Jesus is Lord

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If the sun were to suddenly stop shinning then...loosing your investment in a solar panel factory would be the least of your worries!

Religious right, religious left, superstitious new age quackery, I don't care what beliefs are based on faith alone. I don't have to be 100% certain they are false to point out that there is no legitimate evidence to show they are true. These are delusional beliefs that often hurt people. Reason may be misunderstood and misused, but that doesn't undermine the use of reason itself. Politics actually temper my criticism, since these are citizens with the same right to vote as me, and we have to get along.

There is no complexity that justifies faith. What am I distorting? I agree that there is no reason to start a religious war, but this is just social activism of a type common to many points of view. I'm not objecting to religious people for their enthusiasm, in fact it's the one thing I admire. Evangelism for truth is not objectionable if the thing is actually true.

Last edited by AspE on 14 Dec 2018, 10:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm an atheist, and I said it. It made me feel dirty, since I don't believe it. It feels like lying to yourself. It lacks 'tegrity. But there is also no entity to dissuade the saying of magic words.

Why stop with that phrase?

After you do as the OP says then everyone, including the OP, should try saying:

"There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet" three times.

Then say "Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Haree Haree" three times.

Then say "from each according to his ability, and to each according his need"(Karl Marx) three times.

Then note the sensations of saying each thing.

My own problem with this is that too many people say things like that who haven't actually done their homework. They might feel like they have because they've spent a lot of time listening to people they agree with who seem like they have but to bring Mill in:



The problem really occurs early because people don't seem to know how to look across frames. They get so hung up on one person's version of what they mean, or one religion's version, or one politician's version, that they seem to get stuck on human theories and then make theories about humans theorizing (for example - the claim that people only believe in things they shouldn't because of inculturation), and all of this seems to happen instead of people actually looking at evidence and interpreting what it means. If you just look at evidence you don't have to worry so much about frames, you can and should worry about people pushing their frames politically, but you don't get lost in a whirlpool of naive beliefs and trying to reconcile them - you can go back to the research, see what the evidence is or isn't, and triage off the stuff that we can be sure is incorrect.


What I've noticed is politics almost acts like roofies for a lot of people. If someone who has a doctorate who can speak with authority on a topic speaks at doctorate and PhD levels on this topic and many other things, and then you notice that the resolution of their thinking dipped from PhD or even pre-graduate level down to third grade or even kindergarten levels of fidelity - it's almost always a political topic that inspires that deprecation.


That people use faith all the time and when they jettison religion and start attacking it they miss that they never really let go of faith - not meaning faith in God but faith as a sort of lazy pattern, confirmation bias. We shouldn't just lose blind faith in religion, we should also lose blind faith in humanism, science, and reason. There aren't really things to have faith in, there are just instruments.


I might add - I wasn't arguing 'leave mainstream religion alone'. There's a lot that's just plain historically and factually wrong. One might even say that if Iamblicus were right about the cosmology of spirit and that we might have whole host of conscious superbeings that we bud out of - the most important thing, here, would be the primary reality that we're still apes and that we're here to kill each other and take each other's stuff. I don't think salvation is a valid concern, it would be as useful as anything for us to actually understand the architecture of conscious being and actually sort out what is and isn't out there, or what our conscious essence is in the scheme of things, but regardless of that it'll always be somewhat minor and deeply secondary to the primary issue - ie. how messed up, twisted, and beastial we are and how far we have to go before we're only half this crass. Even if one were to discover that angels were real or that we reincarnated - it would have very little impact and quite likely if such things had even always been here you could still count on human moral progress being as glacially slow as ever.

The point I'm making with that - the existence or nonexistence of undiscovered conscious beings is far less important than the human to human politics, but that being the case we should call it that for what it is - we don't want people ramming planes in buildings for God, going to other countries to force conversions, or try to inject religious law into the Constitution. It's also not an issue whether or not someone believes angels exist, it's whether they believe that they're somehow salvific beings whose power they can harness or whose wills they would interpret as 'Ye shall found a new religion in my name'. We've had thousands of years of bloodshed, all kinds of expansion of knowledge in terms of how the natural world works, thus it's too late for us to fall for that sort of BS and anyone who does needs to have that taken to them on the demerits of what that person's trying to do.

I didn't have a particularly bad falling out. Both family and church treated me well in matters of religion both when I was a believer and when I stopped believing. I never felt mistreated. They were not Bible bashers. They believed firmly that a person can only come to Christ through their own free will.

However, saying Jesus is Lord brings no nostalgic feelings to my mind. Not because the church mistreated me, not because I have unpleasant memories of that place but simply because those words have no meaning for me. They never did.

