A religious almost-debate

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soger	2011-08-08 10:09 GMT \| #1
Comments: 42	Some time ago (about two years) after watching the first Zeitgeist movie a found this website: http://kingdavid8.com/ Based on the website he looks like a decent man defendig his faith so I wrote him a letter. But as it turns out he is just another fanatic and hypocrit just like religious people usually are. The reason I'm accusing him of that is because I wrote him a latter maybe to start a debate. He wrote me a very short answer. In his letter he responded only the issues he felt comfortable with and when I replied him, I didn't get an answer. And also, he didn't publish on his website our short lived conversation. My guess is that he publishes only the ones where his point is the one that looks good, hence he is a hypocrit and he tries to silence anyone with a different opinion just like the church does. But see it for yourself, here is our conversation cut&pasted from the gmail interface: Dear David, Let me start by telling you how I found your website. A few months ago I stumbled on a movie called Zeitgeist. I was amazed by it. It's first part talks about religion in general; it's like someone took my thoughts and phrased them to words. But I don't believe in anything blindly so I started verifying it. Unfortunately I cannot validate a lot from the movie but the religion part is the one I surely can. So I started looking for pages that compare Jesus to Horus and that is how I found your webpages. I would like to comment some of them: On the "Jesus a copycat saviour?" page you say: Of course, as you'll see on my pages, there are a few (very few) valid similarities. So what does this mean? Honestly, not much. This is where you are wrong because it means everything. There are hundreds or even thousands of myths and/or religions, they all derive from each other. And just like folk-tales when they are preserved by many generations without actually writing it down they will be unavoidably changed. But if you don't like this explanation, here is another one: they were both made up by men based on astrology hence the similarities. I personally think that the first explanation is more likely. I also read a few pages from the "Letters and discussions". For example there is the one about the free will and also the Free will FAQ. What you are saying is that God gave us free will so we can do both good and bad. So far so good BUT if the entire fate of the humanity depends on one choice than you better make sure your inferior makes the good choice, you don't put the forbidden fruit right in front of Eve. You should know that I'm (among a lots of things) a sysadmin and I restrict the size of an email that a server would accept/send. I do not do this because I'm an evil man who wants to hold up others in their work but I install the restriction because if I don't then eventually someone will use the server for bad purposes which will prevent others to use the server. That's simply human nature, if God created us, He should know that, which leads us to the following options: 1) God is the worst sysadmin you can imagine and I'm sorry for this universe, no surprise so many bad things happen in this world 2) God doesn't really care about us. But this is in contraditcion with the teachings of religion, saying that God loves us. 3) This hole thing is a tale; a story invented to support some other stories. Noone can verify it's validity anyway. You have the debate with Ben. I'll tell you my comments about the debate in a minute just let me tell my point of view on the subject first. The question "Does God exist?" is some ways similar to my question: "Does Winnie the Pooh exist?" If you answer to my question with "Yes" then there is no doubt wheather God exists, because billions worship some god. On the other hand if you say "No" the question becomes a lot more complicated and your debate did not solve anything nor will any future philosophical debates. Maybe in the future humanity will discover that there really is a creator of everything but at that point He will not seem so godlike anyway. Or maybe humanity will never find the Creator, I have no problem accepting that the universe runs on it's own based on chances. In the debate you talked a lot about quantum mechanics. If you really knew quantum mechanics (and that is the only way you should use it in a debate) you should also have no problems accepting that the universe does not have a cause or a purpose. Quantum mechanics defies common sense, think about quantum tunneling or quantum entanglement. These phenomena make no sense and yet they happen. You made a mistake in the debate. You said that after the Big Bang was disorder and now there is order (the Sun, the Earth, etc). Thermodinamically speaking that is not true. At the moment of Big Bang everything was compressed in a very little space, that is as ordered as the universe can get hence we say that the entropy was minimal. And the entropy of the universe has been growing ever since. Anyway it doesn't really matter. You can't use the Big Bang in a debate like this. You see science (and especially phisics) was always about first describing an event, then explaining it. For example even the ancient greeks knew about planets and described their motions but only Sir Newton was able to explain why they did so. The Big Bang theory is still in the "How?" phase so it is only describing something we don't really understand. What you should have done is discuss the issue in a historical context. I think it's more important how religions came to existence. There are probably three reasons why people believe in God (this is based on the religious people I know): 1) the most dangerous one: people tend to behave like a herd if raised as part of one. So if you are raised as a religious person and you don't tink too much about it you will believe in God because that is the reality to you. Remember, the reality is happening only in your brain. 