There can be nothing as immoral as those dreadful teachings according to which an angry and vengeful God punishes...

Eh, I like it well enough. Not terribly theologically sophisticated (though I must think that he could be sophisticated when he wanted to be, since he wrote so voluminously on theology), but very sensible and sincere.

The problem, for me anyways, with Christianity is that it requires belief in ANY implausible event as a matter of faith. You may tell me that the Resurrection is not to be taken literally, but that means you no longer worship the thing, but the idea of the thing. And I consent to the worship of ideas, but not of one great Idea more than another. I too love Christ as literary archetype, but not more than Satan or Hamlet or Leopold Bloom. Indeed, any religion I contemplate whatsoever seems to me to return at last to the persuasiveness and suggestiveness of poetry and poetic Ideas, but we should not have "faith" in poetry, and in light of that, I always choose to return to the worship of poetry as such, without delusions (hopefully) of absolute truth or of an objective perspective.

What a massive fag you are

Since before Augustine. The Christian School of Alexandria was flourishing over a hundred years before Christianity was even legal, and was teaching a lot of figurative interpretation. Even the Antiochian School, which had a more literal approach, interpreted certain things as figurative, such as God walking in Eden. The rivalry between the Antiochian and Alexandrians schools, interestingly enough, never focused in their differing approaches of literal vs. allegorical, but came to be focused on alternative Chistological approaches, which ultimately caused the schism, with the Alexandrian School opposing the Council of Chalcedon, and the Antiochian School supporting it (except for Severus of Antioch, who championed Alexandrine Christology). Nonetheless, Alexandrine Christology, through Saint Cyril of Alexandria, is what decisively defeated Nestorius.

Yeah, back then the Bible being literal or not was hardly a heated issue of contention. The contention was all about Christology.

>The problem, for me anyways, with Christianity is that it requires belief in ANY implausible event as a matter of faith
"Faith", in early Christianity, meant "trust" more often than how we see it now, which is merely belief. Faith wasn't a struggle to believe in God, it was often a struggle to have total trust in God.

>it requires belief in ANY implausible event as a matter of faith
>implausible
Well, there are things that exist beyond our knowledge, perception, and comprehension.

>You may tell me that the Resurrection is not to be taken literally
Resurrection is very literal.

>poetry and poetic Ideas
It's more than just poetic ideas.

OP, it does not matter who said these sentiments. It does not even matter about whether the utterer is himself possibly a Christian, a fictitious person, or otherwise. I gather that this is supposed to have been something Tolstoy thought, and again if so, it does sound rather un-Christian. But that is wholly apart from the point.

Here is the point.

These sentiments, whose-ever they are, even if they are meant to an ironic or a troll-ish extent, these sentiments...

These basic sentiments are TRUE. They both actually rhetorically work, and feel good. They are generally correct. They are richly deserving of intellectual and emotional defense, on multiple levels. In a word, they are right.

These sentiments represent a true and correct indictment of the falsity and evil of Christian mystery itself, and even if it happens that Tolstoy was the utterer (as I expect), making these points in the service of some broader mysticism, or other point, then it bears mentioning that the text of the OP itself, divorced from all other context, is right as I've insisted. It is an altogether wholly proper expression of a really moral sense, which amounts to the simple fact that any god as absurd and arbitrary and stupid as the versions of the Abrahamic god who allows that certain people are damned infinitely for various finite fuckups, is thus consequently a god who is wholly undeserving of worship and veneration, and who is deserving of rejection, and this paradoxically (in the face of his presumptive terrible and evil and infinite power), /exactly because he cannot really be resisted in any meaningful way./ Such a child-evil-tyrant-aspergers-retard god, as may be suspected to exist by dint of the awful world that we live in (the concept is an unpleasant and real thought experiment revisited daily by serious thinkers), together with our present historical tradition, is entertained at some regularlity.

Here is the really moral obgligation. Followers of Abrahamic religion should stop repairing to their respective religious traditions, and instead abandon them again in favor of free inquiry The horrors of 20th century socialism in their connection with atheism do not comprise an intellecual excuse to stick with religion, this is false form of reaction. Nor am I even disposed to stick up for modern leftism-as-such, and on this, I have a final point.

Humans are impelled toward the truth, at some level, even if that impulse is unpleasant to the point of being destructive. My concern is to suggest a godless truth while at the same time securing some hedonic security for humans, so that humans don't commit suicide en masse over an idea, or the absence of an idea. the human survival instinct seems to check this worry pretty well, but I am thinking of a longer view somehwat on this.

Secular scholarship of the Gospels is not any more intellectual honest than Christian scholarship of the Gospels, though.

imo it's rather amusing when people think it's easier to believe in god or even in that christ redeemed the sins of the world etc but they think it's hard to believe in some literal resurrection (which wasn't even a singular event, jesus himself resurrected the dead) which is possibly even achievable with the material means as we know them today, not yet, but theoretically in the future; or even they think it's hard to believe in a trifle like the virginal conception (i.e. parthenogenesis)

it's a funny way how their common sense ignores the big ideas but sticks to some small and rather insignificant albeit flashy wonders, so they contradict themselves thinking that god may exist but resurrection from dead..? nah they have never seen such a thing so the all powerful god can't do it too, because they are the measure of all things and it includes their god.

common sense is good only for your everyday life and nothing more, it's neither good for science nor for philosophy nor for religion

this

>think it's easier to believe in god or even in that christ redeemed the sins of the world
Tolstoy didn't really believe in either of those. God to him was more some collective energy of all living things.

i am not about tolstoy though, i about those people who question if the resurrection should be understood literally

any good reading recommendations for the possibility of a malevolent god?

that's a common gnostic conception

You mean like in the vein of the liberal German theologians such as David Strauss, William Wrede, Albert Schweitzter, Adoly von Karnack, and Paul Tillich?

