It's not an argument I expect to win any time soon, but the religious nutters are the people with the problem. They can't prove a single one of their claims, and all they have is some ancient writing preserved in their magic book written by people who, by the standards of the modern world, really didn't know much of anything.
Worse, their magic book has HOW MANY different versions, never mind translations that may have a poor relationship with the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. What happened at the fictional Tower of Babel has nothing on this supposed "holy scripture."
Tell them the Tower of Babel was built by a unified people all speaking a single language. The biblical god feared that if they could accomplish such a feat that NOTHING would be impossible for them. So he screwed everything up by having them all speak different languages so they couldn’t work together.
And yet people STILL pull together and accomplish things that would have been unimaginable, not that long ago, current global political madness notwithstanding. Just one more indicator that, if it does exist, Yahweh is an inept, clueless, bumbling fool who, if it knows what it is doing at all, is operating on the barest idea of what is going on.
I have never been able to internalize the cognitive dissonance it takes to BELIEVE. Not even as a child. Don't they claim to believe in and worship an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god - the creator of the Universe and everything in it? Quod Erat Demonstrandum, he created gay people... So, by them they believe in a god who creates evil gay people. I do believe there are evil people in this world, but most of them are die-hard religionists who couldn't think their ways out of wet paper bags.
A place where all the people of the world come together in common language, to build something so strong that it causes God to fear what else they might accomplish.
I hope you all have had time to get to know of Monte Mader on You Tube and she may be here on Substack now? Not sure about all that but if you don’t know about her, she is a deconstructed Fundy who can bring the goods and throw down and debunk the religious fables with the best of them. Check her out if you haven’t already.
There are no original copies of the gospels, and nothing is signed. It's often over looked that after the Bible was organized (More or less) every single copy of it for the next thousand years was copied by hand. Bart Ehrman has pointed out there are multiple variations. Never the less, they keep retreating to the 'divine inspiration' rationalization.
I can remember being taught, that the oldest parts of the new testament are the letters from St Paul. The next oldest parts are the Mark/Mathew/Luke gospels which were written in the 60s, 70s and 80s, with a good bit of .... ahem 'overlap' in them. So, even the oldest parts were written 30 years after the events and everyone's memory is affected by a 30 year time gap. Also, Mark/Mathew/Luke weren't actually present, they were pretty much just writing down hearsay.
I learned the above in RE class. But then that class was giving us an education in religious matters, it was not a proselytising class. Have I mentioned before that my school was run by nuns?
It may be true that the gospels were written decades later but that doesn't mean that they were not based upon earlier source material. Here's an example from the opening of Luke's gospel - "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word."
It isn’t even written by the people that came up with the stories, it was written by folks who came along centuries later who wrote down the spoken traditions and misheard them. The stories were put through a centuries long game of telephone and that’s how we got a god and a savior and a fancy spook to worship. Then the folks who wrote them down inserted their agenda, with malice and foresight.
All anyone need to do wonder about the accuracy of the gospels is try to accurately recall something from popular culture and go doublecheck it. Odds are that one’s memory will be off to some degree. Possibly a lot.
Here’s a good one: How many times did Captain Kirk say, “Beam me up, Scotty”? Answer: Never!
What? You don't respect the Bronze/Iron Ages Goatherders Guide to the Galaxy?
Okay, so that was snarky, and I apologize to Christian readers. An apology is probably also owed to the people who composed the books of the Bible, undoubtedly doing the best they could within the limits of knowledge, culture, and tradition.
I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic schools through high school. The lessons of how to treat other people that my liberal, post-Vatican II nuns taught have served me well, and those were by and large the teachings of Jesus. I'm now an atheist, but I still revere the nuns who dismissed all the anti-human notions that the church and toxic relatives drilled into my mother, and distilled the will of God into being excellent to one another.
So, while all the religions I've encountered have holes big enough to drive a planet through, being excellent to each other is time-tested advice.
Religious nutters were trained to be nutters from a very young age for the most part. When someone is taught that believing in fantasy as reality is moral vs believing in reality and evidence is bad, your going to end up with a messed up person who won't fit into society very well.
So does that include the spectrum that I see from the prism my grandson put in my dining room window?. Did light not get refracted and dispersed before Noah?
““First of all, as a believer, I would push them to read the Bible,” Roupp stated.”
Have you read the bible, Roupp? Or have you just had it read to you by your preacher/pastor/priest? Have you read it for understanding or just inspiration by picking and choosing verses to follow?
