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I was teasing.

Well, did you say it in words that you wrote? Sorry if you don't like the word "implicit."

What surprises me the most about becoming an atheist is how insane biblical apologists now sound when giving answers to sincere questions about God and what the Bible says. I'll come back with examples later. Then again, some of you might have examples of your owns.

Is it wrong to compare the actions of an almighty heavenly father to how we as human parents would behave towards our own children? I think doing so is a reasonable thing to do, but others might say it's like comparing apples to oranges for god's ways are higher than ours. If god's ways can only be understood spiritually, perhaps those who want to believe they're spiritual will not want to question god's parenting skills so they rationalize them instead. Similarly, questioning god's wisdom in how he shows "unconditional love" to his children only makes us fools according to Paul. _____________________ Should we not judge a parent as being inhumane when they commands us to love them or face punishment, who sets us up to fail, who says we were born corrupt and unholy and therefore deserving of their wrath and who will meet our needs only when they decide we have enough trust in them?

"Before the beginning....." (starts at 8:05)

Final thought for now: It takes a LOT to process a loss of faith. There is a period of intense emotion akin to mourning. Not the loss of a relationship with a nonexistent god, but a recognition that so much time and energy has been wasted in his service that could certainly have benefitted real people instead. If I took the money I gave the church and sent it instead to cancer or als research or autism or clean water or even just a gotdang food bank, I would have actually helped more people. It is exhausting to come to terms with what just happened in our lives. Charity came here to share that journey. The disrespect shown in return, the accusations of arrogance, the prissy, privileged, entitled ANGER at her gall to format responses in a way that made you unhappy... You wanna talk about not being important enough to DEMAND any such thing!? You wanna talk about who is acting like a f'ing judgmental Pharisee? Charity will respond however she chooses to respond, and if you don't like the method, tough s*it. How DARE you act as if this creates a problem for YOU, after the contempt you've shown for Charity's journey and pain? Ok I need to step away before I lose it.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html Where does it come from? The Russian propaganda model of Firehose of Falsehoods.

Originally posted in the "God's accountant, etc." thread in response to a post that cited I Corinthians 2:14. We obviously don't look at I Cor. 2:14 the same way. I see it as Paul's way of inoculating his followers against the Reason virus. Usually, if someone disagrees with you, you respond by presenting additional evidence or reframing your argument. In one fell swoop, Paul makes that unnecessary by declaring his opponents incapable of grasping his concept because they lack what I [jokingly] call the Magic Decoder Ring. "How can he possibly understand the things of the spirit? He doesn't have what it takes?" "What's that? evidence?" "No, spiritual discernment!" "What's spiritual discernment?" "It's the God-given capacity to understand what I'm saying is true." "So it's a magic decoder ring that suddenly transforms your thesis from bulls hit to enlightenment." "Well when you put it like that it sounds silly and disrespectful. It's more like, when you humble yourself, God opens the eyes of your understanding." "Ah, so it's not a magic decoder ring at all." "Exactly." "It's gullibility." ... Note how in that conversation we go from "Paul's message doesn't make sense," which focuses on the message as the subject matter, to "It's a Yahweh thing; You wouldn't understand," which focuses on the rejector of the message as the subject. I Corinthians 2:14 is an ad hominem attack on anyone who hears or reads Paul's message and concludes it's a crock.

People "understand" what's familiar to them. Isn't that really just another way to grasp the concept of indoctrination? It's in the news these days from the fearful perspective of parents afraid of the indoctrination their kids might get in public schools, right? Do we want our children indoctrinated to accept reason or superstition? IOW, do we view indoctrination from a perspective of the future, or from our own accumulated body of knowledge and how we understand the world? Well, children are inherently gullible, aren't they? Weren't we, way back when? It seems to me Raf made a reasonable, likely quite sound argument. "Magic decoder ring" seems like an apt description of what was taught in the Advanced Class on PFLAP. I remember clearly, during that indoctrination session, pondering my thoughts (stream of consciousness) wondering whether I was receiving revelation. Then in residence with the 9th corpse (just a few short months hence) when the entire student body at Emporia was asked for clues to some actual mystery (not so fictional whodunit) and all I could come up with was one person's name. My thoughts were out of the blue and irrational. I offered my "revelation." My "insight" was never acted on.