AW! Epistles
From Steve
Abstract
Sunday, 13 February 2005
Mike, I have the following comments on: AskWhy! Angels—Jewish Mythology. Was this the product of research, or of a particular irritation? With all respect… your arguments in this piece seem to be designed to incite arguments, rather than address an intellectual set of questions. Many assumptions are made, I assume, based on your presupposition that most Christians are “empty-headed”.
If it was not the product of research, if reading some sources can be called that, then it is just make-belief. If a Christian is questioning it, it cannot be make belief, can it? Again, it will doubtless incite some sort of antagonism in those who believe in angels. If you tell me what assumptions you mean, I will answer your implied question.
In response to this ad hoc rant where it’s assumed we, the empty-headed are wrong,
Is it possible for empty-headed people to be right?
I simply ask: Why does being super-human equal divinity?
Well, I have a habit of trying to use words with the meaning they are commonly understood to have. Divine means superhuman, doesn’t it?
Why do wings equal flight?
A wing is an organ or limb used for flight through the air.
Why is Satan “trouble” for God?
Satan is defined as the great adversay of Gad and man. Why don’t you buy yourself a dictionary? Even quite small and cheap ones have these words defined in them.
Why do critics such as yourself find ancient concepts of various gods and Christianity/Judaism’s God as mutually exclusive (as I see it, one God could be seen by differing people with different pre-existing axioms, and therefore affecting the outcome of what they report, yet having fundamental similarities. Such as two witnesses to a crime—one is a fundamentalist Muslim, one American Humanist… one claims heroism, one claims suicide. One reports tragedy, the other honor. One tells of blood as the other refers to the smoke. Same event, different presuppositions. In the end, we get one story with two sides. Which is right? Neither? Both?)
I quite agree with you here, but I thought you implied you were a Christian by identifying yourself with the empty-heads. Christians are obliged to believe in one God alone, and little children are impressed with stories of young virgins preferring to be eaten by lions than being obliged to worship pagan gods. The Pagan Roman magistrates are on record as often pleading with Christians simply to burn a little incense to the gods, or the emperor, or even to the air! They would not, so they were very particular that God was not any other god. It stands to reason that, in fact God was the same as some other gods. He was Jove (even the letters are the same) and Jupiter was Jove too, and so was Zeus. The Greeks and Romans wanted the Jerusalem temple to be a temple to Zeus or Jupiter, but the Jews would not hear of it and nor would the new Israel, as the Christians liked to call themselves when they decided they were God’s new pets. In case you have forgotten, John was particular in recording that no one could get to heaven except by Jesus. Presumably no other God will do, and I cannot see many Christian sects being so liberal that they would be happy if people worshipping went around saying they were Christians though they actually worshipped Allah. You should get your own thoughts styraightened out. You might find that you are not a Christian at all.
I know healthy debates are fun.
Of course they are, great fun, but most Christians, I find, have no sense of humour.
But your distaste for the beholders of the beliefs you confront destroys credibility for your perspective.
You really need more of an argument here. This is just an assertion.
You seem out for blood.
Really! You go too far! It is Christians who have spilt most blood in the last two millennia, or had you not noticed? Christians are the humourless ones who burn people they do not like at the stake, lock them up without cause or trial for the rest of their lives, and drop 10,000 pound bombs on them and their innocent families. These are not sins for Christians because for them sex is sin, but, if their own God did it, letting blood is the least they can do in His honour, or so it seems. Christians are quite disgusting.
All the while, truth gets left in the wake of your attack. We will never know the truth if we have decided beforehand what and who we want to be wrong.
You mean God’s truth which is not truth at all, it is lies, as I have shown repeatedly on my pages. Christians are in practice so Satanic they think lies are truth and truth is falsehood. That is why they have a disgusting history, and only disgusting plants have disgusting fruit, or so said the Christian God. Such rotten plants ought to be subject to the axe, he added, but I am not aware that I have advocated killing any Christian for their beliefs. The wickedness is entirely one way—from the Christians to others.
Again… loveless tooth and claw that is supposed to be a response. Ouch.
Christians are the only ones who know anything about love. That is why you can call my response “loveless” in complete contrast to your initial email which accused me of “ranting” out of a surmised “irritation”. That attitude does not strike me as being a loving contrast with my grumpy self as you seem to think it is. Is it possible you have a beam in your own eye while showing concern for the mote in mine?
My guess is that you or a loved one have been hurt by someone professing faith in Christ, or at least routinely annoyed.
Here is the amateur psychologist in you coming out, another Christian trait since psychology became fashionable. Before then it was called pastoral care or some such sheep and shepherd metaphor. Christianity is routinely annoying for all of the reasons that I explain online. In particular, Christians will not keep their insanity to themselves but regard it as a God given necessity that they force everyone else to believe as they do. God gave us free will, they tell us, so that they can strip us of it.
