually comparatively merciful and that it was long ago, and we shouldn't read it literally in the first place, but I'm sure you wouldn't be convinced by that and have heard it before, but I would submit to you that the apparent discrepancy is intentional, and to force you to not rely on what makes sense, but have to make a leap of faith that forces you to rely more on God instead of reason or your own whims, but part of that is that it often requires you to be able to trust him even when there is no way to humanly make sense of it - and whether you choose to accept or reject that is up to you, but the bible here is to confront you with the paradox so that you can make a leap either way, if that makes sense. It is designed to test your reason and self-reliance to show why you cannot lean on them, hence regarding the conquest of Canaan, what happened is less important to faith than how it is transforming you right now."

For one night only he should allow believers 30 seconds to pray for him to, you know, see the truth of Jesus, recant his atheism, lose followers etc.

Take notes of what exact things were prayed for and then a couple of weeks later, check in and see how effective the prayers have been.

If prayer is so powerful, then with the power of a whole night of sincere prayer from believers surely it'll cause Justin to be restored to his full faith, right??

So arguing with presups is my latest obsession. I was obsessed with flat earth for a while but that's kinda dead now after the Final Experiment so I've had to find something else to fill my peculiar need to argue with the dumbest and most bad faith actors on the internet.

Anyway, a presup asked me how I judge right from wrong. I told him I use the metric of: what promotes survival or flourishment for the most people involved in the situation vs the amount of destruction caused by a given course of action.

His response, I shit you not, was "but how can you use this standard to judge the Nazis as being bad?"

Dude, what? How can I judge the event that caused the most destruction and death in the history of humanity as bad if I use the survival as the metric?

Like if my metric is that it's good to put out fire with water and he asked me" but what about these arsonist who lit 500 buildings on fire? They were using the same system as you! " like you couldn't possibly be more wrong.

There then ensued like an 8 comment thread where he continued to avoid admitting the point. I kept saying " you must at least understand that IF you use this metric then the Nazis were clearly wrong? "

I told him he didn't have to agree it was a good metric, just see how the metric would work if someone chose to use it.

He eventually said I was being stubborn so he was going to "bow out".

Honestly, how do these guys even get dressed in the morning?