Here’s a promising-sounding new book: 10 Dumb Things Smart Christians Believe:
Many Christians, new and seasoned alike, tend to bank on promises that God never made, says one pastor.So when God doesn’t come through on those “promises,” some are likely to become angry at God.
And “that to me as a pastor over all my years is always one of the saddest things,” says Larry Osborne, teaching pastor at North Coast Church in Vista, Calif.
Osborne, whose church draws over 7,000 people, is hoping to spare a lot of Jesus followers from that anger. He’s also hoping Christians will peruse Scripture more and align themselves with what God really says rather than the “word on the street.”
Wait, that doesn’t sound promising at all! Does he at least have a good list of ten?
- Living God’s way will bring good fortune
- Faith can fix anything
- Forgiving means forgetting
- A godly home guarantees godly kids
- God has a blueprint for my life
- Christians shouldn’t judge
- Everything happens for a reason
- Let your conscience be your guide
- A valley means a wrong turn
- Dead people go to a better place.
Well, a number of those are stupid things. But if I were making a list of “Ten Stupid Things Smart Christians Believe,” none of those would be on it. What’s that? You want to know what would be on it? Good question!
Ten Stupid Things Smart Christians Believe
- A mistranslated book written by cave people is a reliable guide to the modern world.
- There’s an invisible man in the sky who likes to watch you while you’re showering.
- Two thousand years ago, an alter ego of this invisible man knocked up a Jewess whose husband wasn’t satisfying her.
- The progeny of this drunken coupling was both god and the son of god.
- This son of god was killed (but not really, since he’s also god, and god can’t die) and then came back to life to seek revenge, just like J.D. Walker.
- His killing was a necessary sacrifice in order that we might be forgiven for the sins of Eve, the first woman in the world, who lived 6000 years ago in a magical garden, where a talking snake convinced her to eat a forbidden apple.
- To show our thanks for this sacrifice, we should put special crackers and wine in our mouths, where they will be magically transformed into his flesh and blood, which we should then swallow despite taboos regarding cannibalism.
- If you don’t believe all the preceding items, then after you die you will be plunged into a lake of fire and tortured for all eternity.
- If you do believe all the preceding items, then after you die you’ll get to go to heaven, which is a cloud in outer space connected to the earth with a dotted line bent into a heart-shape
- Thomas Kinkade is an awesome painter.
Which book would you rather read?
I am not happy with sin, I commit it every day, and can’t do anything about it. Wildman, I’d much rather be, like you, in heaven with a God who I trust and love, who also trusts and loves me. Try looking at the facts with an unbiased view, please, so you can decide again. And I must say, what about the rest of my comment?
Catholism isn’t a part of Chrisianity because it is so different, as in it refusing science, which used to be its best friend, casting Christianity in a bad light, and stopping at nothing to get money.
AAA, I wasnt denying God having revealing Himself physically, I was saying He doesn’t need to. He’s walked with Adam, spoke with Moses, Job, David, Samuel, and many others. He has come down to Earth to reveal Himself, and died of His own free will to take our sins and do away with them. Why, then, do we not automatically become perfect or go to heaven? Because we need to accept His sacrifice, cherish it, and love what He has done, because He has saved you, if you want to be saved. And when you were mentioning prophecies, a couple hundred years before Tyre fell it was prophesied by a prophet of God that it would, and in exactly in the way that the prophet described. And I’ve stated this, but it is mathematically impossible (almost) for Jesus to have fulfilled eight prophecies about the Messiah, but He fulfilled more than 100!
And like you said, the perfect spiral of the snail shell is evidence. The beauty and evidence of God’s creation is magnificent.
If anyone wants, I will criticize Lucy and Ardi some more. Just ask!
I wanna read the second book. BTW why do you need a god? The only thing that science can’t explain is quantum fluctuations. By your snail example (person below me) i can just say well it’s obvious that god didn’t make the world because in the bible it says it was made in 6 days when elemental dating proves this wrong. See, two things that are aimed to try and bring down a whole argument but don’t do shit because they are both easily re-rebutted and explained.
I wanna read the second book. BTW why do you need a god? The only thing that science can’t explain is quantum fluctuations. By your snail example (person above me) i can just say well it’s obvious that god didn’t make the world because in the bible it says it was made in 6 days when elemental dating proves this wrong. See, two things that are aimed to try and bring down a whole argument but don’t do shit because they are both easily re-rebutted and explained.