2) Fear. Some people are too afraid that they are alone so they need to have a divine power that attends to them. What they probably don't see is that they are never alone, if you ask for it, people will probably help you. And the television is not helping these people, all you can see in the news is accidents and agressivity. I hitchhiked for 5 years while I went to the university and not once did something bad happen to me (except for motion sickness but that's irrelevant right now). This does not mean that it will never happen but that certainly will not depend on the God or the Devil, maybe someone will make a decision that will nat favour me but that will be a human not a divine entity. 3) and finally probably the most ancient reason, people do not understand something so they attribute it to a divinity. Based on "David's Response #3" from the debate, I think you fall in this category. And unfortunately all of these "shortcomings" can be exploited by other people. This is what the institute of the church is about. You said yourself in the "Validity Of Other Religions" letter that you are not a big fan of religion so you will probably agree with me that all the church is doing is trying to control people and even make money off them. I find it revolting that the minister refuses to marry you with a girl until you settle all your dues to the church. Come on, the church does not provide me electricity, does not heat my house on winter, why would I pay money for them. And still, people pay the money. The teaching of the church is self-sustaining. Imagine a mother who gave birth to her child. She wants the best for him/her. You van imagine that she does not want her child to go to hell so of course she get's the baby baptized. Noone has a chance, everyone is born with the original sin, if you are not part of a church you will burn in hell. It's a pity people fall for that. So my question to you is: if you are not religious, and you don't do the foolish rituals then why do you need Christ? Just because you don't understand everything in the universe? It's no shame in that. Do you need Christ to eat and breathe? Do you need Him to love your girlfriend or your family? Can't you just accept the world as is, as you can observe it? I think it's about time religion becomes obsolete. Gergely Gergely, When it comes to the Christ-myther claims, the problem is that if you actually read the stories they talk about (Horus, Krishna, Buddha, etc.), those parallels don't actually appear in the stories. Christ-mythers have essentially fabricated the parallels, counting on their audience to be unfamiliar with the stories and gullible enough to take the claims on blind faith. But I've actually read several versions of those stories, and the parallels simply aren't there. I even have a web page where I'm offering up to $1000 to anyone who can find me versions of the stories where the parallels occur (see here: http://www.kingdavid8.com/Copycat/Challenge.html ). I've so far had seven people tell me that they'd seen versions of the stories where the parallels occur, but not one of them was able to actually find them. Regarding free will, keep in mind that if one is given free will, then they're naturally going to do things that God doesn't like. It's inevitable. The only way God could assure that man never sins is to either not create man in the first place, or to not give us free will. Personally, I believe that the "forbidden fruit" is completely metaphorical, that it symbolizes the fact that man doesn't always do what God wants. You asked me why I need Christ. I lived many years without Him (I was an atheist until I was 20, and didn't become a Christian until I was 27), so I can't say I "need" Him for anything currently. So the question, rather, is why do I believe in Him. That's because I go where the evidence points, and the evidence is enough to convince me that Jesus lived and was resurrected, which essentially proves that He was who He claimed to be. I'll gladly give up my belief in Jesus if someone can provide evidence that He was a fictional character. Christ-mythers make the claims that He has parallels to pre-Christian deities, but the evidence shows that these claims are bogus, not part of those stories at all. If you have evidence that the claims are valid, such as stories where these things happen, I'll gladly take a look at it, and even give you the money that I promise on the "challenge" site that I linked