Please don’t think that there are people n this world that haven’t heard about your god and Jesus and whatnot. Maybe, they all have and already made decisions regarding their own belief. You sharing his kingdom or whatever is just hubris on your part and incredibly rude.
Like so many others, Roupp has had the bible READ TO HIM. Oh, he's likely got his own copy and picks it up and reads along when the leader of the bible study group tells him to turn to Luke 6:27 or whatever, but never touching on something like Judges 19:22-30 or even worse examples.
And the one thing this tells me is that those who lead such lessons KNOW that the bible has serious liabilities in it, and the last thing they want is to let their s̵h̵e̵e̵p̵ congregants find out.
It's such a blanket cop out and allows them to just look like victims. These people simultaneously want to use the bible as a bludgeon and a shield when it's convenient.
Hey Roupp: "Love the sinner, hate the sin." Sure, Jan. How about "love the believer, hate the belief"? Does that help you understand why expressing your belief is hateful in and of itself?
Exactly, you can't love people and also think they deserve to die. Those 2 things don't match up. Then again most evangelical Christians don't maintain any logical consistency. I had an argument with one recently where he stated that everyone who isn't his version of Christian was going to die, and I said that it means God is going to genocide billions of people, and he said it wasn't genocide if you have the moral high ground. These people are insane and argue in bad faith.
Grown men who believe in childish nonsense acting like children.
If they're going to claim that their specter in the clouds somehow owns an atmospheric/meteorological phenomena, then that same specter can also own destructive hail, lightning, tornadoes, cyclones, windstorms and blizzards. After all, their bible says that its God creates both good AND evil. Says so right in Isaiah 45:7.
And we all are genuinely supposed to believe that, eh? Oh, and that business about "push them to read the bible." What happens when they run into Leviticus 18:22 or 20:13. Better yet, let's put Ezekiel 23:20 on the list for bible study, while we're at it. This is the brand of disingenuous crap I've come to expect from believers who barely know the bible, and yet have the temerity to proselytize others.
The other shame is that Major League Baseball won't grow a backbone on this issue. I wonder if they know how many of their fan are of the LGBTQ+ community. My guess is: a lot more than a few.
Okay, they could have just not worn the caps with the tiny rainbow colored emblem that is very subtle and performative anyway. But nooooo, they had to wear the caps and put an insulting message on it. But please, tell me again that it wasn’t about hate.
Providing the thread of support organizations is more helpful than just having one game with displays of rainbows. It feels performative without the thread for sure. But I also understand that in this social climate, it is a risky performance. I think there was a time where businesses could get away with throwing a little rainbow flag on something and call it good, to get the social clout for being supportive, but behind the scenes they were really ambivalent at best about the support. But lately the more profitable tack is to accept the Christian hate as the standard. Let the nasty bigots run down your LGBTQ employees, move your performative support to a corner in the back of the store or remove it altogether. So I can appreciate that the team management didn’t approve of these players being dicks. And even that they are still having pride nights. I hope this does not give the team and the sport reason to stop trying to support LGBTQ people.
There's just so much fodder here. A. Where did they think they were playing? Anti-pride in San Francisco? B. What idiotic bible verses...the rainbow belongs to god b/c of a covenant. Didn't anyone ever tell them that any covenant has 2 sides? C. What assholes, just to be assholes. D. MLB will only care if this hits them in the wallet, and I urge Bay Area residents to boycott going to games (Giants suck anyway, so this shouldn't be too hard). These players are asinine and hateful, and even more importantly, they're dumb as a box of rocks. And I mean no disrespect to the rocks in question. Maybe I should say dumber than a box of rocks. "My invisible friend in the sky owns rainbows," isn't the own they think it is.
It's not an argument I expect to win any time soon, but the religious nutters are the people with the problem. They can't prove a single one of their claims, and all they have is some ancient writing preserved in their magic book written by people who, by the standards of the modern world, really didn't know much of anything.
Worse, their magic book has HOW MANY different versions, never mind translations that may have a poor relationship with the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. What happened at the fictional Tower of Babel has nothing on this supposed "holy scripture."
Someone at CP said that the Obama Library looked like the Tower of Babel. I politely inquired how he knew what the tower looked like.
Tell them the Tower of Babel was built by a unified people all speaking a single language. The biblical god feared that if they could accomplish such a feat that NOTHING would be impossible for them. So he screwed everything up by having them all speak different languages so they couldn’t work together.