Okay A believer, a universe, in my theory and some thai scientist in my circle, is a cycle. The old universe spread so much that big rip or big crunch occur and reset to big bang again. Each time, everything (EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE) will reform into a giant ball of energy, then my big bang theories. Easy?
^rebut it now, then. And about bible, you can’t do anything about it. New Testament is mostly filled with St.Paul’s letter, and he was a genius, whereas Old Testament were simply written by people who have faith in God, but with unidentified intelligence. Since there’re so many Christianity sects nowadays from one Jesus’s speech, I do believe that people who wrote Old Testament were doing mistake while writing it. They might have inferred God’s ideas that were given to them to be written wrong.
@Wildmanstimpie: How did you join Christianity I wonder? Just curiosity
whoops, that was for an atheist actually, but just a exchristian cut through my reply quickly.
To believer:
I say the same thing, the catholic church is not christianity, but the problem is the practices of the catholic church (man’s religion) is being practiced in all other churches. The christmas tree for example which is Pegan. In fact, the christian religion is founded by Peganism. It wasn’t uncommon in the ancient days for one religion to adopt another’s religion, change some things around, and make that religion their own. One religion has done the same only a couple of hundred years ago; Mormonism. If you think Mormon’s have it all wrong because they are an occult, and I must say they are whacked, I should remind you that christianity was an occult at one point too.
My science explanation for the crossing of the Red Sea.
The parting of the Red Sea (or Reed Sea, depending on how the ancient Hebrew is translated) is one of the Old Testament’s most spectacular episodes. After being led out of Egyptian slavery by Moses, the Israelites find themselves trapped: before them lies a seemingly impassable body of water, while behind them the pharaoh’s army is fast approaching. Moses appeals to Jehovah for help, and God obligingly blasts a “strong east wind all night” into the sea, creating a path to freedom for the Israelites and, when the wind subsides, a watery grave for the Egyptians.
Now researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., say they have found a plausible natural explanation for this apparent miracle — though not at the Red Sea itself. Using computer models, they discovered that a strong wind blowing across the perfect spot — a sharp bend where a shallow river meets a coastal lagoon — with the right contours on the bottom of the waterway, could result in water being driven upstream and downstream, opening up a dry walkway.
That phenomenon is known as a “wind setdown,” but, if you believe the account in Exodus, it’s unlikely to have occurred at the Red Sea, notes Carl Drews — a software engineer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the lead author of the study, published in the online journal PLoS ONE. That’s because the Red Sea runs north to south, Drews told Discovery News, so an eastward wind wouldn’t have been able to sweep the waters to one side.
Instead, Drews argues that the event likely took place in the Nile Delta, where a similar wind setdown was recorded in the late 19th century. A senior British army officer stationed on Lake Manzala — a shallow, coastal lagoon on the Mediterranean Sea — reported seeing the waters retreat in early 1882 after a “gale of wind from the eastward set in and became so strong that I had to cease work.”
“Next morning … I found that … the effect of the high wind on the shallow water [had] actually driven it away beyond the horizon,” Maj. Gen. Alexander B. Tulloch later told the Victoria Institute, a British organization set up to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution. “The natives were walking about on the mud where the day before the fishing-boats, now aground, had been floating.”
Using satellite data and earlier research into the ancient geography of the Nile Delta, Drews and Weiqing Han of the University of Colorado estimated the lay of the land around 1250 BC and ran their simulation. The model suggested that the crossing could have taken place at Manzala — about 80 miles north of the port of Suez — where an ancient branch of the Nile entered the lagoon, then called the Lake of Tanis.
Manzala runs east to west and also matches the alternate Biblical translation of “Reed Sea,” as it was once filled with papyrus reeds. Drews and Han found that if a 63 mph east wind blew across the water for 12 hours, a 2.5-mile-long, three-mile-wide stretch of mud flat would have been exposed. That path would remain clear for about four hours, giving the Israelites plenty of time to make their escape.
“The simulations match fairly closely with the account in Exodus,” Drews said in a statement. “The wind moves the water in a way that’s in accordance with physical laws, creating a safe passage with water on two sides.”
The researchers’ findings also suggest that, if the pharaoh’s troops were crossing the mud flats when the wind died down, they would have bit hit by “an advancing wall of churning water.” Or as Exodus puts it, “the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them.”
