The good news of Jesus is that it is all made up. Men don't actually walk after they have been executed, babies are not born of one parent, and there was never a time of only one pair of humans. Those things are impossible magic, and you know that deep down.
So what do you do now? You stop judging people as wrongdoers just because they were BORN, and you find a way to work with your fellow humans to the peace and good fortune of all without relying on a nasty promise that the wrongdoers-just-because-they-were-born will be burned in sulfur for eternity.
You are a decent person, and you can judge for yourself what good ethics involves. You don't need any angry sky friends.
Just a thought.
Stuart
I want to understand your correctly, so I will go paragraph by paragraph.
1. It seems you are saying:
--that the good news about Jesus is a lie.
--that you doubt either (a) eyewitness testimony that Jesus was dead by crucifixion and by having his heart pierced with a spear or (b) eyewitness testimony that after being buried in a tomb Jesus came back to life and interacted with many of his followers or (c) both.
--that you doubt that either (a) Mary was a virgin at the time of Jesus' birth or (b) that Jesus was born at all.
--that you doubt Adam and Eve ever existed, since there was never a time when there were only two people.
2. You seem to dislike the doctrine of original sin. (Personally, I don't like churchy words, but it does save time in terms of making a reference.)
3. You think:
--I am a decent person and can make my own decisions about what is good or bad.
--God is just a figment of man's creation.
If I don't understand you correctly, please let me know. My responses below will be incomplete, but if you are sincere, and not just trolling, you may want to read C. S. Lewis' book "Mere Christianity". He gives a much fuller response to many, if not all, of the questions you raise.
1.
A. There is no better news than that Jesus, the literal Son of God, became a man so as to pay the penalty for man's waywardness so that man could be restored to friendship with his creator. There is no story like it. It goes against so much of what our natural minds think that it bears a mark of originality and authenticity.
True, some myths talk of gods who sacrifice themselves on mankind's behalf, but these myths invariably show the sacrificial god as doing so in opposition to a higher power, for which he suffers the penalty of death for his own rebelliousness. In Jesus' case, he colluded with God in a plan to become a man himself so that he could suffer man's penalty, not his own, so that God could remain truly just in forgiving the wrongdoing of mankind (which deserved and required punishment), since the price for man's wrongdoing was fully paid.
B. If you doubt eyewitness testimony, ... I don't know what to say. How can you believe anything: a news report, the findings of a court which are based on testimony, a scientific report which is based on testimony? Even scientific data is offered by testimony and should be confirmed by repeatable experiments whose findings are also presented by way of testimony. Thus, scientific understanding is based on the testimony of multiple witnesses. The facts of Jesus' death and resurrection are confirmed by multiple eyewitnesses, more than can confirm the existence of Homer, Socrates or, probably, Confucius. I would recommend a read of "Evidence that demands a verdict" by Josh McDowell for a fuller response.
C. I don't know where you stand on the topic of evolution, but I have much less trouble believing that God, who designed DNA in the first place, could impregnate a virgin, than to believe that the unimaginably complex processes of life could have formed themselves accidentally no matter how long a time period you use--and the clock is ticking and it is becoming ever clearer that the past did not stretch out indefinitely and was shorter than would even reasonably allow for such "accidents" to occur. The theory of spontaneous generation was disproved by Pasteur at about the same time that Darwin was formulating his hypotheses. Why people did not connect the dots, I have no idea. But the idea of life arising from mud puddles persisted. Of course, in fairness, they knew nothing of the complexity of DNA replication.
D. As we understand more about DNA, and it's continuing witness among us, we are gradually seeing confirmation of biblical accounts. At the moment, DNA origins seem to agree with the general part of the world the Bible described: i.e. the Middle East and North East Africa. I don't doubt that unbiased further investigation will produce further confirmation of biblical accounts. Of course, finding unbiased investigators who are not pushing their own agenda are always rare.
But if there were never only two people, how can you account for the appearance of multiple people at once? Did they arise simultaneously at different places? Then how could they interbreed? Did they come by spacecraft? Then I have the same question, just a different locale.
2. Without reference to a higher authority it is impossible to have concepts of right or wrong, good or evil. C. S. Lewis dealt with this question much better than I can here. But without an external reference point, what I consider good could be bad to you and vice versa. There would also be no way to decide which opinion is better, yet both cannot be equally valid unless we are never to have contact. The moment we interact, our differing ideas of morality will inevitably cause conflict and conflict will likely harm one or both of us.
Within ourselves, I believe we all realize at some level that we have not always acted as we should, often by way of unexamined responses to circumstances or people. Often we have learned these responses from interaction with other people or by observation of other people. This is one vector for the transmission of sin from generation to generation.
From another angle, we are discovering that some choices we make affect our DNA. These changes will then be passed on to our offspring. So, here is another vector for how sin or it's consequences can be passed from generation to generation.
3.
A. How can you decide whether I am decent or not without a point of reference? What defines decency?
If I make my own decisions about what is right and wrong, we end up with the problem I described above.
B. It seems extremely odd that ancient mankind all over the world believed in some form of higher power. Only recently, historically speaking, has the concept of God been rejected. And yet we, in our enlightenment, cannot figure out how those ancient idiots could have erected such edifices as the walls of Cuzco, all our engineering expertise and machinery notwithstanding. Either the ancients had capable minds, like our own, or our minds have evolved beyond theirs. Then, why can we not, with our evolved minds, understand how they accomplished such building feats? All our machines cannot hope to lift such massive blocks of stone, much less fit them so precisely. I believe we vastly underestimate the understanding of the ancients, and our hubris in this is to our detriment.
Sent from my XT1565 using Tapatalk