And yet people STILL pull together and accomplish things that would have been unimaginable, not that long ago, current global political madness notwithstanding. Just one more indicator that, if it does exist, Yahweh is an inept, clueless, bumbling fool who, if it knows what it is doing at all, is operating on the barest idea of what is going on.
Yahweh is a putz.
One wonders if these people hear the words coming out of their mouths... 🤪
I have never been able to internalize the cognitive dissonance it takes to BELIEVE. Not even as a child. Don't they claim to believe in and worship an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god - the creator of the Universe and everything in it? Quod Erat Demonstrandum, he created gay people... So, by them they believe in a god who creates evil gay people. I do believe there are evil people in this world, but most of them are die-hard religionists who couldn't think their ways out of wet paper bags.
It was big. And a building.
A place where all the people of the world come together in common language, to build something so strong that it causes God to fear what else they might accomplish.
I'd take it as a compliment!
https://pics.craiyon.com/2023-10-19/c944f8c6937c486fb8360c13eef54f33.webp
https://chicagocrusader.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Untitled-design-14-1-600x600.png
Not even close.
An article in the Guardian suggested it looks like a Klingon prison. At least we've seen one of those.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jun/02/klingon-prison-barack-obamas-presidential-library-chicago?CMP=share_btn_url
Sorry, but it doesn't look a bit like Rura Penthe!
I hope you all have had time to get to know of Monte Mader on You Tube and she may be here on Substack now? Not sure about all that but if you don’t know about her, she is a deconstructed Fundy who can bring the goods and throw down and debunk the religious fables with the best of them. Check her out if you haven’t already.
I've seen her work. She is sharp as the proverbial tack, and she communicates well.
Well worth your time.
There are no original copies of the gospels, and nothing is signed. It's often over looked that after the Bible was organized (More or less) every single copy of it for the next thousand years was copied by hand. Bart Ehrman has pointed out there are multiple variations. Never the less, they keep retreating to the 'divine inspiration' rationalization.
Have you noticed that the average Sunday School doesn't teach any of this. WHYIZZAT??? 😉
I can remember being taught, that the oldest parts of the new testament are the letters from St Paul. The next oldest parts are the Mark/Mathew/Luke gospels which were written in the 60s, 70s and 80s, with a good bit of .... ahem 'overlap' in them. So, even the oldest parts were written 30 years after the events and everyone's memory is affected by a 30 year time gap. Also, Mark/Mathew/Luke weren't actually present, they were pretty much just writing down hearsay.
I learned the above in RE class. But then that class was giving us an education in religious matters, it was not a proselytising class. Have I mentioned before that my school was run by nuns?
As it comes to the whole synoptic gospel trip, check THIS out:
https://ibb.co/NdFm9LJh
And there is no surviving attestation to Jeezus or any of the gospel story miracles from the time of one Pontius Pilate...
It may be true that the gospels were written decades later but that doesn't mean that they were not based upon earlier source material. Here's an example from the opening of Luke's gospel - "Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word."
And at least 3000 contradictions !
https://www.lyingforjesus.org/Bible-Contradictions/
It isn’t even written by the people that came up with the stories, it was written by folks who came along centuries later who wrote down the spoken traditions and misheard them. The stories were put through a centuries long game of telephone and that’s how we got a god and a savior and a fancy spook to worship. Then the folks who wrote them down inserted their agenda, with malice and foresight.
On top of that, church committees voted on which books were "scripture" and which were not. Gospel of Thomas anyone?
All anyone need to do wonder about the accuracy of the gospels is try to accurately recall something from popular culture and go doublecheck it. Odds are that one’s memory will be off to some degree. Possibly a lot.
Here’s a good one: How many times did Captain Kirk say, “Beam me up, Scotty”? Answer: Never!
Vader never said “Luke, I am your father.” He said “No, I am your father.”
Rick Blaine never said: "Play it again, Sam".
What? You don't respect the Bronze/Iron Ages Goatherders Guide to the Galaxy?
Okay, so that was snarky, and I apologize to Christian readers. An apology is probably also owed to the people who composed the books of the Bible, undoubtedly doing the best they could within the limits of knowledge, culture, and tradition.
