Atheism

Sorry mate but if you're hoping i'll only tell you what you want to hear, you're gonna have to find yerself another boy!
Congrats for fulfilling this Bible prophecy..-

"For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear" (2 Tim 4:3)

You are using the proleptic method FB.

That is to say you are anachronistically representing something as existing before its proper or historical time, as in the precolonial United States.

The something being the 20th century conditioning of your brain thought of as existent in the times the Bible was written or edited.

A virgin, for example, being what you think a virgin is now. Virgin born was a commonplace expression. That you might laugh at the idea is merely due to your proleptic thinking.

Also the son of God. Many females in Biblical days who did not know who the father of their son was would say he had been fathered by a god.

The analeptic method is an attempt to restore the original. Not being a Biblical scholar I am not very good at it.

I have been banging that drum for 10 years Romeo. That is why some here have their fingers in their ears.

And after all those years trying to convert decent people, can't you see that the missionary position is socially obsolete?

(TIC)

I can indeed tim.

I neither believe nor disbelieve that interpretation, but I have to ask how you arrived at it, what your evidence/rationale for it is, and how we are supposed to distinguish between what is to be taken literally and what is to be understood figuratively. Did Jesus, for example, literally die and stay in a tomb for 3 days, as the vast majority of preachers would preach, or is that also a symbolic image? How would we ascertain that with any degree of reliability or credibility? Mere opinion doesn't suffice for such monumental claims.

Concordance plus a consistent political agenda.



I am not qualified to answer such a question. You could ask Setanta. He will know.

Actually, I think your textual analaysis carries a good deal of credibility. I'm all for textual analysis. That's how scholars know that there was a Q-source. What I suggest is taking it to its logical conclusion, viz if artistic license was used in those stories, then why not any or all of the other stories, up to and including the very existence of this proposed god?

Gay Julian Clary said that when he was a youth he once asked a monk to pray for him. They later lost touch but met again 30 years later.
"Do you remember me?" asked Clary
"Of course I do, I've been praying for you every day since then" replied the monk.
By then, Clary had become a big Brit TV star, so maybe the prayers worked..

According to Condell's bottom line, Wilso, they are not doing anything other than wasting their time.

So why is he commenting on that particular method of wasting time when there are so many other methods of wasting time to choose from?

The obvious answer is that he is obsessed with the subject of God and/or being in the public eye.

Asserting that he is "free" when Godless societies are particularly unfree is an odd thing to do don't you think? And he isn't free anyway because nobody is. Thus he is treating us like an infants class.

Besides--it is not him being godless that those people are praying about. It is his need to inform the world that he is godless, which is not the same thing.

He is a vegetarian, a supporter of UKIP and a Dawkins fan.

I had never heard of him before now so I checked Wiki. His oversimplifications are quite absurd. What actions does he recommend we take? Talk's cheap.

I'll pray for you Spendi. I'll pray that you figure out whether you're godless or not.

Good to see there are still atheists who are godless.

Not very many of them here in A2K...and I was beginning to wonder if they had pretty much died out.

I don't know much about Q but, as I understand it, it is a hypothesis that Matthew and Luke must have had a source, oral or written but now lost, which Mark either did not know or did not use, and which contained about 200 verses which are common to Matthew and Luke, and often identical despite being independent of each other. Thus, Matthew and Luke had another source besides Mark.

But Mark may have been redacted for political convenience in relation to appeals to Pagans and Gentiles. Matthew is essentially Jewish.

And there is also "M" and "L".



That seems reasonable. Artistic licence also applies to architecture, dance, music, painting, fashion and etiquette.

Biologists Confirm God Evolved From Chimpanzee Deity




BERKELEY, CA—Challenging long-held views on the origins of divinity, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, presented findings Thursday that confirm God, the Almighty Creator of the Universe, evolved from an ancient chimpanzee deity.

The recently discovered sacred ancestor, a divine chimp species scientists have named Pan sanctorum, reportedly gave rise over millions of years to the Lord Our God, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

“Although perhaps not obvious at first glance, there are actually overwhelming similarities between the Supreme Being of today and this early primate deity who preceded Him,” said Dr. Richard Kamen, a leading biologist who also heads Berkeley’s paleotheology department. “The holy chimp moved around on all fours, but its descendants eventually began walking upright to expend less energy while foraging across the infinite reaches of the universe. This of course led to the bipedalism of modern-day God.”

“In fact, you can see a distinct likeness to God in the chimpanzee deity’s skeletal structures, not to mention its prototypical expressions of vengeance and wrath,” Kamen continued. “The great-ape god was, however, considerably smaller in stature, having not yet developed the capacity to occupy all space and time simultaneously.”

According to experts, divine life began as a single-celled all-powerful organism roughly 3.6 billion years ago, eventually evolving into a multicelled, sponge-like deity that bobbed and floated across the chaos of the early universe. Kamen explained that over hundreds of millions of years, the godlike life form became more complex, with limbs that allowed for locomotion across the endless expanse of the heavens, and sophisticated photoreceptor cells capable of seeing all things.

Based on newly obtained evidence, the Pan sanctorum is thought to have first experimented with creation ex nihilo around 7 million years ago. Kamen noted that the chimpanzee deity made several early attempts to produce rudimentary solar systems, but on each occasion was spooked upon inadvertently creating fire, which is said to have caused it to screech loudly, angrily swat away the newly formed sun, and then scamper across the universe to hide from the flaming sphere.

“Natural selection played a huge role in the evolution of divinity, and in this regard, the adaptive value of Pan sanctorum’s immortality proved critical to its survival,” said Kamen, adding that with its opposable thumbs, the divine ancestor was eventually able to fashion primitive tools for creating crude oceans and basic mountain ranges. “Today’s Lord Almighty actually still has a small bony protuberance in the small of His back, the vestigial remains of a tail we believe was used by an even older, monkey-like god to facilitate climbing, allowing it to escape into the heavens when faced with danger.”

“That potential for threats made it an evolutionary imperative for the primate god to develop omnipotence,” Kamen continued. “As well as sharp claws and pointed incisors.”

Though its smaller brain limited its cognitive abilities, the chimpanzee deity is believed to have possessed not only self-awareness, but also spatial intelligence, object permanence, and a rudimentary capacity for knowing all that is, all that has been, and all that ever will be.

However, it was only relatively recently that the heavenly species developed the intellectual capacity for higher reasoning, critical thinking, and infinite wisdom, according to Kamen. For Pan sanctorum, he noted, the passage of divine judgment was “purely a matter of primal instinct.”

“While complex speech would not emerge until the evolution of the Cro-Magnon god from Pan Sanctorum, the chimpanzee deity was capable of using grunts and hand gestures to convey basic emotions such as happiness, anger, or the forgiveness of sin,” Kamen said. “However, it appears that the chimp deity often exhibited extremely aggressive behavior, in some cases unleashing its divine wrath with little if any provocation toward the mortal chimps it created in its own image.”

He added, “It is our understanding that these creatures lived in a kind of jungle-like forerunner to the Garden of Eden, until a day came when their enraged creator cast them out, flinging feces at them as they fled.”

Dr. Kamen is a gleeman and is self-evidently habituated to addressing inferior intelligences.

He looks gay, too.