When I believed I felt that proclaiming Jesus is Lord was stating the obvious. I didn't understand the purpose of giving God endless praises even when I believed in his existence.

I have been a believer, then a non-believer, then a believer again.

But I don't go to church anymore. It doesn't mean I don't believe. Even if it's a crowd of less than thirty, I won't go to church. And yes, someone who goes to the last church I went is one of many reasons I don't go. I believe the main reason that people don't go to church is that a Christian didn't apologize for something he or she did wrong. Maybe you feel differently about that.

Encyclopedias have writeups about Jesus Christ, so if a non-religious book publisher prints it, at least his existence can't be challenged by me. Not merely because an encyclopedia publishes it; encyclopedias have plenty of checks and balances before something gets published.

Oddly enough, I may be finally comfortable with my theology. I don't believe that for the most part a "bible code" exists in the way TV and movies portray it. I'll go as far to say that the bible code premise is a major deterrent in people studying the bible at all. Most of the bible is easy to understand as it is written, particularly in the NASB and Amplified or One God One Father translations, save the obvious symbolic parts (Daniel, Revelation, Job).

And I do believe that many Christian churches theology could use some fine tuning. Once in a while, it can get unbiblical in many denominations. When in doubt, the bible trumps all denominational mess.

I don't even claim some fiery level of fervency. But one can't go wrong praying for others above themselves.

Then we basically agree, you just want to warn of the possibility that any ideology, even atheistic ones, are subject to fanaticism and faith. To that I say sure. Although, trust in the power of science to determine useful knowledge is well supported. Reason may be flawed (and oftentimes misunderstood and misused) but I have yet no reason to think so, and humanism becomes an ethical imperative if it's the mental and physical health of humans you care about.

Encyclopedias don't capture the state of scholarship on this issue. Historians have invariably been Western and Christian, and so there is little reward for doubting the existence of Jesus. I have no conclusive reason to think he didn't exist, but there are compelling arguments against his existence among some modern historians, for instance, no records from the time he lived or from anyone who lived concurrently. That being said, his existence has nothing to do with the supernatural claims about Jesus. Legends can arise based on real people that have little, if any, resemblance to their actual lives.

Its not so much that reason itself is flawed, just that its garbage-in-garbage-out. The two mistakes I see people making often are either seeing reason as so holy that such holiness sanitizes the inputs somehow or they confuse the current state of knowledge with 'reason' as an aggregate noun and assume that our current state of knowledge is almost complete despite warning signals to the contrary. At the end of the 19th century for example we were telling people that they shouldn't go into physics because we had all but two mysteries figured out, just that those two mysteries packed the wallop that was qm and gr. We're sort of there again with things like dark matter, might be on the right track with the Negative Mass Fluid idea, but there's yet another prong of the yet unknown that I think we're a lot closer to cracking and its all the Jacques Vallee Magonia type stuff - ie everyone's cryptids, Bermuda Triangle events, magical practices and results, we might be seeing enough on what's really a natural phenomena to much more effectively peel up a corner for better science and I do think we could get some very beneficial tech out of it, like yet unknown shortcuts or at least greater efficiencies on mass and energy issues. We may also be able to show ourselves as having a much more interesting and active relationship with the universe than previously considered (albeit we might get some real epistemic humility in considering that we're not particularly big fish).

Not a swear word!

@ OP: I'm a fellow believer (Catholic just to be clear), but what you are implying is just wrong. What you are doing is trying to force non-believers into the Christian faith against their will.

Now before you think of me as being like Judas The Betrayer, I'm not, in fact, I'm trying to reason with you.

Let people believe what they want to believe.

Jesus is overrated. I'd rather not accept a savior who says I deserve to be put to death because I'm an abomination.

Leviticus predates Jesus by several metric jonks. Now, far be if from me to suggest the New Testament be particularly consistent (I seem to recall a passage where he JC says that all the old stuff is still in effect), but as for the man himself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciple_whom_Jesus_loved

The argument from previous inaccuracy. I don't find this compelling, since science is always making progress in filling in gaps in knowledge.

It's more an argument from seemingly permanent human dogma and blind-spots, and I might add today that there are a lot of more basic things that are far more important to people than truth - like image, reputation, popular beliefs and on what side of them they fall, etc.. If someone staunchly believes something you almost never have to worry about them looking at evidence to the contrary, in fact they become proud in their ignorance of what facts and evidence would lead sane and reasonable people to the opposite camp (sometimes they have to - maybe out of just sheer neediness - project unreason and unintelligence all over people they'd disagree with, not just on metaphysical issues but just about anything from politics to dueling academic disciplines). It gets bad enough sometimes that I occasionally wonder if our species is even worth saving from a mass extinction.