I am a Christian… and this is true of me, so it’s probable you share that. Such anger from you had to be inflicted, unless you are playing the role of devil’s advocate.
It is playing the Devil’s advocate to you, but to me Christians are the satanists.
Mike, I am not mad at you for differing with me (in other words, I don’t hold it against you that you are wrong… .smile… ).
Nor do I hold it against you that you are wrong. What is annoying is that you want to make everyone as wrong as you are. if i am wrong, I prefer to make my own mistakes and find out for myself. That, one would presume is what God intended, if you are right that He made us with free will. He did not do it for the reason Christians have always thought—so that you can torture us into submission.
We both have faith. We both trust in things unknown; lists of which would exhaust my keyboard ( I don’t even know how gravity works… but I trust it, because I have seen what it does). We bring our biases to the table and decide EVERYTHING from there. You must admit that.
Your example illustrates the difference in quality in our respective beliefs. Scientific beliefs are testable. Religious beliefs simply have to be believed on the authority of others who have believed themselves for precisely the same absence of reason. You are the victims of a temporal chain letter.
To say that Christians are culpable for the most blood-letting of the last millennia tells me that you are not a historian or you are pulling my chain… for not even the most devout atheist would assert such blindness (Nazism, Taoism & The Roman Empire alone trump in death anything a bunch of monsters ever did cumulatively in the name of Jesus… and that, as we both know, is the tip of the bloody iceberg in terms of deadly worldviews throughout the ages. It’s an established fact that more have been martyred for Christianity than killed by perversions of it. Unarguable.
Well, you are typically Christian in knowing all things even though you freely display your ignorance in everything you say. I suggest you actually read a little about history before you spout about it. Christians just do not care about truth because it is just what you define it to be. If that is God’s idea of it, then it is another reason to be an unbeliever. Christianity specifically has such a vile history that no Christian will speak about it, but there are plenty of pages on my website that can enlighten you, not that you will have any desire to read the truth.
Fifty million people died in the last war. Guess what? It was fought mainly between Christians, the Japanese being the exception. The Nazis were all Christians. Germany was an overwhelmingly Christian nation, more so then than the USA is today, and there we see Christians wreaking a typical vengeance on innocent people for the criminality of certain men who turn out to be business friends of the Christian family Bush! Stalin was trained as an Orthodox priest before he turned his skills to wider usage. Trotsky was a Jew.
Twenty million died in the first world war. You guessed right. It was mainly fought by Christians, the Turks being the exception then. Europe only a few centuries before was ravaged by religious wars between Protestants and Catholics in which countless numbers died, and both sides were simultaneously burning witches at the stake, and any of their religious enemies they could pin the accusation of witchcraft to. Before that the Inquisition ravaged Europe for centuries, and before the the Albigensian crusades and the Crusades themselves led to myriads, perhaps millions of deaths in a smaller population. Before that the Christians destroyed the classical culture bringing on the Dark Ages when countless numbers died of filth and disease. Try reading a little history. You will find it a good antidote to your Christian fantasies.
This does not excuse what the “church” has done… it’s a disgusting, sad fact. But it says nothing of the merits of the faith. Just some errant adherents. Shameful in the extreme.)
Nothing can excuse it, but you are again wrong if you cannot find some connexion between your odious beliefs and what they have led to. Even your own God, as I often point out to Christians, knew that bad fruit were a sign of a rotten tree that should, he said, be chopped down, but there is one thing that Christians are incapable of and that is seeing anything wrong in their own manifestly evil institution. To imagine that the huge litany of Christian horror is due to just a few errants is precisely this blindness.
Other comments about Christianity being the source of all evil in so many words troubles me if you are serious. That’s just irresponsible. Name one Atheist founded hospital.
In the place that I live in there was no comprehensive hospital service for the poor until it was set up by the secular government. The present Christian led government is taking us the American way of making everyone pay for treatment, and hard luck if you cannot. Pray instead. That is Christianity in practice. Mother Theresa is considered a saint because she raised vast sums of money for the Catholic Church by moving dying people from the streets of Calcutta. Treatment was not her objective. She wanted them to die in peace. Well, doubtless it is better than dying in a soilheap while being eaten by rats, but it is a poor example of Christian charity to fellow human beings.
You have a website where millions might learn from you, Mike. Don’t claim things that YOU may not even believe. The comments give way to the concept that you are out to hurt, rather than to inform.
I am out to inform. Christians are out to obfuscate, obscure and downright lie. No one with an ounce of humanity in their bones could want to be a Christian if they first knew of its results over the centuries. You present a view that is not merely anodyne, it is false.
I have been in exchanges like this before… as I am sure you have. Nothing much comes of them. So I won’t give you any clichés or canned phrases about life and reality. I will just encourage you to acknowledge that your bias is really strong in the negative; and this makes it impossible for any rational analysis of the world around you.