Drews and Han note in their paper that if “a crossing actually took place here, any debris field of military artifacts should be found to the North” of the crossing site. But even if archaeologists found ancient Egyptian skeletons and armor at the site, secularists and believers are unlikely to agree over the supposedly miraculous nature of the biblical episode. Devout Christians, Muslims and Jews will continue to see the work of a divine hand behind the unlikely combination of factors that allowed the Israelites to escape. Others, meanwhile, will argue that Moses and his flock were simply in the right place at the right time to take advantage of a rare natural occurrence.
“The value of studying the event described in the Old Testament certainly lends support to the thesis that physics is a natural phenomenon, a normal part of our universe,” Stephen Baig, a researcher who has studied storm surges for the National Hurricane Center, told Discovery News. “If there is a miracle, it is that we are able to describe such events with numbers.”
Iyaah, took some times, thanks to mi amigo for finding some data and news on it.
I’m just wondering, do you atheists only believe in coincidence? Because there’re too much thing in bible and real life that are too strange to be categorized as mere coincidence, like that one above for example. I want to hear your opinion about this.
To AAA:
I think aliens helped not god. believer worships his alien god.
Hear me out, people exagerrate what they see or hear. Everyone does this. It’s just a mere coincedence that people exaggerate. For example in thai, they say Solar eclipse happen because a giant try to swallow the sun, before. However, back then, 2000 years ago, sea level there wasn’t so high and was very lower than now. So it could occur when there’s strong wind. Also, egyptian aren’t that stupid, they know wind too. So they could predict that there will be a wind setdown. Everything is science and can be explain with science.
Question: Does God contribute to human learning how to calculate a square’s area? Or to me becoming a scientist that go against him? Or a rocket that could send people to connect the space station in outer space?
I didn’t meant that it’s a coincidence that people exaggerate. But people exaggerate coincidence.
^regarding your question, the answer is well, yes, a very bit. Had God not letting free will exist among mankind, there’d be no science development at all and hence, maybe none of us will able to calculate a square’s area.
And for question about being a scientist against God, maybe no. That’s because of those arrogant Christians who hated you so much, making you trauma of Christianity. Mahatma Gandhi was also once wanted to be Christian, but he cancelled this idea very quickly as soon as he saw a lot of arrogant Christians in his country (most or maybe all of them were Eurasian, as India’s main religion is Hinduism, which was Gandhi’s religion since he was born. And also, due to lack of relationship with God? Maybe all you need is a good church which has a true, perfect example of Christian? If you go to church frequently, I really hope you can find something good there.
I’m more than twice younger than you, so I won’t persuade you to back to God etc here. But on some rare case, some people with terrible past had their life restored and became devoted Christian (note that this kind of christian are usually the ones that aren’t arrogant or too stupid). Regardless of your belief, I’m glad you have a good life now. But you haven’t answer my previous question: how do you treat Christian around you? Just asking. Won’t judge you here. Christian have done many bad things too anyway, so judgin you won’t be a good idea.
Unless they attack me first, I treat them as someone normal. I treat the christian at my village this way too. If someone start saying how amazing God is to me and try to drag me back into christianity, I got so pissed and tell them in science that it ain’t true.
However, you are someone with reason, AAA. I have a great respect for you. Not blindly into religion but with reason. You accept facts. Unlike someone who denies everything against God and using false info or rumor into fooling others.
^well, thank you.
You have two holes in your red or reed sea argument, Justa exchristian. The first is you state people in the 1900s incident were walking on MUD, while the Bible specifically states the Israelites were walking on dry land. Not mud. Your second is that the Bible states that When Moses put his hands up the waters receded, but when all the Israelites had gone through and he was also across, and the Egyptians were crossing too, he put his hands down and the waters came down on top of the Egyptians.
Your big bang theory would be completely correct, except that that kind of energy just can’t happen. Also, it requires Evolution to work, and there is only a little proof that it is right, while there is a lot that Christianity is correct.
And an atheist, you are assuming two very great things, the first is that God actually used seven 24 hour days to bring about creation, which many people disagree with, and that your elemental dating is correct. Do you mean radio metric? Because that is extremely unreliable.
Wildman, out of curiosity, which parts are pegan? By the way, you are much more reasonable, thank you for that.
Oh also exchristian, if this incident really happened naturally, then how did the wind seem to do what Moses wanted?
To A believer:
Which parts of christianity are Pegan?
