er.. I mean till you have faith. And I call this load of crap.
I don’t think there is a right way of being an atheist. But there are a group of believers that I treat with a lot of suspicion. The type who every post they write they say when I was a non believer this or that. I understand it is possible to convert to a delusion religion after having being irreligious. I, however, would expect that these group of believers write articles that are better thought out than their other brethren and sisters. I don’t understand how it is they churn out the same kind of trash. Maybe, religion does really atrophy the brain.
This particular theist writes
When I was a non-believer I could grasp that Jesus was a great man. I could grasp that His death on the cross was a travesty of human justice. I could grasp that He was a holy man of God that spoke great truths of the universe.
A statement, which from the face of it points to one who was generally ignorant of the scholarship on Jesus. Any one with a little common sense would as well have written this. Adding he was a non believer doesn’t add any value to the above statement. It isn’t profound.
He continues to write
However, as a non-believer, I just could not grasp the Christian theology that Jesus’ death on the cross was for me. I just could not grasp that Him hanging on the cross was for the forgiveness of my sins. How does a man dying on the cross reconcile me to God, I asked myself?
And I see the ramblings of a believer, a confused one but still a believer. The much he could be, in my opinion is a Muslim who was trying to grasp what the message of his fellow book people mean with a dying messiah. It’s a statement lacking any attempt at being critical.
His conclusion that
Jesus dying on the cross was just the end of a cool dude’s life and then the church fabricated the resurrection thing. It just doesn’t make any sense if Jesus was just…a man.
sounds more like apologist rambling than one engaged with an intellectual question. In fact, had he not written he was a non believer, I would think he belongs to the WLC school of apologists. Those who, like Brandon and UnkleE pretend to have a faith that is intellectual. How this is even possible, I am yet to understand.
Mark tells us
During the last plague in Egypt, God commanded the Israelites to paint the blood of an innocent pure lamb on their doorway so that the death plague would passover their homes. This points to Jesus on the cross. His blood was spilled so that we might live.
and I wonder what happened to humanity? Putting aside the myth of the story of the plagues, for a minute, how in the name of all that is profane would someone take joy in senseless murder so that he may live? Would Mark be willing to die so that other people in some distant future may live forever plus 1? I want to bang my head on my computer when I read such crock, except I still need to use it tomorrow. My head, I mean.
Mark tells us it was important for Jesus to commit suicide because
It all goes back God’s sacrificial system. Jesus is the culmination of that. The animals used in the passover and the sacrifices at the Tabernacle and later the Temple had to be pure and spotless to be used to atone for the sinner’s sin. Jesus was pure and spotless.
A former non believer, who has lost all sense of decency, tells us a god could not find a way to forgive people without recourse to a scapegoat? Think about it for a moment. So god needed to die to save us from god. The same god who had created the conditions for our failure, first by making us in his image, an image that I think is full of shit and then cursing the land, making it possible for malingerers to flourish. I sympathise with Mark. He would have remained a non believer or if he had to believe this silliness, he shouldn’t have become an apologist.
If, as he writes,
On the cross, He was thus sacrficed for sin. He became all sin of all time, past, present and future.
why should the christian be moral? All his sins have been paid for in advance. What is the point in repentance when all the sins have been washed away by the sacrificial lamb? And how does this work? Does it mean if Mark steals from his neighbour, he can point them to the cross in his house or one hanging around his neck? Or do I need faith to understand this trope?
This post is already longer than I would want it to be. The rest of the post is the same trope. Freewill, Satan and all the other excuses apologists come up with to explain their inability to think critically. Go read it.
Random thoughts 