earlier. Peace, David Dear David, My feelings about your answer are pretty ambiguous. On one hand it is refreshing to hear that someone believes in Jesus by choice based on evidences but on the other hand this sounds nothing like a "real" religious person would do. Religion is more like a blind faith. I'm saying this because this is how religious people I know are. And anyway, Christian clerks teach all the time that we should not doubt Him, so I have this feeling that you do not have real faith if you would "gladly give up" your belief. I don't know... it's a tough question. To tell you the truth I never saw any convincing evidence that Jesus existed nor did I see that He did not exist. I am prepared to believe you that there was a guy, someone like Buddha, who tried to teach everyone about love and was crucified by the jews/romans because that sounds like human nature but I don't think you could prove me that He is the son of God. Even if you prove me that He was put in a tomb and got out 3 days later, I'm sure there was a medical explanation. Moreover there had to be happening something because there is a huge difference between the old and the new testament. In the old testament God seems a bit cruel, you know for example think about the story with the deluge or the 7 dents (I don't know if said these correctly because I'm Hungarian and I don't know the bible in English, I just translated them with a dictionary program) but the new testament changed the tone. So there had to be something and that could be easily a guy who turned the script around. I'm not a big fan of the Bible. I respect it because it's a huge party of the human culture but it's content is a story not to be taken seriously. Everyone interprets it differently. And these "divine revelations" were probably simple hallucinations. And I don't like the idea of monodeism. How could there be only one God? If one day someone proves that there is a God ("God" being the creator of the universe) I'm sure he will find more of Them. Now about the paralelism. You are right about "Christ-mythers" that they use the fact that the audience is unfamiliar with the stories and they exaggerate the similarities. But the similarities are there. Maybe not by letter, they are not similar enough to win your price but there are similarities. Just to mention a few that I did check: 1) The miraculous birth. The name Isis-Meri might be an exaggeration I'm not sure. It's hard to find out because it seems that there were two gods named Horus in the egiptian mithology. I found articles stating Horus' parents are Meri and Seb (heaven and earth) others say Isis and Osiris. But the "virgin Isis" is an exageration, Isis was not virgin, that is for sure. 2) Saviour of humanity. What these comparisions don't mention is that Horus And Jesus save humanity from diffrent things. Horus saves humanity from the evil gods. Although this also can be considered as a parallelism because in the christian mitology the Devil is the root of all evil and Jesus saves us from hell where we go if we follow the Devil. 3) They are both sun gods. I could not find the date of birth of Horus but you can't argue that Jesus is not a sun god. A god who's birth is at december 25, right around the time when the Sun is "reborn" is a sungod. I'm sure if I had the patience I would find a lot more similarities. You take two stories from the same category and you find similarities because both of them were told by humans. For example (if I remember correctly) Joseph in the old testament has 12 brothers (or he was the 12nd brother, I'm not sure) Jesus had 12 followers. Both Joseph and Jesus were sold, there you go, similarity. All of this is telling me that the existence of Jesus is just another story. Jesus died and resurrected after 3 days. Again, why 3? Because 3 is a magical number, you can't find a Hungarian folk-tale that does not contain the number 3. There is one more idea I would like to share with you. In any science there is a widely accepted principle, it is called Ockham's razor. Look it up if you did not hear from it before. It's saying if there are more explanations for one phenomenon then the simplest one tends to be true; the one that makes as few assumptions as possible. So again, let me write down two theories (you can add more if you want): 1) There is a God who created the universe and the people in it. He made revelations and then finally He sent down His son, Jesus, knowing that people will agonize him and finally kill him. But nowadays He is not vengeful and does not state His presence. 2) Poeple (in general) on one hand are afraid of being alone and on the other hand doesn't really understand how things work so some people use this to manipulate them by intimidation, by telling stories about a God who put the power in their hand. Well, If you ask me the second theory makes no assumptions at all, it is just describing human nature. Bye, Gergely PS: I hope the holidays were merry to you too, I had a lot of fun; away from my computer. That is why my answer comes this late. Well, that's it. You should know that I've published this conversation without David's consent and even without his knowledge but if he can arbitrarily choose what to publish then so can I.