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Old 09-13-2007, 09:45 AM
Insp. Clue!So? Insp. Clue!So? is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 552
Default Re: Christianity in a nutshell:

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So you are making the physically-testable claim that bread and wine are actually converted into flesh and blood?

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Did you read the rest of my post? I'm an atheist, I'm not making any claim at all, I'm just telling you what actual Christians believe.

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As for petty I think the descriptions are a thousand times more honest/accurate than those given by the faithful, who have or are vulverable to all sorts of hype and pr-related adjustments of what is a rather strange, nonsensical, tale (which in turn was taken from several other strange, non-sensical older such tales along with contemporary flavorings that continue to be added to this day).

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You are incorrect, as I tried to point out by emphasizing the existential implications of Christianity's highest commandment. Christianity cannot be understood as a rational belief system. It is nonrational. Treating it like a rational belief system is like trying to understand Pulp Fiction by reading a print-out of the voltage patterns in your computer's RAM while it plays the movie.

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I think you should shoot an email to the pope, who has gone out of his way to claim that Christianity (or at least Catholicism) is "rational". Anyway, to the extent Christianity makes claims in the dirty here and now, are you saying we CAN'T test it? If somebody claims that the Sun whizzed about in circles in the sky above Portugal 100 years ago, or that the wine we just put in that case is now really blood, such things are either true or not and subject to our "rational" examination (something greatly feared by the faithfull).

And of course it's not just Christianity that suffers from this little problem with reality. (And let's not get into the fact that all these major faiths often directly contradict themselve, heck blaspheme the [censored] out of each other; you know these "interfaith councils"? The only honest interfaith council should resemble a WWF multi-man no-rules smackdown. The "major faiths" all claim high degrees of certitude about what, if they are correct, are terribly important concepts with serious consequences for those holding other views).

The larger point here is, unlike Sklansky I don't feel the need to run about bashing people's heads in with Venn diagrams or whatever in order to prove that some deity is explicitly impossible; rather, simply showing how absurd these beliefs are *as held by the vast majority of folks who claim them* is sufficient (and of course very easy to do). Brother, folks don't go around brooding about these abstruse arguments concerning infinite love etc., they just spend a few hours each month mumbling dictated screeds derived from tall tales they were told at a tender age. It takes an educated idiot like NotReady to spend all that time and energy with these silly mental contortions involving knowing what even they should realize is on their own terms unknowable.

I'll happily grant (at a prob. of 10 (-40) the chance of a snot-nosed uber-being on the fifth-dimension planet Xanathrax, who is In Charge, but the sober evidence points the other way. And all that Abrahamic junk is just that, like Thor and the Moon God and all the rest before them.
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