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Has there ever been a decent Christian rebuttal to Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian"?
>You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell.
>There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."
>The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings.
cont
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>>1954515
>There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
> If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary.
>Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists?
>There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching
>There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs.
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Nothing Russell says about people, society, culture or behavior is of any value.
Lifelong atheist speaking, but has this guy ever wrestled with a theological argument? Has he ever even attempted a dialogue with a theologian in good faith? Or is he the Dawkins of the early 20th century?
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>>1954519
>There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause.
Lazy af for a philosopher tbqh famalam
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>>1954515
>"It is God's will that your honourable lives should silence those ignorant people who make foolish accusations against you..." 1 Peter
To silence isn't to win an argument, but rather to silence is to ignore, walk away from. So this dude wants a rebuttal, he doesn't get one.
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Calling Jesus immoral for believing in Hell is similar to condemning a swim instructor for believing in drowning.
This is the fundamental problem with Russell and many atheists in general, namely they want to judge an omnipotent eternal Being by limited and temporal standards. In other words it's the intellectual arrogance of genuinely believing that one knows better than God. The whole point of religion is to attempt to make sense of a confusing world and tied into this conception is the idea that God is above us and does things that we as puny human beings cannot understand. Atheists such as Russell of course do not like to be reminded of their own puniness and instead want to play prosecutor to the author of time and space. However if there is a God, it's preposterous to assume that any of His creations would be capable to make any kind of objective claim against him because our brains lack the processing ability to perceive reality as God sees it. It's equivalent to having a chimpanzee evaluate the competency of a brain surgeon. Sure the chimp might be able to fling some feces at the surgeon but this "criticism" doesn't carry any weight or authority because the chimp isn't able to comprehend what is actually going on. This is basically what Russell is doing by saying "well if I was God I would have done things differently!" The fact remains that no one can comprehend what it would be like to be God so to make any kind of claim about how God ought to behave is ridiculous because it implies some kind of standard or measure against which God can be judged.
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>>1954745
>muh "mysterious ways"
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>>1954912
Really don't get why people struggle with this. I'm quite certain that my decisions appear mysterious to my dog; why would it be any different between humanity and God who is orders of magnitude more above His creation than a human is from a dog.
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>>1954967
>I'm quite certain that my decisions appear mysterious to my dog
kek imagine trying to explain to your dog the socio-economic factors that caused you to buy him the cheap dog food from china again, not because you don't love him still
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>>1954997
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l2s8x5XhCGA
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>>1955012
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>>1955015
Thanks man.
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But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
For the kingdom of God is not in word, but in power.
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