I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic schools through high school. The lessons of how to treat other people that my liberal, post-Vatican II nuns taught have served me well, and those were by and large the teachings of Jesus. I'm now an atheist, but I still revere the nuns who dismissed all the anti-human notions that the church and toxic relatives drilled into my mother, and distilled the will of God into being excellent to one another.
So, while all the religions I've encountered have holes big enough to drive a planet through, being excellent to each other is time-tested advice.
Religious nutters were trained to be nutters from a very young age for the most part. When someone is taught that believing in fantasy as reality is moral vs believing in reality and evidence is bad, your going to end up with a messed up person who won't fit into society very well.
OT: I’ve got commenters at CP trying to argue that rainbows are the property of god.
Kinda circular. If you take as a premise that the bible is true, then you conclude that the bible is true.
Rainbows have been around a lot longer than their god.
I've seen rainbows multiple times. Their god is still the all-time champion of hide-and-seek.
I had tickets to see Rainbow but they canceled due to an illness.
I have a friend who has been to see Blackmore's Night.
Said commenters need to acquaint themselves with the laws of physics and more specifically, OPTICS.
I copied in from Google an explanation. Response: God sure worked out the details.
[chuckle] SUUUUUUUUUUURE he / it did! 😝
Not the sharpest bulbs in the potato patch, are they?
That’s not fair.
Not the sharpest bowling balls in the medicine cabinet.
That's a new version, it made me smile, thank you.
If rainbows are property, are they taxed?
So does that include the spectrum that I see from the prism my grandson put in my dining room window?. Did light not get refracted and dispersed before Noah?
Has gawd trademarked it? Checkmate kkkristers.
Property of Dio!
Well, Ritchie probably..
Copyright has long since expired.
“First of all, as a believer, I would push them to read the Bible,”
And drive them to atheism? Mmmkay.
““First of all, as a believer, I would push them to read the Bible,” Roupp stated.”
Have you read the bible, Roupp? Or have you just had it read to you by your preacher/pastor/priest? Have you read it for understanding or just inspiration by picking and choosing verses to follow?
Please don’t think that there are people n this world that haven’t heard about your god and Jesus and whatnot. Maybe, they all have and already made decisions regarding their own belief. You sharing his kingdom or whatever is just hubris on your part and incredibly rude.
Like so many others, Roupp has had the bible READ TO HIM. Oh, he's likely got his own copy and picks it up and reads along when the leader of the bible study group tells him to turn to Luke 6:27 or whatever, but never touching on something like Judges 19:22-30 or even worse examples.
And the one thing this tells me is that those who lead such lessons KNOW that the bible has serious liabilities in it, and the last thing they want is to let their s̵h̵e̵e̵p̵ congregants find out.
It's such a blanket cop out and allows them to just look like victims. These people simultaneously want to use the bible as a bludgeon and a shield when it's convenient.
𝑆𝑜, 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝐼 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑, 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒’𝑠 𝑛𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑖𝑛 𝑖𝑡 𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙
Hey Roupp: "Love the sinner, hate the sin." Sure, Jan. How about "love the believer, hate the belief"? Does that help you understand why expressing your belief is hateful in and of itself?
“Love the faithful, hate the faith.” That’s what I say.
Can't I just smite them? They like when they get to do it in the name of their imaginary friend. I'll just tell them "God told me to do it."
Smiting is very underrated these days, I think we should have lots more smiting.
Like last Sunday evening, that was a perfect opportunity for a bit of smiting. Alas ...
Listen to the very end if you haven’t heard this one before. Zimmerman has a bunch of irreverent songs, btw.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyE5wjc4XOw&list=RDMyE5wjc4XOw&start_radio=1
Giving up 4 runs in 5 innings, maybe we should say "There's no hate in it at all. I just think your pitching is crap."
Exactly, you can't love people and also think they deserve to die. Those 2 things don't match up. Then again most evangelical Christians don't maintain any logical consistency. I had an argument with one recently where he stated that everyone who isn't his version of Christian was going to die, and I said that it means God is going to genocide billions of people, and he said it wasn't genocide if you have the moral high ground. These people are insane and argue in bad faith.
They should put the commandment (3 or 4) about the sabbath when they play on Sunday and see how MLB feels about that.
No games between sunset Friday to sunset Saturday (the Jewish Shabbat).
Who was that Tiger who sat out a World Series game in the 30s because it was Yom Kippur. Hank…..?
Greenberg?