You seem to be wanting to obliquely draw the conversation into a specific wheelhouse (the gospels) where you are an expert, in order to "win", in the domain of that wheelhouse, but what has really gone on in the few related posts above is an indictment of Christian culture itself, which although the gospels are central to it, is much larger than the gospels. There are basic concepts of christianity which are well understood by the culture, even by those who have never read the gospels: some people go to hell for ever and ever. Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, there is an element of mystery to all of this, and so on. The point that is correctly made in the language cited by the OP as it relates to the concept of the Christian god, is that from the human point of view, there is no justification that matters one whit to us for a god behaving in such-and-such a way, as far as humans are concerned, /even if there is additional information of which humans are presently unaware/. This is what leads to the moral necessitation of the rejection of the god as given in scripture, conventional understandings, etc. Unless of course you happen to be a depraved masochist and understand yourself as such, in which case I want nothing to do with you.

I don't even agree with your central premise, in principle, although if you were to push me I would not be able to be detailed. Roughly, I would suggest that the understanding of knowledge itself has improved somewhat via the scientific method, although I appreciate that there are philosophical considerations which fall outside this point, "meta" stuff.

I like your post but
> there is no justification that matters one whit to us for a god behaving in such-and-such a way, as far as humans are concerned, /even if there is additional information of which humans are presently unaware/
How can you say this, isn't this just a classic example of hubris? Given the nature of God and the afterlife, and the hidden reasons contained in the divine intellect, it is entirely possible that all the sufferings of the world are redeemed beyond imaginable measure.
My objection would be to sidestep the idea that this could happen by saying that there is not enough information to make us certain of God's intent and to follow his will as limited human beings in this life. While the Christian God would hypothetically give every human the just amount of opportunity to find the Truth and secure their place in heaven, I don't think this is quite true. Reasonable nonbelievers seem to exist.

Lol

I despise this argument.

>bible was written ~2000 years ago
>bible has been taken literally for 1800 years (according to you)
>people start seeing through the horseshit
>OH it was all actually a big metaphor

Even if it was earlier, you don't just get to decide whether it was literal or metaphorical based on what the population starts to think about it.

go fuck yourself

The extremely literal interpretation you often see in the USA only came about in the last few hundred years

>The extremely literal interpretation you often see in the USA only came about in the last few hundred years

Not really they genuinely believed in events like exordous and that Adam and Eve were real people.

People didn't have actual brains until like 200 years ago/

We still do. Just because we believe that many things in the Bible are figurative or stylistic hyperbole, doesn't mean we don't believe Exodus was real or that Adam and Eve weren't really individuals. if you don't believe those, then you probably don't believe in the Resurrection either.

So how do Christians respond to the archeological issues regarding the egyptian captivity and the 40 years in Siani?

*Eastern Orthodox Christians

We don't, that's not really the clergy's job. If you want apologetics for the historicity of Exodus though, you might start with this

putlocker.is/watch-patterns-of-evidence-the-exodus-online-free-putlocker.html

It's an overly dramatic documentary that shills for Israel, you can start at 25 minutes in, you won't miss anything if you do, it's just dramatic framing up until then. But it's worth watching. Basically the premise is that the dating for Exodus has been wrong, and it has been dated because Exodus mentions "the City of Ramses". This hypothesis is that it was written that way because the readers would be more familiar with it, or that it was a gloss later added (this has precedence in the OT, since the "City of Ramses" is used to refer to a location since Genesis). If you plug in a much earliest date for Exodus, than a lot of evidence shows up, but this evidence is almost universally rejected as evidence for Exodus because it doesn't agree with the common scholarly dating for the event.

Just confriming though, that its truth is ultimatly a matter of faith and the archeological evidence for it being there or not is not of consquence?

> a lot of evidence shows up,
Are you talking about the egyptian captivity and the wandering in Sinai or the invasion/settlement in Levant?

It doesn't really matter to me, since archaeology is an ongoing process.

All three of them.

>It doesn't really matter to me, since archaeology is an ongoing process.

I was asking as a general rule not a personal ie that no evidence or lack of evidence would ever be sufficent for people to reject the religion, kind of like the Mormons and their claims.

>All three of them.
When you say lots of evidence are you sure you dont mean just there being reasonable doubt over the lack of evidence?

Can you show some sources of the evidence for the 40 years in Sinai?

bump

>He lived in an age where everything in the bible was taken literally.

Absolutely false. The idea that people have taken their religion literally forever, but suddenly stop doing so because some writer shares some easy quips about a theological argument is retarded.

even the ancient pagans didn't take their myths literally on all accounts, it's not a new idea in any way

also the attempts to explain myths from a realistic point of view go from the ancient greeks, see palaephatus

>even the ancient pagans didn't take their myths literally on all accounts, it's not a new idea in any way

They didn't take it literally at all if you ask me. They are just playing a drama meant to reveal something else.