Christians are also fiond of projecting. They attribute to others the faults that they have in trumps. I have never attempted to hide my bias, if that is what you want to call it. I have read what you refuse to read and have come to the conclusion that Christianity is evil. I have based it on practical evidence in the real world, not on fairy tales with bogus promises of paradise that none of you have the least idea about in fact. All of these promises are just further Christian lies to beguile the guileless.
Seek and you will find is a promise based on genuine seeking. In other words, you will find what you are looking for. If ugliness, then ugliness. If truth, then truth.
I have sought, unlike you, and I have found the truth about Christianity. It is very, very ugly.
P.S. Tell penguins, kiwis, dodos, emus and ostriches that wings are for flying. They hate that assertion!
Well, you tell me why God made these birds with wings but unable to fly. I thought he was a perfect designer.
He made birds winged without flight, as he made some men with ears that can’t hear. You know nothing of my library, the path I’ve taken to this moment, the points and counterpoints I have wrestled with to have a sense of faith and doubt such as I carry. You know nothing of the hearts of faithful men who genuinely weep at the ugliness of humanity that masks itself in perverted truths and whole lies. You know, apparently, nothing of Jesus, who was killed for loving children, for giving women a fair shot and for telling people to be fully human to one another, rather than kill each other with words and swords. Do you ignore the goodness due to your unsettling focus on history’s evils and your imbalanced dispersement of culpability to Jesus’ followers? Or is it just not good to you? Not the followers—the message itself—have you judged it a horror? Is you’re entire ideology based on what power hungry monsters have done in the name of their god? Mine is based on Christ. You seem to hold Christ responsible. You have completely missed the fact that I’m also sickened by the ignorant monsters who have done such harm in his name.
It is seemingly more important to you to put me in my place, rather than consider anything but shadows. Might I suggest, then, staying away from the doctors, for they malpractice often. Might I suggest you shun teachers, for they are often errant. Might I suggest you discard science, for they often rethink and start over. Ignore your parents, for they got a few things wrong. Dismiss any product that has ever had a recall. Might I also suggest that you regard as anathema all news agencies, all school books, all heroes… everyone and their legacy; for certainly there was an absolute truth and standard which they tried to attain and missed it on many occasions. And in your world, that is not only unacceptable but the source of all evil. I have no interest in turning you or anybody else into a Christian. I just want you to know the truth. And that truth is not changed by the activities or even the inactivity of mankind. Hidden, but not changed. We have to be smart enough to live based on the truth, not out of fear or hate of people. Dig, man. And stop judging the dirt.
PS. This will be my last response, though I will read yours if you care to respond, and respond to specific questions of you have any.
You wish to terminate the correspondence. Well you started it, so you can finish it, but you say you will read any response I make to your final e-mail if I “care to respond, and respond to specific questions”.
It seems, as I can only expect, that anything I say falls on deaf ears, something you rightly know something about, and I have no questions to ask people who only answer with fantasy and lies, including your tearjerking journey to your present state. God cannot possibly want us to believe the means, however evil, justify the end, so there can be no justification for Christianity no matter how tearjerking you make it.
Those you call power hungry monsters were Christians and maintained the Christian churches for 2000 years. These Christians were the monsters, and these Christians cannot have been any good God at work. God supposedly abandoned the Jews as His pets for less than the Christians have done. Yet you all believe you are favoured. Perhaps you are, but the god doing the favouring is not the one you think He is.
If you had read the pages I have written with any comprehension, you would have noticed that I consider the man you call Christ, but the Jews did not think was messiah, was nevertheless a Jewish hero for defying tyrants occupying their own country contrary to their wishes. He was a Jewish hero but not a god or even supernatural in any way. How then can I be blaming him for what those who claim to be following him do. The Christ of the Christians is a mirage they have made for themselves by doing their utmost to ignore the real world. But there is nothing illusionary or shadowy about what Christians have done in the name of their god or indeed God.
Your idiotic recommendations of ignoring doctors, teachers, parents and so on shows that you have no idea of the enormity of the disgusting things that Christians did and are doing. It is not getting a few things wrong.
Christ fought the Romans and died a hero who became the Christian God. Now the great Christian nation of the world under its Christian leaders—leaders who pray together in public—are occupying a country no distance away from Judaea, the home of your god, in the same part of the world, and for the same reasons—to exploit them. Hypocrites. Worse. You elevate hypocrisy into a virtue.
You claim to know the truth from some outdated book of ancient law later mingled with romantic stories. It is a Christian lie intended for credulous people. Maybe you are one of them, but it can only mitigate your ignorance slightly.
You want me to mention specifics but you ignore them, as I have found repeatedly in my discussions with Christians. You are accustomed to the admiration of your friends and have no answer to the historical truth that Christianity has itself splashed in blood everywhere in the world when it is vehemently pointed out. There is no point in saying more. God must have designed you with feathers in your brain.
Nevertheless, best wishes for a future untrammelled by fantasy.
