3Sum wrote:attofishpi wrote:Only a thoroughbred atheist would suggest a man purported to be the Christ turning water to wine is a logical contradiction. If..and it is, God is all dimensions then you would understand that miracles do not happen, there is nothing contradictory to logic with such power of simply turning water to wine.
Or am i just gullible?
Oh, but of course you're right attofishpi. A creator of the freaking universe sends his son to earth in barbaric times when nobody could even record his presence, in a remote part of the planet where his son turns water to wine to prove his divinity. Makes almost as much sense as God sacrificing himself to himself so he can save us from himself because of the flaws he himself designed us with.
Thing is, if you're going to take Christianity for serious, at least be consistent and start taking other fairy tales for serious too. Harry Potter might be true, right? I mean, if there truly were wizards they would surely be able to hide themselves from us?
Cause right now, it seems to me that you're extremely biased and partial to one specific fairy tale for which there is no more evidence than for some other fairy tale.
3sum,
I am compelled to empathize with atto's position, having once believed the Church's teachings. Atomic physics 401 made it pretty clear that the wine into water trick would have released enough thermonuclear energy to vaporize all of Jerusalem, because it required the synthesis of carbon, sulphur, nitrogen, and other atoms from a solution of hydrogen and oxygen. Assuming that Christ existed and either knew all about atomic physics and the laws of thermodynamics, I figured that, God or not, he had to have been clever enough to buy a few nice barrels of wine, have some friends stash them in the back room of the wedding hall, then have those same friends label them H2O and conduct a simple exchange while the already intoxicated revelers were too drunk to pay much attention. Simple magic without the thermonuclear penalty.
There is another version of the Christ tale that you might find curious.
Suppose that planet earth is not ruled by God the Creator because he is more interested in the quadrillions of other planets that are populated with more intelligent beings. Earth is thus ruled by low-level spirit administrators, spook bureaucrats who change positions and gain or lose power now and then. Christ was a new administrator who decided to introduce a better religion to earth's denizens.
So he incarnated in human form, with extraordinary intelligence, psychic skills, charisma, and purpose. His choice of locale was perfect. He found a backwater country on the fringe of the expanding Roman empire, sufficiently distant from Rome and its stay-at-home priests so that his new teachings would be ignored until they had taken root. His used his charisma to teach. His superior knowledge of the laws of physics, human biology, and human nature were put to work in the context of paranormal skills, producing a number of remarkable and convincing healings and the loss of an infected fig tree.
A dramatic exit, which he no doubt left his body to observe, followed up by a resurrection that did not go quite as planned and required a temporary spook body that could make but a few token appearances, was enough to set the stage. The expanding Roman Empire was infected with the virus of Christianity. It spread everywhere, west and northward, and back into Rome itself.
But viruses have a tendency to mutate, and Christ, from his no longer incorporated position as bureaucratic administrator, did not take steps to kill the mutations.
The Gnostics were the first mutators, as they tried to fill in the metaphysical gaps that J.C. failed to address during his sojourn. Conflicting sects arose everywhere. Paul, the Roman butcher and phoney apostle who was probably gay, decided to kill Christianity by distorting its focus onto sex, declaring fun to be evil and thus teaching the church that the way to control its members was to circumcise their enjoyment of life and love.
Constantine, the big Roman, destroyed Christ's church by politicizing and standardizing it, and we know much of the rest of the story. But I kind of like Christ. He had a good plan, and must have learned a lot about human nature from his attempt to implement it.
There are so many christians in my class so I'm sure I'll get backlash. I have to say that everyone has rewritten the bible, Koran,....how can anyone claim it was even from God in the first place.
