Has there ever been a decent Christian rebuttal to Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian"?

Has there ever been a decent Christian rebuttal to Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian"?

>You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell.

>There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

>The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.

cont

>There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.

> If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary.

>Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?

>There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching

>There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs.

>it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness
Common misconception. Name one.

tldr lol

>>Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?
>What is free will?
Also I feel as if pic related pretty much BTFO most arguments against God and Christianity. So there's that desu.

Chasity

Chastity prevents sexual addiction, the unambiguously unhappy lifetime of lust and desire that comes with it. It's the lesser of two evils, and allows someone to focus on meaningful works that net happiness.

I'm an atheist and these arguments are largely shit

>muh problem of evil
>muh suffering is bad for arbitrary reasons
>muh progress is good for arbitrary reasons
>muh misinterpretation of Christianity
>muh arbitrary human dignity
Russell is a fucking idiot and will go down in history as a figure about as relevant as Sam Harris in his secular spiritualism.

The criticism of the Gadarene swine always makes me laugh. It seems like the weakest and most pathetic reason for not liking Jesus. Some guy hurt some pigs therefore his whole message is tainted.

>I'm an atheist

Russell was a genius who was also an intellectually sheltered ideologue who wrote about things he didn't know about to pay the bills and drum up some relevance

>analytic
>genius

throw in Tolstoy and i think that covers all the arguments presented

If Russell actually read St. Aquinas like he claims to, he would see that him and others before him already refuted the problem of evil: God allows all possibilities humanly possible and knows them all.

>>muh suffering is bad for arbitrary reasons
Christfags, everyone.

In Christianity suffering is bad for actual reasons.

Humanists cannot make any claim of legitimacy.

>suffering is bad for actual reasons.
>Humanists cannot make any claim of legitimacy.

Couldnt they claim, suffering is bad because they would prefer to not suffer?

>In Christianity suffering is bad for actual reasons.
Let's hear it, I suspect this will be good for a laugh.

The problem is that the effective Christian rebuttal is seems profoundly weak set down as an argument. You are not a Christian because it can be shown to be true; but because you have faith that it is true. Because that truth helps you be better, to live as (you believe) God intended. Ultimately the Christian response to "I am not a Christian" is "I am, and I wish you all the best."

I'm not a believer in anything and I find these arguments embarrassing. Most of the people who are arguing against religion are arguing against the corruption they see in the men and women around them, or have simply adopted (athe/agnostic)ism as a tribal totem. Most of the people who defend it are either defending it from a the same tribal viewpoint, or are trying to explain a personal relationship with the transcendent. So you've got two groups in your archetypal chimps flinging shit political argument, and two more just talking right past each other.

>Chastity prevents sexual addiction, the unambiguously unhappy lifetime of lust and desire that comes in with it
Not so, desire always remains. Hence temptation being such a staple in Christian thought.

>god can't be real because he doesn't have the same morality I do :)

epic argument

He doesn't say that, he just says that's why he's not a Christian.

>The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men.
>There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

nvm misread your post

...

why are you asking questions about betrand russell and posting women smoking pipes. you made another thread like this

There really doesn't need to be. Russell creates a host of strawmen in addition to presenting questions that have already been answered in some way. Many of his questions and "problems" with morality are addressed in St. Augustine's City of God. Omnipotence has been addresses by several biblical scholars. Jesus never believed in hell, jews at that time and Jesus himself only reference the place where things are burned such as trash. Ect.

tldr; Russell doesn't know shit about christian belief or thought, this is babbys first atheistic crisis

>Jesus never believed in hell
I don't know what special snowflake new age brand of Christianity you got this from, but you can't really blame Bertrand Russell for not responding to it.

>I don't know what special snowflake new age brand of Christianity you got this from
It's called Judaism. Jesus was a Jew. Jews don't believe in eternal damnation. That's some of the misinformation that bubbled up during the 2,000-4,500 year game of telephone that is translating the Bible that is rarely, if ever, caught due to the animosity and lack of communication between Jews and Christians.

Funnily enough, when the Jehovah's Witnesses transliterated their own translation of the original texts they caught that and amended it in their own Bible.

christian here. well said.

kierkegaard said this:

So rather let us openly mock God, as has been done before in the world: this is always preferable to the demeaning air of self-importance with which one would prove God’s existence. For to prove the existence of one who is present is the most shameless insult, since it is an attempt to make him ridiculous; but regrettably people haven’t the faintest idea of this and out of sheer seriousness see it as a pious undertaking…One proves [God’s] existence by worship—not proofs.

But Thomas Aquinas did prove God is true, and we have faith in things revealed by divine revelation because we know that.

Gehenna is certainly an eschatological concept in Judaism. You don't know what you're talking about.

I do always love criticisms of past moralistic fads for their incompatibility with current ones that of course go unquestioned.

>those who hold a position I disagree with must be shamed and made to look bad!

I'd prefer not to pay taxes, doesn't mean they're bad

>Gehenna
ask literally any Jew about that.

That's not a valid claim, so they would be acting contrary to their dogma.

Literally Deus Vult

Chastity is not about abstaining from the fulfilment of your desire but rather of channelling it in the least harmful ways.

You might as well say gluttony is not bad because people will always get hungry.

>ask literally any Pharisee about that
Yes, they have differing views on the nature of Gehenna than Christians do. Orthodox Christians also have a different view than other Christians.

He was a decent mathematican, a mediocare scholar of history of philosophy and a horrible philosopher himself.

>mediocare
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Russell talks about happiness, but I have never met a single happy atheist. They tend to be miserable, adrift, subject to unusually intense pain and misfortune. At best, they are emotionally dead. At worst, they believe life is pain, love is nonsense, and that nothing will save them.