How about Sandy Koufax from the Dodgers?
https://baseballhall.org/discover/sandy-koufax-sits-out-game-one
The modern baseball uniform (hat, jersey, pants and cleats) consists of polyester, spandex, cotton, leather mesh and plastics. IOW, mixed fabrics.
Oops. Gonna play naked, xtians?
Wonder if they've ever trained (worked) on the Sabbath (Saturday)?
Good point!
Someone should ask the lads about the rule of mixed fibres.
I might pay to see that.
Gay people exist.
"god" does not.
Grown men who believe in childish nonsense acting like children.
If they're going to claim that their specter in the clouds somehow owns an atmospheric/meteorological phenomena, then that same specter can also own destructive hail, lightning, tornadoes, cyclones, windstorms and blizzards. After all, their bible says that its God creates both good AND evil. Says so right in Isaiah 45:7.
Wear THAT one on your caps, xtians.
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒’𝑠 𝑛𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝑎𝑡 𝑎𝑙𝑙. 𝐼𝑡’𝑠 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑤ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝐼 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑖𝑛.
And we all are genuinely supposed to believe that, eh? Oh, and that business about "push them to read the bible." What happens when they run into Leviticus 18:22 or 20:13. Better yet, let's put Ezekiel 23:20 on the list for bible study, while we're at it. This is the brand of disingenuous crap I've come to expect from believers who barely know the bible, and yet have the temerity to proselytize others.
The other shame is that Major League Baseball won't grow a backbone on this issue. I wonder if they know how many of their fan are of the LGBTQ+ community. My guess is: a lot more than a few.
Apparently back in the Bronze Age, people were quite familiar with donkeys and horses!
(Ezekiel 23:20)
And cooking baby goat in its mother's milk must have been considered quite the treat.
This is what he stands for and in: 💩
Gay men don't have sex with each other they way straight men have sex with women*. So no problem.
*. The woman's sexuality being irrelevant.
Ain't nothing in the Bible mentions lesbians. Apparently, like a lot of men, God likes to watch 2 women going at it.
I'm pretty sure gay men lack vaginas, so doesn't that make it difficult for them to have sex with one another like straight men have sex with women?
That's part of it.
OT: Just read the sextpot Jackson Lahmeyer resigned his campaign. Boo fucking hoo.
The Trump kiss of death strikes again.
Maybe he should've prayed to his deity to make him a better pitcher.
Sometimes god says no. ; )
Frankly, I think it's pretty freaking rare when Yahweh says ANYTHING.
God was busy answering the other team's prayers for hits.
He did say God was the reason he was in the position he was in. Maybe that is why he is such a bad pitcher and their team sucks. God hates them lol.
Okay, they could have just not worn the caps with the tiny rainbow colored emblem that is very subtle and performative anyway. But nooooo, they had to wear the caps and put an insulting message on it. But please, tell me again that it wasn’t about hate.
Providing the thread of support organizations is more helpful than just having one game with displays of rainbows. It feels performative without the thread for sure. But I also understand that in this social climate, it is a risky performance. I think there was a time where businesses could get away with throwing a little rainbow flag on something and call it good, to get the social clout for being supportive, but behind the scenes they were really ambivalent at best about the support. But lately the more profitable tack is to accept the Christian hate as the standard. Let the nasty bigots run down your LGBTQ employees, move your performative support to a corner in the back of the store or remove it altogether. So I can appreciate that the team management didn’t approve of these players being dicks. And even that they are still having pride nights. I hope this does not give the team and the sport reason to stop trying to support LGBTQ people.
There's just so much fodder here. A. Where did they think they were playing? Anti-pride in San Francisco? B. What idiotic bible verses...the rainbow belongs to god b/c of a covenant. Didn't anyone ever tell them that any covenant has 2 sides? C. What assholes, just to be assholes. D. MLB will only care if this hits them in the wallet, and I urge Bay Area residents to boycott going to games (Giants suck anyway, so this shouldn't be too hard). These players are asinine and hateful, and even more importantly, they're dumb as a box of rocks. And I mean no disrespect to the rocks in question. Maybe I should say dumber than a box of rocks. "My invisible friend in the sky owns rainbows," isn't the own they think it is.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0e47ec53bb11628f1ebde6d5a76e2827b217d826dabf12653de1ff21b86ee2f4.png
so true
Abso-freaking-lutely!
Pink Floyd owns the rainbow. Eiter them or Skittles. Or maybe LeVar Burton.
Rainbow Brite?
Not to mention Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, here on the North Coast. They do real, actual GOOD.