1. Taking communion= This happened with the last supper, but it was practiced with the Egyptians long before Yeshua, and was a ritual to the god Osiris.
2. The christmas tree= I mentioned this one quite a few times, this was a pegan tool of celebration for the god Bacchus, and is traced from Jeremiah the prophet.
3. Yeshua calling himself the son of god= Julius Ceaser among 4 other Roman emperors some before and some after Yeshua used this title.
4. The Easter Bunny= Although this is not mentioned in the bible that I know of, it is a tradition of men in regards to christianity during the resurrection of Yeshua because the story isn’t his own but belonged to Krishna, and is because of the god Ra who was born from an egg that lived before Yeshua and Krishna.
5. Sunday Worship= This too I mentioned which you failed to acknowledge and yet ask me “what are the Pegan roots of christianity?” Sunday worship is conducted in remembrance of the resurrection, but not every Sunday. Well the pegans worshiped their Sun god on every Sunday just like the church attends church on Sunday. That’s Pegan right there.
6. Yeshua the Meshach/jesus christ= The title messiah doesn’t necessarily mean christ directly. Christ or “Christos” is Greek for the Messiah, but the Greeks were ignorant to the meaning of Messiah just as many christians are today. There are no refferences in the OT with the name “Christ” Messiah means “anointed one.” There were many “anointed ones” many messiahs. Yeshua son of Nun was one of the Messiahs before Yeshua of Nazareth. The Levites which were the first priests and they were anointed as priests. That makes them the ”anointed ones” right there. The NT tries eliminating the OT’s priest hood by calling Yeshua of Nazareth “man’s intercessor” “The final priest”"The anointed one” “the Messiah.” The Jews of the OT were no stranger to Paganism, and they practiced it. The Jews were constantly made into slaves and were desperate for relief this is why they had so many prophets, and holy men that were anointed.
And lastly, I have no doubt that you will ignorantly trample on this research that I have conducted because you seem to do that with every opposition that doesn’t match up with your bible. Just know that you can find the same info online from well educated archeologists and other historians who have conducted much more time to their sciences than you have at your precious church.
1. So the Egyptians did something similar, that doesn’t mean that they got it from them. In fact, it started because they were ESCAPING the Egyptians, not being Friends with them.
2. The christmas tree has nothing to do with Christianity, it has to do with the part of Christmas made by non Christians, which is Santa and flying reindeer and whatnot.
3. You are saying its pagan to declare you are the Son of God when you really are, because some idiots did. Oh, Julius Caesar wasn’t an emperor either, so stop making stuff up.
4. It’s exactly like Christmas, because a bunch of Christians celebrated, people wanted in, but without the Christian part, so they created eggs and bunnies and other things.
5. We don’t do this because we took it from peganism, we do it because of Easter Sunday, we worship on this day because Jesus resurrected on this day.
6. I know that, but Jesus was THE anointed one, the anointed one to save us from our sin.
I didn’t ignorantly trample over, I patiently explained it. Thank you for also once again being patient.
This is to Wildman, btw, about his pegan comments.
To believer:
You remind me just how blessed I am for leaving an ignorant group like your own. You really are as bad as a lawyer. I think it only takes a few brain cells to see right through your bull shit, and bad enough I’m sure it took you a total of five minuets to type that letter above.
I tell everyone the truth. I was a devoted believer myself once, and just like you believer I would do anything to save man’s souls by leading them to Yeshua, I studied and took in as much knowledge as I could about the lord. The problem is that I took in too much knowledge. Unlike you believer, I wouldn’t answer back with meaningless comments that take no research. I would always try to defeat the wicked mind frame of another by using scripture to show god’s genius. In order to correct a problem, the problem has too be exposed. You haven’t done that. You have little to no merit with every reply. Another problem I have with you is that ”anyone who says Yeshua is lord comes by god” yet you don’t recognize me. Let me ask you again…. What is the job of the holy spirit?
It is apparent to me believer that you are not answering questions for god. You are only doing this for yourself because you take pride in yourself. I am going to ignore you believer. I will only answer to everyone else for now on.
1. Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of India’s greatest mathematical geniuses. He made substantial contributions to analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptical functions, continued fractions, and infinite series. Despite the lack of a university education, he became known in the Madras area in 1911 after the publication of a brilliant paper on Bernoulli numbers in 1911. In 1914, he was invited in to Cambridge University by the English mathematician GH Hardy who recognized his unconventional genius. He worked there for five years producing startling results. According to Ramanujan inspiration and insight for his work came to him in his dreams. A Hindu goddess, named Namakkal, would appear and present mathematical formulae which he would verify after waking. Such dreams often repeated themselves and the connection with the dream world as a source for his work was constant throughout his life.
Otto Loewi
2. Otto Loewi was a German born physiologist who won the Nobel prize in 1938 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses. In 1903, Loewi had the idea that there might be a chemical transmission of the nervous impulse rather than an electrical one — which was the common held belief — but he was at a loss on how to prove it. He let the idea slip to the back of his mind until 17 years later he had the following dream. According to Loewi:
The night before Easter Sunday of that year I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at 6 o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at 3 o’clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered 17 years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a single experiment on a frog’s heart according to the nocturnal design.
The result of the experiment became the foundation for the theory of chemical transmission of the nervous impulse.
3. Louis Agassiz was a Swiss born naturalist, geologist, teacher who emigrated to the US in 1846. He made revolutionary contributions to natural science with landmark work on glacier activity and extinct fishes. He trained and influenced a generation of American zoologists and paleontologists and is one of the founding fathers of the modern American scientific tradition
While Agassiz was working on his vast work “Poissons Fossiles” a list of all know fossil fish, he came across a specimen which he was, at first, unable to figure out. He hesitated to classify it and extract it since an incorrect approach could ruin the specimen. At that time, Agassiz reports having a dream three nights in a row in which he saw the fish in perfect original condition. The first two nights — being unprepared — he did not record his image. By the third night he was ready with pen and paper, and when the fish appeared again in the dream he drew it in the dark, still half asleep. The next day he looked at his drawing which had remarkably different features from the ones he had been working out, hastened to his laboratory and extracting the fossil realized it corresponded exactly to his dream.
4. Elias Howe invented the sewing machine in 1845. Howe started working on his design for a sewing machine in 1840. He had the idea of a machine with a needle which would go through a piece of cloth but he couldn’t figure out exactly how it would work. He first tried using a needle that was pointed at both ends, with an eye in the middle, but it was a failure. Then one night he had a nightmare. He dreamt he was a missionary taken prisoner by a group of natives. They were dancing around him with spears. As he saw them move around him, his attention was drawn to their spears. They all had holes near their tips. When he woke up he realized that the dream had brought the solution to his problem. By locating a hole at the tip of the needle, the thread could be caught after it went through cloth thus making his machine operable. He changed his design to incorporate the dream idea and found that it worked.
Can these things scientifically explained? Or were they simply God’s messages?
I have no doubt whatsoever, AAA, that Wildman will state that since the first person saw a Hindu goddess it will be evidence for Hinduism. But the guy could have of course saw something else, like Jesus, and just wanted to make it for with what he believed. Anyway the example I see in this is that religion and science go together pretty well. Right??
Wildman, you are not even trying to prove my points wrong anymore, you just seem to think ill believe you if you say they are wrong because you said so. Where is the logic or reason in that? Are you mad because I proved to you that there is no peganism in Christianity? Yes, I think you are.
The Holy Spirit comes into you after you accept Jesus, and helps you preach, and tell people about Jesus.
So you retreat, and try to make it seem like I’m still the one that can’t answer questions. Ok.
To believer:
Yep there is someone here who drinks way too much jesus juice, and it gets all over his mouth, and his eyes, and his face after sucking that shit dry. I am so glad too see that you are god’s little bitch chear leader.
Here’s a joke everyone:
Jesus went to a motel one day with 3 nails, and asked the motel employee there “Here are 3 nails. Do you think you can put me up for the night.”
To believer:
I just love it how you interpret AAA’s dream by telling him that was Yeshua with no proof, and then tell me that I am not proving you wrong anymore, and that I have no proof to my claims. Oh what a hypocrite you truly are. What is worse is you drag your god down with you because no one is believing your bullshit, Yet I am sure you don’t care about that you simply want to win at arguing. Oh you should so be a lawyer.
The only thing you prove to me believer is how much cock you like sucking boy, so how much pride do you feel on your knees “praying to your god” if that is what you want to call it?
Oh BTW jew, with each lie you make your nose is only going to get just a little bigger each time, so knock it off of your own good. That way I won’t make fun of you for being able to stuff the entire hand up your nose instead of just the entire finger jew.